Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to David Simpson, Salesforce Administrator at the 1916 Company. Join us as we chat about how he landed his first Salesforce Admin role and what advice he has for folks who are new to the ecosystem.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with David Simpson.

If you didn’t catch David’s presentation about resolving Flow errors at Dreamforce, be sure to check out our earlier episode with him. Another thing that came up was his career pivot, and it was so interesting that I had to bring him back to talk about it.

David started out as an accountant before eventually becoming a financial systems analyst. He had to run a lot of reports and quickly discovered that the thing he was actually interested in was the Salesforce platform.

Soon enough, David became the part-time admin for his organization, but he quickly realized that if he wanted to just focus on Salesforce, he would need to find a new job.

While David bulked up his credentials, he started looking for full-time Salesforce Admin roles to apply to. One piece of advice he has is to take a closer look at the job description and be clear about what you want.

“It’s not uncommon now for admins to have developer skills or maybe dip their toe into the architect side of things,” he says, “but I focused mainly on positions that were only looking for admin-related work.”

David also was really specific about finding an organization that was already committed to Salesforce. He looked for green flags like job postings with specifics on certifications or Superbadges. Finally, it was important to him to join a Salesforce team as opposed to try to cut his teeth as a solo admin.

David’s advice for people new to the ecosystem is to get curious. Back when he was a part-time admin, he was laser-focused on opportunities because that was what his organization was asking him to do. 

“I should have given myself the benefit of the doubt,” he says, “and taken a little bit more risk in learning new things.” Reflecting now, he sees where he could have taken the initiative to try automations or enhance integrations and become a better admin in the process.

There are a lot more great tips from David about his pivot into a Salesforce Admin career, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

Mike:

So, David, welcome back to the podcast.

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So, he suggested that I become another admin with the company, and that I would learn about the general inner workings of Salesforce and be a point of contact for cleaning up that data, for troubleshooting issues and just all the things that come with being a junior level admin. So, he gave me a system administrator license. He recommended that I go into Trailhead to just learn the basics of being a Salesforce admin, the Salesforce ecosystem, custom objects. All those general items that you learn as an admin, and then I just kind of fell in love with it. It was such an interesting pivot from doing spreadsheets and reconciliations. I was able to kind of do problem solving and be an environment that I wasn’t too familiar in, but I was also able to see how Salesforce works and how we can get this data to be reportable data.

So, the automation behind it or validation rules, just even something simple like setting up a page layout. It was all very interesting and new to me, so I just latched onto it a hundred percent, and then I further got sold on the whole experience after about a year or so, being a Salesforce admin, I went to my first Dreamforce in 2018 and I got my Salesforce administrator certification, and at that point, that kind of signaled to me that this is what I want to do full time. So, from that point on, it’s all history. I went and unfortunately, the company I was with didn’t have the resources for a full-time admin, so I did go to another company, but since then I have been an awesome admin just doing it every day. Custom objects, flows, you name it, admin work-wise, I do it.

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I used actual project and real-world experience, but something else that was a little kind of ace up the sleeve for my interview process was that I did have finance and accounting background. The job that ultimately hired me, while I did not do finance and accounting work for them, I was able to be a point of contact to help bridge the gap between the finance team and the Salesforce team. If they needed to pull financial data from Salesforce, I would be a person that they could go to, and I could confidently answer that because of my background.

So, when it comes to jumping from one career to a Salesforce career, I definitely recommend that people do lean into what they’ve done in the past and show how they can enhance a new job’s day-to-day by focusing on those areas of expertise, but just in a Salesforce context. That’s what really helped me because yes, I did unfortunately have a handful of interviews where I didn’t get the job, and I think that ultimately came down to just pure raw Salesforce experience. But the job that did hire me, it was because I had a great rapport with their CFO, and I was able to talk the talk with finance as well as bridge that gap to the Salesforce side of things.

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Additionally, I was looking to see what kind of qualifications and credentials they were looking for from an education side of things. If there was nothing about a Salesforce certification, then I erred on the side of caution and didn’t apply there. I wanted a company that was fully bought into the Salesforce ecosystem, and that can be illustrated in a job posting by seeing that they’re asking for the proper credentials. An extra little bonus, which was much more rare, was seeing your certain Trailhead status, or you have certain super badges. It’s very rare for a job to ask for those sorts of things, but that’s how you know you’re working with a company that knows the Salesforce ecosystem and knows what they want.

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And most of the time they said no. But every once in a while they’d say yes, and then I get to show off my screen flow that I worked really hard on. So, nowadays, yes, I do have my dev org. I’ll bring up Trailhead every now and then, or I did back then when I was in the job hunt, but really, I like to showcase the dev org whenever possible because it is something that I’m actively developing in. Even now that I have a job and I’m in a job I love, I still whatever I do at my normal job, if I say, “Oh, that’s pretty interesting,” I go and I rebuild it in the dev org. But of course, without confidential information.

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It was just essentially getting a feel for the Salesforce ecosystem that was there. And then from that point, once I was left my own devices, I just continued to do some more digging. I looked, okay, they’re using cases. How are they using cases? Where is the queue that stuff that we get asked to do comes in? What does their account object look like? Because the account object is always one of the busiest objects in the Salesforce ecosystem. How many validation rules do they have? I was really just trying to take the little experience that I had from my previous job and then look at those same areas in this new job. So, essentially just getting a feel for the org.

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That company was actually where I learned how to build flows. The Salesforce architect there, Nick, he sat down with me one day for two hours and he said, “Okay, we’re going to build a screen flow and this needs to be triggered from a button and it needs to grab all these records. Let’s see you build it.” And then he walked me through it step by step, and it was just such an incredible experience, and I’m super grateful for it because now I use flows every single day in my job and I talk about flows. I talked about it at Dreamforce that just recently ended. I have a YouTube channel where I talk about flows. So, it was just such a good experience and I’m forever grateful for them.

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Or, “Why doesn’t this process work the way as intended? Can you let me try this automation?” I eventually got those skill sets over the years, especially with automation, but it took a little bit longer than expected because I was just afraid to take that leap very early on, and I should have given myself the benefit of the doubt that I could have figured it out that early on, and I think that would’ve made me a stronger admin from the get-go.

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The post How Do I Transition Into a Salesforce Admin Career? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Naveen Gabrani, Founder and CEO of Astrea IT Services. Join us as we chat about why Salesforce Foundations is a game-changer for admins.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Naveen Gabrani.

This year at Dreamforce, Naveen is giving a presentation about something that Enterprise users already have access to that’s criminally underrated. “Salesforce Foundations is one of those lesser-known features,” he says, “but it is extremely important.”

Announced last year, Salesforce Foundations brings the most useful basic features from Agentforce Sales, Agentforce Service, Agentforce Marketing, Agentforce Commerce, Data 360, and Agentforce to your org. It has a modern UI that consolidates the most important features you use every day into an updated homepage.

And the best part? It’s free—you simply have to enable it in Setup.

Naveen gives some examples to highlight how important Salesforce Foundations truly is. If you have Agentforce Sales, you can borrow Agentforce Service features like Knowledge and macros to give your customers some technical support. Or you could build a customer journey with Agentforce Marketing’s flow-based interface that feeds into a Agentforce Commerce  storefront.

With so many businesses pushing to integrate AI features, Salesforce Foundations gives you the opportunity to try before you buy. You can configure Agentforce and Data 360 to get everything integrated with your org and then make the decision to expand functionality. It’s much easier to convince stakeholders when you have something concrete to show them.

Naveen is a Dreamforce veteran, so I wanted to know what keeps bringing him back, year after year. “The biggest thing for me is to make sure that I get time to meet my customers, meet my friends in the ecosystem, meet my partners,” he says. “Those networking aspects of the conference have helped us a lot as a company in the long term.”

Each year, Naveen makes a point of writing a blog post to summarize his takeaways on what’s happening with the platform. Make sure to check it out, and make sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Mike:

So Naveen, welcome to the podcast.

Naveen Gabrani:

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Coming back to the user interface part, there are a few different things that are provided in the Salesforce Foundation user interface. One is all the apps are accessible on the left nav bar in a very modern UI. And also for setup for admins, the most important features are available through a dropdown. So for example, managing users, you can just go to the top right and then access the most important features that you use every day. The third important feature of the new Salesforce Foundation user interface is access to a more modern homepage that will give you everything that you need the moment you’ll land on the homepage. So that is the UI aspects of the Salesforce Foundation.

The second part of Salesforce Foundation is the access to multi-cloud, which is more important actually. So let’s say you are using Sales Cloud and you enable Salesforce Foundation. What it will give you is it’ll give you access to Service Cloud’s essential features, it will also give you access to essential features of Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud, and Agentforce. The reason it is called Salesforce Foundations is because it gives you the platform on which you can start building your Agentforce applications without paying anything extra. Okay? So let me just elaborate this multi-cloud features.

Mike:

Naveen Gabrani:

So let me talk about Marketing Cloud next. So Marketing Cloud here is based on a flow like interface, so it’s based on top of flows. So you build journeys and you use flows to build your journeys. So let’s say you want to send a mail today and send another mail after two days to a market segment. Then you can create email contents using an Experience Cloud kind of interface, and then you build a journey and set up the campaigns, and this is all included within Salesforce Foundations. Okay? So you have Sales Cloud, you are getting essential version of Marketing Cloud for free, for no other charges. Okay?

Mike:

Naveen Gabrani:

The next is Commerce Cloud. So as part of your Foundation license, we have access to one storefront. You already have products available as part of Sales Cloud, so we can use Experience Cloud interface, a drag-and-drop kind of functionality, to build a professional looking user interface. And it’s fairly easy to set up. So we can build an e-commerce site for our clients using Commerce Cloud and Salesforce Foundations. And this is you can pretty much go live in a day, it’s so easy to set up. There are some limitations on the number of transactions and the number of storefronts, etc. But that is… So the idea is if you are a very large company and you’re exceeding those limits, then you work with your account manager and purchase additional transactions.

Also included our Data Cloud and Agentforce. If you want to just learn Data Cloud or you want to check whether Agentforce is good for me or not, then the idea is you can set it up in your Sales Cloud or Service Cloud org, try it out, test it out, set it up, everything. And then when you are satisfied with it, only then you buy it. So basic advantage of Salesforce Foundations is that you try everything. When you’re satisfied, only then go ahead and make a purchase. So that in a nutshell is various aspects that come out of the box without any charges when you have just a Sales Cloud or Service Cloud Enterprise or higher license.

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The post Get More from Your Org With Salesforce Foundations appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Sharon Klardie, Senior Director of AppExchange Labs & Innovation at Salesforce.

Join us as we chat about how Labs empowers Salesforce employees to build and share solutions on the AppExchange, and what that means for admins navigating the new world of AI.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Sharon Klardie.

Next year, Salesforce Labs will celebrate its twentieth birthday. If you haven’t checked it out, it’s an innovation program for Salesforce employees to create solutions, package them, and share them with customers like you.

That’s why I was so excited to sit down with Sharon Klardie. She’s the Senior Director of AppExchange Labs & Innovation, and as she puts it, her team’s job is to “showcase the art of the possible.”

If you’ve ever stared at a new feature and felt some blank canvas anxiety when it comes to how to actually implement it in your org, browsing through Salesforce Labs solutions could be a great starting point. Even if you don’t end up using something, you can see what’s possible and even look at how they did it on GitHub.

If you’re like most of the admins I talk to, you’re probably looking for new ways to use Agentforce. As Sharon puts it, “How do you have meaningful and mindful implementations of AI at your organization?”

You can get a lot of ideas looking through Labs apps that incorporate Agentforce. However, as Sharon points out, that’s only one piece of the puzzle. You need to get your data in a good place and build a solid foundation for scalable AI, and there are several Salesforce Labs solutions that can help you get started.

Finally, we talk through some AppExchange best practices that will help you get the most out of any Labs solutions you want to try out.

First and foremost, never install an app you haven’t used directly into production. Spin up a dev org or sandbox so you can test without breaking anything. But more importantly, make sure you have a solid rollout and change management plan for any new functionality you’re adding to your org. You need to tell users what’s new, teach them how to use it, and be ready to handle any edge cases that will inevitably pop up.

Be sure to catch Sharon’s presentations at Dreamforce, and say hi if you see her! And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Mike:

So, Sharon, welcome to the podcast.

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And we have a number of different Labs solutions that we’ll share. Pro-tip for anybody who’s going to see the content, it would be probably a few more solutions than seven. We’ll throw a couple bonus things in there and some shout-outs. But there’s a lot of technology out there to really help you frame is your data ready. Data readiness is super important as an AI strategy to move forward in the space. If you’re going to train your AI or use AI on your data and if your data is no good, then you’re going to have a problem. The AI isn’t going to respond the way that you expect or what your business needs. So we want to showcase these solutions that you can use to get started to help ground you in strong AI strategies.

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The post How Can Admins Use Labs Apps To Get AI-Ready? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Abhishek Saxena, Technical Architect at Copado. Join us as we chat about how he learned Data Cloud and why understanding context is the key to making Agentforce shine.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Abhishek Saxena.

As a developer and architect, Abhishek isn’t lacking for technical knowledge about the Salesforce platform. But even he found it hard to get his head around what Data Cloud was and what it could do.

Abhishek attended community events, scoured LinkedIn posts, studied videos, and even read a book about Data Cloud. But there were so many new terms being thrown around, and he still couldn’t explain the difference between a data lake object, a data model object, and a data source object.

“Even though there was a lot of buzz around Data Cloud and how it is such an amazing, innovative solution,” Abhishek says, “I was not able to grasp what it does in an easy fashion.” Luckily, he had an “aha” moment that helped him see the big picture, and so he’s giving a presentation at Dreamforce to share what he’s learned.

Abhishek’s talk, “A Beginner’s Guide to Data Cloud,” will get you up to speed in 20 minutes or less. As he explains, the main thing to understand is that Data Cloud is about data unification.

If you have your data in a bunch of different places, you used to have to dedicate significant developer time to maintaining APIs that allowed Salesforce to share information with your other platforms. With Data Cloud, you have everything on one record, with Salesforce and Slack as the front door. You have a complete 360 view of your customer, regardless of where the information is.

Getting a complete picture of your customers is doubly important when it comes to Agentforce. AI agents are extremely context-dependent: they do a much better job when you “ground” them with extra parameters.

As Abhishek says, “If you give agents good data, your responses are going to be much more personalized and better.” Data Cloud allows you to give your AI agents a much more specific picture of your customers, opening the door for better and more effective automations.

If you’re coming to Dreamforce, make sure to come to Abhishek’s presentation so you can be a Data Cloud pro. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

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But getting into Salesforce, that was a happy coincidence. My hometown, where I’m originally from, it’s called Jaipur, it’s in India, and that’s where I did my engineering from as well, Jaipur is traditionally not touted as a tech hub, but for some divine reasons there were several Salesforce consultancies that were trying to make it big in that area when I was just graduating, I got an offer to work for one of them as a Salesforce consultant after a series of intense grueling interviews. But yeah, that’s how I got started, and I have never looked back since then.

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So Trailhead modules weren’t baked out completely. There weren’t any demo environments that I could get hands on, and it just felt a little bit overwhelming. I knew my friends who were doing Marketing Cloud, Einstein, CDP, that sort of stuff, knew what was going on, but us commoners who were just working on the core clouds.

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But at this point, now I had several months of experience trying to learn Data Cloud, I thought that, okay, let me go ahead and do the Data Cloud certification as well just to quiz myself if I know enough. I did that and I passed. So that was the validation I was seeking that, okay, now I am somewhat of a Data Cloud consultant. But I wanted to share this journey with everyone else because I consider myself fairly technical with a consultant and a developer background, and if it took me a lot of time to get through, then I would not blame anyone else in the ecosystem who’s not as technical to not completely understand that, Hey, why Data Cloud? What is Data Cloud? Why is this important? So that’s why I thought that yes, I need to share my knowledge with everyone else.

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So I’ll try to explain this and I go into much more detail in my session as well. If anyone in our listeners is in the attendance, I would love to have you in my session. But just to give you a recap or a quick preview of what I’m going to talk about is that let’s say your company uses Salesforce, your company also uses SAP for something else. Your company maybe uses Trello for tracking some stuff as well. So you have your record your identity as, since my name is Abhishek, all these systems have my identity there in SAP or ServiceNow, Abhishek can do certain things, maybe that has my personal email for some reason, or maybe a different phone number. And then the Abhishek on the Salesforce ecosystem, that record, that contact or user, has slightly different details. Maybe the address I put in is different. Maybe the phone number I put in is my work phone, and in the other one I put in my personal phone.

So what Data Cloud ends up doing is that from these different identities of Abhishek that exist in these separate platforms that are not linked, it allows you to create one record where all of your identities are linked. So in case I want to get Abhishek’s email in SAP, I can just call out to Data Cloud and Data Cloud will give that to me instead of myself having to write three or four different APIs trying to de-duplicate records, trying to find some common way or how it’s called an external key of linking that, okay, this Abhishek in Salesforce and that Abhishek in SAP are the same person.

Data Cloud takes all of that complexity out of this and just tells you that, okay, Abhishek’s record exists in five systems, here are the values of different things in those five systems. And I could just get that. So once I understood this, I was like, wow, this unified data that Data Cloud is giving you could have so many ramifications. And that’s again, one of those things that I explored in that presentation that how agents that need this sort of information can benefit from Data Cloud.

Mike:

And so you would have these really robust time management or project management apps and the platform could more than easily handle it. And you didn’t have to be a coder, you could build a project management app with a few objects and a couple dozen fields and some relationships, and there you’re ready to go. And then it kind of became like, well, wait a minute, why are we spending all this time building on this platform when we can just connect things? But there was no sense of unification there. And I think in your description, what I heard is finally now you can have an entire enterprise where the front door is Salesforce or Slack and it can access all of that data and you’re getting a complete view of a customer regardless of where the system information is, and that allows other applications and other things to run and do their job just well, but you still get that unified pull back in, and then you don’t have the burden of a developer maintaining 200 APIs on the back end.

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Now, if you provide the agent with good context that whenever agent responds, it knows that I’m working for Coral Cloud Resorts, I am responsible for handling bookings, I can refund things, I can access customer details and which objects to look at, where to get the information from. If your agent has these informations, or again, a simpler example that if you are in ChatGPT and tell it that, okay, I want to write a sales email as a customer service agent for Coral Clouds, my name is Abhishek Saxena, when you start your email, start with the salutation. This is intended to be for the guests who are staying at the resort. And if I give all of these details and then hit enter, the response I’m going to get is going to be a lot more personalized.

And that’s how you can automate it to send to any user that is using your agent. That’s what I mean by why context is so important for any AI to work. And with Data Cloud, as we have discussed in the podcast so far, it gives you that unified profile. It gives you the customer 360 so that your agents have all the information about your particular user who is asking the question or to wherever you’re trying to use it. Because good data, if you give it good data, your responses are going to be much more personalized and better.

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So that’s sort of basics of data processing that a typical data engineer knows, but a typical Salesforce consultant, admin developer does not, that was somewhat difficult for me to wrap my head around because in my training on working on Salesforce platform for so many years, I have been accustomed to think about data in terms of objects, Socket queries, and that form. But with Data Cloud, it’s a little bit different. So that was one of the things that threw me off initially, and I had to look at some resources even outside of Salesforce’s Data Cloud trainings to understand that data lake is not actually a lake. Data warehouse is not a big factory in which there are tons of books with data. So yes, that was something that threw me off initially.

Mike:

Abhishek, this has been a fun conversation. I think it’s going to be a very compelling presentation at Dreamforce, but also I think it’s been very inspirational, at least for me, that even the hard stuff is still not that hard to learn. I go back to a saying, everything in the world is created by somebody at some time, and if that somebody can figure it out, you certainly can too. So Data Cloud and Data Lakes was created by somebody, which means they figured it out, so it can’t be that hard for anyone else to figure it out.

Abhishek:

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So be sure to catch his session if you’re going to dream for us and share this episode with a fellow Salesforce admin maybe who’s also struggling to understand some new technology or just getting started with Data Cloud. Either way, until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Making Data Cloud Understandable for Admins appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Denise Carbone, Director of Delivery at ImagineCRM. Join us as we chat about her journey from business analyst to external consultant admin and why AI makes BA skills even more valuable.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Denise Carbone.

Denise was working as a business analyst when she was first handed the keys to a Salesforce org. She remembers getting a plaque in the mail for being one of the first 500 people to become Salesforce certified.

Obviously we’ve come a long way since then, but the skills needed to understand a business problem and map out the requirements for a solution haven’t changed. As Denise explains, you have to be “process first, technology second.” I sat down with her for this episode to find out how these BA skills are even more important with Agentforce.

In order to really do your job well, an admin needs to be more than just an order taker. But if you’re spending your time running through a list of requests without having conversations with users and really understanding the business process, well, that’s a tough row to hoe.

Instead, you need to ask why. That’s where your business analyst skills come into play. You need to have a full understanding of how things currently work, where they could be improved, and who cares about it the most.

Another key business analyst skill is change management. You may have built the coolest solution in the world, but how do you get folks to actually use it?

As Denise explains, if you want your solution to be adopted, you need to make it adaptive. As you’re building, you need to keep going back to your users for input. If they feel like their feedback is a part of the process, they’ll have ownership over the results.

While Agentforce has greatly expanded what the platform can do, it’s still just technology you’re using to help solve a business problem. As long as you understand the why behind a request, you can build solutions that transform your organization.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more from Denise on business analyst best practices and the importance of establishing AI governance policies. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.

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So, I put my BA hat back on and went back to the team, and explained some of these points we had to clean up and just do better with some guidance, and some structure and rigor around using the tool in the platform me. And that was in 2004, so in 2006 I attended my first Chicago user group meeting. Completely intimidated. I had major imposter syndrome because I really didn’t know much about the platform. Do I even belong here? But I needed to learn, I had that desire and curiosity to really build out my skill set. So, I got a little bit more comfortable in this ecosystem. And then, in 2008 I was presented an opportunity to help co-lead the group.

The user group leader was moving on and actually going to work for Salesforce at that time, and left a vacancy in Chicago. So I said, “Yes, sure.” At the time I agreed to helping co-lead the Metro Chicago area, so just anything in the city limits. And that same year I actually took the certification exam. So, in October of 2008 I was certified as an admin. So that solidified, put to rest slightly the imposter syndrome that I was carrying along, but felt really confident and good about that. And a few months later I received a plaque in the mail, I was one of the first 500 people globally to become Salesforce certified.

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I wasn’t sure if I belong, but it was a really cool opportunity for me to learn and grow, get to meet amazing people like yourself, Mike.

Mike:

Denise Carbone:

It’s over-automated, over-architected, over-engineered, so I always like to peel it back and ask the questions why, and get to learn more about the users, more about what we’re trying to solve for. I love that journey, and when I joined the partner side I had the opportunity to really upskill myself in both BA, administration, and then just focused on delivery. So on the partner side today, I am a director of delivery. I stepped into a leadership role in the past 10 years. So, I started as a director of delivery in 2015 with a team of one. I was able to build a team of 14 people, which means I manage a team of consultants, and I am accountable for all of our project success. Today I’m in the same industry, work for a smaller SI. We are focused in the philanthropy space and also nonprofits. Again, I support a team of consultants and I am very client-facing.

I work day-to-day with our teams, I meet with our clients, and I’m accountable for the overall project success. So, one of the things I really love about the job I do today is the coaching and the mentoring for learning and upskilling. In this space in the day and age that we’re in today, things change fast. I remember last summer seeing a preview of the Dreamforce keynote where they’re talking about agents, and being presented to us, and what do we think about this, and how does this work? I will say Salesforce has done an amazing job at providing enablement so that we can all start this learning journey, and you have to stay up to date with it because it changes, as you know, as the ecosystem knows, almost weekly. So, it’s been fantastic. But today, again, I focus on project delivery with my teams, and upskilling, and supporting, and mentoring folks.

Mike:

Denise Carbone:

Mike:

Denise Carbone:

And today in this space, I think it was even maybe eight years ago when people were really talking about career transitions, and they wanted to get into the Salesforce ecosystem and they wanted to learn Salesforce, and it was definitely a shift in that learning and it became a career back in 2004. And I don’t know about even yourself and folks, was that something people aim for? I think it started becoming a career path more towards maybe 2008, 9, 10, when certifications become more prevalent.

Mike:

Denise Carbone:

Because sometimes people say, “Oh, this is so different. You’ve probably never seen this before.” Well, some cases maybe because maybe really broken, or sometimes it’s just they never took time to step a few steps back and optimize, make things more efficient. So, I love efficiencies, I love optimization, I love the ability to break down complexities, I love the ability to speak in layman terms. I think that’s a learning that I’ve taken wholeheartedly through my journey because I can speak business speak, I don’t want to speak Salesforce speak if the recipient on the other end doesn’t speak Salesforce. So, I want to speak in a language that’s going to be comfortable for them, and then break down the complexity and really help and work to build systems that are going to bring the client along for the journey.

Mike:

Denise Carbone:

Mike:

Denise Carbone:

I think that should be the starting question honestly, and then go forward and then do the build if applicable. But it’s definitely a learned skill. The other flip side to that is, I think there was, I’ve heard it before and it’s so not true, that business analysts are not just note takers. They should never be a note taker. I mean, they can do documentation, but they’re not glorified note takers. It’s definitely a skillset where you talk about a user story, or a requirement, or use cases. Those are all three very separate things. And the reason why you do some of this documentation upfront is to make sure that what we’re building as admins meet the technical requirements for the end user.

Mike:

Denise Carbone:

Mike:

Denise Carbone:

It’s really getting that buy-in as you’re doing the build so that it can easily be adopted, and you’re getting the feedback in the time where it’s more real time. So, if it’s features and functionalities that are, like you said, the bells and whistles of dependent picklists were amazing, but after a while it could become stale and they’re not using it. The goal is, I always say less is more. You don’t want to overkill something that’s not going to be used. Even today I was talking to somebody earlier about utilizing a tool to be able to scan all the metadata and see all the unused fields that were created at one point in time that are just sitting out there and untouched for a long time. So, we have to get rid of that technical debt.

So, my approach and my recommendation or suggestion is for people to really partner with who they’re building it for so that they can get the buy-in, get feedback. “Does it work? What would you like to see? Does the user interface still, is that intuitive?” I feel like with the new Lightning design pages, Mike, we grew up on Classic, remember that?

Mike:

Denise Carbone:

Mike:

Denise Carbone:

I always still laugh because it still comes up today, we don’t want to do all these clicking. So, there’s many magical ways to make things a lot faster than to do all these clickings. The automation tools that are available today on the platform are amazing, the flow automation is just next level. So, I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity there to do really cool things, but you want to make sure the cool things are really going to support the folks that are going to use the platform.

Mike:

Denise Carbone:

Mike:

Denise Carbone:

I needed to be able to document and explain what needed to happen based on a client’s experience, or their workflow, or their processes. So, I would document processes and I would be able to document the heck out of how to explain or the build steps to create a flow. But I didn’t have to be hands-on right away. I do know how to build flow and I can build flows, but it wasn’t a skill that I had to learn because I was able to document that, write that, and I was able to articulate it well enough so that an admin or one of our builders was able to pick it up and run with it to build. But this day and age today with AI, it is here, it is not going away. It is not like a nice to learn later, it is if you don’t know it or if you haven’t started, you’re already behind.

And that’s one of the pieces I really want to emphasize is that if you have, and I would beg to differ with the folks attending Dreamforce, if this is not on the radar, if they’re not already in this learning journey, I’m sure a good majority of them are because it is so prevalent. But if they’re not, they’re already left behind. But I do feel that the human skills, storytelling, communication, ethnical reasoning, these are things that we bring to the table to it. Using AI, AI is really good at processing, data processing, or summarizing, maybe some automation. They’re good at pattern recognition, but they’re lacking certain human emotions, human elements that go into the work that we do today.

Mike:

Denise Carbone:

Mike:

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Denise Carbone:

Mike:

Denise Carbone:

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Mike:

Denise Carbone:

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Denise Carbone:

Mike:

Denise Carbone:

Mike:

The post How Do Admins Use Business Analysis Skills Effectively? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Nicole Pomponio, Director of Delivery Management and Operations at SaltClick.

Join us as we chat about how admins can unlock the full potential of Slack in Salesforce. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Nicole Pomponio.

If you’re planning on coming to Dreamforce this year (or catching it at home), you’re probably going to hear a lot about new ways of combining Agentforce and Slack. That’s why I’m excited I got a chance to sit down with Nicole for this episode and have a conversation about her Dreamforce presentation.

Nicole is the Director of Delivery Management and Operations at SaltClick, a consultancy for Salesforce and Slack, so she’s eager to find new ways to get the most out of both platforms. The ever-deepening integration between Salesforce and Slack means there are all sorts of new ways to connect users with data.

As Nicole explains, all this means that the entire idea of what an admin can do is becoming more and more expansive.

If your organization isn’t using Slack, how do you get the buy-in you need to overcome inertia? And if you are using Slack, how do you get the most out of it?

Nicole is an admin, but she’s also a decision-maker at SaltClick, and when she puts on her leadership hat, she wants to hear about business problems and possible solutions. So the key to getting buy-in is to reposition Slack from something that sends messages to something that can solve real business problems.

“I think the magic of Slack is that when you’re using it and when you’re using it right, it’s easily adopted,” Nicole says, “you don’t have to sell it because when you use it, you showcase it.” For example, identify how many meetings can be eliminated with a dedicated channel on Slack, or show how much you can simplify your team’s workflow with the Jira integration.  

As Nicole explains, it’s helpful to establish some rules of the road for how your organization will use Slack. Here are a few tips to get started:

Make sure to check out Nicole’s Dreamforce presentation, in-person or online. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Mike:

In addition, Nicole shares her journey from accidental admin to leadership, and she gives us some insight into building intentional channel structure, integrating external platforms, like Jira, and reshaping the admin role in this new very connected era. So whether you’re Slack-curious or already swimming in salty channels, you’re going to walk away with some ideas you can use.

And with that, let’s get Nicole on the podcast.

So Nicole, welcome to the podcast.

Nicole Pomponio:

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

My day-to-day life right now, I manage delivery and operations over at SaltClick. We’re a consultancy for Salesforce and Slack, so I get to work with very bright people building out super fun solutions for customers and ourselves, and that’s Salesforce and Slack together, which also gets me very excited.

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

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Nicole Pomponio:

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Nicole Pomponio:

So from my perspective, we’re starting to see a really close merge of Slack, this communication powerhouse, with Salesforce and having the ability to understand and navigate both right now is going to be such an amazing opportunity, and I think it starts to rewrite the narrative of what an admin is.

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

And now it’s merging more with other platforms. As a Salesforce admin, I need to also understand connected platforms, how to maybe connect to different systems. So over the course of, I think rapidly the past three years, what an admin has been I think is no longer just those foundational Salesforce elements. It’s really starting to evolve. So I see that happening too with Slack, so bridging the gap a little bit, expanding out to other systems. So I do think it’s shifting, and Slack has helped shaping that.

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

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Nicole Pomponio:

But also our teams. We talk about Slack being our work operating system and wanting to do more in the flow of work, all these buzzwords and phrases we hear. What does that really mean? It’s bringing those systems in, whether it’s just the data or it’s actually actions and connecting out too.

So I think the example that is top of mind for me, because I’m in it constantly, is Jira. So I want to connect with Jira through Slack so that I can create issues, I can update issues. I just get things done faster with pulling in those external systems, the data, but now the actions too, right?

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

I love to spend my time with people. So I know that was a long way from connecting systems and bringing things in, but it becomes my favorite question because we can start to do so much when we connect systems that we’re using every day and when we’re actioning in those systems too.

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

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Nicole Pomponio:

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Nicole Pomponio:

But I will say when I started at SaltClick, it was almost three years ago, time flies, it was already heavily being used, and one of my predecessors was really starting to push on what is Slack, how can we use it? And I really gravitated toward that, so I just started to pick that up, training sessions for folks, really empowering people and pushing them to Slack’s help articles because they’re amazing. So it just became a natural conversation for us.

And now it’s people coming to me saying, hey, can we do this with Slack? I just posted something about Gearset and getting notifications and then linking out to pull requests to understand what’s being validated, what’s failing. That wasn’t my idea. Shout out to Jacob on my team because he knows that we can use Slack for many different things, and he wants to make his own life easier.

So it’s become a natural conversation for us. What can we do in Slack, and how can we do it? People come to me with half-baked ideas. I love it, and then I just help get it to the finish line. I might have an idea I reach out to somebody about, but it is really all hands in on Slack.

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

I think as leaders we tend to see problems and we have potential solutions, but we really want input and buy-in from the people that are using the tools, right?

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

So that’s what comes to mind for me when I think, how do I reposition this tool that might just be seen as a way to send messages to something that can actually solve some business problems for us.

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

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Nicole Pomponio:

So for me in leadership, it’s been very powerful because I can understand how we can use our systems to really solve our business needs. And again, SaltClick gives me the opportunity to continue to do the things that bring me joy.

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

So from the Slack community lens, the engagement there is really answering questions that come in. Sometimes you’re going to get a meme. Sometimes you’ll get some help articles and some directions and a path forward. And it’s really posting consistently there to help people understand that you’re there for them, that you can bring them information in the flow of their lives that’s going to help them.

On the SaltClick side, it really is about trying to organize because I did some kind of research pretty recently to understand how many channels are we in, how many messages and files and all kinds of stuff are we sending around. It’s a lot. I think on average people are in 100 or 200 channels, so the noise can become pretty robust. You want to try and organize that and make it meaningful. So really helping navigate with channel descriptions. What are we even doing in this channel, what’s our goal, what can you expect? Letting people know that they don’t have to be in a channel. They can exit it. They can leave. They can set their own notifications. I really like to advocate for not only the way that we have our channels set up, but the way that they can help themselves in that experience as well.

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

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Nicole Pomponio:

And then we did develop a standard naming convention for our project channels because again, we are Slack-first. So we are running our projects through Slack, and then we have our customers in Slack channels as well. So we wanted to define what those naming conventions were so that we could organize ourselves a lot more efficiently.

And then we also think about too what should go in that channel. Should there be a canvas or not? So not only are we thinking about standard naming conventions for channels, we’re also thinking about what would add value right there in the channel. So if I have a canvas for a project, what should I have in that canvas? If I have a canvas and a DM with one of my direct reports, what should I have in that canvas to make it meaningful?

So in my mind, it’s definitely thinking about the structures of the channels, how we’re using Slack, what our etiquette is for each other. And even things like defining the emojis that you use. A thumbs up or thumbs down could mean something else to someone.

I like to give the example of my parents texting one another back and forth. My mom sent a long paragraph to my dad, and then his response was a thumbs up, but we probably had a good five-minute conversation around what his thumbs up meant. Was it a good thumbs up? Was it a sarcastic thumbs up? So defining what your emojis mean could avoid some confusion down the line.

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

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Nicole Pomponio:

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Nicole Pomponio:

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Nicole Pomponio:

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Nicole Pomponio:

I think it is the perfect opportunity. I was at TDX and started to hear a lot of Salesforce people asking, what’s up with Slack, what can we do there? A lot of people are starting to join the Slack community. It’s the perfect time. And I think with how fast things are changing, I don’t want anyone to get left behind. I don’t want them to feel like they’re being left behind, certainly not anyone’s company.

So I think, for me, it’s really, really being at this point of being able to understand both and connect them.

Mike:

Nicole Pomponio:

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Nicole Pomponio:

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Nicole Pomponio:

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Nicole Pomponio:

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Nicole Pomponio:

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Nicole Pomponio:

Mike:

Now I know not everybody’s headed to Dreamforce, but if you are, I hope this session got you excited for some of the content that’s out there. If you’re not, that’s okay. There is a ton of content on Slack, on both Trailhead, on our YouTube channels. You’re not going to miss out. We’ll also broadcast a whole bunch of this. I do believe Nicole’s session will probably also be online, so I’ll just let that out as a sneak peek.

Now, if you learned something new or you enjoyed this episode, do me a favor, share it with somebody, promote it on social, spread the word.

Let other admins find some of this great content that you enjoy listening to.

And with that, until next time, I’ll see you in the cloud.

The post Slack Is Redefining the Salesforce Admin Role appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to David Simpson, Salesforce Admin at the 1916 Company. Join us as we chat about his process for troubleshooting Flow errors and his unexpected path into the Salesforce ecosystem.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with David Simpson.

If you’ve ever received an emergency ticket from a user because they’ve encountered a Flow error, you know just how cryptic they can be. It’s not always clear at first glance what’s going on, or what your user can do to fix it.

What’s more, if you’re hearing about an error from a user, that means it’s made it to production. So now you need to start worrying about your testing and anything else that might pop up. And oh yeah, you need to fix the dang thing, too.

That’s why I was so excited to sit down this week with David Simpson. He’s doing a Dreamforce presentation about how to better navigate Flow errors and how to prevent them from happening in the first place.

David breaks down the process of fixing a Flow error into five steps:

David emphasizes the importance of communicating with stakeholders at every stage of your solve. You don’t need to share every single detail, but you want to make sure your user knows that you’ve identified the error, how long it will take to fix it, and if there are any workarounds in the meantime.

We also discuss David’s path from finance into the Salesforce ecosystem. He started out as a staff accountant, but when he was asked to take over some of the Salesforce administration duties, he realized he loved working with the platform far more than burying his head in spreadsheets.

Finally, I ask David about his top tips for getting better at solving Flow errors. He points to the Trailblazer Community and Salesforce Help articles as two of his best resources. However, he also suggests getting hands-on in a sandbox by trying to build things that might break. It’s a low-risk way to flex your problem-solving skills and will give you valuable experience for when a real error ends up in production.

Make sure to listen to our full conversation for more from David about how to solve Flow errors. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Mike:

David Simpson:

Mike:

David Simpson:

Mike:

David Simpson:

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David Simpson:

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But then what I try to do is I first see what the error message is, if it’s something that I’m familiar with, if it seems like it might be related to a validation rule or permissions or just general access, I’ll see if I can address that quickly. But if it’s something a little bit more convoluted or harder to decipher, normally what I like to do is to take that same flow and we have sandboxes, so I’ll go into the sandbox and I’ll just try to replicate those steps. I will perhaps use the flow debug and run it as the user who encountered the issue. Maybe I’ll try and recreate the record if it feels like a particularly daunting error and then just run through the flow and see where it fails.

Those are normally my processes and through that I will eventually encounter the cause of the error. And then at that point it’s just going through the process of fixing the error in the flow, performing more tests to make sure that I’ve covered that as well as any other potential unexpected issues that might arise from the change and then getting that pushed out, all the while communicating to whoever encountered the issue that this is being taken care of, this is the ETA, and if possible, any workarounds for that fix and error.

Mike:

David Simpson:

Mike:

David Simpson:

A great example would be just the introduction of an auto-layout in a flow. Being able to see that clear process and order of operations to the flows, it’s really helped. But also with all of these features, it does get a little bit more complex. What is the best element to put on your flow in order for this to not only run but run efficiently? Is it multiple update records? Is it doing a loop and an assignment and then an update? Is it using Transform? There’s so many options and there’s no particular right way to do a lot of stuff, which is really freeing. You can get super creative with these solutions and I think that that’s been an awesome thing.

And not to mention testing, going back to the flow errors. The recent introduction of an enhanced flow debug has really made my life a lot easier. I can see so much more detail in what’s going on in my flows than what I just built. I can see the technical specs behind it, and that’s really helped me narrow down what exactly needs to be done or what needs to be fixed in my flows when I do encounter an issue.

Mike:

David Simpson:

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So he gave me an admin license and told me go on Trailhead, start learning some of the beginner stuff, and I just instantly fell in love with it. I love the problem solving aspect. I love the ability that there’s so much you can do and build, that Salesforce is just a canvas of process creativity that I said, you know what? I don’t think I want to do finance related work anymore. I want to do Salesforce full time.

Mike:

David Simpson:

And I was very intimidated at the point. But I had a mentor who walked me through flows that they had built and it just clicked. It was so logical and just made so much sense while still being flexible that it was, I didn’t go back to Workflows and Process Builders unless I absolutely needed to.

Mike:

David Simpson:

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It’s like cooking. You should be tasting as you go to make sure that nothing unexpected is happening. And you can do the same with the flow. You add a new element, you click the debug and you test it. You add a couple of decisions or a loop, click that debug and test it. So it can get as complicated or as complex as you need it to be. But you can also just start very simple and you can test along the way and it will come out fine, just provided that you’re being proactive in your testing.

Mike:

David Simpson:

So we utilize opportunities to process our sales. We actually use Salesforce as our main point of sale, and when they go to close out their sales, they click a button which triggers a screen flow that says “Have you gotten all of your tasks in order for this opportunity? Do you have the opportunity products added? Are they available for sale? Have you synced this opportunity to our external system?” And then all they have to do is just fill out a few fields, probably less than a dozen throughout the entire screen flow, and then it completes the sale for them.

Similarly, when they want to create a brand new sale, they click a button on the account that creates a screen flow instead of the new opportunity standard action. Because it has many less fields on it, they only need to fill out, okay, who the customer is, what’s the deal name, and then some just basic additional info that our customer experience team likes to have. So it’s a very streamlined process and we find that it not only saves them clicks, but it saves them time and gets them back to helping out their clients a lot faster.

So I’m very much screen flow. I just gave an example about opportunities, but we use it throughout the entire Salesforce org.

Mike:

David Simpson:

And then the third and final resource that I would say is just build and break in a sandbox. Just try to make things that don’t work and see what happens, and then try to fix them. Because it’s a sandbox and it’s not real data you’re not at risk of causing any issues. But I learned the most by making mistakes, by building a flow and maybe not testing it thoroughly enough or forgetting a field or forgetting a step where I get a certain record and then seeing what that error is and then adjusting that. That generally happens to all of us eventually, but try and do it deliberately and see what error results you get back. You’ll be surprised to find that they’re the same errors that you get when you’re not trying to make mistakes. So a great way to learn is just by simply doing.

Mike:

So last thing that’s on my mind, and I wonder. AI in the last few years has just erupted. What in your job has changed because of AI? And I just mean in general. Doesn’t have to be Agentforce, nothing like that. Just in general, has anything changed for you as an admin because of AI?

David Simpson:

Additionally, I can put in a solution that I’ve already had and have it output a nice format so that way if maybe I’m not the one doing the ticket, whoever I hand this off to, it can be much easier understood. So overall, just AI is making us more efficient and making us have a faster turnaround time, and that’s just in turn building up the expectations for our stakeholders to deliver faster.

Mike:

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The post Navigating Flow Errors as a New Salesforce Admin appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jim Ray, Director of Developer Relations and Advocacy at Slack. Join us as we chat about enhancements to Workflow Builder, the Slack features everyone should be using, and the future of AI and Slack.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jim Ray.

Jim and his team have been improving the core Slack experience. “We’ve really been focusing on those little paper cuts, the smaller features that just never quite made it into the next release,” he says. So essentially, Slack is a little better everywhere.

One area they’ve focused on is Workflow Builder. In particular, they’ve added new branching functionality—allowing admins to create conditional paths like “if/then” logic.

They’ve also been hard at work upgrading canvases and lists. With new data like AI-generated meeting notes, canvases provide a central place for all the relevant information. Jim also urges you to check out lists as a sort of “semi-database” for data you want handy in Slack.

For Jim, Slack is one of the best tools to interact with and fully take advantage of the AI agents you build with Agentforce. It’s already the place your team communicates with each other, so why not be able to loop in AI teammates?

“In the same way that Slack is the single place where every person in your organization is communicating, now it’s the place where you’re all working with those agents,” Jim says. And so his team is looking at how Slack can bring together every AI agent your team uses, whether they’re built in Agentforce or another third-party platform.

I asked Jim for a sneak preview of what he has in store for Dreamforce 2025, and he did not disappoint. We’ve come a long way with tools like Salesforce channels and the ability to deploy an Agentforce agent directly to Slack. Now his team is working on ways to deepen the integration. So look for improvements to search and embedded Salesforce data in the coming year.

There are so many more great insights into how you can get the most out of Slack in the Agentforce era, so be sure to listen to our full conversation with Jim. And be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Mike:

Jim Ray:

Mike:

Jim Ray:

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Jim Ray:

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So we’ve had some really great development happening in Workflow Builder. Something I’m actually really proud of is we’ve been really focusing on the core user experience of Workflow Builder. We’ve got a whole team that’s working on something that internally we call Back to Basics, which is really just all about focusing on those little paper cuts or the smaller features that just never quite made it into the next release. So they’ve been building that out. So hopefully just the experience of using Workflow Builder is a little bit nicer, which is something that we always aim for.

Mike:

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But I think Lists are another place that we’re seeing a ton of value with things like Workflow Builder. So you were saying you’ve got an input form, but where are you going to put that once somebody has filled out the form? Lists are a perfect place for that. And again, it’s not a full-blown database or even as powerful as something like an Excel or a Google Sheet, but if you just need to capture that data and you want it native inside of Slack, something that’s searchable inside of Slack, something that you can easily add workflows to, I love Lists. And so they’re both really fantastic features.

Mike:

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And DevOps was hugely successful to Slack being successful because a lot of our earliest customers were startups, engineering-focused organizations, media organizations, places that understood kind of the basic premise of DevOps, and we could just plug Slack right into it. So many developers looked at Slack and they were like, “Oh, this will fit right into my GitHub pipeline or my Jenkins pipeline, and then I can just pipe messages right into Slack. I can have all my entire engineering team in a channel and they can all come take a look at this.”

But as the platform grew and evolved, we added all of these features for interactivity. We added Block Kit, which is our UI composition framework. And now that we have all of these large language model and other generative AI tools, it is kind of this return to form for the platform in many ways.

And so 10 years ago, if you wanted to build a Slack app that interacted with you, it was almost like a command line more than anything. It wasn’t a natural place to chat. You would kind of send off some commands and then wait for the response. It felt very much like using a terminal or a Unix command line or something like that. But now with all of these LLM tools that are being plugged into all of the various systems of record, Slack is of course the place to bring all of that into the same place where you’re working with your colleagues. And that’s kind of been the basic pitch of the platform for a long time.

Mike:

Jim Ray:

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And the premise for the Slack platform from the very beginning, and this is still true today, is that you can bring whatever programming language you want to. We make some first party SDKs available, but you don’t have to use those. We have some frameworks that are even a little bit higher level than the SDKs. Those are all available in Python, Java, and JavaScript, but you don’t have to use them if you don’t want to. We have some amazing community-developed SDKs and frameworks as well.

So that’s the initial thinking as to what makes developing on the Slack platform great. But then the other part is that you can do things with the Slack platform that really you couldn’t do with other forms of communication. They just didn’t make sense in the context of email, for example. Even if you wanted to use email as the ultimate endpoint, it kind of didn’t make sense because an email inbox is a one-to-one relationship with every person in the organization. Well, there’s no really good way to collaborate until you pull people into these channels.

And then when you layer on top of that, the platform pieces, that’s where it starts to get really powerful. So again, think about your engineering org within your organization. So you’ve got a team and they get an alert from somebody has pushed some code and the tests fail. Well, now everybody on that team can see why the tests failed. So the engineer who pushed the code, that test probably wouldn’t have failed if they knew what the problem was. So another engineer that might have a different bit of context, oh, I just checked in this bit of code, that’s probably why your tests are breaking, for example. They can see that. And so now you’re maximizing that visibility.

And so when we layer on these other tools, to bring us back to this AI, so now every tool that you’re using in your organization, they’re starting to add these agentic features. And we were talking about, so if you’re an admin, well, Slack now becomes the place. Rather than having to administer an agent in every single platform that you use, you bring those agents into Slack, so now you have a single place to work with them. In the same place that Slack is the single place where every person in your organization is communicating, now it’s the place where you’re all working with those agents.

And so we’re not there yet. We’re still working on it. Obviously Agentforce is the best place to, if you’re just getting started with this and you have a ton of data inside of Salesforce, of course Agentforce is the place where you’re going to go, maybe try out some of these agents built on top of your data. But as we’re seeing many of our partners, many of the other SaaS tools that our customers are using, all of these agent features are being built on top of the systems of record that they manage. And so what we’ve got, we’ve made those same AI features available to everybody on the platform. So now anybody can build an agent that works inside of Slack. And if you’re an admin, this is fantastic news because now you’ve just got one place to manage all of these.

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And we’ve been working behind the scenes on some things that I think will continue to make Salesforce even more embedded and useful with the context of Slack, a lot of them having to do with things like search. And so we’ve been releasing these new features to search that allow you to search not just your Slack corpus, but your Salesforce data and your Google Docs data and your Microsoft data. And so continuing to broaden and make search that much more useful. I feel like search is one of those hidden superpowers inside of Slack. People will sometimes come ask me a question and I don’t know the answer, but I know how to search for it and where to find it.

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I’m excited about our continued partnership with Heroku. Heroku is really doing some really amazing work. And they’re in a big reboot phase right now over there in Heroku, and they’re really leaning heavily into AI. But if you are doing custom development work, Heroku really is the best place to deploy those apps, especially if you want those apps to show up inside of Slack. But some of the work that they’re doing with their custom inference and the databases that they’ve got for AI tools, I think is really, really cool.

So if you’re a developer, if you’ve got a team of developers that’s really interested in pushing pretty hard into some of this custom AI tools, it’s probably time to give another look to Heroku and see what they’ve got going on. Really, we’re doing some workshops with that team as well, and so we’ll be showcasing how to build great custom apps, deploy them to Heroku and have them show up inside of Slack.

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The post How Can Admins Use Slack To Manage AI Agents More Easily? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to LeeAnne Rimel, Senior Director of Admin and Developer Strategic Content at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about True to the Core Deep Dive and how it will give Salesforce Admins more chances to engage with product leaders, ask questions, and influence the roadmap.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with LeeAnne Rimel.

If you’ve been to a Dreamforce or TDX, you’re probably familiar with True to the Core. Typically, it’s a keynote session with Salesforce product leaders where you can get key insights and engage them in a Q&A. However, as LeeAnne points out, we’ve noticed over the years that there isn’t always time to go deep on a particular topic.

That’s why we’re launching a special monthly video series, True to the Core Deep Dive. Each month, we’ll focus in on one core Salesforce Platform product area, with product leaders there to answer questions and really get down to the nitty-gritty.

For our first episode, we looked at the most highly voted topic area on IdeaExchange: Setup and user access management. So we sat down with Senior PMs Cheryl Feldman and Elizabeth Martin to walk through recent feature updates and look at what’s on the roadmap.

The highlight was definitely the 40-minute question and answer section, which really let us go so much deeper than your average keynote session. Other product owners Larry Tung and Laurent Kubaski were firing away answering even more questions in the chat. If you missed it, be sure to check out the video on LinkedIn or YouTube. 

If LeeAnne wants you to take one thing away from this episode, it’s that we need you to help us pick future topics. That’s right, this series is all about transparency and that includes topic selection. So each episode ends with a survey to determine what next month’s episode will be about.

“I read every single comment,” LeeAnne says, “we read all of the feedback and it directly informs every episode we’re going to put together.” So tune in next month for the first community-chosen topic, Flow testing and debugging, and help us figure out what to look at next.

Be sure to listen to the full episode for more from LeeAnne about what she’s working on for Dreamforce. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us in your feed every Thursday.

Mike:

You’ll have to hear how the first episode went. I’ll have the link in the show notes. We’re going to hear a little bit about what’s coming next, but more importantly, how you can shape future topics. So if you’re as excited as I am, keep walking or riding the train or listening, and let’s get LeeAnne on the podcast.

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And I think, I should know this, I can’t remember exactly when it started, but it’s more than 10 years old. So it’s a little bit of a fan favorite if you’ve been in the Salesforce ecosystem for a while because it’s such a great opportunity to get transparency into roadmap, to ask very direct questions about things that impact you as a Salesforce professional.

So with that context, that’s why we created True to the Core Deep Dive. So that’s what we launched in August. August 12th was the first episode. And it’s very much directly in response to that community feedback that we heard. We want more opportunities for this feedback loop. We want more transparency into roadmap. We want to ask more questions, we want to dive deeper into specific features that matter to us.

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So it was really exciting. I’m really proud of it. I’m really excited that it’s so deeply connected to community feedback. I think it’s really important. That’s basically the north star of True to the Court Deep Dive is community feedback and community voting and community questions. So it was really fun. It was great.

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So first of all, I’m Salesforce admin and I really want to contribute to this series. What are ways that I can participate?

LeeAnne Rimel:

So in episode one, at the end of episode one, we had the episode one survey. And the top topic that came out of that and also happens to be a top trending idea exchange topic is flow, and within that, testing and debugging. So that’s our next episode is flow testing and debugging.

So we’ll link, Mike will link in the show notes the blog announcing this, and within that we’ll have both the recordings for the previous episodes, the link to register for the upcoming episode, and also the opportunity to vote on topics that are meaningful to you.

So that is very much, that community feedback specifically from that voting mechanism that we will have in every episode is incredibly important for us to ensure that we are putting together episodes and shows that are directly meeting the community with what you need to talk about. And we’re going very deep. We’re really getting granular with the features. So notice it’s not just a flow episode, which is a very popular topic, but there’s so much within flow.

So we went into the subtopic of what is the most hot, trending, highly voted subtopic within flow? And that was, for this round, was testing and debugging. So I think your feedback and I read every single comment, so if you’ve filled out a survey, thank you so much, from episode one. And then if you fill out surveys in the future, I want you to know we read every single comment, we read all of the feedback, and it directly informs every episode we’re going to put together.

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I would anticipate, safe harbor, but I would anticipate over the next year we’re probably going to have more than one episode on flow because it is such a prevalent topic and there’s so many areas within flow to talk about. And we do really want to be able to have this space to go really deep, really granular on those subtopic areas, if you will, like those feature areas within a larger area.

It’s a great question and I think, yeah, there’s no rules around, well, we spend time on this feature area and we’re never going to talk about it again. I think that that’s not true to the nature of True to the Core and what we’re intending here. And then also I think we’ll see what the data show and what’s demanded.

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We’re hoping to share more opportunities to vote, to really increase the feedback that we get on future episodes. So stay tuned for Dreamforce posts and things like that. And we’re hoping to share more opportunities for Dreamforce attendees to share what they would like to see more of with True to the Core Deep Dive episodes. And then when we’ll be back with our regularly scheduled programming, if you will, [inaudible 00:12:34].

Mike:

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We also, I will share, are going to have more community-led sessions than ever before, so there’ll be more information coming out about that. But I think we’re going to have a lot of technical sessions, a lot of opportunities for admins and developers and architects and more community-led sessions than… We’ve always had a lot of community-led sessions, we have even more. So I’m really excited to hear and learn from our community.

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Don’t forget now, all these True to the Core Deep Dive episodes are going to be built on your questions and your input, so be sure to jump in, vote, share your thoughts, jump on the lives, ask questions. I don’t anticipate these ending for a while. We’ll have links in the show notes to the first episode and any other information that I have about it as of when this comes out.

The post What Is True to the Core Deep Dive? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Kate Lessard, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the new Agentforce Adoption Framework and her new YouTube series, “Kate Clicks Through It.”

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Kate Lessard.

It’s been a while since we’ve had Kate on the pod, but she’s been cooking up something cool, and I wanted to sit down with her to hear all about it. It’s called the Agentforce Adoption Framework, and it’s your guide for bringing the power of AI into your organization.

Kate and the Evangelist team identified a gap: admins needed a structured path to get up to speed with everything Agentforce has to offer. The framework breaks this down into five areas of focus:

You can check out Kate’s post on the Admin Blog for more details, but the goal is to help you set goals for your organization and get ready for what’s coming next with AI.

Kate’s also started a new YouTube series, “Kate Clicks Through It,” where she walks you through Salesforce processes step by step, with demos so you can click along and try them yourself.

“I personally am someone who learns best by doing,” Kate says, “I need to get hands-on, I need to do something. In many cases, I need to do it over and over again.” The videos are around 10 minutes long, giving you quick tutorials on subjects like how to build an Agentforce data library, or how to use Org Check as an alternative to Optimizer.

The Agentforce Adoption Framework was developed through tons of research and feedback from admins, Salesforce MVPs, and folks on the product team. We think it’s pretty spiffy—so keep an eye out for more adoption-focused content at Dreamforce or even an event near you.

As Kate points out, while Agentforce might be the shiny new toy, the adoption framework can be adapted to just about anything you want to implement. She uses the example of Data Cloud to highlight how important it is to have that fundamental level of adoption for both your users and your external customers.

There are so many more great insights from Kate about how to level up your understanding of Agentforce, so be sure to check out the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you can catch us every Thursday.

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So Kate Clicks Through It launched in July. We have two episodes out right now, one on Agentforce data libraries and one on using Org Check as an alternative to Optimizer, which is retiring this winter. And it’s just a way to follow along step by step. They’re short episodes, less than 10 minutes spent on each demo so that you can actually have your computer up and click along beside me, and by the end we’ve accomplished something together.

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Because I think the biggest thing that we see with surveys in general, and this is me going down a total rabbit hole from my past project management and consulting experience, when you send out surveys or you’re gathering requirements or you’re asking questions, if you do so without having the specific goal in mind of what you’re trying to get back, you can get so much information that is valuable, but maybe not what you’re looking for or answering the questions that you really need answered. So I think that AI, as well as our internal marketing team, was super helpful in refining that.

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The post The 5-Step Framework To Help You Navigate Agentforce appeared first on Salesforce Admins.