💃 What Separates a Good Admin from a Great Admin 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds!  Are you a good admin?  Or a great admin?  

Agenda for today includes

• What Separates a Good Admin from a Great Admin?

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

What Separates a Good Admin from a Great Admin

There are more than 5,000 Salesforce Admins out there.  A few are no-talent ass clowns, many are good, and some are great.  What separates the good from the great?  Is there some kind of drug 💊 or witchcraft 🧙🏻 that will elevate you to that next level?  

Let's talk about what goes into being a great admin.  Will all these boxes need to be checked?  No.  Are there boxes missing?  Yes.  Use this as awareness and considerations, but there are many paths to becoming a great admin.  

Having Perspective from Sales Users | As a Salesforce Admin, do you know what the sales people at your company are doing day-to-day?  Not just in Salesforce, but out in the field or via phone and email (since they certainly aren't tracking their activity in Salesforce.....).  Do you know which reports they look at everyday and how they make decisions off of them?  Or the reports no one has ever looked at?  Do you know which Opportunity statuses add no value, and which are critical?  How about the Sales Manager?  How are they reviewing, monitoring, and planning for their team?  What KPIs are they interested in that their sales people are not?

Takeaway - A Salesforce Admin that is looking at the business from the user's perspectives, and then creating a Salesforce solution that makes the users' jobs easier and adds value to their roles is a great admin!  🦉🦉🦉

Business Analyst Skillz | Do you know what business process is?  Can you explain the sequence of steps taken to execute a thing?  Can you explain it in a way that someone else understands?  What are the inputs?  What are the outputs?  What is upstream of the business process, and what is downstream?  Can you draw a process flow?  Can you do a current state, desired state, and gap analysis?  Can you quantify your analysis and add dollar values to impacts?

Takeaway - A Salesforce Admin needs to have the ability to interview a sales user and understand the sales process.  Then, the ability to document the current process, the desired process, the gap, and then explain that gap to a sales user in terms that they can comprehend.  The cherry on top is quantifying the whole thing in dollars, which is what most decisions are based off of. 🦄🍒🦄🍒🦄🍒

Understanding of SaaS Applications | This is 2 things.  Software as a Service (SaaS) and application software.  Software as a Service is centrally hosted (in the cloud ☁️) software that is priced as a subscription (*ahem, Salesforce).  An application is software that executes a defined task (*ahem, Salesforce again).  The combination of these is a very powerful solution.  SaaS is exceptionally accessible and scalable.  Applications can execute highly complex tasks at volumes and speeds that the combined power of 8 billion humans could never achieve (sidenote - this is one reason why those FAANG engineer's compensation plans are so high).  

Takeaway - Understanding the underlying technology concepts is foundational knowledge that will help to make Salesforce simpler.  This is because Salesforce is a fish in a sea.  A big fish, sure, but if you are familiar with the composition of the sea, that is more foundational than knowing about one fish in that sea.   🐡 🐠 🐟

Platform | In software terms, a platform is a configurable application that also excels in connecting with other things like tools, databases, websites, and other applications.  Salesforce takes it a step further, they are kind of a half-baked cookie that needs just a lil more cookin to be edible (or, in non-cookie terms, it comes with many cool features and functions right off the shelf, like Standard Objects, Lead Queues and Lead Conversion, Confetti, etc).  As well, Salesforce provides excellent pre-built APIs for their standard objects, enabling connections to external solutions, out of the box.  Powerful stuff. 

Takeaway - If that sea and fish analogy made any sense, then the same applies here.  If it didn't, the simple explanation is that Salesforce falls into specific categories and types of software.  There are other categories and types, and knowing even just a few more will expose that the software world is big and there are some common concepts and principles that they all have.  This will make your Salesforce org seem smaller and simpler - a good thing if you are responsible for managing it. 🧑🏻‍💻🧑🏻‍💻🧑🏻‍💻

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes