💃 Can We Get Some Gratitude?! We're Working Hard Over Here! 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Have you received a genuine "Thank You" from your stakeholders, users, or clients? Has someone ever sent you or your manager an email touting your accomplishments and how you made their life easier? Why is getting a lil love so difficult and rare? How good is that hit of dopamine when we do get it?!

Agenda for today includes

• How to Get a Thank You for Your Salesforce Work

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

How to Get a Thank You for Your Salesforce Work

That meme up there has an important point. You, as a Salesforce Professional, are well compensated to do a job. Doing anything less than your role and responsibilities is not going to win you much gratitude. Meeting your role and responsibilities, yeah...nothing special.

So...do we have to go above and beyond to get the love? Our pure wisdom of this Salesforce thing, that the user/client/etc have no idea how to manage, is not enough to get a measly compliment? The answer is YES. If you want someone to take time out of their day to write a gracious email to you, then you better deliver something outstanding.

The solution must be good, it must meet the stakeholders' requirements. It also must be on time, and on budget. Is that it? What else can we leverage? If it works just the way the business asked for it to work, what else can we do? Here are 3 exceptional things to get you that coveted compliment -

1. The Game + Humility - First, The Game - this is making the stakeholder believe they are responsible for all the amazingness. The solution was their idea. The business requirements they provided were perfect. The demos where they brought new ideas (actually, they were scenarios they didn't provide initially, so technically a change request....) were soooo insightful for you and allowed you to design the best solution possible. Humility is a muscle we could all flex more. In this case, we need to give the stakeholder all the credit, and take none for ourselves. This gives them a sense of pride and ownership and builds their confidence. It engages them, making them more likely to meaningfully contribute in demos, UAT and Go-Live.

2. Set Them Up for Success - This will be additional effort on your part. A basic example - have meeting notes well prepared for every call, guide your stakeholders through the call (but don't make decisions for them) so they do not have to put in much mental effort. Here are some advanced examples - if there is a choice for them to make, provide impact assessment, pros, and cons of each choice; write UAT test scripts for them (but they need to sign off); create excellent functional documentation - if the stakeholder can understand the solution though your documentation, then your documentation was excellent.

3. Continuous, Documented, Communicated Progress - this is a simple thing that we could always improve on. If we want to get compliments, we obviously need to deliver excellence, but we also need to always be making progress (and quickly remove blockers). We need to document what we have done (completed), what we are doing (WIP), and what we have left to do (not started). We need to communicate these updates simply, efficiently, and at a predictable cadence. The updates need to be easy to understand, not project manager hieroglyphics.

An underlying theme in these items is empathy - put yourself in the stakeholder's shoes. What would you want the Salesforce Professional to do to make your life easier?

Here is the honest truth - you may do all these things, and more, and not get a thank you. All you can do is work to influence the situation, but there are no guarantees you will get someone to take time out of their day to offer a compliment. Don't worry, it was not all for nothing. Your delivery was excellent, and hopefully you learned lessons along the way. You WILL get another opportunity to deliver excellence!

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes

But First - refer a friend in the link at the bottom of the email and receive a Salesforce Salary Guide that includes salary ranges from 2019-2022 and how they may shake out in 2023!