Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, Josh Birk talks to Jagan Nathan, Technical Architect with Customer Success at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about guest user anomalies and what you can do about them with the Threat Detection app.

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

The most important thing for a successful Data Cloud migration

Jagan works as a Technical Architect with the Customer Success Group at Salesforce. He’s focused on helping businesses use Data Cloud to de-silo their data so they can get a full picture of their customers.

Jagan estimates that 60-70% of the time you spend on a Data Cloud migration is used to make sure you understand what needs to be done. That’s because the most important decisions are around what objects and data sources you want to map and how it all fits together. If you need help getting started, his team has put together the Data Cloud Workbook Template to walk you through everything.

What is a guest user anomaly and why is it dangerous for your data security?

The biggest security issues Jagan encounters in orgs come from changes made to profiles and permissions over time. All those consultants can begin to add up! At some point, you need to do an audit of who can see what and apply the principle of least privilege.

And that’s the reason we brought Jagan on the pod, because one way this can happen is through something called a guest user anomaly. Essentially, it’s when a guest user account has more access than it otherwise than it should. For example, an Apex class that allows them pull all of your data. It’s the kind of thing that’s difficult to identify but can leave you primed for a data breach if you don’t know about it. 

How the Threat Detection app can help you identify guest user anomalies

The good news is that there’s something you can do about guest user anomalies. If your org has Event Monitoring, you can use the Threat Detection app to identify problematic accounts and take action. It uses the power of machine learning to figure out where the gaps are in your permissions and flag them for you.

In fact, the Threat Detection app can help you monitor all sorts of other anomalies, too. Like if a user who does their reports in the same time window each week suddenly logs in at 3 a.m. to pull a bunch of data, or someone based in Albuquerque logs in from Finland. It can even monitor your APIs. And the best part is that enabling Threat Detection is as easy as turning on the permission set.

Jagan gets into more specifics in our interview, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Salesforce Security Guide: Threat Detection
• Salesforce Security Guide: Guest User Anomaly
• Salesforce Help: Best Practices for Investigating Guest User Anomalies
• Trailhead: Get Started with Event Monitoring

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Jagan on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on Tiktok
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Josh Birk:
Hello Admins, it’s your guest host Josh Birk here. Today, I’m going to welcome Jagan Nathan to talk about some very specific things about security, specifically quirks in security that can sometimes be a little difficult to detect and how we’re going to help you detect them. So without further ado, let’s go to Jagan.

All right. Today on the show we welcome Jagan. Did I do that right, Jagan?

Jagan Nathan :
Yes.

Josh Birk:
All right. We’re going to talk about some very interesting security things, but first of all, welcome to the show.

Jagan Nathan :
Thank you, once again, for having me.

Josh Birk:
Thanks. All right, well, let’s start, once again, in some of your early years. How did you originally get into computing?

Jagan Nathan :
Oh, yeah. So back then during school days, we used to play Counter-Strike. We have in-house network connected with a group of friends.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Jagan Nathan :
So that is how we started into it. We started in a playful mode and then we slowly started programming and all those aspects to it.

Josh Birk:
Did you actually get into modding Half-Life and all that stuff?

Jagan Nathan :
Not really.

Josh Birk:
Got it. Nice. How did you originally get involved with Salesforce?

Jagan Nathan :
Salesforce, initially I got trained in the Java platform and then back then we got a new project on Salesforce and we have been asked if we could try this out and then I initially thought of giving it a try. I initially thought Salesforce is purely sales driven or some sort of MBA-related work, but that is how it was. And then slowly I got into it. It was quite interesting. And then back then it was even more interesting without Trailhead. We had a lot of learnings. We used to push in developer forums. It was quite challenging and interesting. From that point of time, there’s no looking back. We just love this platform.

Josh Birk:
Nice. How did you find the transition from Java to Apex?

Jagan Nathan :
So I was able to correlate most of our things through the basic modules. I usually compare Java-related world with Salesforce Apex related, so that it was easy for me during the transition phase.

Josh Birk:
Got it. And how would you describe your current job?

Jagan Nathan :
So current job is more of a technical architect part of customer success group. Work with different set of customers. Each customers have their own set of challenges and problems to be solved. So right now I’m even focusing on the Data Cloud related piece of it. Try to stitch in the data from multiple data source what customer is having. They have a lot of silos data across the platform. We are using the power of Data Cloud to bring in and harmonize all those data.

Josh Birk:
Got it. I feel like that’s a very common thing at the company right now. So welcome to the club. Just as on that topic itself, especially when it comes to Admins, are you finding any particular specific challenges that run into when they start adopting Data Cloud?

Jagan Nathan :
Our Data Cloud, the best part is we at Salesforce, we have a template called Data Cloud Workbook Template, which is mainly recommended for all the admins and then whoever is trying to configure Data Cloud. So Data Cloud, what we have seen so far is 60 to 70 percentage of time we need to spend on understanding what needs to be done, like what objects we’re going to map, what are the data sources we’re going to map. So we have a pretty good decent template out there called Data Cloud Workbook Template, which is highly recommended for our customers so that they spend a lot of time on what needs to be done, what fields needs to be mapped, what should be the data sources. So once we have that in place, admin life looks even more simple.

Josh Birk:
Got it. Nice. And I think I’m going to ask this in the right way because I believe I don’t know the answer, but since we’re talking about security today, does Data Cloud offer any new thoughts on what to be concerned with security, or does it just kind of bolt itself on the platform and the platform is taking care of security like it normally would?

Jagan Nathan :
Yes. So Data Cloud currently supports our data spaces. We have this concept called data space filters through which we can set up the security of it so that authorized users can access a particular set of data instead of accessing all Data Cloud data.

Josh Birk:
Got it. Before we get into some of the specifics, when you first start talking to clients and customers, are there very common security issues that you find people aren’t concerned about or aren’t aware of that they should be aware of?

Jagan Nathan :
Yeah, so the main concerns or challenges what customer was facing right now is down the line, Salesforce or a lot of consulting companies work for them and then they have tons of changes made on the profiles and the permissions, and then someone got access to something which they are not supposed to. For example, I have seen customers, some marks, they have lot of sales users have export report function permissions and a customer is thinking about do they really need those export reports permission? Definitely not, only a subset of users need that. So it is all about backtracking and trying to find out how did they got this permission? Do we really need to give this user a permission to those reports? That is one of the challenges there.

Josh Birk:
Right. Nice. It’s amazing how many of the security issues really can be boiled down to the concept of lease privilege.

Jagan Nathan :
Oh, yeah. There are a lot of things happening around the permissions and then recently we also rolled out object permissions and permission sets, for example, how the particular permission got assigned to the particular user. Is it through profiles or a permission set? So we have all those enhancements as part of recent releases too.

Josh Birk:
Right. Now today we’re going to talk about a very specific one, and I’m going to give you credit because I had not heard of this, although I think I was kind of aware of the concept, I swear back from my IoT days, but we’re going to talk about what a guest user anomaly is. Let’s start at the beginning. Define that for me. What is a guest user anomaly?

Jagan Nathan :
So this guest user anomaly, before we talk about it, in the last podcast we discussed about event monitoring in general, what are the events we have as part of event monitoring. For the listeners, to give a quick background, event monitoring is a subscription-based QVF. The beauty of our Salesforce platform is everything is built on top of event-driven architecture, right from the user logs in, logs out, when the user access the list views or reports, all those are captured as events at the backend.

So when it comes to threat detection, threat detection is one of the submodule of the event monitoring, which comes free of cost. If customer has event monitoring, then they would be able to use threat detection free of cost. So threat detection has a lot of events built into it and one of the events is a guest user anomaly event. So guest user anomaly is one of the interesting event because there are a lot of customers who are using guest users in their communities or back then they used to have a Force.com site. So they have built a business process surrounding guest user. So here at Salesforce what we thought is why can’t we build a guest user anomaly even so that customers would be able to identify if there is any threat around the guest user.

Josh Birk:
What sort of traffic is the threat detector picking up that says this is a guest user and then this is a guest user anomaly?

Jagan Nathan :
So behind the scenes we have a lot of machine learning methods through which we constantly understand the profile of a guest user, what they are supposed to access. And there are a lot of parameters at the backend, which is quite black box for the customer, which is totally handled at the product side. So at the higher level we use a machine learning algorithm to detect if there are any information which the guest user is not supposed to access to, but due to some different options, if the guest user is able to access it, then we are throwing that as guest user anomaly events to our customers.

Josh Birk:
So go down one more level to that for me because it was interesting that, so I’ve set up a guest user, I expect him to have this set of lease privileges, but you’re saying there might be some things that I did in setup that would cause an unexpected ability to access data. Is that what the anomaly is?

Jagan Nathan :
For an example to deep dive into it, let’s say we have lightning community, which is running on a guest user mode, and then behind the scenes it all starts with the OWD settings. So our recommendation for a default external access is a public read or some customers might have a public read. It depends on the business use cases. Let’s say if there is any suspicion even caused by a guest user, for example, if there is a Apex class which runs in without sharing mode for an example, and then if that guest user through some ways, if they are able to get the data, which they are not supposed to get. So in this scenario in general, guest users should not have access to the objects. But in a worst case, if something happens and if there is any Apex class without sharing, if they’re able to get some information out of it, so it is inadvertently permitting the guest user to access some data which they are not supposed to.

Josh Birk:
Got it. So it’s nothing necessarily that the admin would see from a setup point of view when it comes to inspecting profiles or permission sets or anything like that, but it would be access to et cetera, et cetera, something else like an Apex class and then how that was designed is giving them access to something that’s outside of their profile.

Jagan Nathan :
Exactly. From the admin standpoint, what we recommend is whatever list views which are getting shared, make sure it is getting shared only with a certain set of groups which are set to private. That is one recommendation, what we could say to our customers. And then the next one is make sure to do a proper analysis on all the sharing rules we have. Do we have any sharing rules, which is sharing with any side guest user? That is one option we would recommend.

Josh Birk:
What are some inherent risks here? Is it simply access to data that they shouldn’t have or can it get more nefarious than that?

Jagan Nathan :
Let’s say if that guest user is not supposed to access the data what they should have, then what happens at the background, it could lead to a data breach in the near future because there could be some guest user, there could be some data Apex class which runs in without sharing mode, for example. It gives a view all data of all the accounts, then the guest user would get all the accounts. Then that eventually turned out to be a data breach.

Josh Birk:
Got it. Got it. In reference to these tools, let’s assume that an admin, they’re not familiar with it. What does it look like? Is this a report that they’re going to run from time to time? Is this an app that’s going to alert them that maybe something is wrong? What’s the user interface here that’s letting them know that there’s a red flag?

Jagan Nathan :
So it all starts with a permission. So there is a permission called view threat detection event. So once that permission get assigned to us through a permission set, then we will get access to a threat detection app. So threat detection app, once you navigate to a threat detection app, we should be able to see the list of anomalies. For example, if there is any guest user anomaly happens, then we will see a record on the threat detection that says guest user anomaly event. Then it is up to customer to take up a decision if they really think it’s a threat, or else, if they think it’s not a threat, they can provide feedback back to Salesforce.

Josh Birk:
Got it. So it is kind of a constant monitoring, taking action when they feel like that was definitely a set of data that this person shouldn’t be able to have access to.

Jagan Nathan :
Exactly. So in addition to it, we are also giving customers option to build a transaction security policy as well. Transaction security policy is something like it is automatically monitoring the trades. For example, guest user anomaly is one event. So we have an anomaly event called report anomaly event. For example, user is everyday logging in on a particular time interval and they are working on the reports, but suddenly if the user works over the weekend or suddenly if the user tries to connect from a different VPN network altogether, and if that particular user is trying to export a report, if that report count is more than 10 million rows, for an example, then Salesforce can throw that as an anomaly event and then customer can take up an action. If they really feel it’s a threat, then they can block it or else they can add it in some audit log for their purposes.

Josh Birk:
Got it. Without going into too much detail, what are some of the other events that the threat detector is monitoring?

Jagan Nathan :
One of the event is a session hijacking event. This is more of a customer-focused attack event. For example, if any attacker is trying to steal information from using client access to their web application, then through session hijacking event we would be able to identify if the attacker tries to hijack the client’s session by obtaining some session token.

Josh Birk:
Got it. How about APIs?

Jagan Nathan :
API, that is super important. Thanks for bringing that up. So behind the scenes what we do is once we have the streaming and storage enabled for API anomaly, let’s say there’s an integration user who periodically runs the API scan and then they get data out for business processes, but suddenly out of nowhere, if the integration user is trying to export more than X number of records or else the way the integration user is pulling the data, for example, the row count might be new or else they might be logging in from a different IP address or some sort of anomalies. So what Salesforce does at the backend is it constantly understand the pattern of how that API user is being used for all the API requests. And if Salesforce thinks the new request is quite different from the existing request in the past, then Salesforce will throw it as an anomaly.

Josh Birk:
Got it. So kind of at a high level, because if we look at the session hijacking, that’s where I steal your cookie for lack of a better term. I steal your session ID, I hijack your identity, I try to access Salesforce as you, that would be something very difficult for somebody, a human on the Salesforce side to detect, well, that’s not Jagan, that’s Josh. With the APIs it’s sort of similar. It looks like somebody knocking on the door and the fact that they are doing something once that door is open that’s anomalous is not something easy for a detect and then finally going back to the guest user. So at a high level, the threat detector is giving us this machine learning eyeball into what the traffic is coming out and saying, “Hey, that thing doesn’t…” It’s kind of like when you get the fraud alerts, right? It’s like you don’t normally buy $300 worth of goods in Ohio,. Maybe you should call us before we spend $300. But it gives us this suite of tools to be able to do that kind of investigation.

Jagan Nathan :
Yeah, perfect. Exactly.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Where can people learn more?

Jagan Nathan :
Oh, yeah. So we have a help article, which we’ll be adding it in the podcast as well. That help article talks about threat detection and how the machine learning algorithm at high level works and how customers can proactively build a transaction security policy on top of it to play around with the threat detections.

Josh Birk:
Nice. And once again, this is not a licensed add-on, it’s on a SKU, it’s once somebody turns on the permission set, they’re good to go.

Jagan Nathan :
Yes, exactly.

Josh Birk:
Very nice. In general, do you have any security resources that you’d like to share?

Jagan Nathan :
Oh, yeah. In general?

Josh Birk:
Yeah.

Jagan Nathan :
I will add that as well.

Josh Birk:
Okay, perfect. Well, Jagan, thank you so much for the great conversation information. That was a lot of fun.

Jagan Nathan :
Good. Thank you so much to, Joshua, for having me again.

Josh Birk:
I want to thank Jagan for the great conversation information. And as always, I want to thank you for listening. If you want to learn more about this podcast, head on over to admin.salesforce.com and of course you can subscribe to it in the podcast client of your choice. Thanks again for listening everybody. I’ll talk to you soon.

The post Key Security Best Practices for Salesforce Admins Using Data Cloud appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to John Demby, Director of Solution Engineering at Tableau. Join us as we chat about Pulse for Salesforce, Tableau Einstein, and how easy it is to get started.

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

Getting to know Pulse for Salesforce and Tableau Einstein

John leads a team of demo engineers for Tableau. What that means is they get their hands on all the new solutions and products ahead of time, and use them to make cool things. And two of the coolest, newest things out there are Pulse for Salesforce and Tableau Einstein.

Tableau Einstein takes all of the goodness of Tableau, the powerful features of Data Cloud, a new semantic layer called Tableau Semantics, and brings that into Salesforce. There’s also a Tableau Agent, allowing you to open up the power of business intelligence and analytics to everyone on your team through Agentforce.

Introduction to Pulse for Salesforce

“We started thinking about how people consume data,” John says, “and I think it’s changed.” People want to consume data within the flow of their work. They don’t want to have to go looking around for things, or sift through multiple dashboards to figure out what information is relevant.

That’s where Pulse for Salesforce comes in. It provides contextual, relevant insights from your data directly into Salesforce. With a simple KPI scorecard, you and your users can see what metrics are up, what metrics are down, and get insights about the next steps you should take.

AI-infused and ready to share

The scorecards Pulse for Salesforce provides are just the beginning because you can also ask it questions. Pulse is AI-infused, meaning you can ask plain language questions to generate specific insights about your data. It’s also built for collaboration, so it’s easy to take these insights and start a conversation with anyone else in your organization.

Getting Pulse for Salesforce is as easy as installing a managed package in your Salesforce instance. “We’ve made it really for a Salesforce Admin to set this up with little to no Tableau experience,” John says. There are nine premade dashboards to get you started, and it’s easy to customize things to get something that works for you.

John shares a lot more great stuff about Pulse for Salesforce and Tableau Einstein, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Get Tableau Pulse
• More about Tableau Pulse
• What is Tableau Einstein?

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• John on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on Tiktok
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’ve got the much loved John Demby, our resident Tableau guru, here to talk about some of the really super cool things that Tableau has come out with, specifically Tableau Pulse and Tableau Einstein. Now, you may remember John and his team create these amazing demos that really show all of the possibilities of Tableau Pulse and Tableau Einstein. And boy, we get into it, about how we’re driving insights with AI, and of course we talk about why pie charts are so out. This is really a fun episode. Now before we get started just a quick reminder, if you want to hit that follow button, that way whatever podcast app you’re listening to, every Thursday a new episode will be downloaded right to your phone. So with that, let’s talk Tableau Pulse and Tableau Einstein and get John on the podcast. John, welcome to the podcast.

John Demby:
Hey Mike, it’s great to be back.

Mike Gerholdt:
I know, it’s been a while. So what have you been up to? What do you do at Salesforce, for the people that haven’t run into you at our many events?

John Demby:
Well, I have I think today the coolest job in the world. I work in our pre-sales organization in solution engineering but what I do is, I lead a team of demo engineers. You might go, demo engineers, why is that really cool? Well, we get our hands on the solutions and the products ahead of our customers. We get to put it through its paces and figure out what it really can do and how it can do it, and then we build these just really … pardon the expression, kick-ass demos to show to our customers and to anybody else that wants to see them. So yeah, that’s what I do. I lead a team and they are all all-stars and amazing people, and we have just been killing it.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, it sounds like fun. I mean, that’s also what admins do, get our hands on stuff and try and build killer demos to get our executives to fund it.

John Demby:
Yeah, we’ve got a lot of similarities there.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Well, I mean, also a very close kinship. You kind of started out with Tableau the same way I did, you were just a super admin power user that got hired on.

John Demby:
Yeah. My story goes back to a long time ago … man, probably about 12, 13, 14 years ago, I was working with Salesforce data. I was leading at that time a pre-sales organization, and I couldn’t get a decent report out of Salesforce, no offense to dashboards and reports. It was partly because of the way we had configured our Salesforce data. I mean, we had the same company in Salesforce maybe 70 times because they were all around the globe and stuff like that. I couldn’t figure out where my solution engineers were spending their time. I did a Google search, found this really cool thing called Tableau, downloaded it, and within about 10 minutes I had the report that I’d been wanting to make for months. So I filed that away and became a power user of Tableau, and then when I was ready for a career change, it just worked out. Tableau and I made things happen, came to work for Tableau. I did some pre-sales work for Tableau and then we got acquired by Salesforce.

And then I got to do all sorts of cool things, like move into the office of the chief product officer where I worked on Salesforce Tableau integration strategies, and now I get to lead my fun team.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I remember … Well, I mean, you’re right, there’s totally a limitation on the reports and dashboard stuff. But I remember the last time we talked, one of the things you gave me the insight into was just all the visualizations that Tableau could do. I think it was, “The biggest common mistake is, everybody makes a pie chart.”

John Demby:
Oh yeah, pie charts are not very good for analyzing data, believe it or not. But yeah, we build that into the product. In fact, when you start analyzing your data in Tableau, we actually propose or suggest or give you the best practice visualization for what you’re trying to find.

Mike Gerholdt:
So it’s not a dashboard of pies.

John Demby:
No, not a dashboard of pies.

Mike Gerholdt:
That’s okay. We have AI now, so let’s talk about that because we’ve got Tableau Einstein and Pulse. Help me figure out what these are because these sound fun.

John Demby:
Well, I want to talk to you a lot about Pulse today, but let’s talk about Tableau Einstein real quick. So Tableau Einstein … Well, just back up. AI in general is disrupting everything and very much so in the business analytics space. Two years ago I went to the Gartner Data and Analytics Conference, and all the vendors were starting to talk about AI. Last year, it was the subject of everybody. It was everybody had a cockpit, or a copilot rather, and were starting to feed data into LLMs, and now it just got to be part of the table stakes of the application. You’ve got to be able to use the power of AI to be able to generate and understand and see things even quicker. So what we did with Tableau Einstein is, we are envisioning a new paradigm infused with AI and built on the Salesforce platform. So we’re actually taking all of the goodness of Tableau, we’re bringing it over to Salesforce, we’re using all of the fantastic features of Data Cloud. We’re adding things like a new semantic layer that we call Tableau Semantics, and then on top of all that we have Tableau Agent, which is part of the Agentforce family. It is going to be an evolving product, we showed our vision at Dreamforce.
It’ll take us the next couple of releases to fully get it realized, but it is an amazing leap forward as it relates to AI and especially integrating into Salesforce data.

Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, is it really any surprise? Because I feel like for the last couple of years, especially once we talked about Data Cloud, I remember having guests on talking about data lakes, and joked about putting the cabin out on a data lake. I mean, we’re at the point now where the amount of organizational data that we are creating, it’s almost incomprehensible to be analyzed by any human.

John Demby:
Oh, absolutely. In fact, what AI gives us, which is kind of cool is … traditionally BI tools rely on structure. They need the data in rows and columns or in a database or in something of that format. And what AI begins to do is, it allows us to reach unstructured data and that’s a big value prop for Data Cloud right now, is that people are able to ingest unstructured data. Tableau Einstein is on top of that and able to see both structured and unstructured data through AI. So it’s really, to me it’s exciting. I’ve been in this space for a long time, and to see this disrupt and then us embrace the transformation has been pretty fantastic.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I think back to the early days of Salesforce, talking about Einstein, and us talking about having to feed it 100,000 rows for the LLM to understand in a very simple use case, what makes an opportunity more likely to be won versus lost? And to feed it all of that data, but boy, you had to get your data in line. Everything was, get your ducks in a row, data, data, data this. And now it’s data but it’s like, well, let the AI figure it out. Right?

John Demby:
Yeah. I think that’s one of the things that Salesforce has really hammered home, especially with our AI vision is, context is everything when it comes to AI. As much context and information that you can drive … and we have it in Salesforce just out of the box, begins to really drive that AI interactivity in a way that without the context, yeah, AI is pretty dumb at that point if it doesn’t really understand the context of what you’re asking.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Now, you sounded excited for Tableau Einstein, but you sounded over the moon for Tableau Pulse. So tell me about Pulse.

John Demby:
We released Pulse back in February … I guess, here’s my question for you, Mike. When is the last time you picked up an actual newspaper?

Mike Gerholdt:
You mean, outside of needing it to start a charcoal fire?

John Demby:
Yeah. Or actually read it or something like that. But you were probably like me, you probably got the Sunday paper back in … now, we’re dating ourselves here-

Mike Gerholdt:
I know, little age. Absolutely, the Sunday, because it had the thickest classifieds.

John Demby:
Oh, yeah. Well, thickest classified, but it had all the-

Mike Gerholdt:
And the Sunday cartoons.

John Demby:
… cartoons and for me it had the score, all the information about the college games from around the country and stuff like that. But even when we had Sunday papers, if you were like me, you didn’t read it in order, you went and grabbed your favorite section. Maybe for you it was the classifieds, maybe it was the comics or something like that, so you would pick and choose. And then when you actually go through the newspaper, you probably would read a headline and if the headline didn’t grab you, you probably just moved on. Since the pandemic and since the advent of smartphones, and our attention spans really coming down considerably … there’s lots of research that talk about that, now most people consume their news maybe on their smartphone. I know I use a news app and I’ve curated what I want, I pick the sources that I’m interested in, and it surfaces me high-level summaries. In the morning when I wake up, I look at the news, want to make sure the world is still around.

I scroll through and I find something, maybe the latest story about Taylor Swift and that other dude she’s dating.

Mike Gerholdt:
He plays football.

John Demby:
Yeah. He plays football and they were saying, at the Taylor Swift concert Sunday they were actually playing the football game on the big screen. So go figure how far we’ve come. But yeah, it’s really a different paradigm where we look for information so we started thinking about, how do people consume data? I think it’s changed. I think people want to consume data in the flow of their work. I think they don’t necessarily want to have to go look for it. They don’t want to have to go interrogate a very complex dashboard. They want it to be contextual, they want it to be informational, they want it to be relatable to what they’re looking at. And then they want it to tell them maybe in plain language, maybe through AI, things that they should be worried about and things that they should double-click on. So that’s what we did with Pulse was, we totally re-imagined how people consume data for information. We built an app that’s very similar in some ways to a newspaper app on your phone, that lets you pick the metrics that you’re interested in, you can double-click on them. It’ll tell you what’s up, what’s down.

It has AI infused in it, it has the ability to really give you insights very quickly. So then what you need to do is to take action, either early warning or corrective action, or even if something’s going great, letting your team know it’s going great.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I mean, listening to you describe it, for the longest time that I’ve built reports and dashboards, I’ve never really thought about it in the way that you described it. But the way that I hear you talk now, it makes sense. Because if you think about driving your car down the road, you look down at the speedometer and some gauges, make sure you have gas. You get real-time information in your car so that if you’re coming up on an exit and your car is getting low on fuel, you know to exit to get fuel. Whereas traditional reporting, you would do most of the trip and then you’d stop and go, okay, so how fast was I going and when do I need fuel? You’re like, oh, I actually ran out of fuel a mile ago, as a traditional dashboard. So when you say it gives insights in the flow of work, where does that surface? What should an admin be thinking about, where should they put these insights and what should they be looking for?

John Demby:
Well, we launched the original product, Tableau Pulse, in February. Since then we have over 5,000 customers, that were basically Tableau customers that have adopted the product. About the beginning of the summer we started asking the question, what if we could do, bring Pulse natively to the Salesforce platform? What would that look like? How would people consume it? And things like that. So we were very aggressive. We took a very agile approach, maybe almost like a startup, and we built a companion product to Pulse that we called Pulse for Salesforce. And what it does is, it takes these metrics really show up in the form of a KPI card. The KPI card, like I said, has a big number. It tells you if you’re up or down, gives you a spark line, begins to tell you in plain language what’s happening. So you can read that and then as you double-click into it, it gives you all of the additional information you’ve asked for. The outliers, the what’s up, what’s down, what’s causing this, what should I be looking at? So over the summer we built Pulse for Salesforce and we released it a couple of weeks before Dreamforce. It is as simple as installing a managed package, and then we drop in nine pre-configured Sales Cloud metrics. So we started with Sales Cloud, we’re looking at expanding into the other clouds, into the industries and Service Cloud. But it actually gives you nine pre-built metrics.

The good news is, we gave you permissions to be able to create all the metrics you want on any of the data, as long as you surface it inside of Salesforce from that perspective. If you’ve got some external data that your salespeople would really value and seeing right there on the opportunity record or the home page or something like that, you can actually add those metrics, not just the nine that we ship. It’s just embedded in Salesforce. It works on Salesforce mobile. We actually made it to pop up off the utility bar, which people think is really cool. So I’m right there in the sales app and at any point I want, I hit the button and I’ve got Pulse metrics. But yeah, you can stick it anywhere inside of Salesforce. We give you those nine pre-built ones, but we don’t limit you to that. It’s a simple app but it is a very powerful app, and we’re already seeing demand. We’ve got hundreds of customers already lined up that want to get onboard with Pulse for Salesforce.

Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, that utility bar is so underutilized, I need to work that into demos more. As you explain through that, I’m hearing yet another reason for Data Cloud. Because it’s not only the data in Salesforce but the data that you bring to, or surface as you said. So if I had Data Cloud and I was just bringing in data, then Tableau Pulse can help me bring insight to that as well.

John Demby:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Pulse for Salesforce assumes that maybe you don’t have Data Cloud, so we don’t make that a requirement. But if you do have Data Cloud … or if you are moving along with us because you really see the value of Agentforce and all the things that Data Cloud is going to power, then yes, Tableau has a live connector to Data Cloud. You could create these additional metrics or data that you bring into Data Cloud or Zero Copy or any of that kind of stuff right there in Data Cloud, and then have these Pulse metrics sit on top of them, so that you’re giving your people the most up-to-date information possible so they can make data-driven decisions.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I think I heard you say this, but I just want to make sure because this is really cool. Tableau Pulse helps me understand the what, but I think you were getting at more than that, it also helps me understand the why. Can you explain that?

John Demby:
One of the things we’ve built into Pulse for Salesforce and Tableau Pulse is, in addition to surfacing insights that may be relevant and popping those up immediately … Let’s just say for instance I’m looking, one of the out-of-the-box metrics for Pulse for Salesforce is conversion rate. The metric card tells me my conversion rate is down over the last month and gives me some indicators from that perspective. I double-click in, and maybe the first thing that Pulse tells me is, these are the segments that you’re underperforming in. So I can begin to take some analysis, maybe I need to look at that. But maybe I want to ask it a question, so we do have Q&A built into the product. I’m not bound by what Pulse tells me, I can actually click the ask button and then just type a plain language question like, tell me what industries are in decline? Or something like that. And then it will source that information for me and I can begin to do that additional analysis, and then with tools like Slack and others I can take those insights and even share them with others in my organization.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, that was going to be my next question is, it’s fun if one person knows about it, but how do they broadcast that out? It sounds like you’ve got that figured out with collaboration.

John Demby:
Yeah, collaboration is built into the product. This idea of sharing is really critical in the solution, I could share a number of different ways. But keep in mind, we do usually encourage customers to adhere to some level of security. So if I try to share an insight with somebody they don’t have access to, that I’ve set up in Tableau, they won’t see it. But that’s fine because we want governance, we want data governance and stuff like that. But it still gives you that ability for that data you do share and you do have, to very quickly share those insights and start a conversation about it.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I mean, that to me is one of the often overlooked things, you set up your profile, your permission set groups, once in Salesforce, and then everything on the platform respects that. You don’t have to worry about, oh, we use this third-party tool and then going over there and learning their terminology, and then configuring that and then hoping you got it right. I like that. As an admin, who do you often talk to in organizations about Tableau Pulse? Because more often than not admins are square in the middle of business process. They’re like the BAs. They often do BA work. They know the pain points of the end user and they often need to translate that up to executives to say, here’s a way that we can improve our process better, but also it’s going to cost money. Where often in organizations are you talking to people about Tableau Pulse?

John Demby:
Well, Pulse is really, it’s interesting, when Tableau first started, Tableau really spoke to the business user. We made it really easy that a business user … like I said in my introduction with how I found Tableau, could easily go and get a license and start using Tableau. We still do that today. We still have an online store and anybody can buy Tableau, even if it’s one license to get started and things like that. But it’s usually the business that drives this. It’s like, okay, I need these insights. I would imagine it’s the same customers that admins deal with on a day-to-day basis, is their end users and leaders and people that are overseeing things in Salesforce, they want these kind of things. And what we’ve done, especially with Pulse for Salesforce is, because of the managed package we’ve made it really easy for a Salesforce admin to set this up with really little to no Tableau experience, and then get started. And then they can expand their usage and learn more about the product and stuff like that. But yeah, it’s the business I think is really who’s driving a lot of this. In fact, one of the things, it’s a stat that’s out there is, if I remember it right, 70% of leaders really want their organizations to be data-driven.

But when you look at it, only about 30% of the potential knowledge workers … think of a knowledge worker as really anybody that could use data to influence a decision, so that could be all the way down to the shop floor. So knowledge workers are everywhere, they’re not just behind a desk and things like that, but only about 30% of those actually have access to data. Sometimes, like I said, it’s locked away. It may be in a dashboard, so we actually ask them to go find it. But the future is really bringing it in the flow, embedding it in where they are, being able to show it on things like mobile devices and tablets and all those accelerated devices where you can get more information. Yeah. I think admins will find that it’s a very common conversation to have with the business. We’re happy to have it with you, to talk to you about all the different industry use cases and all the different options that we’ve seen people use Pulse for.

Mike Gerholdt:
The perfect segue. I was going to ask, is one thing that I don’t ask enough on this podcast, I try to keep things generic and applicable to most. But industry use cases in industries, is there any industries this is specifically geared for, or which ones are really benefiting the most?

John Demby:
That’s a great question. In fact, in case my team actually listens to this … I don’t know if they will or not.

Mike Gerholdt:
Of course they do. Everybody listens to the admin podcast.

John Demby:
Everybody listens to the podcast, but I’ll actually compliment them. Because once we launched Pulse, we started on a mad project to enable and create as many industry demos as we could on Pulse. And do everything from HLS, healthcare to financial services to non-profit, to public sector to manufacturing, to … I’m going to leave some of them out, Salesforce, all the Salesforce clouds, really marketing, HR. There’s really not a use case out there that Pulse doesn’t meet some need for, because everybody’s got KPIs. And what’s kind of fun to me is, I had a sales … I’m going to talk about how great it is to use AI here too. I had a sales rep come to me and says, “Hey, I’ve got a customer, they’re buying Loyalty Management from Salesforce. I want to know what I could do from a Pulse perspective.” Well, we have 50 plus demos out there but we haven’t got the 51 done for Loyalty Management yet. It’s a product that I’m not as familiar with, so I turned to my friend AI that we actually have licensed in-house, so it’s secure and everything like that.

I simply ask it, tell me the Pulse metrics for Loyalty Management and next thing I know, I had about 10 Pulse metrics they called out that you could actually write on Loyalty Management. It was very simple, very clean. I could actually take those definitions, create my dataset for Loyalty Management, and build out those metrics just in a matter of minutes and then share them with the organization. So AI is helping us even figure out what ways to deploy our software, which I think is really cool.

Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, yeah, that’s always beneficial. You think of, especially for an organization like Salesforce, how much documentation and video and just even internal assets we create, it can be hard to know where it all is and what’s what too. John, thanks for coming on and talking Tableau Einstein and Pulse with us. It’s always good to hear. Are you going to any world tours this-

John Demby:
I think I may end up at the Dallas World Tour since it’s local.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, well, that makes sense. I would say, look for the guy in the cowboy hat, but if you’re going to the Dallas World Tour …

John Demby:
Surprisingly enough, even if-

Mike Gerholdt:
… you’re probably not the only person.

John Demby:
… the Dallas World Tour, I will probably be the only person in a cowboy hat. Because I seem to be pretty … Although it was interesting, I will say this, I was at, of course, Dreamforce with you a couple of weeks ago or a month ago or however long it was. I’m coming down the escalator-

Mike Gerholdt:
I don’t really know, it was in the past, in the time.

John Demby:
Yeah, it’s in the past. But I’m coming down the escalator and I’m going to do a session in one of the broadcast theaters, I literally walked by a guy with a cowboy hat. I was like, wait a minute, I’m the only one out of the 45,000 people who are supposed to have a cowboy hat in San Francisco.

Mike Gerholdt:
Didn’t you get the memo?

John Demby:
Yeah, there you go. But no, look for me at the Dallas World Tour. I would love to catch up with you in any other way, just reach out to me on LinkedIn or however you want to find me, I’d be happy to chat.

Mike Gerholdt:
Was it a white cowboy hat? Because I will say this, you have the most crisp white cowboy hat.

John Demby:
Yes. Well, I have a collection-

Mike Gerholdt:
I’m sure.

John Demby:
… much to the chagrin of my wife, but I do have a collection of cowboy hats. And yes, for Dreamforce I was wearing a nice, silver/white hat.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. No, I remember it. So did the other person have a white cowboy hat or do you not remember?

John Demby:
I think it was brown.

Mike Gerholdt:
Right. See, so you’re one of-

John Demby:
I was the only one with the silver cowboy hat there.

Mike Gerholdt:
Exactly.

John Demby:
There you go.

Mike Gerholdt:
No, it’s awesome. Good. Well, people make it down to Dallas, then look for you, I’m sure it will be hard to find anybody else walking around with a white cowboy hat. But also think of it, they can also just go, they’re in the perfect city to get themselves a white cowboy hat.

John Demby:
Yeah, there we go. Or ask me, I live in Fort Worth, I’ll hook you up with my hat guy if you want a hat.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, man. A good haberdasher that can form and foam, that is … I have gone down that rabbit hole of TikTok before for a couple of hours and watch them, how they can make those hats and steam and form, it’s an art.

John Demby:
In fact, I have one sitting by my desk, that I need to go see my hat guy and have him shape it back up because it’s a little crooked. I need to do that this week.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, so cool, I could watch those too. Thanks so much, John. Have a great world tour and we’re going to go check out some more Tableau Einstein and Pulse.

John Demby:
All right, sounds good.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, it was another great discussion with John. I hope you enjoyed this episode, I know I did. It was a fun reminder of just all the amazing things that Tableau can help us Salesforce admins do in terms of driving insight across our orgs. Now, if you enjoyed the episode, please be sure to share it with a friend or a colleague, especially if you’re listening on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen. Generally there’s three dots in the corner and you can click share episode, and then you can post it to social or maybe text it to a friend. Now, we mentioned a few things, any resources and really just a lot of content for you to check out is over at admin.salesforce.com. That’s where you can find a ton of blog posts that me and the whole admin team create to help you be successful with our product and in your career. Of course, you can find everything that we mentioned, links in the show notes, including an episode transcript if you need to go back and check that out.

And don’t forget to join the conversation with other Salesforce admins over in the admin Trailblazer group that is over in the Trailblazer Community. Again, you know where to find the link, it’s in the show notes. So until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post What Makes Tableau Pulse Essential for Salesforce Admins? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, guest host Josh Birk talks to Katie Villanueva, Golden Hoodie winner and Salesforce Administrator at 10K Advisors. Join us as we chat about her work with mental health advocacy and mindfulness principles that you can apply to your work as a Salesforce Admin.

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

Mental health advocacy in the Salesforce ecosystem

Katie started out as an accidental admin, getting her degree in radio and television. These days, she works as a Salesforce Administrator for 10K Advisors, where she’s hard at work updating legacy code with flows and improving workflow processes.

Katie’s also the founder of the Mental Health and Illness Trailblazer Community Group. It’s a space in the ecosystem to make meaningful connections, share resources, and share stories. “We’re not alone in our struggles,” Katie says, and what’s important is to build that support network and talk about it.

Mindfulness principles for stress management and personal growth

Recently, Katie gave a talk at Midwest Dreamin’ entitled “Appreciate Your #AwesomeAdmin Self,” based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s seven principles of mindfulness. The principles are a skill and something you have to practice, but they can help you overcome fear, doubt, imposter syndrome, burnout, stress, and negative self-talk.

The principles are:

1. Non-judgement
2. Patience
3. Beginner’s mindset
4. Trust
5. Non-striving
6. Acceptance
7. Letting go

In the talk, Katie gets into how you can apply those principles to your work as a Salesforce Admin. 

As seen on the Dreamforce stage

At Dreamforce, Katie presented “Automate with AI: Prompt Builder, Flow, and Slack,” about the magic you can make when you get all three working together. If you missed out, she recently covered the same topics on How I Solved It with Jennifer Lee. 

Katie has so many great insights to share, so be sure to listen to the full episode to learn more. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Trailblazer Group: Salesforce Mental Health + Illness Group (Virtual)
• How I Solved It: Harness the Power of AI, Flow, and Slack to Summarize and Notify Users

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Katie on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on Tiktok
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Josh:
Hello, Admins! Guest host Josh Birk here, and today I’m going to bring you my guest, Katie Villanueva. You may have known Katie Villanueva from her recent Golden Hoodie Win. Also, Katie and I share a long history of mental health advocacy, and indeed, today we are going to talk about mental health and wellness tips for the workplace. Now a quick note due to the Gravity, well, which is Dreamforce. We actually recorded this shortly before Dreamforce, but it is not coming out until well after Dreamforce. So just kind of imagine when Katie’s talking about the session that she’s going to do at Dreamforce that she already did it. I attended it and it was wonderful. Now over to Katie. Alright, today on the show we welcome Katie Villanueva to talk about her work with mental health advocacy and some of her upcoming presentations. Katie, welcome to the show.

Katie:
Hi, thanks for having me.

Josh:
Alright, well let’s start with your early years. What did you go to school for?

Katie:
I went to school for radio. Television. Yeah. Well, no, actually a farmer. And then I graduated with radio, television, so I bounced around until I found my niche in the world, which is Salesforce being an admin.

Josh:
Okay. And what was your first involvement with Salesforce?

Katie:
I was an accidental admin, accidental on purpose admin. I wanted to do the job so they didn’t have anybody doing the job. So at a company that didn’t have a team or didn’t have any experience with Salesforce, you always have that one person who ends up being the accidental admin. I sought out that position and said, I want to do it.

Josh:
So you were kind of a voluntold admin, but you sort of voluntold yourself?

Katie:
Yeah, yeah. I had a lot of really good ideas and nobody was going to execute ’em the way that I wanted to execute them, so I just decided to steer the ship myself.

Josh:
A classic form of if you want a job done. Right. Got it.

Katie:
Yes. Love it.

Josh:
And how would you describe your current job?

Katie:
Oh, my current job, I am no longer steering ships. I am absorbing all the things about Salesforce. I went to, the first role that I had was at a smaller company, no integrations, we only use Sales Cloud. It was a great role to wrap my arms around Salesforce and what its core capabilities were. But I graduated into this role. Now I’m with 10 K advisors. They’re amazing, made up full of great people, and they have a really old org and it’s full of code, and they’re looking to update it with flows and retire those old workflow rules and put ’em into flows and clean up that old code and put it into something that now Salesforce is capable of doing that it wasn’t able to do eight years ago. So I’m learning a lot about Code and Flow and also just the mega massive org that it is. And I’m working with a team, so I’m also learning best practices and how to work with others and share the helm.

Josh:
Got it. Nice. Nice. Well, we’re focusing on mental health for the most part today and awareness. So tell me a little bit about the Trailblazer community that you started. Yeah,

Katie:
So I created the mental health and illness user group, and it is a space in the ecosystem where we can make meaningful connections and share resources and share stories and try to figure out this not only work-life balance and build up a support system around you, but understand that we’re not alone in the struggles that folks have that I think everybody has at one point or another in their lives, or folks that are dealing with mental illnesses such as myself, I have bipolar disorder and I get to meet other people with bipolar disorder, and we get to talk about how that affects us doing the job and how we get through that. So all kinds of, everybody’s got stuff going on and we weren’t talking about it that much prior to the group, openly, at least that I was aware of. And I started talking about it and folks gathered around and I went to Salesforce and said, Hey, I think there’s a community here that could use some support and can flourish. And they agreed and we created the user group. It’s a virtual user group, but at conferences we try to meet up and color Well, I mean, conferences are so exhausting.

Katie:
You get zapped or whatever the word you want to use, you get drained really easily over socialized, overstimulated. And some folks use it as a quiet time and put on some music and chill out. And then other folks just use it as icebreakers too, to meet some other people, conference goers, and then it’s very library vibes. It’s quiet, there’s small talk or there’s no talk. I love it.

Josh:
Which is sometimes exactly what people need. So that’s good. Yeah, no, I agree. And I feel like it’s actually Dreamforce and Trailhead DX have only gotten, I think is the way I’d put it. Being on the floor on Moscone can just be visually overstimulating even before you start lingering in sounds and social interactions and things like that. And I know it’s become even more important for me to remind myself that sometimes you just have to take a walk, get outside, enjoy that wonderful park that’s right next to Meko before things get a little haywire. Tell me a little bit about before you started grappling with your bipolar disorder and with stress and anxiety, what were some symptoms that you saw at work that were causing you pain?

Katie:
Oh man. I was a wreck. I think the first thing that comes to mind was probably the most impactful that had happened to me is that I had a manager just blow up at me on one day and say, I don’t know which version of you I’m going to get.

Katie:
Some days you come in here, you’re on top of it, you’re productive, you’re all over it. I don’t have to worry about anything. And then other days it’s like you don’t know what’s going on or you’re crying or you just aren’t thinking through some simple tasks, stuff like that. And he couldn’t depend on me, which broke my heart because I am a hard worker and I put so much of myself into my work because, and this was at the radio station, I loved the radio station. I found a direction at that time in my life and the fact that I was failing it and failing at what I’m capable of really just hurt me to my core. So that was an issue. And then a lot of times I cried a lot. I cried so much if my personal life was not steady, which at age 20, trying to figure life out, it’s not really one thing

Katie:
Yeah, yeah. You don’t have balance in your life. That was a trigger. And then some personal stuff, deaths in the family, stuff like that, just like anybody else would react to. But for me, when I had those triggers, it was exponential. I mean, here’s good example. Just recently my dog died and it was my soulmate dog, and I had a manic episode after she died. Yes, I was grieving, but I took that for the nth degree and abandoned my everyday life. And just because I was so obsessed about, I went to a manic episode about creating a photo album. I created three, I printed 400 pictures out of, I only had 200 out of my dog and I printed 400. I had triplets of the same picture, and I kept on printing them. And then I bought photo album after photo album after photo album because the photo albums weren’t good enough for the kind of book that I wanted to make. And then I spent time obsessing and I wasn’t doing my work. I wasn’t going to the gym. I was eating crappy food, I was also depressed. So I was drinking every night and I was just going through pictures, and I spent a ridiculous amount of money on this more than anybody really should when they want to put together a photo album for a dog that may have passed away.

Katie:
So when life gets imbalanced for me, it trickles into my work life. And unfortunately, that just means, I guess my manager said, I can be unpredictable or unreliable. It’s hard. It’s hard to hear because I know I can do a good job and I know I am a good worker and I know I produce good work.

Josh:
Yeah. Well, and we’ve talked about this back on the dev pod days, and it’s so important to be able to talk about it because first of all, I think in the tech industry, it’s really hard for people to admit that they might become unreliable for some reason because so much of our jobs, it is supposed to be show up. I was just at a user group meeting and they were joking about how they figured out that the best way to learn how to do flow was by failing at it five times. Right? It’s the same thing with coding. You’re going to break it three times to Sunday before you ever get anything work. But our outer image is like, oh, you need that code to get you to work. The train’s going to come on time, boss. You’re going to just kind of get it done. But if you don’t talk about it, you don’t normalize it. You don’t rationalize it. And then we realize so much that we’re not alone, that there are so many people out there dealing with depression, anxiety, chronic illnesses, or even just basic,

Katie:
I can’t be, there’s 10 million people with bipolar disorder. I cannot be the only person that this company who employs not 10 K, but I mean a company of however, a hundred, I worked for larger companies, national, global companies with a hundred thousand plus workers. I can’t be the only one with this. So how are you going to deal with this? How do we learn how to deal with this when it comes up? So yeah, you got to talk about it.

Josh:
Yeah. And I’m on the record on a different session than I did, basically saying to people, managers, I know you didn’t sign up to be somebody’s therapist, and we’re not asking you to be somebody’s therapist. That’s not your job. However, part of your job as a people manager is to recognize, acknowledge and work around mental health challenges because it will happen. It will happen to somebody who has, I don’t even know if normal brains exist in a post pandemic world, to be honest. When somebody loses a dog or a mom or a father or something like that, every now and then life is going to break you down a little bit and you’re not going to show up to work and be a hundred percent and maybe not showing up to work for a while is exactly what you need. And I will, as I always do, give a shout out to the wonderful people I’ve worked with at Salesforce who have been so supportive in things that I’ve done in the past and really helping prioritize mental health days and be able to take time off and the important things. So the self-care is very important to the employee, but it’s very important to have a safe space that management can help provide that as well.

Katie:
Yeah, agreed. I think, I don’t know, I got nothing. I feel like we hold so much back

Josh:
Because

Katie:
We’re spending so much energy trying to cover it up. When I let go of holding back and I got my medication and I found my balance and I went to therapy, all that energy that I had trying to hide, it turned into something really productive and my career skyrocketed.

Josh:
Yeah. Yeah. Nice. What are some things that you do on the day-to-day that kind of help you regulate your stress and monitor your stress?

Katie:
Definitely workout. Workout and eating. That is what I can keep in my control

Katie:
When I, I reduce my stress levels, which evens out my moods. And then I also, I get a boost of serotonin in my brain, which is pretty much a dose of happy medicine. Then you put that on top of the actual medicine. Then it keeps me my boat upright. Nice. I like it. Yeah. Eating. I try to eat healthy and I control how much I drink. Unfortunately, like I said, when my dog passed, I wasn’t monitoring those things and I spiraled and I felt like junk and alcohol’s a depressant. So when I was depressed, I, and I knew I was digging myself deeper in the hole. I didn’t have the energy to stop myself, but it was enough for warning signs for my loved ones to know, Hey, Katie doesn’t drink that much. And my husband said, if you’re sad, we can’t drink. He helped me. He was like, I’m not going to buy any alcohol this week.

Josh:
Nice.

Katie:
And it helped and it just broke the chain and we got alcohol back in the house. Again, not that I’m an alcoholic, but I couldn’t stop myself, but my support was able to see these signs that this is irregular, this is not everyday, Katie. So when I stopped going to the gym and when I stopped eating healthy, those were signs.

Josh:
I had somebody, actually, I think it was an article I was reading, and this is mostly about anxiety. So serotonin inhibitors, they work by forcing serotonin to go back to the front lines and keep working. And then she’s like, so it’s a very healthy thing because you’re basically just tricking your brain into doing what it was supposed to be doing in the first place. And then if you smoke marijuana, marijuana goes after the same receptors, it goes after the same serotonin receptors, so it doesn’t let this SSRIs do their job. And so she’s like, now think if your house is on fire, right? Serotonin is like a sprinkler system in your house goes off, fire is down, your house is fine. Marijuana is kind of like you call the fire department even though it’s just a kitchen fire. So now the fire is out, but your entire house is drenched and you have all this property damage.

Josh:
And then she’s like, alcohol is like you have your house on fire and you call in the military and send in a tank to blow up your house. That’s how much more powerful alcohol is taking the attention away from what your brain is supposed to be doing. Alright, well let’s shift gears here a little bit. Move into kind of positive vibe mode. And I want to talk about the talk that you did at Midwest streaming, which is appreciating your awesomeness as an admin. And the first thing I want to ask you, because you kind of set up the session is like, this is about you. This is about a person, but you bring up somebody, John Cabot, Z, and I don’t know if I’m saying that right, but who is John Cabot Zi and how did he impact your session?

Katie:
Oh my gosh. Actually, I have a funny full circle story about him. So I’ll just start with, so the session is based off of the seven principles of mindfulness, which he is known to have created or at least put pen to paper and say, these are the seven principles. I’m sure they existed prior before that, but he popularized the principles. So the principles are widely accepted around the world for its impact on stress. It will, and this is what I tell the folks that come to my session. It’ll help you overcome fear and doubt and imposter syndrome and burnout and stress and negative. The principles are a skill and it’s something you have to practice. But if you practice, you will be able to manage your stress. And sometimes I even catch myself thinking, oh, I am not applying a principal right now. But the principles themselves are non-judgment. So I relate that to folks. I say, are you comparing yourself to others? Because that means you’re passing judgment on yourself.

Josh:
Yes.

Katie:
Which everybody does at one point or the other. And then the second question is, are you patient with yourself? We all want to learn everything right now, especially the new stuff that comes out. I remember when AI came out and people were experts the next day, they’re self proclaiming experts.

Josh:
That is a very important addition to that phrase because I assure you, as somebody who jumped on that bandwagon and had to do a lot of reading, unless you were already an AI researcher, nobody was an expert when this certain bandwagon started rolling up.

Katie:
Yeah. Yep. Exactly. So the second one is be patient and give yourself time and space to learn. The third question that he cited was having a beginner’s mindset. So are you being open to learning new things, which is so important. I mean, you can’t be in this profession without it. And if you don’t have it, you probably aren’t very good at your job. And I’d say that sounds harsh, but what I’m saying is having a beginner’s mindset is being open to new things. We always have new releases. It’s being open to new solutions. If you come to a table and think that you already have the fix and you haven’t heard other ideas or other things that may snag it up in the process, then you’re being very closed-minded and may not have the best solution. And then being open to learn, like I said. And so it’s having a beginner’s mindset. And I say this in the session and it’s my favorite line in the entire session is having a beginner’s mindset is the thing that prevents you from getting stuck. It allows you to grow.

Josh:
Yeah, yeah. Well, and as you’re saying, it’s very important in our culture and Salesforce culture because we do stuff changes so quickly. Three releases a year, new features, new products. The joke that I’ve been putting on the road these days is at one point you could actually learn the whole platform. You could learn almost everything about being an admin. You could learn almost everything about being a developer. And it wasn’t, wasn’t a mind killer. And now it’s practically impossible because even within just the Salesforce platform itself, there’s so many moving gears, but then you add in MuleSoft and Tableau and Slack and they have their own releases and they’re constantly updating stuff. But I think it even goes farther than that. It goes exactly what you’re talking about with your new job. If you don’t assume that there might be a better thing on the table now than when you made the thing three years ago, you might be missing out. And I always told my developer teams, don’t rely on the code you wrote last year because chances are somebody at Salesforce fix that 15 lying piece of code that you wrote just to get that one thing to work. It’s probably one line of code now, and if you don’t go researching it, you won’t find that out.

Katie:
Yeah. I mean, I don’t mean to be so harsh, but it’s so important in this line of business is to open yourself to all the things available and to all the possibilities and all the ideas and all the learning, and that’s what keeps us moving forward. But going back to the principles, the fourth principle of mindfulness is trust. So I feel like a lot of us don’t trust ourselves. We’re not confident in questioning or even I gave them an example of saying no to somebody, especially maybe somebody in a leadership position. But sometimes we don’t do that because we’re afraid we’re going to make a mistake. But I remind folks that mistakes are okay. It’s not failure, it’s just learning in action, but still trust your gut. So that’s the fourth principle. The fifth principle is non-striving. And people are like, what? Non-striving, you mean don’t cry? No, what I mean is that if you’re always breaching and striving for the next thing, how can you be happy with what you did accomplish? And I say the example of how often do you see somebody work really hard for a certification and they post on LinkedIn that they got it, they’re certified now, but before the end of the post, they’re already onto that next one.

Katie:
And so they’re not in the moment and they’re not supporting themselves and they’re not appreciating their accomplishments. So a non-striving is definitely appreciate how your accomplishments make you feel and tap into that. The sixth principle is acceptance. And that’s another what I get from people. The acceptance is see things as they are. But I quickly follow that up as that does not mean keep things as they are. I mean, how many of us are in a situation with either rose colored glasses and something is so great, whether it be a work experience or a job or maybe a skillset that you think you have spot on and you really don’t. Or maybe you’re in a situation that’s really negative, but maybe it’s not so negative because you’re not being open to what’s coming at you and you are not really benefiting from it. You just are so against it. So the sixth question really challenges people to open their minds and their hearts to the situations they’re in. Because I say and what Mr. John says, he says, if you can see a situation for what it truly is, that’s what helps you decide to change it.

Katie:
And that’s what gets you organized and motivated to take on the next challenge. And I tell folks, I said, you have to appreciate that you have the power to change what you see.

Josh:
Nice.

Katie:
Yeah, it’s really cool because sometimes we feel like we don’t have that power. It is like we don’t have the power to grow. We don’t have the power to learn will take us forever to get to where we want to go. We can’t say no to somebody that is all inside you. We have that. We just have to recognize it. And then the seventh principle is the hardest one, but the simplest. And that is to let go, just let go. This is where we’re at, this is what we’re learning. This is the situation I’m in and I’m going to change it, but it’s going to take time. And I’m working towards those goals and just let go of that stress

Katie:
I just fixating on what isn’t really isn’t healthy.

Josh:
So I love all of that. And the two things that come to mind, first of all is there are so many things that you’re describing that are so similar to how cognitive behavioral therapy works, which CBT is a lot about reframing and asking questions. Do you have evidence for this thought that you’re having? And if you don’t have evidence to it, does that mean it’s an irrational thought or a rational thought? And it’s like investigating the emotions that we jump to before we actually try to make change. So there you’ve got acceptance there, you have patience. The other thing I love about it is how they kind of play with each other a little bit. You have to give yourself patience to not know something, but also open a beginner’s mindset to go learn something new. So it sounds like it’s a very good lesson in balance. It’s not just all our favorite statement and no insult to yoga people because yoga is wonderful, but when people are like, oh, you’re having a bad mental health day, why don’t you just go do yoga? It’s just not that simple people. It just doesn’t work that way. How do you find yourself dealing with, when does this introduce into your daily life? Do you find yourself in a situation and then you take a step back and be like, oh, I should leverage this principal at this point?

Katie:
Oh, for sure not. Yeah. And I’ll be honest, I was introduced to this when I was going through yoga teacher training. It’s not the seven principles of mindfulness, it’s the eight branches of yoga, and it’s very similar and it’s theories of mostly being letting go, not being possessive of things and so on and so forth. So that’s what got me to looking for something that I can bring to the Salesforce community along those lines. And I stumbled upon these. So when I wrote this up, I was like, I need this. And every time I give this session, it’s like a love letter to myself from my past self. It is just a reminder that I am imperfect. It’s a reminder that I am on a journey and to be patient. And so when I get mean at my job at 10 K, I’m still in my first year. Everybody there. I don’t know if you know this is a hall of Famer or an MVP. Oh, I know that. No. Oh gosh. It’s really intimidating. And I’ve only been in the ecosystem for four years. I’ve the least amount of experience and everybody on the Team.

Katie:
I get really insecure about that. But you know, it’s where I’m at.

Katie:
Yeah, it’s where I’m at and I’m learning and I’m growing. So when I get upset about work stuff, I do think about these principles or I’m prepping for Dreamforce and I’m really excited to give my presentation, but I’m like, am I going to get it done in time? Am I going to remember all the words? Am I going to get tongue tied? And I just take a step back when I get really upset or really wrapped up into something, something that’s stressing me out that I’m trying to be productive on. That’s when the principles come to me. And then I take a step back and I think through them and I’m like, how am I applying this? What is the one that’s stressing me out the most? And so it’s taking that step back and it definitely calms me down a lot.

Josh:
Got it. So kind of preparing your mind to go prepare yourself to go do something.

Katie:
Yeah. Yeah.

Josh:
Nice. What are some of the things that you’re going to be doing at Dreamforce?

Katie:
Oh, I will be giving my first technical session about automating with ai. I’ll be reviewing Prompt Builder flow and Slack and what happens when you combine them all and what kind of magic comes out of that?

Josh:
Nice.

Katie:
I’m really excited about it. I keep on making a joke. I was like, I’ve talked about my feelings a lot. I am ready to talk.

Josh:
Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. I’m trying to teach my status as the guy who really bums people out. Oh, she’s going to talk about something dark again.

Katie:
I just say I’m an admin. I want to show people that I do admin stuff too. Nice. I love it. But oh, speaking of which, I did say that I called it John Kebas. You called it his name different, I don’t know, I should probably look that up exactly. But I said it was a full circle thing because when I went to my first community conference, I went to my first Salesforce tower in Atlanta and I was really excited and they had all these books on the shelves and they said, we can grab one. And I grabbed Barack Obama’s book, I grabbed his book, and it’s a book on mindfulness.

Josh:
Nice.

Katie:
I didn’t realize that when I wrote this session last year, I didn’t realize that I had grabbed that book two years prior because I never read it because it’s not a graphic novel, but I’ll get to it when I put my comic books down, I will get to it. But I just thought it was weird. I was like, this guy has been in my life before and now I’m talking about him. That’s

Josh:
Nice. That’s nice. Are there any mental health and illness events coming up soon?

Katie:
Well, let’s see. We’re still trying to figure out what we’re going to do for Dreamforce. We do want to color, unfortunately, it will not be in the community networking area, but they do have coloring posters though. So I still suggest people go and decompress with their coloring posters. But we are looking at maybe having a nonprofit event where we raised money for a charity by coloring.

Josh:
Oh, nice.

Katie:
Teaming up with Green Power, who’s interested in giving back to the community. And they reached out to me and loved the coloring event, and I was like, I’m looking for somewhere to host, so someone to host. So doing that. And then also October 10th is World Mental Health Day,

Katie:
And I saw a speaker at Dreaming in Color this year. She was speaking about mindfulness, and her name’s Nick e Thomas, and she’s not part of the ecosystem. She actually was a radio DJ who went rogue and wanted to do more mindful and self-care talks and helping people find their purpose and balance and center. And it was a wonderful session. So I invited her to come for World Mental Health Day and teach us a little bit about self-care. We’re going to do a little bit of meditation, a little bit of chair yoga, and then just learn about centering ourselves a lot. Like these principles next tell us to do so. Yeah, we got

Josh:
That’s awesome. And that’s a virtual event. I love the Rogue DJ who went out to try to help the world. That’s a movie I would watch. I’d watch that.

Katie:
Yeah, she’s awesome. I’m really happy that I stumbled upon her.

Josh:
Nice. Alright, well one final question. Do you have a favorite comfort food?

Katie:
97% dark chocolate.

Josh:
Oh wow. That’s a good one.

Katie:
I like it. Dark and bitter,

Josh:
Not a lot of

Katie:
Sugar. And it’s

Josh:
Creamy. Nice, nice. I like it a lot. I like it a lot. I always go back to meatloaf. I think it’s because my mom used to make meatloaf. I think it’s a mom

Katie:
That’s on the whole other spectrum for me. No way. Although my husband introduced me to smoked meat loafs and that’s actually really good. So if it’s smoked, I’ll eat it.

Josh:
And this is the thing I have learned since cooking meatloaf. There are a lot of different ways to do it. So yeah, wrap them in bacon sometimes works really well.

Katie:
Oh wow.

Josh:
Alrighty, Katie. Well thank you so much for the great conversation information. That was a lot of fun.

Katie:
Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Josh:
I want to thank Katie for the great conversation and information. And as always, I want to thank you for listening. Now, if you want to learn more about this show, head on over to admin.salesforce.com or go to your podcast client of choice. And of course, as always, join us over on admin.salesforce.com to learn more about being an admin. Thanks again everybody. I’ll talk to you soon.

The post How Can Salesforce Admins Overcome Imposter Syndrome and Stress? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Eddie Cliff, VP of Product Management at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about Salesforce Foundations and how it can give you access to even more capabilities within Sales, Service, and beyond.

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

Introduction to Salesforce Foundations

Eddie is the lead PM for Salesforce Foundations, and he’s here to tell us how it can be a game changer for orgs looking to incorporate AI. Now, if you’re a longtime listener to the podcast you know that AI tools are only as good as the data you give them. And while Data Cloud is meant to help you bring all your data into one place, it’s not always easy for customers to make the transition.

That’s where Salesforce Foundations comes in. It adds the basic capabilities of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud, and Agentforce to your org, for free.

How to get started with Salesforce Foundations

The goal with Salesforce Foundations is to make it easy to get that 360° view of your customers. As Eddie says, their philosophy is “Easy by default, advanced by choice.” And you’ll find that as you start doing more with segmentation and personalization, you’ll realize just how much further you can go.

Right now, customers with Sales or Service EE or UE can get Salesforce Foundations for free. All you have to do is go into Setup and click on the Salesforce Foundations node, and you’ll be presented with a handy-dandy checklist with everything you need to get started.

Preparing for Agentforce

Foundations makes it easy to get your org ready for Agentforce. That’s why Eddie and his team have included a freemium version of Agentforce in Foundations. “What’s really cool,” he says, “is that as you do more and you use more of these cross-cloud capabilities, your data in Data Cloud gets richer and more powerful and so does Agentforce.”

There’s a lot more in this episode about how Foundations was developed, what’s coming in the future, and the ins and outs of sea kayaking, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode of the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Trailhead: Salesforce Foundations: Quick Look
• Help docs: Considerations for Salesforce Foundations
• Salesforce Admins Blog: Connect Teams and Data with the New Salesforce Foundations

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Eddie on X
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on Tiktok
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, we’re talking with Eddie Cliff, VP of Product Management at Salesforce, about some exciting developments in Salesforce Foundations. It was the subline to Agentforce that you heard at Dreamforce this year. Eddie has been at Salesforce for nearly 14 years, transitioning from roles in go-to-market and solution engineering to now product management. And in this episode, Eddie shares insights into the evolution of Salesforce products like Starter, Pro Suite, and we learn about Salesforce Foundations.

Now, before we get started, I just want to make sure that you’re subscribed to the Salesforce Admins podcast on whatever platform you get your Salesforce podcast on. Go ahead and click that subscribe, or sometimes it’s a follow button. And that way, when new episodes come in every Thursday morning, they will be downloaded to your phone. So with that, let’s jump into our conversation with Eddie where he explains how Salesforce Foundations is designed to give customers access to even more capabilities within sales, service and beyond, including all of their existing Salesforce implementations at no cost. So Eddie, welcome back to the podcast.

Eddie Cliff:
Hey, thanks for having me again. Good to be here.

Mike:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, product managers that work on good features that admins love, we love to have on the podcast. So if people aren’t avid listeners, let’s refresh their memory. Tell me what exactly you do at Salesforce and how you came to be?

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, definitely. So my name is Eddie Cliff, VP of Product Management, leading product for our Starter, Pro and now Foundation Suite, which I’m really excited to talk about today. I’ve been at Salesforce for almost 14 years now, and I’ve done a variety of roles, from go-to-market and sales and solution engineering and customer success prior to moving into product management about eight years ago now.

Mike:
Wow, I didn’t know you were an SC. I don’t think you said that in the last podcast. That’s awesome.

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, SCs are amazing in what they can bring from their technical understanding and how Salesforce works, but also working with our customers to understand their requirements and needs, and ultimately designing the solutions that they can present back to the customer to hopefully prove out the value of Salesforce as they look to explore it. So actually, have a couple of SCs on my team… Well, former SCs that are now PMs. SCs make really great PMs because of that solutions mindset that’s really tied to customer outcomes, which is super valuable.

Mike:
Yeah, no, I hear you. I also steal from the SC pot as well because they make for good evangelists too.

Eddie Cliff:
Definitely.

Mike:
And they help us present and run demos at Dreamforce, so it doesn’t hurt. Speaking of Dreamforce, maybe not lost in, but the byline under Agentforce was Salesforce Foundations, which we announced, and your leading as the PM force. So let’s talk about what Salesforce Foundations is.

Eddie Cliff:
So it was buried there at the very end of the keynote. So perhaps some people missed it because it was all about Agentforce and it was an amazing keynote. But we’re really excited about Foundations because it’s going to help customers unlock Agentforce. And so before I talk about Foundations a little bit more, I want to take a step back to talk about AI in general, which I know is top of mind for a lot of businesses today and probably a lot of the admins listening today. And I promise we’re going to get to the meat of Foundations, but I think it’s important to talk about this first. So first and foremost, great AI starts with great data, and you can only have great data if all of your apps and systems are connected and you have that single source of truth. And that’s what Data Cloud really does for a lot of our customers.

Now, bringing all that data into one system will lead to happier customers because now you can do targeted marketing, smarter commerce, and more effective sales. And what’s really cool is that this also gets all of your data centralized and ready for AI, but it’s not easy for a lot of our customers to go from say just Sales Cloud or just Service Cloud on their own to the full Customer 360 that we talk about a lot. You need time and resources, and I know from a lot of customers I talk to, that’s not something that they have the luxury of having. And so that’s the goal here with Foundations is we’re making this easier by bringing all of these capabilities to all of our customers through Salesforce Foundations.

So Foundations gives all of these sales and service customers access to more of Salesforce included with their existing Salesforce implementation, and this is free. I want to make sure that’s clear. That’s not something we’re charging for, and you can add this to your existing organ, we’ll talk a little bit about that. But ultimately, with Foundations, we’ve made it easier than ever before to get started with that Connected Customer 360 by building our foundational apps into your CRM. And this includes the basic capabilities within Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud, and now Agentforce, which is really exciting because as of today, it’s now available at no additional cost as part of Foundations.

Mike:
Yeah, free is always good. I also thought for a second that I was like, somebody said, “Well, did you hear about Salesforce Foundations?” And I think they dropped the S and I was like, “Yes, I’ve heard of the Salesforce Foundation.” That’s not what we’re announcing.

Eddie Cliff:
No, that’s right. Yeah, I know there’s a lot of words that we use at Salesforce and a lot of them sound familiar. This is Foundations with an S, not our .org and all of the amazing things that we do via the Salesforce Foundation. This is, if you think about it, like the foundations, the platform, the beginning point of your Salesforce journey and all the power you can bring.

Mike:
So I feel like all of this existed prior, we just brought together… I’ve seen all this stuff. How did Foundations come to be?

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, and I think, Mike, last time I was on, we were talking about the Pro Suite and hopefully everybody had an opportunity to listen to that, but this is a refresher, the journey we’ve been on over the last few years with Salesforce Starter launching back in 2022. We really built this with this ethos of being easy by default and advanced by choice and creating that 360 out of the box, sales, service, commerce and marketing with a hidden version of Data Cloud that was powering all this behind the scenes. And we were getting a lot of great feedback on Starter. It’s really a self-service product. You didn’t need any help to get up and running. You didn’t need to talk to an account executive. You could sign up online, try it for free and purchase with a credit card. But what we started to hear from our customers is they wanted more, either because they were growing or they just needed more advanced capabilities and more customization options.

And so that’s why we launched Pro Suite last year to allow for that seamless upgrade from Starter, and to allow our customers to get that enhanced set of capabilities and customization options. And again, we were getting really great feedback, which is awesome. And so what we started to hear from customers is they wanted to go up, they wanted to expand to Enterprise or even to Unlimited Edition, but they didn’t want to lose any of that 360. They didn’t want to go to Sales EE and lose the marketing and the commerce and the service capabilities that came with Starter and Pro Suites.

So that was the beginning of, “Well, let’s create this in a way that we can allow customers of Starter and Pro Suites to upgrade and not lose any capabilities.” But at the same point, we realized, “Well, we should make this base set of capabilities available for all of our customers so they can get that value, and they don’t have to start with Starter or Pro Suite. So they can do this directly in their EE or UE org.” And so doing things like allowing sellers to speed up things with payment links, and so they can send people to a digital storefront to take care of transactional deals that might free them up to focus on more strategic opportunities or doing cross-cloud scenarios like driving loyalty with Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud, working together to create onboarding journeys and loyalty campaigns.

And then also allowing marketing teams to get into the mix with really targeted Data Cloud segmentation and personalization tools to execute their email marketing campaigns. And ultimately allowing all the teams within an organization to get better cross-functional visibility by working out of that same system, all underpinned by Data Cloud.

Mike:
I think some of that, I’m thinking through as you were talking through that, a lot of that saw in the keynote with how… I forget the retailer we were talking about, but retailer can go in and the person can shop online and then look at it and then immediately pay in the store, making everything a little bit more seamless as opposed to having to send a link or somebody just call in with a credit card or paying online the modern way.

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. So bringing all of these pieces together and making it easy to consume and connecting all of the dots so you don’t have to do that on your side, allows you to do more with Data Cloud, to do more segmentation and personalization because you’re capturing that full Customer 360 in that unified profile that you can then use. So if you have say your commerce order data flowing in, that can be used to trigger marketing campaigns or can be used to surface in a service interaction within a case. And as you start to think about all of the Agentforce use cases you saw at Dreamforce, it’s predicated on the fact that you have a connected view of your customer. You built that Customer 360, which we know is a challenge for a lot of our customers. And so again, that’s the hope here with Foundations is it will help give you a starting point to start building that Customer 360 that you can grow with and scale up with as you need to.

Mike:
So one thing that struck me as you are walking through your last answer is thinking, I started as an admin and admins start in different orgs that are of different size. I started in enterprise level, so we were EE with days of always becoming a UE org, the big shiny emerald city. But you said in your answer, customers wanted to expand to EE and above. Was a lot of this predicated on our organizations that were below EE that set up very transactional use cases?

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, good question. It was primarily with those that had started with Starter or with Pro Suite for one reason or another, maybe that fit their business needs when they were first evaluating Salesforce, and then their needs grew and they needed the EE level of capabilities from a sales standpoint, from a service standpoint or just from a platform standpoint. And so that’s where we wanted to create this seamless motion that they could go up to EE without losing any of the functionality as well as the experience. It’s something we haven’t talked about that we’ve brought in with the Starter and Pro Suites with things like the Left Nav and our homepage, but ultimately allow them to grow as they need to without losing anything was really important to us.

And again, as I was talking about before, we realized that there was a large opportunity here to say, “Hey, there’s a lot of EE customers.” It’s by far and large the most adopted addition for us. There’s an opportunity to bring this starter level functionality from marketing, from commerce and from service to let’s say, a sales EE customer to start taking advantage of, to start trying out and using and see if it’s a good fit. They can start to bring in more team members across the organization, and then those solutions will scale and grow with them. But again, all can underpin by Data Cloud. So this makes it really easy for them to create that 360 view and sets it up really nicely now for the launch of Agentforce.

Mike:
Yeah, so that begs the question then, who’s eligible to get Salesforce Foundations?

Eddie Cliff:
So right now, customers with sales and/or service, EE or UE, so Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition can get Foundations for free, and that’s something that you can do. It just takes a couple of minutes, we’ll talk about it. But for those customers that have industries or might have some additional capabilities already in their org, we are working really hard to make Foundations available for you in the near future as well. So stay tuned there. And if you’re unsure of what your Salesforce org has, and if it’s eligible for Foundations, we have a lot of documentation, but of course, you’re also always able to reach out to your account executive and talk with them and learn more, and they can even assist with getting Foundations turned on.

Mike:
Right, because it normally was available to people EE and below, right?

Eddie Cliff:
That’s right. Yeah. So if you think about what we’ve done in Starter and Pro Suites, I think probably a simple way to think about what Foundations is, is the Pro Suite level of capabilities that we built, which is based on professional edition, sales, service, marketing and commerce. And in bringing that level of functionality up to EE and UE so that you get those additional capabilities that you didn’t have access to before. If you had sales EE or sales UE, you didn’t have a lot of this service or marketing or commerce capabilities and you didn’t have Data Cloud. And so that’s really what we’re trying to bring when you think about a foundational layer of capabilities and value that we can bring to all editions so everybody can take advantage of it and see the value from it.

Mike:
It’s almost, I think of the the Steve Jobs early Apple mantra of them looking at remotes and seeing 1,000 buttons and saying, “Well, yeah, anybody can make something complicated. It’s really hard to make something simple,” and bringing that motion forward. Sometimes you can overcomplicate things and set up. In this way, it’s just bringing it forward and making it very simple and logical to set up.

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, that’s certainly the goal and that’s the ethos that we took with Starter, that easy by default, advanced by choice, that you don’t need to be a Salesforce expert to get started with Salesforce. And we’ve carried that forward as we launch Pro Suite and now as we’re launching Foundations, to try to make this as easy as possible for everyone to set up and use and save everyone time in the implementation or adoption of these key features. And you’re right, Mike, it’s really hard to take something that’s hard and to make it easier, and we have a better, better, never best mentality as we approach this. There’s always work to be done and sharp edges and rough corners to round off and make the experience better and easier to use and fewer clicks to accomplish key tasks.

And so that’s near and dear to my heart, my team’s heart, on everything that we do in Starter and Pro and Foundations to hopefully make their products experiences as easy to use as possible and as delightful to use as possible as well.

Mike:
So you mentioned customers with sales and service, EE or UE are eligible. How do they turn it on? Is it light switch? That was the joke we made with Lightning, right?

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah. And as I transitioned into product management, you gave me some PTSD a little bit for the early days of Lightning back… When was that? 2015, 2016. And yeah, we had to do a lot of work to really make it so Lightning was something that large organizations could adopt. Foundations is a little bit different, which is really exciting and it is really simple to add it to your word. And actually, in setup now, there’s a new Salesforce Foundation setup node, which you’ll notice at the top left. So if you go into setup and you click on Salesforce Foundations, you’ll see all of the steps you need to do in a section called Start Here. And so we’ve made this super simple to get Foundations added and to get started with in your work. And it does require that you’ll need to add some skews as we call them, some licenses that you get added to your order to provision the right level of functionality.

And so you’ll have to accept some terms and go through that process, top power via your account, hopefully everybody’s seen that really cool self-service capabilities to manage what you have access to in Salesforce. But again, this is free. You’re not paying anything. It’s just adding these capabilities, accepting the terms because it’s some addendum cinema says, and that’s legal terms and the lawyers required it. But once you agree to all that, then we take care of the rest and provisioning and adding everything to your work. And so then all of the necessary pieces will then be present. And so you can go through the rest of the steps once you’ve added it in. There’s some more sections in that set up node. So if you want to go ahead and enable Data Cloud, you can go through that process. If you want to get started with Marketing Cloud, you can enable that, and Commerce Cloud and so forth.

And we’re going to continue to add on to this page as well to make it simpler, and so that you can take advantage of some of the experience pieces too, like being able to add the Left Nav, to get our homepage in the quick settings enabled for your users. So we’re really excited about that. So it’s just the beginning of what you’ll see if you log into your org today. More will be coming in the following months and releases.

Mike:
Good. I like when things just show up in setup. That’s a lot easier for me. Early in the podcast, we talked about how Agentforce stole all the headlines at Dreamforce. I know there was at least one session in the admin track that talked about Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud and their importance, and I’ve heard you mention all of those in your answers. So I think tying Foundations to Agentforce, how does this help an admin get ready for Agentforce?

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, we hadn’t intended on this. When we started on Foundations, we didn’t intend on this being the foundation for Agentforce. It was something that just organically happened. In partnership with that team, we realized, “Wow, we’ve got a huge opportunity here because in Foundations, we have all the necessary pieces that are really required for somebody to get started with Agentforce.” And so you may have heard at Dreamforce, but there’s a freemium offering of Agentforce that’s being included in Salesforce Foundations, and that includes some of those agents that the Autonomous Service Agent, ASA, and the BDR, some of those sales use cases, which was really exciting. And this podcast that you’re listening to this, it’s October 24th or after, and that’s the same day as Agentforce is going live in Salesforce Foundations. So if you’re listening now, you can get started with agents as part of Foundations.

And as I mentioned, all those pieces that you need are there. And so you get Data Cloud out of the box alongside Agentforce, and you get that full Foundations Suite experience across sales, service, marketing and commerce. And what’s really cool here is as you do more and you use more of these cross-cloud capabilities, your data and Data Cloud gets richer and more powerful, and so does Agentforce. So a great example of this, you think about the service use cases, which I’m really excited about the possibilities and what our customers are going to do with the Autonomous Service Agents. Really, really cool stuff, where you get that base level of Service Cloud now that has knowledge base. And so you can create those knowledge articles and you can start to build out that wealth of information that can then flow into Data Cloud and be used via Agentforce, which is just really cool and not something that you’d been able to do without Foundations previously.

Mike:
Oh, absolutely. That’s always a question that admins get asked is, “How do I turn this on?” Eddie, one of the things I figured out this weekend was working in tech and having done this podcast for so long, I feel like everybody that does technology stuff, secretly on the side also has a very tactile hobby of theirs. And this weekend, I used some scrap wood because I live in a housing development and they’re building new houses around me. So there’s piles of scrap wood that I reclaim as my own, and I just build random stuff out of it, and it was incredibly fun. I’m wondering, is there a fun hobby that you like to do when you’re not working on Salesforce Foundations?

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, tons. And if you go in my garage, there’s power tools everywhere.

Mike:
Of course.

Eddie Cliff:
So I love to tinker and fix things-

Mike:
You have to buy a new power tool just for every project. Right? That’s the whole reason you do a project.

Eddie Cliff:
That’s the best part. Yeah, that’s the best part. Pick up projects you get a new power tool for. So I’m always constructing something, whether it’s something that we need for the house or something that we like to do. For example, we have this hobby, Kayak is a trimaran, a sailing kayak in the seats. Being a product person, you just find the things that really annoy you and you come up with solutions for fixing them. And these seats sit in the bottom of the kayak. And so as you’re going around, you start to get wet. So, “There’s a solution to this. I can come up with something. Get some PVC pipe, I can construct some plans and get some mounts and some boat seats.” And voila, I’ve got some nice cheap seats that I can put into the kayak that’s going to keep me dry as I’m going out with my family, which is… I’ve got a 6-year-old. And so he loves to go out on that and go out on the water. And so that was really important to me to have, so a little bit more comfortable.

And also the utility of keeping me dry because it’s got these pedals that you have to use with your feet to propel the kayak. So it’s really important that you have a comfortable seat so that your back isn’t killing you at the end of the day.

Mike:
Oh, man.

Eddie Cliff:
So we do a lot of that kind of stuff. And then this past weekend, it was just tons of gardening that we were finally getting done around the house. It’s not so hot anymore. So getting all those plants in place was really exciting and it looks great.

Mike:
And you said sailing kayak. Are they bigger than just the regular kayaks that I’m thinking of?

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, it’s a two-person kayak and it’s got the Ama, as they call them, the little outriggers on either side.

Mike:
Okay.

Eddie Cliff:
So it’s super stable, and then it’s got a fairly big sail that goes into it, so you don’t have to use the sail, but in light winds, it sure does make it a lot easier so you’re not pedaling the whole time.

Mike:
Sure.

Eddie Cliff:
And so you can beach launch it, so it’s really easy to get onto the water and get back onto the trailer. And so it’s something that we really enjoy doing as a family together.

Mike:
Wow, okay. I had no idea these things existed. I’ve thought of kayaks before, but that sounds incredible. And pedaling would be… I guess there’s no motor.

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, you get to work out. Actually, my next project is to put a mount on the back and so I can put a trolling motor-

Mike:
I was going to say.

Eddie Cliff:
For those days where the current’s a little stronger.

Mike:
Electric motors are getting better. I see them on the prices. These little things that divers can hang onto. They look like wings or whatever, and they pull them under, get a couple of those.

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, exactly. And that’s a fun thing. You get these types of things and you can modify it to fit your needs and your requirements. You can come up with solutions to really make it work for you. So I apply that same level of thinking that I do at Salesforce to my day-to-day, and the things that I use in my day-to-day life outside of work, which is always fun.

Mike:
Yeah. Well, Eddie, thanks for coming on the podcast and talking about Foundations. I’ll have to work on getting somebody on the podcast to see what they think of Foundations as a customer and what they’re excited for as a follow-up.

Eddie Cliff:
Yeah, thanks for having me. And we’re really excited about the future of Foundations. Stay tuned to release notes. There’s more coming. We’re going to be adding more capabilities to Foundations for you to take advantage of, and those will continue to be free. So keep an eye out for those release notes. And as you turn it on and try it out, we’d love to hear your feedback. So please share your feedback with us, or if you have any ideas going out to the Idea Exchange and share those with us because we’re constantly reviewing those and seeing what we can implement to help make it better, better, never best. So thank you for listening and I appreciate your feedback.

Mike:
You bet. Thanks, Eddie. So that was a fun conversation with Eddie. I had no idea there were sailing kayaks. Maybe you did. I grew up in the Midwest. We don’t have a lot of water around here, so no surprise, but sounds cool. Sounds very cool. Except for the pedaling part, always a fan. If you can have a motor, I’m on board. But if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to share it with at least one person who you think could benefit. I think a lot of people can benefit from understanding and learning more about Salesforce Foundations. And of course, whatever podcast platform you’re listening on, go ahead and click that follow or subscribe button. That way, new episodes will come out and will be immediately on your phone.

And if you’re looking for more resources, we’ve got those. So you can learn about Salesforce Foundations. Just head on over to admin.salesforce.com for a wealth of content, all for Salesforce admins, directly for you, including a transcript of today’s show. And don’t forget to join our conversation in the Admin Trailblazer group, that’s in the Trailblazer community. Again, link is in the show notes. Show notes are at admin.salesforce.com. We keep it all together for you in one place. Speaking of keeping it all together, until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How Can Salesforce Admins Leverage Foundations to Prepare for Agentforce? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Cole, Director of Business Intelligence and Automation at 908 Devices. Join us as we chat about how Salesforce Admins can bridge the gap between business processes and data accuracy.

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

The importance of understanding the ‘why’ behind data entry

Jen gave a stellar presentation about business processes and data strategy at World Tour Boston, and I wanted to bring her on the podcast to learn more. “Data isn’t helpful if you don’t know your process,” she says, “it’s just interesting facts on a screen that maybe make pretty graphs. But what does it tell you if you don’t know what questions you’re answering?”

More often than not, the people doing a business process don’t understand why they need to log data a certain way. That’s why as Salesforce Admins, we need to understand the “why” behind data entry. If we can bridge the information gap and explain why having accurate data is so important, we’re more likely to get people on board.

The impact of inaccurate data on business tools 

With new AI tools like Agentforce or Next Best Action, having accurate data is more important than ever. As Jen puts it, “Inaccurate data creates inaccurate business decisions.” But in order to get there, you have to explain why it’s important.

Jen supports a lot of sales teams, and it’s a great example. Sales teams want to sell things, and they don’t always understand why they need to log an email into Salesforce or create the next step on an opportunity because they don’t know how that information will be used.

It’s up to Salesforce Admins to bridge this gap and spell out what the data is used for. If your sales team knows that logging their calls accurately will help you tell them the best time to call each prospect, they’ll be a lot more attentive to how they enter that data into Salesforce.

Strategies for improving data collection

Jen points out that trainings are a great time to get started with explaining the why behind data collection. When they fill in this field, who else will use that information and how will it help the business as a whole? You need to get them invested in the process and help them see the broader picture.

Finally, it’s important to establish feedback loops that help your team stay invested in the process. If they can see how accurate data impacts their day-to-day, they’re much more likely to be invested in the project of data collection.

There’s a lot more great stuff from Jen about how to look at your business processes and data strategy, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Podcast: Solving Business Problems with Composer and Flow with Jennifer Cole
• Blog: How to Use Salesforce to Manage Your Documentation
• Blog: How to Write Great Documentation to Help with Future Problem Solving
• Podcast: Understanding the Importance of Data Health in Salesforce

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• Mike on Threads
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• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re talking with Jennifer Cole about data strategy and process. Well, yeah, a little something different because in the world of AI and a lot of tools just in general, not to mention automation tools, it’s good to know what you’re doing with your data and do you have a process in place to make sure you’re collecting good data. Also, I ask her about bad data, so that’s an interesting answer. But really understanding what data are you collecting, and does everybody know the process for data collection because as we know, it’s going to be even more important to have great data so that AI can give us even better insights. But if we don’t know the process, then I think we’re in trouble. So Jennifer’s going to help us with that.

But before we get into the episode, just a reminder that if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, be sure to click the follow button, that way this podcast can automatically be downloaded right to your device so that when you’re out on your dog walk, you don’t have to worry about downloading it because it’ll already be there. And of course, I always appreciate a good review, so let me know how we’re doing. With that, let’s talk process and data quality and maybe data strategies. There’s quite a few things in this podcast with Jennifer. And let’s get Jennifer on the podcast. So, Jen, welcome back to the podcast.

Jennifer Cole:

Thanks, Mike. I’m really excited to be back.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, last time, and I’ll put a link in the show notes because you won’t hear that a thousand more times today, but we were talking about documenting your process as an admin when you’re solving things.

Jennifer Cole:

Yes, good stuff.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know. Well, I really enjoyed that. I could spend, again, probably another two hours doing that because, first of all, I constantly forget, “What was I doing here?” I should have wrote that down better. But we’ve since caught up a thousand other times and wanted to expand on that conversation because with AI, there’s so many more shiny tools out there.

Jennifer Cole:

There are.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know, seriously.

Jennifer Cole:

A lot.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’m getting the cart in front of the horse. Let’s refresh people about the amount of awesomeness stuff that you work on and what you do in the community. So let’s start there.

Jennifer Cole:

Sure. Yeah. I am Director of Business Intelligence and Automation at 908 Devices, which is a super cool title that basically says, “I am still an awesome admin.” I’m building apps and supporting my team. I run a team of awesome admins and have recently been able to co-present with one of my awesome admins at the Boston World Tour last, what, two months ago? Wow, time flies.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know. Yeah.

Jennifer Cole:

Oh, so much. Talking about process and data strategy. So that is my sweet spot and what I’m still rocking out at 908.

Mike Gerholdt:

I feel everybody now is paying attention to data with AI. Data, data, data. Pay attention to your data, clean your data, wash your data, put your data in a dishwasher.

Jennifer Cole:

Give me your data.

Mike Gerholdt:

Cascade is going to have special data tabs here pretty soon. Tide’s going to have data pods, right? I’m kidding.

Jennifer Cole:

I was going to ask if they were going to be Salesforce branded, that would’ve been fun. I would’ve bought those.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, I know, right? But they only work in the cloud, so you’d have to stand outside in the rain. That wasn’t a well-thought-through joke, so that’s okay. You can’t have a zinger every single time. But you bring up a good point. So what good is data if you don’t know your process, right?

Jennifer Cole:

Yeah. I don’t know that it’s helpful if you don’t know your process. It’s just interesting facts on a screen that maybe make pretty graphs, but what does it tell you if you don’t know what questions you’re answering?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I guess in the scheme of things, if we’re sitting down and we’re looking at our data and we’re cleaning our data, we should really take a step back and think about, “What are we doing with our process?” And maybe to your point, and you can expand on this, does everybody know the process? Do you run into a lot of organizations that don’t know their process?

Jennifer Cole:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

Or a process, I should say. The process, like there’s one.

Jennifer Cole:

Can I choose C, all of the above?

Mike Gerholdt:

C, all of the above.

Jennifer Cole:

Yeah, actually quite a few. And I would expect most people assume it’s certain pockets of the organization or those who just aren’t doing the day-to-day work, but I don’t think that’s true. I actually experience people that are doing the day-to-day work don’t even fully understand the process or why they’re doing what they’re doing or what information downstream or upstream their process is being leveraged in. So it’s everywhere, honestly.

Mike Gerholdt:

Look, we all go to work. People are probably listening to this podcast going to work, like, “I’m going to go to work and send some emails and do work.” And they do things. So when you say they don’t know the process, what about that do you… Is it there’s no organizational book or they don’t know where the data comes and they don’t know what they’re shipping out or where it goes?

Jennifer Cole:

I think a little bit of both, but if I think about the group of folks I support the largest amount of my time against is the sales organization. They have an objective to make sales, right? They’re in sales. It’s literally in their title. And for them, they just want to get the job done, right? They want to make a customer happy, they want to book that order, and they want to move on to the next one. And they don’t always understand why they have to log an email into Salesforce or why they need to create this next step on their opportunity, and who is actually using the application field that they’re tagging about their customer.

I think they get rightfully so focused on what they’re trying to achieve, they don’t see the broader picture of where their data’s going and how that helps the company refine what they’re doing or tweak the customer they want to focus on or tweak how we do things to make them more efficient. So I think in that particular very specific example, they’re just so focused on their job, they don’t understand why or how it matters.

Mike Gerholdt:

You bring up a very good step in the sales process. If they don’t understand why that step’s required and the data they’re gathering for that step, then they’re less likely to do it, right? They’ll just do it in a spreadsheet and then when the deal’s closed, they’ll just go in Salesforce and just bang through the opportunity as fast as they can, right?

Jennifer Cole:

Right. There’s nothing enriching in that. I can’t look at a bigger scope of data to understand, “Geez, a lot of our opportunities close faster when they do a follow-up call 20 days after X event.” And that would be juicy information to know because then it becomes a feedback loop in the process to say, “Hey, it looks like the odds of closing your deal faster if you do this particular step.” But if all of that is being logged outside of the system and we don’t know how many follow-up calls there are or face-to-face meetings or customer demos that are taking place, then we can’t provide that intel back to help them achieve their goals faster and smarter.

Mike Gerholdt:

So if they’re logging, let’s say, a required field, which is an arbitrary date because they’re trying to get through to the closed one because they think they’re following the process, but they really did the whole thing out of Salesforce, and then it’s Friday night and the quarter closes and they’re trying to get their opportunities in, by not understanding the process, are they then creating bad data?

Jennifer Cole:

Oh, bad’s a funny word. I would say inaccurate data. I would say data that’s going to mislead you. Yes, there’s technically bad data, but in that case, it’s not intentionally bad. It’s more just inaccurate to the true story. And I think that can make it very misleading for the business because they might adjust their workflow based upon the intel they have and it actually isn’t improving anything because nobody was being honest about what they were entering.

Mike Gerholdt:

So CEO goes to, we’ll use your example, Boston World Tour and sees the new AI, Copilot and Einstein stuff, and maybe wants to use Einstein Next Best Action, but because they’re just putting in arbitrary dates, the new shiny isn’t really helping them.

Jennifer Cole:

No, it just becomes a very expensive toy. Sorry, but it does. It doesn’t help them move anything faster, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. And I think it’s an interesting concept because we always go back to, “Well, this one thing will just help you do stuff better.” But ultimately, before you even look at those things, it’s, “But what is the process that you’re trying to get to? Do you even understand the process?” Is that where you start with a lot of things?

Jennifer Cole:

It’s where I start everything. When a person comes for an enhancement or wants to report out on this particular metric or get data to understand what’s happening with their business, the question always begins with, “What questions are you trying to answer? I understand you are asking for this data point, but why? Is it something you’re doing today or you’re not doing today and you want to understand how well you are or are not filling that information in or following that process?”

Because understanding the process for me and my experience and my team’s experience helps us serve our customers better. And when I say customer, I mean internal employees in this case because we’re an internal team. We help them achieve so much more when we can get underneath and get to the why. Understanding their why is what drives bigger change for us because it often is not just them who need the help or need the change, but actually other people in the organization have that same why. So process is almost like a keystone in the bridge for us. We have to get to it. We have to understand it before we start building across and bridging islands together.

Mike Gerholdt:

Man, the number of times understanding the why has come up. I should get a shirt that says that.

Jennifer Cole:

That’d be a great shirt.

Mike Gerholdt:

Understand the why. So let me dial in specifically for an admin that’s listening. Are there things that you build into your application when you create something, let’s say for sales or customer service, that helps remind the end user about the why?

Jennifer Cole:

Sometimes, yes. Actually, a recent deployment we did was to enable sales to capture who should get automated booking and shipping notifications. And we moved that into Salesforce so that when it replicates over to our ERP, it’s auto-fed. It’s just more accurate. The sales rep knows who should be getting those notices. And we have those fields there to fill in those addresses, but we did something super simple. We added a little text bubble, an actual text component on the lightning page that explained what field did what, and critical reminders about which field you should fill in and which field you should update this address only.

And the feedback we got was, “That was great. I need that. That always will remind me because I can never remember what I’m supposed to do or why it matters.” And it was just a really simple little text component on the screen. So we try to do small things like that where we nudge them through the workflow with those gentle reminders, conditional visibility reminders, anything that helps them in that moment for that particular step in the process to remember the critical reason why it matters helps.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. That’s really great because you think about the level of complexity that is getting added to everyone’s job. I remember as an admin, I’d spent two, three months with maybe a department or a team working on what their process is and getting their app right in Salesforce. And by the end of it, man, you could have quizzed me Jeopardy-level on what was going on with that team and how the data flowed and I would have nailed it, but two months later-

Jennifer Cole:

It’s gone.

Mike Gerholdt:

… no idea. It’s gone.

Jennifer Cole:

What’s my name? Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’ll take, nope, I don’t know, hodgepodge for 500, Alex.

Jennifer Cole:

Yes. Real admin life.

Mike Gerholdt:

Exactly. But somehow you just expect to turn that app over to your users and like, “Oh, I’m sure they’ll remember this.” So when you’re creating an app and have those epiphanies, “Let’s add this box that reminds people,” how important is it for you? Or how important do you feel it is that admins make sure that their users know where the data that they’re working on comes from and where it goes?

Jennifer Cole:

I think it’s actually critical to adoption. Everyone loves to throw this word adoption around, and it’s more than just logins. It’s actually usability of the system and following the process. And we had a sales meeting, was it two years ago, a year ago? And we were asked to present as a Salesforce team to the sales team about critical fields they need to fill in. And everyone’s done those trainings. They’re painful for the salespeople. They’re just sitting there, “Yeah, okay, I have to fill in the application. Yeah, okay, I have to update my close date. Yeah, okay.” And they go through this monotony. But what we found was so successful and an incredible adoption to following the process was when we told them why.

We said, “Okay, when you fill this in, here are the people after you that are using this data. Here’s your marketing team and how they’re using it to refine the drip campaigns to send to your customers. So if you classify them right, they’re going to get special content against their industry or application usage.” And we found, Mike, it was the coolest thing, we found in our support channel, we use Slack for issues and questions by the business, people after that sales meeting we’re just saying, “Now, what if I choose this and what happens if I choose this?” Because they knew who was using the data that they input and where it went, they started to care. And then we just saw greater adoption and questions around, “Well, what happens if I choose the wrong thing? Can I fix it?” And that’s a win as an admin in my book when your business suddenly cares about the data they’re putting in.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, especially for salespeople. I did an exercise like that where the salespeople went through the call center. And I remember sitting in the break room and the salespeople sitting down with call center agents and like, “Well, whenever we get this from sales, it says this.” And them sitting there going, “Well, we fill it out because we think it’s this.” But those two people had never talked. And the second they talked, it was like, “Oh, well we could 100% get this.” And then the customer service agent is like, “Oh, that would be so helpful because then when they call in and ask, we don’t have to spend 20 minutes looking something up.”

Jennifer Cole:

It’s amazing. It’s powerful.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’ll take ownership of this too, it’s the fact that when you sit down sometimes, you work at processes at a stage gate level and you forget, “Okay, well, I did sales and then sales ends here.” Well, sales doesn’t end there. There’s that gray area, and I just didn’t bring those groups together. I jumped over to service and obviously everything shipped and it was fine or then they’d call, except that gap in between there is the parts you got to work on.

Jennifer Cole:

The bridging of the teams and how the data flows between them.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Jennifer Cole:

I think that’s where the secret sauce is.

Mike Gerholdt:

A lot of it is. So let’s touch on this. Automation has always been huge, and I know we’ve talked a lot with you about integrations and bringing data over. How does not knowing the process really impact automations?

Jennifer Cole:

How much time do we have? No, I’m kidding.

Mike Gerholdt:

As much time as you’d like.

Jennifer Cole:

I think it can have a huge impact on the business in not a good way. I think it could accelerate inaccurate data faster. If you don’t understand your process and why you’re filling in what fields, you could be filling in fields that mean nothing to your business, that mean nothing to you learning how to change your process, adapt your process to better suit your business and your customers. I think it can actually be an unfortunate waste of energy for your admins and money for the organization if you just don’t understand what you want to do and who’s doing what and why. Remember the TV show Lost, which is very controversial, no one likes the ending of Lost. But remember-

Mike Gerholdt:

I remember it. I’m one of the few people that never got into it.

Jennifer Cole:

Okay, consider yourself lucky.

Mike Gerholdt:

So I’ve been told.

Jennifer Cole:

You’ve saved so many hours of your life that you’ve done better things with.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh no, I’ve wasted them with other TV shows.

Jennifer Cole:

Well, I will quickly say, for the audience that does know the show, there’s this scene or episode where this guy just keeps pressing a red button and he has no idea why. And then he leaves and someone else has to take over pressing this red button. And ultimately, it ends up being not as critical as anyone might think, but they’re just doing it because they were told to do it and they have to do it, but nobody knows why.

And I think businesses, if they don’t understand their process, are doing the same thing. They’re demanding fields to be populated by their users that are never used, that are never actually aggregated to understand if there’s value or something to modify an existing workflow or change the direction of how you advertise to customers. They’re just pressing red buttons. So I think it can be dangerous if you don’t understand.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. So is that perpetuated by the fact that a lot of products and services are sold with, “Here’s the easy way to fix your X”?

Jennifer Cole:

Short answer? Yes. And I understand why that’s done. They want to show the ease of use of the tool. But I think the piece that’s really hard is we can’t get underneath to see how it’s built to know if it’s going to work for our challenging business problems that we’re trying to solve. And what isn’t really discussed either is why understanding your data strategy is so important and how that tool fits in. I think that’s missed.

And I don’t think that’s always understood by the C-suite or the folks that are paying for these tools. They just see this really cool tool like, “Hey, AI is going to do this for you. I want to be able to do that too. Let’s just buy it.” But somebody has to understand how it works, and somebody has to understand the process so that it actually becomes valuable. It’s missed. It’s truly, truly missed. And it’s hard for admins.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, I think you said something that’s even bigger than process that I’m realizing now, which is process exists in a world where there is a data strategy.

Jennifer Cole:

It’s a piece.

Mike Gerholdt:

We’ve probably not sat down, I’ve never sat down, have you ever sat down and written a data strategy with an organization?

Jennifer Cole:

Written it down? No. It’s desperately needed, but conversations are a good place to start, for sure.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, but it’s something that we as a Salesforce admin should think about because then we can create a world in which process can exist because data strategy tells me, “We know where the data is going to originate from, how we’re going to use it, and what our end goals are.” And end goals could be many endpoints. And then within that data strategy world is where we start to build different processes that take that data and transform it into useful things that the business can then use to make decisions on. So we just haven’t sat down and wrote data strategies.

Jennifer Cole:

I think so. And I think that’s hard day one. My own experience has been the process that was just built over time because somebody needed this field or somebody wanted to do this. There wasn’t a broader conversation of, “Well, who else wants to use this field?” And it’s something I need, do you need it too, Mike? Those conversations, I don’t think they happen at the beginning because businesses are just trying to get off the ground and they’re just trying to get customers engaged.

So we’re a little bit backwards in the whole process, but it is critical, I think, for businesses to start and stop… Well, how do I want to say this? They need to stop and think about, “We’ve got all these processes, do they still make sense? Are they where we want to go and do they fit into our larger strategy for what data we want to use to navigate the ship of our business truly?” So I think unfortunately, the data strategy doesn’t come until after processes are baked in, but hopefully not too solidified that they can’t rip them up and start something from scratch if it doesn’t fit the strategy they want to achieve.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. Yeah, because I’m thinking early day one, which who knows where people are at, but early day one of a sales process is, “How do you get the widget to the customer as fast as possible?” Right?

Jennifer Cole:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

Later stage day one, as the company matures, “How do we efficiently get the widget to the customer and understand our operational challenges?”

Jennifer Cole:

It’s an evolution, yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

We’re still shipping widgets, it’s just why does the widget sit for six days at this stage? Is that six days lost or is that six days… I don’t know. And that’s where data strategy figures that out because are we even capturing that data to make that decision to figure that stuff out? And if not, then we need to start doing that.

Jennifer Cole:

Yes. And it makes me think about how I’m hearing more in the community, which very much excites me, of reverse thinking, “Well, what do you want to measure? Okay, let’s go backwards and figure out do you even have the fields to start measuring it. And are you measuring it because you’re curious or are you measuring it because it’s something you want to bake into your workflow and your process there?” So I’m excited to hear more in the community of folks starting to think about this reverse modeling of, “Well, we want to understand what our customers are doing with our widgets. Now that they’re using them, we’re super excited we’ve got this customer base, but should we start to target certain types of customers? Well, what are they doing with our widgets?”

“Okay, great question. Are you set up to even track that? And what do you need in order to start tracking it? And then who’s going to fill it in and do they know why they’re filling it in?” That whole reverse model. So that’s an exciting shift that I’m hearing more of in the industry and fellow admins to support that data strategy. But I think you’re right, that next step is really sitting down to define on paper what that strategy is and then communicating it to everyone in the organization at every level of the organization because that just goes back to the why. When folks understand the why, they get excited, they want to help.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’ll flip back and forth. So then you sit down, you look at process, you think of data strategy. When looking at tools, what are some things that admins shouldn’t be afraid to ask or should really get behind and get their hands dirty looking at?

Jennifer Cole:

Oh, thank you for the question. I think it’s setup. As a customer of Salesforce, your poor sales reps, I’m tough because I always want to see what’s underneath. Don’t give me the shiny YouTube video, let me play with it, let me get in there. So I would love for fellow admins to be just as precocious and go into setup. Let me physically see my options. And that’s super cool what you just showed me, but how did you set it up? Let me in your demo org. And Salesforce demo orgs are incredible, like what your solution engineers build and play with and what’s in there. Ask admins, ask for a sneak peek because you, as an admin, not only need to understand how your business would apply the tool, but you need to understand how it works and how it can scale to solve all the crazy problems that you’ll come across because in a way, you’ve got to sell it to your business. Admins are diverse. They’re builders, and they’re also internal salespeople to their own executive suite. So I would encourage them to say, “Show me how it’s made.”

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I also, as an admin, liked showing my users if they wanted to see how I made the app or parts of it that, say sales, for example, if they asked, “Well, what happens if we add a step here?” Well, then I can just go click, click, boom, and now that new step shows up in path and shows up in the opportunity. And it lets them know two things. One, I understand the value of being agile and changing because if we’re working on a new process, we’ve got to be ready to, “Hey, this really isn’t working despite what we thought it would do on paper.” And also two, when we get to that point, you need to know I have the skill to change the application at the speed of business so that we can make that adjustment and keep moving forward.

Jennifer Cole:

Yes, I fully agree. And it’s interesting too because even my user population loves to see under the hood, even though they’re never-

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, really?

Jennifer Cole:

… going to use it. Oh, they love it. When they like to see those changes on the fly that you were just speaking to, like, “Yeah, I do know how to manage this application. I do know how to customize it. I can improve it for you.” When we do on-demand changes for them in a meeting when we’re getting app feedback or process feedback that we’ve implemented in Salesforce, they just think it’s so much fun.

Number one, they gain a lot more confidence in the team because they’re seeing something happen in real-time. But number two, they themselves love to see it and enjoy how quickly we can support the business. And also, it allows them to understand when sometimes it takes us more time because it’s more complicated, there’s a better understanding. So totally diverging topics on you, but yeah, users love it too.

Mike Gerholdt:

It’s getting behind the scenes, which is digging into process and digging into data strategies. So a follow-up to that, do you regularly share that, and would you recommend admins regularly do that as well?

Jennifer Cole:

Yes, I would actually. And it’s funny, as an admin, we’re often tagged as being a tiny bit controlling in our orgs and love everything to be precise and buttoned up. But I think it actually gains business trust when we crack open the org in setup for them and they can see how we click around because there’s no risk. If someone wants to join the admin team and they’re that curious and inspired by what they see in setup, oh my gosh, come on over. But at the same breath, admins can gain so much trust, I feel, from their business when they expose what they’re doing.

Because if you think about it, admins are going into the business every day and saying, “Show me your process. How are you doing it? Let me see what you’re doing.” We’re putting our business under the microscope to improve it. I don’t think there’s any harm in the reverse. It just helps build that mutual trust and relationship of sharing how to build something and what the possibilities are or are not. And I encourage it. I think it would be great. Actually, I encourage my team to do it. They do it in front of our users all the time, and it’s been a positive experience.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, I can’t think of a better way to wrap up the conversation than having brought it completely back around on us where we’re being as transparent with our processes, we’re asking the business to be with us while we create the technology to support it. Thanks for coming back on the pod and sharing your thoughts on this and giving us data strategies to work on.

Jennifer Cole:

Thanks, Mike. It was really great.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’m excited.

Jennifer Cole:

Me too. I’m excited [inaudible 00:32:28] admins do, have fun out there.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, I don’t know about you, but I was thinking of a thousand different times that I needed to have a conversation between different departments so that they understood the importance of putting fields in. And really, it was interesting, after the call, Jennifer and I talked a little bit because so much of what we do when we sit down with our users is, “Well, how are we going to document this? What are we going to put in Salesforce?” And we get wrapped up with what we’re going to put in Salesforce, which we should, but we forget to talk of why.

And that came up in this conversation is why are we putting this down? Why is this a critical stage? Why is it critical that we capture this data at this point? And then who’s going to do something with it to make us a better organization? When talking sales, it’s not just shipping out the widget as fast as we can, but maybe as efficiently as we can and understanding different parts of our organization so that we can capture data. And I got to agree with Jennifer, boy, it was such a good point, having all of your users understand where the data is coming from and where the data that they create goes, where in the process they sit, and having those individuals meet with each other. I think that was such a great insight that Jennifer brought to this episode.

I hope you enjoyed listening to it. And of course, if you did, you can share it with your friends. Just go ahead and click on those three dots. There’s usually three dots in just about every application now, and you can share it on social. I would so appreciate that. And if you’re looking for resources or anything that we mentioned in the episode itself, show notes are right there. They’re also on our website, admin.salesforce.com, which has got everything you need to read, blog posts, other podcasts you can listen to, and a transcript of this show. And of course, you can join the conversation in the Admin Trailblazer group, which is in the Trailblazer Community, that is also a link in the show notes. A lot of people talk in data quality and process there too. All right, so until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How Business Process Documentation Enhances Data Collection 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 Workflow Builder, Slack integrations, and what happens when you put them together.

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

Slack as a multi-purpose tool

Jim is here to tell us that Slack is much more than a chat tool. Automations and integrations can open a whole new world of utility for your organization. And while Slack integrations have always been a thing, you used to need some technical knowledge in order to build your own.

All that’s changed with the launch of Workflow Builder. This tool allows you to build automations in Slack without ever having to code or host an app. Once you get started with making your own Slack integrations, you’ll never know how you got by without them.

Empowering admins with Workflow Builder

You can do a lot of cool things in Workflow Builder, like create a new channel or automatically post a formatted message at a certain time each week. But Slack integrations are where it really gets interesting. 

For example, let’s say you have a weekly status report meeting. You can create a scheduled workflow that automatically drops the relevant Salesforce info into a Slack channel so everyone can refer to it for the meeting. Slack integrations go both ways, so you can also use a Slack automation to execute a flow in Salesforce.

With Workflow Builder, you can bring your Salesforce data directly into Slack and vice versa, and the possibilities are endless.

Enhancing productivity with Slack AI

Finally, Jim had a lot to say about Slack AI, which gives you the ability to search Slack with natural language queries and summarize or format the results. When he came back to work after his paternity leave, he needed to prep for a first meeting with a new skip-level manager. So he asked Slack AI, “What does this person think about the Slack platform?” It gave him a summary of everything they ever posted on the subject, complete with footnotes so he could look at specific comments.

Most importantly, Jim points out that the automations you create in Workflow Builder are exactly the kind of structured data that Slack AI loves to work with. This 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.

This episode is full of use cases and tips for how to get started with Slack integrations, 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 Gerholdt:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Gerholdt:

Oh my God, I have so much fun with Block Kit Builder. You have no idea.

Jim Ray:

Fantastic.

Mike Gerholdt:

I have a million questions too.

Jim Ray:

Excellent.

Mike Gerholdt:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Gerholdt:

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 Gerholdt:

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 What Can Salesforce Admins Do with Slack Integrations? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Warren Walters, Salesforce MVP and host of the Salesforce Mentor YouTube channel and website. Join us as we chat about how we’re all becoming adminelopers and why you should learn to code.

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

What is an admineloper?

Salesforce Admins and Developers are increasingly overlapping in their roles, leading to the rise of the “admineloper.” AI has made it easier than ever to get things done with Apex, even if it needs some tweaking to get everything working right. A little coding knowledge can go a long way.

For developers, declarative tools in Salesforce are becoming incredibly powerful. Using flows and formulas can often be a simpler way to solve a problem than creating something custom in Apex.

In short, if you know a little about both admin and developer tools you can truly get the best of both worlds.

Learning to code as a Salesforce Admin

There’s a common misconception that only geniuses can understand code. However, Warren says, some of the best developers he knows didn’t go to school for computer science and are entirely self-taught.

A little can go a long way. Basic coding skills can significantly enhance an admin’s ability to implement more complex solutions and collaborate effectively with developers. Combining a working knowledge of how programming works with the declarative tools we all know and love can get you far.

Soft skills and career advancement

Beyond technical skills, Warren emphasizes that soft skills are just as important for career growth in the Salesforce ecosystem. While he identifies as an introvert, he’s made a focused effort to become a better communicator, and that’s helped him grow into new roles and bigger opportunities.

Warren also urges you to spend some time thinking about your personal branding. His YouTube channel has opened a surprising number of doors for him, but even a simple portfolio can do a lot to help you stand out.

There’s more from Warren about what he’s learned as a consultant and as a mentor, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• salesforcementor.com
• freeCodeCamp.org
• Video: Salesforce Mentor on YouTube
• Video: Salesforce Apex Hours on YouTube
• Video: Coding with the Force on YouTube
• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How Can Solving Sudoku and Wordle Enhance Your Critical Thinking Skills?

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Warren on X
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on Tiktok
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we are talking about mentorship and learning how to code. Surprisingly, not surprisingly, because admins and developers need to know the best practices for creating our apps and deploying the best technology for our organizations.

So I’m going to bring on Warren Walters who is a Salesforce consultant. He’s an admin, he’s a developer, he’s a mentor and a self-described general geek. Now, Warren’s on because he runs a really cool YouTube channel, and I came across his TikToks where he does Salesforce tutorials to help you understand and master the concept of different things in Salesforce.

He has this really cool site, salesforcementor.com, and just a really fun guy to talk about in terms of the world of mentorship, what a lot of skills are that he’s seeing, and things that people should be paying attention to.

Now, before we get Warren on the podcast, I just want to make sure that whatever you’re using to listen to the Salesforce Admins podcast, make sure you hit that follow or subscribe button because then new episodes will show up on your phone or on your computer right away. So with that, let’s get to our conversation with Warren.

So Warren, welcome to the podcast.

Warren Walters:

Well, hey Mike, I’m happy to be here. Super excited because I’ve been listening to the podcast for such a long time and I’m finally on it, which is, I don’t know if it’s a dream come true or an honor, but I’m just happy to be here.

Mike Gerholdt:

It’s destiny.

Warren Walters:

I’ll take that.

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s what I’ll call it, it’s destiny. Well, I ran across your TikToks when I was posting stuff about the podcast and really loved some of the videos that you’re doing and the topics you’re talking about. So let’s just start off with what you do in the Salesforce ecosystem and how you got started.

Warren Walters:

Sure. So my name is Warren Walters. I am a Salesforce engineer. I do lots and lots of development. I probably talk too much about development. Some of you may or may not have seen my face on YouTube, and that’s where I primarily host a lot of my content.

And just from my side, I’ve been in development for about 10 years now. Various different companies, various types of companies to consulting ISVs in-House. And more recently, I’ve been focusing on a lot of mentorship and training in the Salesforce development space. So that’s a little bit about me. I can dive deeper depending on where you want to go.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, I think the mentorship part is intriguing. You said development a lot in this is admin podcast, but we kind of all live in the same space now. I think what’s interesting is when I started doing Salesforce things back in 2006, there was a clear line between here’s things I can do with the UI.

Drag-and-drop GUI was a thing. Oh my God, it’s WYSIWYG now, that was the new acronym back in ’06. But then there was also really hard things that you had to learn. I remember going across to another part of my organization and talking to a developer who had to learn Python, how to deploy stuff.

So there was code and there was the hard way of doing things, and there was the unhard way of doing things as people looked at it. Now those lines seem to be blurred. I mean, I’m looking at some of the data cloud stuff that we’re coming out with, and you can very seamlessly connect things through a UI.

So let’s start with that is sometimes you hear terms where people mash together names of personas of admin and developer, and they think just because it’s declarative, it must be developer or it must be admin. And because it’s code, it must be developer.

Warren Walters:

Yeah. So it’s funny you bring up those personas in the mashing admin and developer together, because as far as I know, it’s called or it’s rising to be called admineloper. I’ve heard that a couple of times [inaudible 00:04:25]-

Mike Gerholdt:

It makes me think of Jackalope. Have you ever heard of a Jackalope? It’s a rabbit with weird horns.

Warren Walters:

Yeah, maybe that’ll be their mask on it in a couple of weeks. Dream Forces around the corner.

Mike Gerholdt:

It is.

Warren Walters:

But yeah, so from my side, especially with the mentorship and what I like to do or a lot of what I do is to help people understand that there’s not just one type of person anymore. Maybe years ago it was like that, but now it is very fruitful for you to understand all sides of the Salesforce. And this could be the configuration.

So knowing how to set things up and the fields and the whizzy wigs like you mentioned, but also the benefits of knowing some development things. Now, maybe you don’t need to jump all the way in where you’re writing custom integrations yourself, but to just understand those core fundamental concepts of development can really help you build out more complex solutions and communicate better with your teams.

And through mentorship, especially with a lot of admins, it’s all about encouraging them and showing them different resources they can use to really understand some of the concepts that were traditionally a bit foreign to them or locked away in a separate area that’s only for developers, which is not true anymore.

Mike Gerholdt:

They’ll be developers, let’s put that on the map. It’s interesting because I think maybe, I’ll go back 18 months ago before I had a really cognizant working awareness of AI. Learning code meant copy the snippet of code, find a developer friend and be like, what does this do?

Now, I put a validation rule into ChatGPT just to have it double check what I was doing. And it can tell you back, you can copy snippets of code into AI and have it tell you what it’s doing. So I have to believe that some of that acceleration for admins, just basic understanding of code is a little bit greater now that we have some tools like that, right?

Warren Walters:

Yeah, it’s really been an explosion of what tools we have at our availability to help us understand it a lot better. In the past, we had maybe things like Stack Overflow and different websites you could go to, or if you were taking it back, you have to buy a book or something and try to read it. And that barrier to entry-

Mike Gerholdt:

The library.

Warren Walters:

That barrier to entry really stopped a lot of people from diving in and understanding certain things that were going on in Salesforce development and in code. But now with those other types of tools and even the tools that Salesforce is releasing, we’re able to more easily understand different code and formula fields.

Even our flows now, we’re starting to be able to just reduce all of the headache and all of the additional knowledge that you needed to have to be able to work with those particular items. Now, there are some benefits of going, getting that deeper understanding, really learning the fundamentals and branching out further into programming concepts.

But at least to get you started, get your feet wet, these AI tools have been really great for helping people get some encouragement and seeing if they’re on the right path and getting more, down to complex questions where you’re saying, all right, you needed to go to a developer friend to get that looked up.

You might come with a more refined question now that you’re using AI instead of just, here’s the code, help me out. It’s, I have this particular piece of code, it should do this. How does this look to you? Is it best practice? So the conversations are shifting a little bit more.

Mike Gerholdt:

Plus also just disseminating some of the code that admins would look at, it’s not foreign into, I don’t know what this does, pages and pages of stuff. I can at least copy it and maybe have AI give me an idea of where to start.

Warren Walters:

Yeah, that’s funny too where the starting piece, just because it’s really about what it gives you. So in certain aspects you have to be a little bit careful of AI because of it could produce code in a different language other than Apex, you get Python code.

And if you don’t know those fundamentals, it can really set you down maybe a rabbit hole or not be as helpful as you think. So it’s a word of caution to a lot of my mentees. I definitely want them to use it, but make sure that you’re still doing that due diligence to understand some of the basics of it.

Mike Gerholdt:

If you’re having it generate code for you, I think I’m in the translation part of the world. So let’s start there though with mentorship, what comes up most in the mentorship and in mentees that you work with?

Warren Walters:

Certifications is always a big topic. What search should they get and what should they focus on? What’s next? So I think that one is really fun. And another big one is a lot of encouragement, especially for administrators that want to start to look in and dabble with code.

A lot of people here, they have this perception that, oh, it’s for the geniuses or only people that go to university, which is not true at all. I’ve met many, many developers that could code me into a box that have never gone to school, have just learned by themselves, and they’re very passionate problem solvers and they really stick with that craft.

So a lot of what I do is encouragement and then giving people resources for, if you’re trying to learn integrations, start with either this Trailhead module or this specific article and bring it back to me and let’s see if we can figure it out together.

Mike Gerholdt:

Do you find when individuals are coming into the ecosystem maybe with a coding background, that it’s less obvious for them to pay attention to some of the declarative tools that are already built in Salesforce?

Or is it intuitive to have them under… Is it natural to just look at everything first and then only go to code as a solution, or do they see everything’s a nail and they’ve got a hammer and I’m going to code them into a box, as you said?

Warren Walters:

Yeah, it definitely starts out as everything is a nail and code is the hammer. It’s funny because if you’re in a lot of different orgs, especially when I was doing consulting, I got into a few orgs that had code written for very simple things that you can do in configuration, like creating a validation rule or sending an email, that kind of stuff. Just tons and tons and lines of code that were not necessary.

But whoever got in there first, their mindset was, okay, I know how to code, let me just stick with that. So a lot of people that I talk with and mentor, especially if they have a coding background there, that’s their first idea and that’s one of the things that I have to educate them on, is Salesforce has so many different tools at your disposal.

It’s better to at least be familiar with everything that’s available, like flows and the formula fields, and even just simple things like knowing how a lookup field works, especially if you’re not coming from this sort of space, it can be a little confusing to understand what it is and how it works.

So I generally recommend going on that journey of starting at the beginning, especially hitting a lot of those beginner admin trails where you can learn the fundamentals and work your way up into a good spot of understanding all the tools that are available and then you can jump into code. The code wall, always be there. There’s plenty of reasons to use it, but you want to use the right tool for the right situation.

Mike Gerholdt:

And it’s also, I have to think of just best use of your time. You could code escalation rules, you could code a workflow, but flow leaves you with an artifact that’s easily upgradable and reproducible as opposed to something custom that, who knows, maybe something 10 releases down the line, Salesforce is going to change and now you might have to rebuild that Apex code.

Warren Walters:

Yeah, that’s a big point, especially in consulting that you have to think about because a lot of times you may not be there one year later, two years later just because the contract or the project is ending.

So designing for the team that is going to be there is very important. If you’re going to leave a ton of code only with a team of admins, and that may not be the best solution for you.

Or there might be a little bit of in-between where you can build out the complex pieces inside of code, but also leave the administrative side or leave the ability for the administrative side to have configuration or custom settings that can manipulate the code.

All things like that are things that you need to start to think about when you look at the longevity of your code and the maintainability.

Mike Gerholdt:

Do people that you work with and start to work with, when they come into the ecosystem, do they know their path? Are they looking at consulting or being a developer first? Or is it just eyes wide open, help me figure something out, Warren?

Warren Walters:

A lot of it is eyes wide open. Lots of existing admins know that the developer path is out there, but people just starting out often they hear about development from other tech stacks and they know that it’s out there, but it’s hard to understand where should I be going? What should I be looking at?

So there’s a lot of education that goes on and there are so many different opportunities in Salesforce. So you need to try to find… Or I recommend trying out a bunch of things, but especially if maybe you have a background in project management or system management like databases and things like that. Take a look at how that translates directly over into a Salesforce career.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, no, that makes sense. Often you start off with an idea, and I’ve had a lot of friends too that were admins for a while and then they see that consulting dollar sign and they start chasing the money and obviously you can do that in any career. So that’s interesting.

You mentioned something that I wanted to think a little bit about, which is the topics that admins and developers should think about. So I started a little bit dumped into the deep end with AI, but we have declarative side, we have the code side.

What is some of the stuff that admins and developers that you’re mentoring aren’t paying attention to and you’re like, folks, the streetlight, the spotlight is on, you totally missed the sign on the side of the road. How did you blow past this exit kind of scenario?

Warren Walters:

That is really cool topic to bring up. I think a lot of it stems to one, everybody they know about AI, they probably are at least dabbling in it. If you’re not dabbling in it, I would recommend at least looking at it. So that’s one big piece.

But the other part is probably more, I want to say on the soft skills or it’s really around communication, especially for a lot of introverted people. It may not seem like it, but I’m pretty introverted. But it’s around how you can communicate effectively either with your boss or your teams or anybody that you’re working with.

And that can be a huge valuable asset to you as an individual because it can help propel you into different types of roles that maybe somebody else that’s lacking those skills or still working on those skills, they’re not able to jump into what goes hand in hand with that is more personal branding as well.

So this is how you present yourself on LinkedIn, doing things like YouTube channels, having a blog and that can also propel you above the rest, especially in a competitive market. Having that awareness of where you’re at and how you want to be presented to the outside world can be very important for a hiring manager to make a decision on.

So I recommend everybody working on a portfolio or having some sort of additional thing above the defaults of your resume and having a basic LinkedIn portfolio and that kind of stuff.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I’m so on board with everything you just said because I feel like for a lot of my career when I was an admin, not only was it just understanding the configuration, but for lack of a better phrase, I’ll say it was selling the configuration, really communicating to the organization, no, no, no, no. I know how to do this and this is what’s best for right now based on what you told me and confidently communicating that.

And then to your second point, showing up, I love it when people look like their profile pictures. It’s so much because you look at, you think of how much you’re online and when you see, especially with a coworker, your slack avatar all the time, and then you see them in person and they look the same, you’re like, oh, I know I have the right person.

Because I’ve always joked that I’m an introvert, but I play an extrovert for work. I can summon up a solid eight or nine hours of extrovertness, but 5:30 at Dreamforce, the bell tolls, Mike is running down the stairs, glass slippers falling off, he’s turning into a pumpkin. He really wants to get back to his hotel room and just have some quiet stare at the wall time.

But being able to show up and look familiar and then interact with people and that’s how you network and that’s how you get different ideas shared with everybody too.

Warren Walters:

I’m on board with that a hundred percent because at least for me, a lot of what you see online, a hundred percent of what you see online, I’m going to be the same exact way at a conference. As soon as you see me after I say hello, what is your name? I’m going to start spewing development and Salesforce right at you.

So I think that that is important though to be authentic wherever you’re presenting yourself because it’s going to take that toll on you, especially over time, especially if you’re at working at a place where either you have to change yourself to do that. It’s important to be at home as much as you can in where you work and how you’re presenting yourself.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I mean for the longest time I wore a red shirt everywhere and it was very easy to spot Mike in the red shirt. So I had this question down, but in hearing you answer it, and I’ve done a million of these podcasts, I’m going to ask it to you different.

So one of the questions, and you probably get this too, is like, all right, so what is good places to start learning? I’m going to ask you that, but I’m going to give you the caveat of you can’t say the word Trailhead.

And the reason I’m going to say that is, look, I work at Salesforce, Trailhead’s table stakes. We all know to go there. Everybody in the community knows to go there. If you don’t know to go there, you should go there. You’re going to hear it at user groups. What are other places that you should go that are good places to learn in addition to Trailhead?

Warren Walters:

How much can I plug websites? How much is allowed? There are a few sites that I really love for either practicing Salesforce development or even Salesforce administration.

I’m a big YouTube person. If you’ve looked me up at all, I love video, that kind of stuff. So there are some really major channels on there that I definitely follow. So some of them are Apex hours on YouTube. There’s Matt Gary’s channel, which is also very focused on Salesforce development, so also look at those.

And then especially thinking more either when I’m studying for a certification or being more well-rounded, a lot of us know about Focus on Force, which is great. But what I like to do whenever I’m either taking exam or studying is, okay, maybe I’m doing some practice items, but I’m also actually building out the practice scenarios, maybe the exam question or something like that inside a Salesforce org so that I’m Retaining the knowledge a little bit better than just clicking through a few different examples. So this works really well for both administration and development.

Just recreate the scenario the best you can when you’re working through those. On top of that, there are some really great, if you’re looking to dive and learn development, really great sites for that. So there’s free code camp org, which is more of HTML JavaScript, it’s like web languages.

But like I’ve been mentioning, once you learn the fundamentals of development, you can transfer it around to any language and it will really help out in your configuration inside of Salesforce. So if you know how to do flows, either on the basic levels, if statement is an if statement, iterator, a loop is a loop in every different language.

So you’re able to translate some of those a little bit easier once you know how they work under the hood. I’m trying to think of some other ones. I know there are a ton and maybe I can link some down in the show notes and stuff like that.

Mike Gerholdt:

I didn’t mean to put you on the spot but to be honest with you, every time I ask a question I’m like, oh, go to Trailhead. It’s like, where do you start? Well, what are you looking for?

Trailhead’s been around I think almost 10 years to me now, it’s to the point where it’s like the help and FAQ part of a website. The first time that you saw a help or an FAQ on a website, you’re like, oh, I wish every website had this. And to me, that feels table stakes. You should be able to do that.

But then to your point, there are things that you should learn like communication skills and presenting skills and personal branding skills, and some of that’s on there, but there’s also good sites and good places to go to learn stuff like that.

Last question, a little bit of a curve ball, but as a mentor, you’ve worked with a lot of people. What is one quality that is consistent across all of your mentees that seems to really drive their success?

Warren Walters:

I think one of the big ones is around persistence. Especially in the Salesforce space, configuration and development. I prescribed to a notion of, let me give you just enough so that you know where to look, you can be very dangerous. But not giving you everything to complete or solve challenges or whatever wacky idea that I’ve come up with at that point.

So knowing that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, there is a solution for every problem, especially in coding. We’re not inventing anything new and if statement is an if statement, some of these things that we are creating have been studied and perfected over a long period of time.

So all you need to do is really find it and then use that solution and make that existing solution work for whatever your problem is. So understanding that idea of, okay, as long as I keep working at it, keep pushing, something will come from this that will put me in a better situation than I am currently, is really what I start to stress in a lot of the mentees that I work with.

I think it can get overwhelming to learn development and maybe you don’t feel like you’re making progress, but a lot of times it’s about looking back and reflecting on how far you’ve come to see some of the progress that you’ve actually been doing, which is really cool. So I think that’s a big one, right?

Persistence and then knowing when to ask questions may have come up before. But you’re working on your own, you’ve found a lot of resources and you’re going through and you end up getting stuck on one particular piece.

I think it’s important once you are completely stuck and you’ve done as much research as you can, of course to reach out. And it’s humbling because maybe years ago, I didn’t like to ask for questions read. I was like, oh, I should know everything, or I should be able to figure this out on my own.

And I started progressing so much faster once I was able to say, all right, I’ve done enough research, I’ve looked at it, I’m going to ask a very educated question to somebody that has done this before, somebody who has been through whatever experience. It could be as small as making a formula field or as big as writing an integration to a third party system.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, you’re spot on. Persistence is right there. You said that answer educated question, and this actually came up I want to say about a month ago or so. I interviewed David who does Wordle and Sudoku on YouTube and TikTok, he rather he also does coding, which is interesting. I feel like maybe a lot of software engineers and developers do Wordle and Sudoku.

But I would rather, he said in working with team members would rather have a team member spend 10 minutes working through what they know to try and solve the problem and then come to me with a question as opposed to just immediately hitting a problem going, how do I do this? Throw your hands up.

And I think when I’ve worked with people too well, how would you work through this? Because you need to start putting those connections together because every time something like this happens, there isn’t going to be a Warren behind you that you can just turn around and be like, now what do I do? So educated question. That was really good.

Warren, thanks for taking time out of your day and being persistent and mentoring people and being a part of the great Salesforce community.

Warren Walters:

Yeah, Mike, it’s been a pleasure and an honor and I guess destiny to finally end up on the Salesforce Admin podcast. Super happy that I was able to make it out and spread the word about development. If you’re scared about it, if you don’t think it’s for you, do not worry. I don’t think it’s for me, right?

Everybody thinks that just try to take it one step at a time or reach out to me. A lot of developers are very, very helpful in the Salesforce Ohana. So yeah, so happy that we finally made this happen.

Mike Gerholdt:

Thanks, Warren. So that was a fun discussion with Warren. I love the term educated question. Going back and really thinking through it makes me think of that podcast that I did with David or ranks on Sudoku and Wordle solving, which is thinking through what are all the possible ways I can solve this, exercising those, and then turning to my community and seeing how they can help me based on what I’ve done.

Because you might find a creative way of doing something, but I couldn’t agree more, persistence, persistence, persistence. There is a light at the end of every tunnel, and I think his sight is very inspiring. I just pulled it up and the first thing it says, remember, I believe in you. So, thank you Warren for being on the podcast.

Now, if you enjoyed the episode, be sure to click that follow or subscribe button so that new episodes are downloaded. And of course, if you’re looking for resources, folks write down below in the show notes. I’m going to link to anything that Warren mentioned, including his social profile.

But you can always find resources at admin.salesforce.com. That is your one stop for everything admin. Release information, more podcasts and a transcript of the show. Now be sure to join our conversation in the admin Trailblazer group.

That is, of course, on the Trailblazer community, and you know where to find the link for that. That’s right. It’s in the show notes on admin.salesforce.com. So with that, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I enjoyed it a lot. And until next week, I’ll see you in the cloud.

The post What Role Does Coding Play in the Future of Salesforce Admins? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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

The problems with Salesforce setup

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

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

Gradual improvements to setup

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

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

Creating a consistent experience

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

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

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

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Full show transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike:
Oh.

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

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

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

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

Ben Sklar:
That’s right.

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

Ben Sklar:
Setupforce.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike:
Ooh.

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

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

Ben Sklar:
Absolutely.

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

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

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

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

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

Ben Sklar:
That’s right.

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

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

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

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

Mike:
But with frisbees.

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

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

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

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

Ben Sklar:
Yeah. Yep.

Mike:
See, I didn’t know that.

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

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

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

Mike:
Right. Yeah.

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

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

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

Mike:
Well, how many is on a team?

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

Mike:
[inaudible 00:19:55].

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

Mike:
Wow, that’s a lot of people.

Ben Sklar:
Yeah.

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

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

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

Ben Sklar:
That’s right.

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

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

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

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

The post The Future of Salesforce Setup appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

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

How permission sets can help you reduce Salesforce profiles in your org

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

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

Profile footprint reduction speeds up deployment

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

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

How to move from profiles to permission set groups

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Full show transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:
I know.

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

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

Douane James:
Yes. Yes. Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Douane James:
Exactly. Exactly.

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

Douane James:
Yes, exactly.

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

Douane James:
Well, yeah, definitely, for sure. You could look at two as a little bit of a failure because we wanted to go down to one. And really that one is it’s just a minimum access profile that we assign to everybody because everything is going to be on the permission sets. But definitely we knew 11 was too many and we ended up going down to two mainly because we’re considering the new purpose of profiles where they’re minimum access. They don’t have any permissions on them.

The permissions are now going to be moved to our role-based permission sets. But one thing that we found is just because of the nature of our organization, we have certain issues with page layouts and then default assignments for apps and also record types, it’s like in the future we will be able to go down to one minimum access, but for right now, 11 to two, we thought that’s pretty successful.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, hugely successful. I think one of the things I’m thinking of is you started and you worked it into your sprints. So how long did it take realistically for you to get down to two?

Douane James:
I will say that’s one where we had to be flexible. I think if you were to add up the time, it would probably be maybe three or four months or so. But we had a break in there and then we ran into… Basically the first one that we started with, we had some pushback because we didn’t get everything right. And what we did in order to get the full idea of what the permissions are that needed to be moved over to a role-based permission set, what we’re doing is we’re looking at a persona, a job function and we’re capturing that.

And in order to do that, what we did was we had a good idea because we’re able to look at the permissions that are already there, but what was really helpful was we did a interview, just a brief interview, and we picked a representative user for each role. And what happened in the issue I was just mentioning is for the first one, it turns out we didn’t pick the right representative.

Mike Gerholdt:
Oh no!

Douane James:
They didn’t actually know everything that their colleagues in that particular role, this was marketing, everything that marketing users should do. So the first change that we heard, “Wait, I’m not seeing this. Why am I seeing this?” That kind of a thing. And this was after we’d gone through doing testing. And the representative user that we picked said, “Oh, yeah, everything is fine,” but then someone else said it so we had to roll back.

So that can happen. That can happen. But actually, just to answer your question, I think it ended up definitely a few months and we were okay with that. We were okay with that because we weren’t looking at it as something that we had to do. It’s like we had to get done by a certain time. It’s like it just works well that, okay, we have this goal, and if it takes us a few months, that’s fine.

Mike Gerholdt:
No. I mean, it’s definitely not a precipice that you’re heading towards. You mentioned earlier in one of your answers the stages, and I’d be curious because I think that part, as a fellow Salesforce admin, I always love to know how people work through the problem so that I can either copy it because they’ve already done the hard work for me, or I can understand how I can use it and maybe modify it from my situation.

So you mentioned the stages. I’d be curious, can you give us a little bit of an overview of what those stages were and how you worked through?

Douane James:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So we had what we call or what we’re not calling legacy profiles. So we had all of these, but what we needed to do really was just to find what are those permissions in the profiles, what permissions are common to each job function? And we might have four, three, four, five or so different roles or personas that we could clearly identify.

And it just made sense, like I said, to analyze those permissions, identify what’s common, and then we also had to identify what’s not so common, what’s unique, so like which is unique to this persona, to this role? In order to do that, we were able to… We did the interview, like I mentioned. Hopefully, we’re able to pick a representative user for each function.

And really what we did was we made sure that we captured every profile. So actually now that I recall it, I think we actually did it was maybe some more interviews because we wanted to see, okay, well, there’s only this one person in this profile. Is there a reason that they need this, a unique profile? So we were able to do that. And once we had that, then we were able to get, like I said, the permissions in the permission set.

And obviously these are everything relating to I guess you would call it user permissions, object permissions, the field permissions, custom permissions, anything that’s related. What we did, we sought to make what I call or what I’ve heard called, so I won’t say I coined this term, but a heavy permission set that was based on a persona. So it has a lot in it, but it captures what that role needs to do in Salesforce. And it doesn’t give them more than they need, and it doesn’t give them less than they need.

Mike Gerholdt:
I like that term, heavy permission.

Douane James:
Yeah, I’ve heard that before. I did not coin it.

Mike Gerholdt:
No, it’s okay. But you said it here and it’s on the podcast. It’s on the internet forever now.

Douane James:
Yes. The reason it came up is because I was so used or we were so used to at the beginning of this process thinking of permission sets as this lighter thing. Because before this, we had plenty of permission sets in the org, but typically it was just a permission set for one specific thing or one thing that a person needed to do on an object. Maybe they needed to edit and it would just be that.

It would just be you have this permission set gives you edit permission for the accounts object, or it gives you delete permission. That’s something that we had to get over to understand that, yeah, we can still have those light permission sets, but for this setup, it just didn’t make sense. That’s one thing I think that may have steered us off for a while is because we were thinking, oh man, this is going to be such a long thing.

If I have to do a permission set for this object and a permission set for this object, that’s going to take too long. But no, no, you actually don’t have to do that. You can just look at it like I want one permission set to capture my sales manager users or another one for my marketing users or another one to represent my event manager users, with the understanding that there could be some overlap with somebody having two roles, and that’s fine. That’s fine.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, that’s where, to play devil’s advocate a little bit, I was thinking, are we just kicking the can farther down the road? So you had 11 profiles, how many permission sets do you have? It’s also, yay, I got down to two profiles, but now I have 400 permission sets to manage.

When you are creating those permission sets, I have to believe you were actively thinking through how we’re going to create groups, keep these things grouped together so that you’re not just moving the problem farther out of profiles into permissions, right?

Douane James:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely, because the idea is profiles are one to one. And for us, it just didn’t make any sense to have everything bundled into one profile and to say that this person is just this when they may be more than this. And it just so happens for us, the one thing that we did not, we did not, we did not want to do is to have tons and tons of permission sets and then not know… It’s like, well, what does this person need to do?

So that’s definitely, I think, we did that more at the end where we were able to say, okay, for our permission set groups, typically the way we set it up is we have this one heavy permission set based on persona where it captures that person’s role, and then the permission set group, that would also have some smaller permission sets maybe for more granular access that is going to be specific to that role or to that function in our organization.

An example of that might be export reports, because that’s a specific permission that some need to have and others don’t, or merging contacts and accounts because we have duplicates. And when you merge contacts and accounts, you need to have a delete permission. So that’s a specific permission set that’s assigned separately. We don’t want to have those unique permissions to be bundled in with the role-based permission sets. We can leave those. We’ll leave those that we can assign as needed.

Mike Gerholdt:
In seeing your presentation, having you say heavier permission set really makes sense because one of the things that you talk about is layering. And can you just expand on that? Because I really think with the principle of least privilege and then your approach to personas and layering permission sets, it actually made it a lot easier for you to think through. And I bet somebody probably made a really cool graphic. I don’t know. It is graphic in my head. I’m thinking of layers of permission sets.

Douane James:
Yes, yes. There probably is a graphic out there. And definitely I think in our organization, we have these different roles and we have noticed it where… I would say this is a benefit of knowing our work and knowing our users. So it was maybe easier for me to approach this because I’ve been there a while.

And I was able to say, okay, at certain point of the year, there will be an area where our recruiters, our advisors, which each of those would be a role, a recruiter, an advisor, marketing would be a different role, event manager. But in some cases, our recruiter can also be an event manager. We will have certain event managers where that’s all they do. That’s all they do.

Their focus is on managing events, and that’s all they really use Salesforce for. But then we have recruiters that sometimes they’ll come in and they’ll need to manage events. So we were able to approach it in that way where if somebody says, okay, someone’s on maternity leave, let’s say, this happens a lot, I’ll be handling this. So we’re able to just add that permission set and it’s no big deal. It covers all the things that they would need to do.

Mike Gerholdt:
I so remember when I was a Salesforce admin before permission sets, I had a couple people in my office that had to go on leave, and one of them was a marketing use case, just exactly that, where another marketing individual had to take over while a person went on leave.

And I had to create this hybrid profile that was what they did in their day job plus the event management stuff. And I remember thinking, I wish I could just… It should be just like a thing I could plug in and then unplug a permission set, if only.

Douane James:
Yes. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And what’s good, another thing that relates to that, because usually when you say the first thing that people would think of is like, well, aren’t you going to give them too much permission? Well, if you design these permission sets really according to principle of least privilege, you’re not putting in things that don’t need to be there, and you don’t have to worry about somebody being able to delete everything by accident.

Because our permission sets, it’s like typically everything that you would need to do in your role, then it would be standard, read, create, edit permissions. I don’t think any of our users have by standard delete permissions. So when we’re layering, we’re doing it without fear, without fear that that’s going to happen.

And that’s something that under our previous setup, it just so happened that, however it happened with profiles, some of our users had these delete permissions. And sometimes users just think of deleting as no big deal, and they don’t realize that on the backend you can’t just delete one thing, this is connected and it’s related, and then you have orphan records. We don’t want that, that kind of a thing.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yep. The cascade delete.

Douane James:
Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:
As we wrap up here, if you had to go back and do it all again, is there something you’d do different? Or for admins looking to get into this endeavor, what piece of advice would you give them?

Douane James:
Well, you know what? There’s two different levels of that. I mean, the biggest thing I would say is you don’t have to be like us where we were procrastinating until it really bit us and was taking so much time. You don’t have to run away from it. You can run toward it. And that’s the reason why I wanted to do the presentation at Dreamforce is because I thought, wow, I was so afraid of doing this because I thought, oh, it’s going to take so much time.

And in reality, it didn’t take that much time. Definitely if you add up the amount of time, we were able to do it pretty easily. Granted nothing ever goes smooth as you expected, but yeah, we were able to do it. It’s just like, don’t run from it. You can absolutely do this. And I think the benefits and definitely is something that’s worth it, it’s just quicker deployments.

It’s like we just had something the other day where we had this new integration and the new integration was basically a whole new custom object, and there were fields bringing in and people needed access. And the question that a developer was asking is like, okay, what about the profiles? How are we going to change all the profiles? I was like, wait, remember, we’re not on profiles anymore.

All you have to do, is it in a permission set? And he says, “Well, yeah, I can put in a permission set.” Then yeah, that’s it. That’s all you have to do. Just assign it and we’re good.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, no. I mean, the part that you’re at right now is that over the big hump and now we just have to maintain and keep this philosophy going part, which is so enviable for everyone. So thank you for coming on the podcast and inspiring us to go to the profile gym and lose some profile weight, I’ll say. How’s that?

Douane James:
Yes, absolutely. See? I love…

Mike Gerholdt:
It’s true. It’s true. We’re all a little over. We got too many profiles and we need to go to the gym, lose it. And that’s the hardest part, getting there and doing it.

Douane James:
Getting started. Getting started. It’s definitely something that helps when you’re thinking of it. Like, let me just work on getting rid of this.

Mike Gerholdt:
Well, that’s what I like that you guys did is you just, we’re not going to tackle the whole thing. We’re not going to go from 11 to one or two overnight. Let’s just get rid of one.

Douane James:
Right.

Mike Gerholdt:
Yay!

Douane James:
Yeah, that’s exactly the way it worked. That’s the way it worked. It was, oh man, I’m refreshing my memory now because that’s something else that we went through where…

Mike Gerholdt:
I can hear the joy in your voice.

Douane James:
Where it was time to remove this profile. We didn’t have any… So we were able to… And then we were just… It’s chopping a tree. It’s like, okay, then we’re down to this. And then, of course, that last one, it took the most time. We wanted to make sure everything was everything, because it’s also important to have a rollback plan because you may need to roll back. But we were able to do that.

It’s something that the more progress we made, the more confident we felt about doing it. And that’s something that I think people in the Salesforce ecosystem would benefit from is just getting started. And then just like you mentioned, you’ll find you get more confident about doing it and you will be able to show benefits even to the business users as far as moving things through quicker and being able to be more flexible in how your permissions are set up.

Mike Gerholdt:
I would agree. Thank you, James, for coming on the podcast, and I look forward to hearing more from you in upcoming Dreamforces and content because you’re definitely giving us a lot of best practices to work on.

Douane James:
Sure, sure. I look forward to it myself. Thanks a lot. I really appreciate the feedback, and this is great. Dreamforce is excellent. Excellent. Always so happy to attend.

Mike Gerholdt:
So it was a great discussion with Douane. I really enjoyed it. A little bit longer because I had a lot of questions about how he tackled it. I think the metaphor of going to the gym kind of works, right? It feels like, oh, we’ve got to do this great big thing and we have to tackle it all in one big chunk. We have to go from a lot of profiles to very few in just one fell swoop.

But Douane actually proved us wrong and said, you just take it one little bit at a time and work on it, and you modify and you change, and you learn from your mistakes. I mean, that’s every day for me. So I’m really glad he could come on, walk us through this, and set the bar high for us. So I feel being a North Star and being able to show us how it can be done and give us that best practices really inspires me.

Of course, there’s a ton of Trailhead modules and there’s stuff on profiles and permission sets and permission set groups. We’ll link to those in the show notes, which you’ll find at admin.salesforce.com, and we’ll also include a transcript of the show. Now, be sure to jump over to the Trailblazer community. We have a group there called Admin Trailblazers. You can jump in, ask questions.

There’s always a lot of admins asking questions in that group. Don’t worry, the link to that is also in the show notes. So with that, until next week, I’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Reduce Salesforce Profiles for Greater Efficiency appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jason Atwood, CEO and Co-Founder of Arkus. Join us as we chat about how to land your first Salesforce Admin role, from where to find good opportunities to how to prep for the job interview and more.

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

How Salesforce Admins should split their learning time

We’re talking with Jason because he spends a lot of time interviewing and hiring people for Salesforce roles. So if you want to be a Salesforce Admin, how should you split up your learning time?

Jason recommends following the 20/30/50 rule. Spend 20% of your time on Trailhead, 30% on acquiring certifications, and 50% on finding some way to gain experience. This split corresponds to how important they are on your resume.

• Trailhead: Becoming a Ranger is priority one, followed by getting some Superbadges. Take the time to set up your profile with a photo, a description of yourself, and a custom URL so that you look like you’re an active member of the community.
• Certifications: When is the best time to take a Salesforce certification test? As soon as possible! If you don’t get it this time, you can use your results to help you prep for the next exam. And if you do pass, you can get the next cert sooner.
• Gain Experience: Volunteering isn’t the only way to get experience. You can enroll in a program where you build mock projects in Salesforce, or just build something on your own. The important thing is to have projects you’ve built in Salesforce that you can demo in your job interview.

Interview preparation and skill assessments

When you’re going for your first Salesforce job interview be ready for some sort of skill assessment. Time pressure is usually a factor in these tests, so Jason recommends doing a practice run.

Talk to a friend, find out what kind of data they collect, and then give yourself a day to build them an app. It could track the books they’ve read or the distance they’ve run, the important thing is that you don’t know what it’s going to be before you talk to them. 

All admins are consultants

It’s also important to realize that an interview isn’t just about showing your skills—it’s about showing who you are. It’s a chance to listen and empathize with the person on the other side of the table. It’s a chance to share something that stood out to you in your research about the company. And most importantly, to show who you are by asking questions.

Why does Jason place such an emphasis on soft skills in a Salesforce Admin job interview? Because, at the end of the day, every admin is a Salesforce consultant for their organization. You talk to people about their problems to get requirements, come up with a solution, and then iterate on that solution.

We touch on a lot more in this conversation about how to look for Salesforce jobs, developing listening skills, and what it’s like to be a Salesforce consultant, so be sure to listen to the full episode and subscribe so you don’t miss out.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Learn more

• Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: Pei Mun Lim on the Skills of a Business Analyst
• Salesforce Admins Blog: Develop Your Communication Skills as a Salesforce Admin

Admin Trailblazers Group

• Admin Trailblazers Community Group

Social

• Jason on X
• Jason on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn
• Salesforce Admins on X
• Mike on Threads
• Mike on Tiktok
• Mike on X

Full show transcript

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

A little bit more than me. More than me.

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

Jason Atwood:

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

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

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, no.

Jason Atwood:

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I think so, yeah.

Jason Atwood:

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

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

Ooh!

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

I would imagine.

Jason Atwood:

Even had one person pass out in the…

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, my. Oh, goodness.

Jason Atwood:

It happens.

Mike Gerholdt:

You get an extra hour now.

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, good.

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay.

Jason Atwood:

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

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, let’s do.

Jason Atwood:

One is empathy.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay.

Jason Atwood:

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

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

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

So true, so true.

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

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

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

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

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

Although the fries are kind of the best part.

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Jason Atwood:

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

There is a lot.

Jason Atwood:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

We had everything named Lightning for a while, too.

Jason Atwood:

That too. That was fun.

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

Pretty much.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’ll probably get in trouble for saying that.

Jason Atwood:

Yes, you will.

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

I’m going to win that Bingo.

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

Totally.

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

You’re full of advice.

Jason Atwood:

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, you say that, but I bet not.

Jason Atwood:

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

We’ll call it 98.

Jason Atwood:

There you go.

Mike Gerholdt:

So there’s two.

Jason Atwood:

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

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s a good question.

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

Right.

Jason Atwood:

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

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, there’s a road tour.

Jason Atwood:

There’s a road tour.

Mike Gerholdt:

Are you going to have shirts made up?

Jason Atwood:

I might. So yeah, I actually-

Mike Gerholdt:

Have dates on the back.

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

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

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. I appreciate you coming by.

Jason Atwood:

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

Mike Gerholdt:

Or sooner.

Jason Atwood:

Or a little sooner.

Mike Gerholdt:

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

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

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