💃 Infinite Glory in the Salesforce Ticket Queue🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! A few years ago my sister gifted me this book.

I am ^(was 🙄⁾ an ^{(self-proclaimed)} athlete who dominated the local basketball courts and baseball fields. And TENNIS was not in my vocabulary.

I had a 5 hour flight ahead of me, so settled into the book while awaiting to board the plane.

But with 2 hours left in the flight, I was done with the book 😮…and amazed at how wonderful it was!

What does this all have to do with Salesforce and ticket queues?

BACKGROUND

Andre Agassi

Andre Agassi was an iconic 90’s athlete. He was up there with Jordan 🐐, Bo Jackson, and Ken Griffey Jr.

With 60 total titles, 8 Major wins (plus 7 runner ups), and one-of-eight men to win the Career Grand Slam…yeah, he’s a legend.

But it wasn’t all sunshine 🌞 and rainbows 🌈.

Agassi had a tough childhood, with a demanding, tennis-obsessed father (who never played tennis himself), and basically played full-time tennis from his pre-teens until the end of his professional career.

Here are 3 things Agassi proves about Salesforce ticket queues 👇

ANDRE 🤝 SALESFORCE TICKETS

Salesforce Ticket Queue Lessons From Andre

🔁 Reps

Agassi’s father built a tennis ball machine not-so-affectionately named “The Dragon 🐉.” It was a turbocharged ball shooter that fired up to 2,500 balls a day to the young Agassi.

By the time he was a teenager, Agassi had hit hundreds-of-thousands of balls. Millions of reps by the time he’d achieved the Career Grand Slam.

In Salesforce, the Technical Architect has built hundreds of APIs, converted and migrated hundreds-of-millions of records, and QA’d a million lines of code.

The Senior Admin has built hundreds of validation rules and created tens-of-thousands of fields.

You remember your first Flow you built, and how slowly and cumbersomely you clicked around the UI? And now you click through it faster than the screen can keep up 🤯!

There is no better place than the infinite ticket queue to get your reps 💯.

🔮 Pattern Recognition

Agassi knows pattern recognition. In a match with the fearsome Boris Becker-

😛 Agassi continued…

In a ticket queue, you need to pick up on patterns.

It could be that “missing lead!!” ticket from that one user, you’ve picked up that they’re not checking the exception report. Or the user who never searches for a record before creating one 🤬. When you get complaints of duplicates, you know the culprit 😡.

Once your proficient in your org, your pattern matching needs to kick in. You need to be looking for patterns (patterns won’t be looking for you…).

☀️ Exposure

Agassi became a professional tennis player at the young age of 16. He won his last major at 32.

That’s 16 years of professional exposure. Playing for money. In front of crowds. Sponsorships at stake.

That’s 16 years of time in the game. Why is that important?

Look at this.

And this.

And this. 💔

There are so many thirsty Salesforce professionals out there who would do anything to be in your position, grinding away at tickets, working with ungrateful users, and working around technical debt.

Until you don’t have it, you don’t realize that the exposure to all of the things is not easy to come by 💯.

And the exposure you get in ticket queues is the perfect environment to build your base, while not being in the riskiest, highest-stake roles.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Working a ticket queue might not feel glamorous, but neither did hours of hitting balls from The Dragon 🐉 or obsessing over Boris Becker’s tongue 👅.

The ticket queue experience- rich with repetitions, pattern recognition, and exposure - are the foundation of mastery.

So, the next time you find yourself drowning in tickets, channel your inner Andre Agassi. Each ticket is a swing of the racket, another step toward becoming a Salesforce legend 🫡.

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes