💃 Get the Most Out of Your Salesforce Experience 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! You owe it to yourself to squeeze the max amount of juice from your experience.

Your 9 month rip ‘n’ replace Sales Cloud implementation.

Your 60 hour data migration.

Your 30 minute presentation.

Those experiences hold a ton of value. You need to capitalize on all of this value. And you’re in luck, because this is a guide on just how to do that 🤗!

THE THREE LAYERS OF EXPERIENCE

A Salesforce Professional’s Experience

There are three phases of experience. They are-

1. Doing it

2. Did it

3. Leveraging it

Here is what they mean-

Doing It

When your project is work-in-progress, you’re doing it.

In a 9 month implementation, those 9 months are doing it.

In the 60 hour data migration, those 60 hours are doing it.

In a 30 minute demo, the 30 minute demo plus all the prep time are doing it.

Hands-on, clicking the things, updating statuses, herding cats, attending project meetings, testing, etc.

You are getting the experience right then and there. And sometimes, you’re getting feedback just as quickly, ex. “well, that didn’t work…” or “omg I can’t believe that worked!”

The experience you’re gaining in this phase is primarily execution, supported by strategy and planning. You take your tenacity and perseverance to the gym 💪. You stress-test your strategy and tactics…and patience. You break rules you didn’t know existed and build solutions you didn’t know were possible.

Did It

Finally, the project is completed!

The 9 month implementation is completed, the solution is Live and users are using it!

The 60 hour data migration is completed, users have access to their legacy data!

The 30 minute demo is completed, the meeting is over and the audience is dismissed!

The experience you’re getting in this phase is the 10,000 foot view. You have a full iteration, a full lifecycle of a project, to treat like your own alien autopsy.

In this phase you polish your strategy and tactics. You identify your lessons learned. And you swear off the things that nearly killed you, like allowing the client to rename standard objects.

Unfortunately, too few people take the time to reflect on their completed projects. Whether a formal retrospective with the full project team, or your personal curiosity itch that you scratch on your own - do not waste an opportunity to memorialize your experience 🙌.

Pro-tip, do it as soon as the project is over. The Zeigarnik Effect is real!

Leveraging It

Here’s where things get interesting. But they only get interesting because you’ve nailed the prerequisite Doing It and Did It phases!

The blood, sweat, and tears that went into doing the project. Then the mental focus and the (non-billable) time commitment for the Did It phase. These are the foundations of the Leverage It phase 💯.

The experience you’re getting in this phase is ridiculously valuable and best laid out in examples 👇

LEVERAGED EXPERIENCE EXAMPLES

Leveraging Your Salesforce Experience

There’s layers to this, too. Starting with-

Beginner

The perfect beginner’s example of leveraging your experience is your resume.

The highlights of your previous experiences, distilled into line-items, and on a single page.

There’s a reason why creating and updating your resume is such a mental slog 😓. In an attempt to convince a company to give you an interview, you’re writing a few hundred words to showcase years of hard-earned experiences.

Each word matters. Each word is highly leveraged. 💯

A really good resume that is compelling, tells a story, and is a single-page is a notch below a unicorn 🦄.

More often, you see a few good lines, mixed with some “why did they include this?” and “what does that mean?” or the worst of the worst - a 5 page resume. 😩

Your ability to create a succinct, quality resume is a solid indicator that you are able to leverage your experience.

Intermediate

Perhaps you’re not particularly smart. For example, you use v-lookup instead of index-match or x-lookup 😜.

But you’re objectively successful 🙌.

Your stakeholders love you. Your orgs are simple and highly functional. You consistently deliver on-time and on-budget.

The intermediate level of leveraging experience is having just a few tools that you are dominant with. (Additionally, you don’t suck at too much.)

Some obvious and unsexy things you could excel at are being diligent and consistent. These will get you far on their own.

Some sexier things could be you are charming and a great story teller. Humans are emotional creatures, and charm and stories influence emotions.

You know that person in your office who couldn’t find their way out of an empty room, but has all the stakeholders wrapped around their finger. Yeah, they have a skill that, they’ve learned through experience, is powerful. And they did the obvious thing and exploit it 🧠.

Advanced

On the outside, what separates the advanced from the intermediate is a bigger tool belt with more tools. More excellent at more things.

But underneath, there is a hack.

The advanced person carefully (or luckily 🤷🏻) selected their first few foundational skills.

Charlie Munger is a good example of this - he identified early on that inversion is powerful. He leveraged inversion early and often, and he eventually became one of the most financially successful people the world has ever known.

But wait. There’s another level to this!

These skills not only continued to compound over time, but they became the foundation for net-new skills, which, over time, also compounded.

That’s like putting turbocharger on a supercharger 🤯!

An example of this is James Booker, the eccentric N’awlins pianist, who was classically trained but a natural improviser. He leveraged his classical training while developing his incredibly unique New Orleans style to become a peerless musician who fused classical disciplines with free-flowing jazz and blues.

The Salesforce analogy for this is business analysis. Technology automates process and process is the bread and butter of a business analyst. Foundational.

Then, stack on another skill, like writing code - a great developer is also a great business analyst. Understanding business process is a prerequisite to writing code that makes users happy.

DO THIS…NOW

Takeaways

Here are 3 takeaways-

1) Value the experience

If you’re going through the motions, patiently waiting for the clock to hit 5 so you can get on with your life, then you are not valuing the experience.

But if you’re continuously improving a repetitive task, or hyped that you’re assigned to a new project, or eagerly applying a new skill, then you’re valuing the experience.

This is the first step in getting the most out of your experience.

2) Understand what is of value in your experiences

And not just what is of value, but how valuable is it? You extra thirsty folks are going to find value in everything, so you’'ll need to make good decisions on what to focus on, and what to exclude.

Use a simple razor to identify the most valuable things. For example-

💰 Does this impact revenue?

🤗 Does this make my stakeholders feel warm & fuzzy?

⏰ Does this impact timeliness or budget?

3) Leverage those valuable things

You put in the execution work. Then you reflected on the things and surfaced the value-add and insights.

Finish it off strong - exploit your new tools, refine your craft through iterations, all while continuing to nurture and polish your older tools.

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Salesforce Memes