💃 Understanding Business Priorities for Salesforce Professionals🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! Have you ever sat down at a diner with a menu thicker than a novel and you want it all, but I can only eat one plate at a time?

Welcome to prioritization as a Salesforce professional!

📔 The backlog is the menu

🤤 The business is the hungry customer

🧑‍🍳 And you’re the chef trying to cook something that won’t get sent back 😬

There’s a simple, but hard-to-grasp truth about priorities that you need to know 👇

THE SIMPLE TRUTH

Salesforce Priorities

This may be hard to hear for some. It may be a relief to other. But here’s the simple truth about priorities - you don’t choose the priorities, the business does 💯.

Priorities are driven by a basic concept - does the thing make money? Does it drive revenue? Does it increase profit? Reduce expenses?

Everything else is nice-to-have 🤲.

Your job isn’t to invent the priorities. It’s to translate them into Salesforce work. And yes, that means sometimes “urgent” is just “someone yelling louder than the others.” 😬

When you understand the real business menu, you can spot which dishes matter and which are just appetizers nobody ordered 🙂.

IS THIS PRIORITY?! 🦋

What Salesforce Priorities Are

A “priority” is not “the VP of Marketing pinged you on Slack.”

A true business priority is an initiative directly tied to revenue, cost, or risk. Think of it as the three major food groups of the business diet ⬇️

🍱 Revenue Generators 👉 projects that help the business sell faster, close bigger, or expand customers. Automating the renewal process generates revenue!

🍤 Cost Reducers 👉 solutions that cut waste. Automating inbound leads and then routing leads to users reduces a dozen clicks and data entry. The less salespeople have to interact with the CRM, the more time they have to sell.

🍣 Risk Mitigators 👉 the broccoli 🥦. Nobody craves it, but it keeps the company out of lawsuits or bad audits. Implementing a disaster recovery process, or a security configuration to adhere to HIPAA compliance

Everything else - custom dashboards, fancy UI tweaks, or that field someone swears they can’t live without - belongs in the “dessert” category. Great if you have capacity, but no executive ever went bankrupt because a picklist color wasn’t pretty enough.

PRIORITY INGREDIENTS

Salesforce Priority Building Blocks

What actually makes something a business priority?

It’s not magic 🪄🎩🐰.

It’s a recipe with four main ingredients ⬇️

💥 Impact - How much revenue, cost, or risk is affected?

🚑 Urgency - Is the business starving now, or can this wait for the weekend?

🧑‍🔬 Feasibility - Can it be delivered with the current kitchen (your Salesforce org, your team, your timeline)?

🤝 Alignment - Does it match the business’s strategic meal plan (annual goals, leadership focus, OKRs)?

If one ingredient is missing, you’ve got a half-baked dish. For example, automating a tiny process might be feasible and urgent, but if the impact is negligible and it doesn’t align with strategy, it’s a snack, not a main course.

Which of these examples, using the above ingredients, would be the highest priority?

1️⃣ A report for MQL to SQL conversion rate

2️⃣ An automation of a daily, manual sales task

3️⃣ Loading a list of Leads from a new-hire sales person

Reply to this email with your answer!

FINAL THOUGHTS

Actionable Takeaway

So how do you stop drowning in a buffet of requests and actually prioritize like an executive? Try these 3 things 👇

💵 Always ask the money question - “Does this make the company money, save the company money, or protect the company from losing money?” If not, it’s dessert.

🧑‍⚖️ Rank impact vs. urgency - A simple 2x2 matrix works wonders. Big impact + high urgency = cook it first.

🧠 Translate, don’t decide - Your influence grows when you frame Salesforce work in business terms. Don’t say “we need a Flow.” Say, “this saves the sales team 200 hours a year.”

It’s not about ignoring requests. It’s about making sure you serve the main course before dessert.

Do this well, and you’ll stop being the short-order cook taking random orders and start being the trusted chef who always serves exactly what the business craves 😋.

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes