💃 3 Salesforce Professional Green Flags 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! We discussed some Red Flags in a previous post. Today, we discuss Green Flags! Logically, Green Flags would be doing the opposite of what was called out as Red Flags. Not all knowledge, skills, and experiences are created equal, however. Let's identify 3 Green Flags, and dive into their exceptional value-add!

Agenda for today includes

• Salesforce Professional Green Flags

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

Salesforce Professional Green Flags

This is not the first, and will not be the last newsletter that we dive into soft and hard skills required to be a Salesforce Professional. It is the nature of the profession - responsibility of an Enterprise CRM requires a broad skillset.

Green Flags are the attributes any excellent Salesforce Professional will possess. There are some obvious ones missing from the below list, like strong understanding of data, and we will continue to tackle them all in future newsletters.

3 Green Flags, or value-add signals, often seen in the best Salesforce Professionals -

1) Builds Trust and Strong Relationships

We all know that person who just kinda glides through the office politics. They are friendly with everyone from the VPs and Execs to the Accounts Receivable and Helpdesk associates. They may be introverted or extroverted, charismatic or drab. But everyone talks to them. Everyone WANTS to talk to them. Presenting - our first green flag.

The ability to gain trust and build relationships is ridiculously important. Consulting, especially, is a people business. But Admins, too, will have higher levels of success when they have strong relationships with their stakeholders (The Business - Sales, Marketing and/or CPQ-related Ops teams), their team, and their boss.

When we have the trust of the professionals around us, we reduce friction. We reduce the probing questions, the second-guessing, and the stepping on our toes or going behind our backs.

When we have the trust of professionals around us, we have support. Others go to bat for us. They bring more truth, value, and insights to the table, because they understand we will leverage that to make their lives better. It might reduce stupid requests, because they know we will hold them to account (unfortunately we can't cut this out completely, but trust does reduce it).

Takeaway: Trust and building strong relationships reduces friction and augments support. Apparently it makes you very popular in the office, too!

2) Tests the Bejezus Out of Everything

If Sales Cloud was a chunk of rock, this Green-Flagged professional would have a buttery, smooth stone. This person tests their stuff. All the time, every time. So. Many. Reps. Their solutions are honed, polished, and hum. They produce no surprises to their stakeholders.

This volume of testing nurtures other positive outcomes besides a solution that works -

• Deep understanding of the org.

• Excellent understanding of exceptions, and how to manage them.

• If/when changes are made, an excellent understanding of potential solution options, the impacts, and the pros and cons of the change.

Takeaway: A person who tests their solution like a fiend deeply understands their solution. The benefits of this are far-reaching and probably underrated.

3) Is Always a Step Ahead

This one requires experience and lessons learned. But that doesn't make it any less a Green Flag! So what exactly is being one step ahead? Well, what is our objective as a Salesforce Professional? It is to provide our users a good CRM experience, and to set them up for success to do their job effectively. And that latter piece is the key- setting them up for success. There are varying degrees of what we can do to set up others for succes, so let's look at some examples -

• Easy - Review notes and create meeting agenda, then send out to attendees in advance of the call. Make it easy for stakeholders to prepare for a call.

• Moderate - Create instructions, test scripts, and datasets; then dataload into the sandbox for stakeholders to test in a PROD-like environment. Make it easy for users to UAT.

• Hard - Create a deck to propose 3 solution options to solve for a problem. Each option includes a future-state workflow, level of effort, financial and operational impacts, and pros/cons. Make it easy for executives to make decisions. 

Takeaway: Being a step ahead makes your stakeholder's lives easier. But guess what, it also makes you look good, too! What do they call that? Oh yeah, win-win!

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes