💃 You Are a Salesforce Snowflake ❄️🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! You’re an incredible Salesforce professional!

You wake up to your boss giving you your flowers 💐 in the #general channel. A knock on the door and it’s bottles 🍾 delivered from you grateful client. You walk back to your workspace and your Application Architect cert (you print and frame your certs, right?!) smiles back at you 😃. You get a push notification that your paycheck has been deposited, look at all those numbers!

You are at the top of your game, a Salesforce professional’s professional! But not for the reason you think…here’s what we mean 👇

THE GOAT

Not One. Many.

Michael Jordan is the greatest NBA player of all time. He won 6 championships and 5 MVPs. But did you also know -

🤯 He made $90MM during his entire 15yr NBA career. He makes $300MM, per year, for his Nike partnership. High earning basketball player AND high earning businessman.

🤯 He was also a Defensive Player of the Year…the same year he won the scoring title. Best defensive player in the league AND best scorer in the league.

🤯 He played in the NBA for the Chicago Bulls and Washington Wizards. He also played professional baseball for the minor league Burmingham Barons. Professional basketball AND baseball player.

See the pattern here? Jordan is not a one-trick pony. He’s not a one-dimensional, purpose-specific bottle opener. He envelops offense, defense, speed, power, ultra-competitiveness and business acumen.

And that is why he is the GOAT.

UNCOMMONLY COMMON

Professionals = Multi Talented

Your accolades as a Salesforce professional (real or imagined 🤪) are generated by your Salesforce skills…partially.

In fact, you possess multiple skills that make you uniquely you.

Think about it-

👉 The best teacher you ever had- they brought more than math and science formulas. Like the famously hands-on physics professor Walter Lewin. Key Skills: Physics, Teaching, and Applied Science.

👉 The best plumber you ever had - sure they fixed your drain pipe leak. But they’re also the Michelangelo of laying tile and drywall, while being on-time, on-budget. Key Skills: Plumbing, Construction, Project Management.

👉 The greatest founder of all time was the product genius…AND a marketing genius! Key Skills: Vision, Product, and Marketing.

If you’re as great of a Salesforce professional as you say you are, then you’re skill-stack is gonna look something like Salesforce, <value-add blah blah1>, and <value-add blah blah2>.

YOUR VENN DIAGRAM

Salesforce Professional’s Skill-stack

You’re a Salesforce savant 🧠! But that, alone, doesn’t make you successful.

It’s your Salesforce skills combined with your other skills that makes you unique ❄️, that makes people want to work with you 🤝, and that makes those tasty paychecks so tasty 🤑.

Here’s an example you’ll be familiar with-

That one Salesforce developer. The one who knows their enterprise patterns, ensures data is always synced, and whose code is so clean that even you can read it!

You can put them in front of users and executives, stakeholders and partners, admins and developers - and they can all understand this developer.

You give them requirements and they come back to you with a workflow document, effort and timeline, and then pepper you with thoughtful questions.

This developer is combining an array of valuable skills - Salesforce, enterprise tech, effective communication, project management, business analysis, and risk management - just to name a few 🥵.

And you? What is making you a superstar?

Your Salesforce skills, of course. But what else?

🧠 Your ability to deliver on-time, on-budget? How many of your Salesforce peers can say they do that consistently?

🧠 Your incredible executive summaries that bring awareness and alignment to execs and the project team?

🧠 Your talent for earning trust with your clients who will confide their company’s deepest darkest secrets to you…and also sign that second SOW 💰 with you!

🧠 Your grasp of leverage and strong-hand at delegating, resulting in windfall margins for your company?

🧠 Your tenacity in moving the needle in tough projects, when everyone else is ready to give up and you’re rallying the troops to victory?

You need to identify your off-Salesforce skills and lean into them, hard!

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

Basketball skills were important for Michael Jordan to accomplish what he did. But it was far from the only skill required to be the GOAT.

Salesforce is exactly the same - Salesforce skills are the cost of admission, but to be truly successful you’ll need to bring additional skills.

Likely, you’ll have those skills walking in the door, like project management or business analysis. Then you need to ensure you are combining your analyst skills with your Salesforce tasks, and managing it all with your project management skills.

It’s not your Salesforce skills that are making you amazing. It’s your Salesforce skills AND…..

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes