Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Nochum Klein, Director of Information Security at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about how Agentforce can make customer interactions and interacting with your organization’s documentation much, much easier.

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

Nochum might have one of the most interesting paths to the Salesforce ecosystem of any guest we’ve had on the pod. Before he ended up as Director of Information Security at Salesforce, he originally trained as a rabbi. However, after he graduated, he realized that it wasn’t for him.

Instead, Nochum wanted to get into computers. By day, he was a coupon broker, buying and selling frequent flyer miles. By night, he went to school to learn mainframe programming in COBOL. Eventually, he got into mainframe integration and parlayed that into a career at Salesforce.

Salesforce is SOC 2 compliant, which means that Nochum’s team gets audited twice a year. As a part of the process, they have to prepare pages and pages of PDF documentation about their security measures. And while this information is also handy for fielding customer questions, it’s not exactly the most user friendly way to keep track of everything.

What the Security team used to do is take the information in their PDF documentation and compile a response database. Essentially, it’s a list of questions and their answers. But that means you needed someone to update the answers every time something changes, and things at Salesforce change fast.

With Agentforce, they’ve been able to take their documentation PDFs and break them down into a vector database, making it legible for AI. That means they can chat with an agent to get the most complete, up-to-date answer to a customer’s question in moments. For Nochum, it means he can spend less time digging through PDFs to make sure his language is correct and more time making sure his customers have the answers they’re looking for. 

None of this would be possible without the confidence that the agent they’ve built is only pulling from the correct information. That comes from thorough testing, and thinking about edge cases where you might be able to get it to give you the wrong answer. For Nochum, building an agent isn’t just about what you want it to do, it’s about being explicit about what don’t want it to do. 

There’s so much more great information in our conversation with Nochum about building agents and how to think about security with Agentforce, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss out.

Josh Birk:

Greetings, admins. It’s your guest host, Josh Birk here today. Today, I’m gonna bring Nochum Klein to the mic. He’s the director of security here at Salesforce and he has found a transformative experience with agents, shall we say. Uh, we’re gonna talk about use cases, we’re gonna talk about building agents, we’re gonna talk about, uh, security around agents and, um, I hope you have a lot of fun listening to that. So let’s go to the tape.

All right, today on the show, we welcome Nochum Klein. Um, am I saying your name correctly?

Nochum Klein:

Yes, you are. That’s perfect.

Josh Birk:

Alright. Uh, we are gonna be talking about agents and building agents and maybe even a little bit about security around agents, but first of all, Nochum, welcome to the show.

Nochum Klein:

Thank you. I’m really excited to be here.

Josh Birk:

Let’s, uh, let’s talk a little bit about your early years. Uh, what did you go to college for?

Nochum Klein:

I became a rabbi.

Josh Birk:

Ah. (laughs)

Nochum Klein:

So I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household, and so throughout my years of school, I never went to public school, I went to the Jewish religious school system, which prepares you for one thing and one thing only.

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

(laughs) So I finished and, uh, I did my thing and became a rabbi and I said, “No.”

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

“I don’t wanna do this.”

Josh Birk:

(laughs) So, so you’re saying that, uh, you didn’t have access to a lot of computer labs right out of the gate?

Nochum Klein:

No, uh, i- it’s funny you say that, because as a child, we were really poor.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, so, yeah, I had no access to that. And we had, I remember as a kid, and I’m gonna age myself-

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

For those who can’t see me, I’ve got kind of salt and pepper beard with more salt than pepper at this point. Uh, so as a kid, I would walk past the Radio Shack and Radio Shack had just come out with a PC, uh, and …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… in those days, there were no hard drives they were using. We also don’t have these days, which are tape recorders with cassette tapes.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, and so I would go and just, and they were very nice to me. They would just let me go in, and that, in those days, the language du jour was basic.

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

And I would go and just play on the computers and it just really excited me and interested me.

Josh Birk:

Interesting.

Nochum Klein:

And so once I determined that being a rabbi wasn’t what I wanted to do, computers was, was always something that, that really grabbed me.

Josh Birk:

Nice. Uh, first of all, I’m with you brother, (laughs) uh, basic was also my first language, which, which almost kept me from being a programmer because, uh, I was, I was pulling it out of the back of P, like computer-led magazines, right? And it’s like, if you put all of these lines of random text in, you’ll get this cool 3D game and all I wanted was the 3D game, right? And I didn’t know what a syntax error was and I didn’t care what a syntax error was. I just wanted my game to work. And so I found that my first experience is trying to get code work, just wildly frustrating and, and actually took part of a college education for me to realize, “Oh, actually, the s- stuff’s not (laughs) as hard as I thought it was.”

Nochum Klein:

Yeah, yeah. No, I’ve definitely also had to unlearn a lot of things along the way that I perceived were one way. Yes.

Josh Birk:

Yes. So, so tell me a little bit more about that transition. How did you, how did you land your first computer job?

Nochum Klein:

So that’s interesting. So I didn’t go directly from rabbi to computers because I needed to learn about computers in between while I was doing something that would actually make me money, so I could put food on the table.

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

So I ended up being a coupon broker, which is someone who works with frequent flyers, who fly a lot and they have more mileage than they can possibly ever use.

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

And so I would essentially, and this wasn’t my business, I was just working for somebody, but we would essentially buy the miles off somebody, say for example, uh, American Airlines was with British Airways. They, British Airways at that time had the Concorde with three-hour flights from New York to London. Uh, so you could get two of those tickets for, at the time, each ticket would normally cost on the market about $7,000. American Airlines had a, an award for 1,000, 175,000 miles for two tickets. We would turn around and sell the tickets for essentially a penny, uh, or we would buy the tickets for a penny a mile. Uh, so it’s essentially 1,750, sell it for say $3,000 a mile, a ticket.

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

So everybody’s making off of it. The airlines weren’t particularly happy.

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

Uh, but I got, I actually went to Concorde. I did a lot of traveling. That was really great.

Josh Birk:

Nice.

Nochum Klein:

So while I was doing that, I was going to school at night to learn computers, which at that time was the mainframe.

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

So I learned COBOL.

Josh Birk:

And hey, once you learn COBOL, you have a job for life. I mean- (laughs)

Nochum Klein:

Especially yes, ’cause you can’t find COBOL programmers these days.

Josh Birk:

No, nope. And it will, it will be the last language (laughs) that we will probably ever end up using. Uh, so then how did you get involved with Salesforce?

Nochum Klein:

So, uh, it’s, so here’s what happened. I felt that being on the mainframe would eventually make me a dinosaur …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… uh, so, uh, but the challenge is, once you reach a certain level in anything kind of changing gears brings you back to square one in terms of salary.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

So what I did was I decided to work on integration. Mainframes, you know, as I indicated earlier, a bit of an island …

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

… uh, but companies need ways to integrate their mainframes with other places. Uh, so I was working with … I’m in, I’m based in New York, so I was working with broker dealers, uh, you know, the large financial institutions and they had a need to work with their banks, uh, because many of their customers would be wiring money in or out. And many of these broker dealers take overnight loans. So they needed to know earlier in the day how much money they would need to take for overnight loans because the price of an overnight loan and interest is lower the earlier in the day that you need. It’s supply and demand.

Josh Birk:

Right, right.

Nochum Klein:

So it was a lot of swift conversations in terms of banking messages, uh, between various banks and the treasury department of the financial institution. And that got me into integrating mainframe to other platforms, which then got me to working for an integration company, uh, at the time, uh, which was TIBCO Software, which later as MuleSoft came out, uh, was a, a competitor to MuleSoft.

Josh Birk:

Okay.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, so I spent a good amount of time doing integration, and at one point, said, “Okay, I’ve done enough of that. I, I wanna do something different.” Uh, somebody I worked with at TIBCO had moved to Salesforce, introduced me to his manager and that’s how I joined.

Josh Birk:

Got it. What was, what was your first role at Salesforce?

Nochum Klein:

My first role at Salesforce was platform. Since platform and integration are very kind of fundamental foundation-y …

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

… kind of pieces. So I joined as a platform solution engineer …

Josh Birk:

Got it.

Nochum Klein:

… pre-sales technology.

Josh Birk:

Nice, nice. And how would you describe your current job?

Nochum Klein:

So my current job is very different. Now, I’m in the security team at Salesforce, so I report up to our chief trust officer, Brad Arkin. And in my role, I’m still very customer-facing.

Josh Birk:

Mm-hmm.

Nochum Klein:

So that part of me hasn’t changed. And now what I do is I work with customers and help them understand the security controls that are inherent in how S- Salesforce delivers our services and capabilities.

Josh Birk:

Yes, yes. I was, I was briefly in data security, uh, for a, uh, it’s on my LinkedIn. I don’t, I don’t know why I’m always shy about saying State Farm. I think they trained me that way, uh, and I was in data security for long enough for me to realize I probably should not be in data security. (laughs) Then I fled back to the world of HTML and JavaScript. Um, alright, well, today’s topic, we’re gonna be talking about agents and Agentforce. What was, what was your first interaction … Actually, I guess l- let me take this one step back because this is kind of like the evolution we’re all going through right now where, you know, AI was this thing under a scientist’s rug somewhere and now it’s like in, in everybody’s face. What was your first interaction with AI itself?

Nochum Klein:

So at some point Salesforce has had acquired, uh, some companies that did AI. It wasn’t anything with large language models.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, it was more the predictive AI. Uh, we had some visual tools as well. For example, uh, one demo that, that actually a colleague of mine, Shane McLaughlin put together was hard hats. Uh, you know, so working with on construction sites …

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

… you have to wear a hard hat. So you have some camera taking pictures of everybody who comes in, “This person’s wearing a hard hat, this person is not,” and eventually, come to figure out and be able to say with a good degree of, uh, certainty, “This person isn’t wearing a, a hard hat. Maybe you should stop them.”

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, so that was my first look at AI and that was … Uh, we weren’t dreaming of being able to talk to AI …

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

… and get results back.

Josh Birk:

You’re right, right, because like, because I remember those days, uh, that’s a far more better enterprise solution than the, uh, bear or not bear, uh, demo that …

Nochum Klein:

(laughs)

Josh Birk:

… (laughs) I put together, but try to identify bear as humans and humans in bear suits. Uh, no, no practical (laughs) s- solution for that I think. Uh, but it was, because at that time, we were talking about models, but we were talking about models like how much training data, how many, how many imagery can you throw. Uh, it’s, it’s formally noticed [inaudible 00:11:18]. And then, and then at kind of off the side, right, there was the birth of Alexa and natural language processing.

But even, even that, as we all know, I mean it’s the classic joke, right, that this, that the, the processing abilities and the human-like c- capacities of things like Alexa and Siri, they’re just not there, right? They’re, they’re, they sound nice, but they’re, but just frequently will just get things wrong and they don’t hear you correctly or they don’t know very specifically how to have a conversation and, and that’s, and then we’ve talked a lot about like conversational UI, “Why, why is a conversational UI transformative, etcetera, etcetera?” Uh, what was your first interaction using, using today’s platform using Agentforce?

Nochum Klein:

So it’s funny ’cause you talked about Siri and my, my family knows if there’s a family emergency, I’m the first person not to reach out to because …

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

… I’m, I’m totally disconnected from my phone and I’ll, I’ll check like WhatsApp maybe once a day and, and kind of respond to things.

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

So with Siri-

Josh Birk:

Y- you and my wife would get together very easily.

Nochum Klein:

(laughs)

Josh Birk:

You could write letters to each other. I, I understand. Sorry, sorry, go on, go on.

Nochum Klein:

Yeah, except it would be very stilted because it would take a week between …

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

… each interaction. So for me, it was actually, when people on my team who know a lot more about AI than I do, started talking about ChatGPT and what it could do. And, you know, initially, you know, I got my day job, so I didn’t … You know, it’s interesting and all that, but it wasn’t really relevant to me at the time until all of a sudden I started seeing the things that ChatGPT could do and I actually started playing with it.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

And my, my jaw dropped and, and, you know, I’ve been, I haven’t been the same person ever since.

Josh Birk:

(laughs) Yeah, and I, and I think you, you fell into the rabbit hole that I, I tempt people into all the time. Uh, p- people are like, “Well, how do I get started with it?” and I’m like, “Go find one of the ones that’s free. It doesn’t matter. And just go, just go talk to it. Like the first thing you need to do is just realize the, get that feeling of how it’s different. Like, like ask it to tell you a dad joke, right? Like, like what … They’re so good at dad jokes.” And then, uh, the other one I recommend to a lot of people is ask, to play 20 Questions with it because playing 20 Questions with an AI that’s trying to guess as a random object that you’re thinking of almost reaches creepy, right? Because again …

Nochum Klein:

Yeah.

Josh Birk:

… they’re, they’re very good at it, but it also is a really good demonstration of how, what a conversational UI can do versus almost any other kind of UI. Uh, what have, what’s been your experience like with, with Agentforce itself?

Nochum Klein:

For me, Agentforce has been transformative …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… particularly in my current role. So in my role, you know, as I stated, I’m still customer-facing, so answering customer questions about how we do security inside of Salesforce.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

So we’ve got so much documentation and I think part of the problem is, in a sense, too much documentation or too much information becomes makes it challenging to essentially find the information you need at the time that you need it.

Josh Birk:

Mm-hmm.

Nochum Klein:

And what has been transformative really for me in my job on a day-to-day basis is one of the things that we’ve done, is we’ve taken all of these compliance documents. Salesforce gets audited twice a year for various, uh, you know, we call it SOC2 reports …

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

… which are essentially we say, “These are the various security controls we have and this is how we meet them,” and the auditor comes in and reviews everything and signs off. So now we’ve got all these PDF documents that really are rich source of information about how Salesforce does security …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… and how cool would it be if we could just take these documents and make it available to Agentforce …

Josh Birk:

Mm-hmm.

Nochum Klein:

… and now be able to ask Agentforce questions and be able to then get answers in a much more reasonable timeframe. And there’s some history here. Before we had Agentforce, what we had was database of, of answers, so a response database. So, you know, standard question is, “How do you encrypt data?”

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

So we have an answer for that. So now we’ve got these thousands of responses, and the problem particularly here at Salesforce is we move at such a rapid velocity …

Josh Birk:

Yes. (laughs)

Nochum Klein:

… that now our answers, you know, over a very short period of time are no longer applicable.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

And nobody wants to go and review these answers. Now you’ve got answers which are purely absolutely wrong inside of the database and the challenge is how do we maintain that. It’s imp, it’s impossible.

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

So what we’ve done now is we’ve taken all these compliance documents and put them inside of a data cloud, and using data cloud, you have this concept of retrieval augmented generation, which is a long term, that just simply means I have the ability to take a PDF file, break it up into chunks and now I can take each of those chunks and put it in a place, we call it a vector database, which is just a way of making it available so that an AI model can easily and efficiently access it.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Because if you think about it, when I ask a question, you know, of that where the answer is in a PDF, PDF is 500 pages, the answer is on page 23, paragraph five, having these chunks now allows the model to efficiently just zap into paragraph five …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… find the answer and give it to me. And so now I’ve got all these compliance documents, I don’t even need to read them anymore, although I should.

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

And, uh, and now because the agent is really responding in the context of the documents that I fed it, I also have a good degree of comfort that it’s not just making up answers where we know that possibility exists out in the internet because the, you know, many of the models on the internet are just trained with, you know, information on the internet, which is not often reliable.

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

Here, it’s trained, you know, it’s pulling in the data that I’ve just fed it and now I get amazingly accurate results, uh, and longer results than I would ever be able to write myself in just record time and significantly increase my own productivity.

Josh Birk:

Yeah. Uh, first of all, thank you because that is one of the most straightforward, uh, descriptions of rank that I think I’ve heard and, and we’ve kind of struggled over here because, uh, and, and for exactly the way you just walked through, the, the, there are things in the AI world right now that have very technical sounding names to them because an engineer got to name them and then that name has stuck. Uh, and it’s like, to, to me, it’s like the end result is, is really, you don’t need to understand how vector database works to realize that’s the thing that’s connecting a PDF to, to your conversational agent, right? And …

Nochum Klein:

Right.

Josh Birk:

… over the, a lot of the use cases that, because that’s kind of the phase we’re in now, right? Like the, the toys are in everybody’s hands, they’re getting to play with them and we need to get, we need information from people out there in the wild who have real jobs as to what are the use cases that are, uh, that, that are, you know, really important to you, that, that are gonna make this, as you say, transformative. Before I get to that though, I just, I wanna touch on that last part that you were talking about. Uh, are there steps that you go through to kind of test it to make sure, because, you know, we have misinformation on the internet, so we skip that because you’ve just given it 500 pages it could use, instead of anything it needs on the internet, but is there, like do you test it against hallucinations to make sure it’s not just like, “Oh, Nochum wants to hear this. I don’t know if I know the answer, but I’m gonna tell him, uh, this compliance rule looks like this anyway”?

Nochum Klein:

Yes, and there’s actually a, a, a number of ways to do that.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Firstly, in, in my specific scenario, my team handles security questionnaires, and oftentimes, these are pre-sales, “We’re making a new deal with the customer and the customer before they decide they wanna put their crown jewels and really sensitive information inside of Salesforce wanna make sure that it’s secure.” So a lot of these questionnaires, the questions on it are questions we get fairly frequently. We know the answers …

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

… although, as I said, answering them is, you know, a, a, an undifferentiated heavy lift in the sense that it takes time and effort to just write all that down.

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, but the good news is because we know the answers, we have the ability to essentially take these questions out of the questionnaires and feed them into, uh, you know, what we’ve just created to actually get the results.

Josh Birk:

Got it.

Nochum Klein:

Now, one thing I just read literally this morning …

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

… was an announcement that Salesforce made and, Josh, you, I’m sure you know more about this than I do, so, so please educate me, but I saw an announcement where Salesforce just announced a testing framework …

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

… for agents where actually now that we can use a model that essentially we’ve developed inside of Salesforce to create random questions …

Josh Birk:

Yup.

Nochum Klein:

… that it will ask the agent. Is that something that you’re familiar with?

Josh Birk:

I was l- literally, uh, reviewing a blog draft (laughs) for it right before this interview, so and, and this is what I love about being somebody who gets to evangelize AI, is exactly what you just described, because it’s like what was true two weeks ago is probably not gonna be true today, right? Like the answer to these questions would have been wildly different, uh, uh, because we didn’t, I didn’t know, uh, I knew this was coming down the pipe, but I didn’t know when it was going to look. Uh, I can’t get too into details because it’s still a little fluid. It is exactly what you’re describing, though it’s basically AI being able to test AI and it is looking really, really cool.

Uh, so if you’re hearing this, I don’t know when this episode’s coming out, uh, there’s probably already material by the time we get this produced and published that there’s probably material in what we’re talking about on admin.salesforce.com. But it, it is, it’s, it’s very cool and what I like about both of those aspects, right, like giving it a litmus test that, you know, the accuracy of and then also using AI to form questions to kind of poke at the AI itself, but, but the key element here is we still have the human in the loop, right? There’s still the human who’s pulling that lever and seeing what happens to it and saying, “Yes, you’re being a good AI.”

Nochum Klein:

Yes, I perceive, and as we look at Agentforce, and increasingly, we’re, we’re looking at some of the differences of say Agentforce with say Copilots that we had last year is the autonomous ability of agents. But at the same time, I perceive, before we let anything loose, it’s just really important and imperative that we make sure that it’s doing exactly what we want it to do.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

And I think that’s where, where this level of testing comes into play to give us that, that good degree of comfort.

Josh Birk:

Yeah, I agree. And it’s when you wanna have that, that, uh, QA engineer mindset a little bit. You know, the QA engineer walks into a bar, he orders, uh, he orders a beer, he orders 10 beers, he orders zero beers, he orders a milk, he asks for a cow. You know, it’s like you have to, I’ve told people like, like, “You know, test your prompts repeatedly. Uh, test them with, you know, run like like, ‘Your dataset looks like this. Oh, what if your dataset has 500 rows instead of five rows, etcetera, etcetera?'” And just make sure that we’ve, we’ve still, you’re, you’re dead on.

It’s like autonomy is great, uh, and I think it’s gonna have a lot of power, uh, for, for Salesforce users to reach, you know, their customers and their consumers, but, you know, you still have to be in the pilot seat. Now when it comes to some of these, what are, what are, going back to use cases, what are some of the other use cases that you’re seeing from the public?

Nochum Klein:

So I’m seeing a lot of internal use cases as well as potential external use cases. It boils down to essentially that undifferentiated heavy lifting. And, uh, especially going back to the trust aspect before you’re gonna have your agents do the really important stuff, you wanna make sure you get a level of comfort at the lower level stuff. If you think about it, this isn’t about replacing the high-level work that I’m doing anyways. It’s about making me just a lot more productive, because in my job, there’s a- always a lot of just lower level, what I call, and, and I think this is a term AWS coined, but I’ve stolen it …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… the, the undifferentiated heavy lifting, which is essentially just the lower level drudge work that all of us have in our jobs that potentially eats up hours and prevents us from doing the knowledge work from reaching out to individuals, making the human connections that will really change our business.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

So I think everybody has that. And what I’m hearing just in my conversations with customers is, in each of their particular roles, “How do we just take those little pieces and, and manage those?” Uh, another example that came up actually on my team, we produce a monthly n- newsletter in term, just highlighting, you know, “Here are the things that our team has done over the past month.” Uh, we track everything we do, we actually, internally use cases. And one of the things that we do is we’ve been using the A- Agentforce actually firstly whenever we close a case to summarize all the interactions that we’ve had back and forth with the various stakeholders, so that it’s, “Here, here was the initial problem that we were brought in to discuss or the security concern that the customer had.”

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

“Here are the points that we discussed. Here were some takeaways.” So now you take all that conversation and we’re boiling that down into a summary.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

So on the case level now, we’ve got an agent-generated case summary that looks at all these interactions and summarizes it really nicely.

Josh Birk:

Nice.

Nochum Klein:

Now take it to the next step.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Now at the end of the month, we’ve got this aggregation of cases that we’ve worked on all month, right? Uh, how cool would it be if we could just now chew through each of these summaries and, and identify the ones that really provided the deepest value because we can’t talk about everything …

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

… but, “What were the biggest problems we solved? Uh, what were the biggest customers with whom we interacted? Uh, how did we really move the needle?” And so now we’re looking at these cases over an aggregate and this is another example of using Agentforce to do that.

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

So, you know, increasingly kind of the little things you do that take up the, the large amounts of time.

Josh Birk:

And you’re, that’s fascinating because I think you’re at least the second or third team that I’ve talked to, that has at least looked at something like that. I actually might sync you up with a couple people back here on Salesforce side, (laughs) uh, because I know that there’s a lot of people who are thinking in, in those terms. Uh, let’s, let me put your security hat on for you. Uh, let, let me have you put your security hat on. (laughs) Uh, when it comes to an internal use case like that, are there any extra like security questions that, because I’m trying to keep this in a format that doesn’t turn into a three-hour (laughs) walkthrough of how to make, make e- everything secure, but I mean, if, if you already are a good-minded security person, a security-first person, are there extra steps that you would recommend before deploying an internal agent? And you know, I’m gonna turn this around and ask about an external agent right after this.

Nochum Klein:

For the internal … Oh, first thing I would say is, increasingly, we’re seeing insider threat as, as a huge threat.

Josh Birk:

Okay.

Nochum Klein:

Um, so while at some level I think we need to trust our insiders. Uh, a- at the other level, insider threat is huge. So I think that’s something to keep in mind. So …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… while yes, you probably don’t need the same degree or the same set of tests that you would do or perhaps controls that you put in place beforehand, nevertheless, uh, you, you do need to think about that insider threat. And I think for the insiders, I would say it’s primarily looking at the access control, uh, because clearly, potentially, an agent could be used to pull in, and largely, I would say that’s, that could be inadvertent where I just ask an innocuous question because now my agent can do things that I wouldn’t normally have done myself just, you know, going and poking where I shouldn’t.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

But I’m asking an innocuous question and the agent, may realize that I have the access that perhaps I shouldn’t, uh, and is going to want to do my bidding, and inadvertently, now I get more information than I should. So that’s a question of access control where you really wanna think about uh, “For this individual, uh, what can this individual access? Because at the end of the day, the agent is always going to respect the access control, and therefore, you wanna make sure that as you build your agents and you’re looking at the various Salesforce objects that the agent is going to be accessing in order to perform its tasks, just make sure that you’re thinking in terms of the broad set of individuals who may be accessing this agent and ensuring that the access control is as it should be,” which then kind of brings us into other scenarios, which takes us out of, out of this Agentforce conversation around things …

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

… like, you know, role-based access. There are so many ways where access can be granted to a user that may not necessarily be immediately, uh, intuitive to, uh, understand why a particular user is able to access this particular information. And that’s kind of a separate conversation.

Josh Birk:

Right, right. Well, I, I always, like I, I guess I’ll, I’ll frame this in, into a question, because when I have been reading, uh, when it comes to best tips for an external agent, I am reminded back to my integration roots and my roots of like, “Oh, if you’re gonna put,” you know, back when we started propping up users that were, you know, accessing systems as an anonymous guest kind of thing, how different is an external agent from those principles or i- is that i- is how much extra experience is required, but, or if you are already are familiar with setting up an integration user, principle of least privilege, etcetera, does, does an external agent change that much?

Nochum Klein:

It does a lot.

Josh Birk:

Oh, okay, okay.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, a- and here’s why. Last year, there was a famous story with an airline, uh, where an individual went on the airline website and the, and the airline had bot and the individual asked a question about, I think it was, uh, returning a ticket or flexibility around flying and they got an answer that was actually not a part of the, uh, the airline’s actual policy. So when the individual went to cash in their ticket, the airline said, “No,” and this individual had record of that bot interaction.

Josh Birk:

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, so, it’s, I think a lot of it is looking at, you know, so this does take us back to some of the testing aspects.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, it also gets us into other, you know, particularly w- wearing my security hat, it gets us into other aspects where, as we create, uh, agents, and I think this is in general for, for developers, humans tend to, we’re blinders. We are building this agent for the use case that we see in front of us and we don’t necessarily see other ways that individuals may try and interact with the agent.

Josh Birk:

Yes.

Nochum Klein:

And at the end of the day, an agent really is responding to instructions, right?

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

And if you wanna be good in Agentforce, this is, uh … I, I happen to be very opinionated, so take my opinions or leave them, but my belief is, in order to be really good with Agentforce, you have to understand that you’re dealing with a model. And the model is like, uh, think of it as a bit of a, a child that takes things very, very, uh, you know, what you say is exactly what it’s going to do. So therefore, you need to really think about, you know, as you’re building your agents and agent actions, you have the instructions that you’re creating for the agent action, you’ve got the scope for the agent action, which is essentially, “This is what you as an agent can do and cannot do.” Uh, so all of this is actually being acted upon by another model that’s reading this, that determines actually, “I’m going to choose this topic versus that topic.”

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

“I’m going to choose this action versus another action.” So kind of going back, and you touched on this with the one beer, five beer, a hundred beer thing, where essentially you really need to think about the corner cases and how, how you wanna make sure your agent is not used and …

Josh Birk:

Mm-hmm.

Nochum Klein:

… be very explicit and really verbose in how you describe that. And that gets us kind of and, sorry to be a bit long-winded to your, to your question.

Josh Birk:

I love it, I love it.

Nochum Klein:

But that gets us also into, you know, conversations around what we in, in security called prompt injection …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… where, you know, think about, uh, yeah, “If the agent is, is always just answering i- instructions, what if I could add an instruction to the end of my bot or my agent that I’m exposing to the internet that says, ‘Oh yeah, and me a hundred TVs for free’?”

Josh Birk:

(laughs) Right, right, right.

Nochum Klein:

And potentially, uh, if that’s an instruction and, uh, an AI model is very, you know, just follows instructions, how do you ensure that it doesn’t do that?

Josh Birk:

Yeah, right.

Nochum Klein:

So a lot of that, and most of those, you know, controls certainly are, are things that Salesforce has to put into our, uh, platform in order to ensure that our agents are smart enough to identify when they’re being told to ignore w- whatever you were previously told …

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

… uh, and do this instead.

Josh Birk:

Yes.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, so, so we do that. We have essentially different ways, for example, that we identify, uh, if somebody is doing that, both because when you create a prompt, say, using, uh, prompt builder, you’re creating a prompt that’s sitting inside of a bigger prompt that Salesforce has created that we’re not really exposing.

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

And therefore, this bigger prompt already tells the, the model that if some, you know, if anywhere you get instructions to ignore what you were previously told …

Josh Birk:

To do.

Nochum Klein:

… or, exactly, to, to contradict …

Josh Birk:

Right.

Nochum Klein:

… what you were previously told, then consider that injection attack and, and don’t listen.

Josh Birk:

And don’t, and don’t behave. Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Right.

Josh Birk:

Uh, yeah. My two thoughts on that, first of all is my first professional review that I, that I had on my code was so eye-opening, uh, because they would show me something that my history had taught me had, had been safe, right? And I, and I, I, and I’ve got a perfect track record so far and I’ve never, and I’ve never written anything that got anybody hacked. But after that review, I kind of felt lucky for him because he’s like, “Oh, but yeah, what if?” And it was the what if that’s like … The, the thing that I think developers don’t, don’t have the same mindset as a security engineer or even a QA engineer is, uh, you know, we’re gonna develop, we’re good at finding bugs and edge cases as to why something’s not working. We’re not, we always kind of assume good intent when it comes to the client.

And it was like the first security lesson I learned when I was at data security is like you never trust the client. Like assume the client is malicious. Assume the client is gonna try to trick you. Assume the client is gonna pull up your JavaScript code, it’s gonna pull up your HTML code, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And then the second thing is “These things are great pieces of technology. I love them. They’re really powerful. I am very excited for the future, but they need us, right? They need us to ride these guardrails, to put in these instructions, to put in the, the, the larger things to, to kind of make sure that we’re, we’re keeping safe.” And it’s like, you know, “Have fun at the swimming pool, but also don’t, don’t run. (laughs) Don’t bring glass.” Like, like there’s always gonna be rules, you know, that we’re gonna have to apply.

Uh, now, Nochum, you’ve also got a blogpost. It’s currently a draft mode. Once again, through the miracle of time travel, uh, will probably be published by the time this is out there. Do you wanna give a quick penny tour, like a quick elevator pitch for that blogpost?

Nochum Klein:

Sure. So as you create agent actions, uh, you know, so what the blogpost really tries to do is, is help you understand kind of some of the things you need to think about as you create agent actions. Uh, creating an agent action can be based on a number of different things. So firstly, when you create the action, you’re going to firstly determine, “Oh, what does my action wanna do?” and you kind of know that beforehand.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

So I think of it in, in two, two main buckets. One bucket is, “Do I need to do something that Salesforce say does well, for example, summarize records or find records?” Uh, those are very common scenarios. And oftentimes, you wanna find records based on certain criteria. So there’s a little bit additional complexity, but those would be scenarios where, for example, using a prompt template would be an ideal solution.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Then you’ve got other types of use cases where you need to maybe update records or you’ve got very complex logic that you need to, your agent to do. And for that, uh, you know, so it’s not just find records. Uh, for something like that, you typically want to do a, um, a flow-based agent action or an apex-based agent action.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Uh, and I find flows are just so much easier to use. Uh, apex has got, got a lot of rules around also the structure of the code in terms of how you annotate your, your apex, uh, and, and you have to pass it in a list and it has to get a list back out. Uh, whereas I find flows are just so much simpler. And just internally also for the ongoing administration and maintenance flows, y- you look at the flow and you immediately understand what it’s doing.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Whereas with apex, that’s not always the case.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

I tend to lean more towards the flows than the apex unless there’s a really good reason to use apex.

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

Um, so there’s the, firstly, you know, “What kind of flow am I building? Is it, is it, or what kind of action am I building as based on flows or based on apex or based on prompts?” Um, so that’s one aspect of it. And then, you know, is, there’s the, uh, you know, there’s the, also, you know, going back to another thing I said in terms of the types of actions because there’s a good degree of actions that Salesforce has delivered out of the box, which we call standard actions. So as admins, we’re all familiar with the standard objects versus custom objects. And so really, you can think of the agent actions as exactly the same thing …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… where Salesforce, we’re continuing to roll out standard actions at a fairly good clip with each new release. Uh, and that’s something I think that, that, you know, that, as admins, it’s kind of you should be plugged in …

Josh Birk:

(laughs)

Nochum Klein:

… because, uh, you know, uh, even as an internal Salesforce employee, uh, it’s just moving so quickly. Uh, but I think the first thing is just understanding also what the universe, uh, of out of the box standard actions are because oftentimes you may discover you don’t need to build one.

Josh Birk:

Yup.

Nochum Klein:

And, you know, what, you know, here we are right now on the, uh, winter ’25 release, uh, and soon it’s going to be the spring and then summer, and with each new release, you’re going to see many, many more standard actions …

Josh Birk:

Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… out of the box. Uh, so that’s kind of another thing you wanna be of in terms of as you decide you wanna build an action, just take a look at what those standard actions are, uh, because you may find a number of them that can actually meet your needs. And then you could just include those in your topic, which you may still wanna build. One thing that I’ve found is that oftentimes departments may wanna have their own separate topics and you may actually have some common standard actions that you’ll bring into each of the, of the different topics …

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

… because if you think about it, what, what’s going to happen is, first, as you build your, and use your, your agents or your agent actions, it’s first going to determine the topic it wants to use and then the actions within that topic. So having the same actions in different topics is perfectly acceptable and very common. Uh, so you wanna then think about the actions that you wanna include and that will include both your standard and your custom actions. And then there’s the logic of, “How do I actually go about that?” and that’s some of the things that I describe inside of the blogposts.

Josh Birk:

Wonderful. And what I love about all of that is that it really underlies what one of our, you know, we, we keep trying to tell and, and message out to people because I think if you’re just coming fresh out of the woods and you hear, “Oh, hey, your job today is to go build an artificial intelligence conversational agent,” you probably think that’s some really overwhelming task. And, uh, and as you just described, it really isn’t because the standard actions do so much for you. And what I have found is that the standard actions will get you so far and then every now and then, it’s like, “I had a prompt built there or I had a prompt template that was hallucinating consistently on this one part.” So I’m like, “Okay, clearly you don’t wanna do that task. I’m gonna go into this flow.”

Uh, and I’m an old, I’m an old school developer and I completely agree with you. I think that’s a really good way of thinking about, thinking about standard actions, think about flows, so then if flow can’t do your use case, consider using apex. And the thing we keep telling people, the flows themselves, most of the flows I’ve written for my demos are maybe four steps long. They’re very simple. Go in, filter some data, manipulate some data, hand it back to the AI and, and walk away. So, uh, really great stuff, Nochum. Uh, o- one last question for you, what is your favorite nontechnical hobby?

Nochum Klein:

Favorite nontechnical hobby? I hike. I love kind of the outdoors. Uh, I find my work is very demanding, and luckily, I have a great manager and, who doesn’t micromanage me. So I find even between my meetings, just during the day and I happen to live in the suburbs right near the mountains, I’ll just go out for 15 minutes and just get a breath of fresh air. I have a stream near my house and just, “Ahhh” …

Josh Birk:

(laughs) Yeah.

Nochum Klein:

… just take my mind off work …

Josh Birk:

Uh-huh.

Nochum Klein:

… and I can come back and recharge.

Josh Birk:

Love it.

Nochum Klein:

And so just spending time in nature, hiking, uh, that’s just something I absolutely love.

Josh Birk:

Absolutely love it. Well, thank you so much for the great conversation and information. That was a lot of fun.

Nochum Klein:

Thank you, Josh. I really enjoyed it.

Josh Birk:

And that’s our show. I wanna thank Nochum for the wonderful conversation. Of course, I wanna thank you for listening. If you wanna learn more about the show and being a Salesforce admin, head on over to admin.salesforce.com where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes and a lot more information on being a Salesforce admin. And of course, you can subscribe to this podcast on the podcast client of your choice. Thanks again, everybody. I’ll talk to you later.

The post How Agentforce Transforms Customer Interactions at Salesforce appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Megan Tuano, Sr. Business Analyst at Accenture Federal Services and an amazing YouTube content creator. Join us as we chat about navigating career transitions in tech, the power of AI, and making your mark in the Salesforce ecosystem.

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

Megan got her start working in college admissions for a data science program at UC Berkeley. “A lot of the students I talked to were scared about breaking into tech because they didn’t come from a traditional tech background,” she says.

After seeing what her students were able to accomplish in tech, Megan got curious about what she could do with her career. She was already using Salesforce to get people through the admissions process, so she started looking into how to get certified.

There’s this idea that you can’t work in tech if you don’t need to know how to code, but there are so many roles out there where that’s not important. You can be a business analyst, a product manager, a project manager, or even a Salesforce Admin.

One question that I always get is how to prioritize Salesforce certifications. For Megan, that comes down to setting clear goals for your career. What roles are you building towards, and what do you need to stand out?

Megan’s found that AI certifications and knowing how to use AI to help you with your work have been a difference-maker for her career. She likes to ask ChatGPT about other scenarios her solution could apply to. The AI has had conversations with many other people about similar problems, so she’s bringing all of that knowledge into her solutioning process.

Megan highlights how important soft skills are for Salesforce Admins. We’ve all sat in a boring meeting, or a presentation where the speaker didn’t seem to care. She always looks for ways to spice up her presentations with visuals and humor. Most importantly, you need to have passion for what you’re doing with the platform and what it can do for your users. Passion is infectious!

Finally, don’t be afraid to ask questions if you don’t understand a business process. There’s often some fear that creeps up that asking too many questions will make you seem incompetent or unqualified. But consider the opposite: asking questions shows that you care, that you’re thorough, and that you’re trying to find the absolute best solution for the business.

There’s a lot more great stuff in my conversation with Megan about shaping your career in tech, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Mike:

Megan:

Mike:

Megan:

Mike:

Megan:

Mike:

Megan:

So these really cool people with non-technical backgrounds, I was figuring out how to get them to the data science space. So with working with UC, Berkeley at that time, with the admission’s counselor title that I had, we were actually using Salesforce at the time, and it was totally new to me. I was like, “This is a great way to be able to track my students.” Once they submit that they’re interested in the program, they would come to me, we would funnel them, get them through the essentially, I say sales process, because that’s kind of what it was. We’re kind of getting them to enroll in the program. But that was my first real introduction to Salesforce and I loved it. I was kind of like that admission’s counselor that was making all these data charts like, “Hey, wait, my students said that this could be better on the page. Let’s take this to the marketing team, or they said that this course could be beneficial for their career. Let’s take it to the professors.”

And I would get all these reports together and I was kind of like, “Okay, well what else can I do?” And I was very fortunate because at the time my uncle actually worked at Capgemini, and he was probably in the ecosystem for about 15 years at that time. But he was like, “Look, you’re working with Salesforce, did you know you could get certified?” I was like, “No way. Stop.” I said, “Stop. I did not know that.” I was just trying to figure out a way to break into tech myself because of working with my students. I was like, “This is super inspirational.” They’re doing things that I never imagined. So the same fear that they had about breaking into tech, I had that too. And I didn’t come from a background that was computer science or technical. My background was international affairs. I wanted to travel the world and figure out something. But yeah, no, I got certified. Took about a year and a half between early mornings, late nights, and finally broke in. It was a challenge, but it was very, very worth it now looking back.

Mike:

Megan:

It’s like, “Look, I do not code. I can dabble but not code.” And it was just about opening their eyes to, you can be a business analyst, you can be a product manager, you can be product owner, project manager. There’s so many cool things that you can do in the ecosystem within the Salesforce world and really expand yourself out there. I think it’s just about knowing the differences in roles and the possibilities, and it’s listening to podcasts like this where you can really discover things and put your foot into finding maybe I want to do a PM job or BA role and just trying it out. I’ve done probably three different roles in the five years of Salesforce that I’ve been in here. And without dabbling, I couldn’t have found that. But without podcasts like this, I don’t even know if I would’ve been able to go into the BA role. So I’ve definitely seen what you’re talking about.

Mike:

Megan:

So now, not only do I look more creative, but I have more suggestions and solutions. You can see them really get excited. Sometimes I’m limited to my experiences and my consulting jobs and stuff that I’ve had, but ChatGPT just kind of opens up an AI, opens up a different world where it’s taken prompts from every other consultant, let’s say, that’s asked the same thing, and now it’s spitting back different scenarios where I can take my client through. Maybe I didn’t think about, well, what happens to the ratings and the survey that are conducted as well surveys, what do you want to do? How do you want to reward the agent? Because I think that’s really important. And you can tell that the customer gets so happy, they’re like, “Oh, I didn’t think about that.” “Well, no problem, ChatGPT got you.” So it’s been a huge, huge, huge, huge game changer, not just within my job, but content all over.

Mike:

Megan:

And then once you understand, I would combine it. Be very structured about your journey. I know it’s very tempting sometimes to kind of grab onto this or that because everything’s being pushed out at such a fast pace. But really AI, I think whether you want to be a consultant, a BA, a developer, being able to keep up with the trends of today, and you don’t need to overwhelm yourself of course, but just know what’s going on. How do you use AI? And I think Salesforce has the associate Salesforce AI cert, which doesn’t dive too deep, but it really covers the basics of what is AI, what can I do? And then it navigates you to ChatGPT. And then there’s fantastic articles where you can go on and kind of… The article that I mentioned earlier from Salesforce spend, how to be able to use chat to prompt it better and you kind of elevate yourself through that way.

So I would definitely start with the functionality, make sure you’ve got that. And then compliment it with AI because these are skills that you’re going to need to have when you go for that first job, when you’re in that first job because you need to be able to talk with your stakeholders, talk with your team, and then on top of it, just set that cherry on top. If you have great ideas, you can also kind of use AI to say, “Hey, I thought about this for my team. What do you think about X, Y, Z?” And then it can prompt you with better ideas for you to be a great team player. So I definitely think the basics, AI, and then kind of follow with Sales and Service Cloud, because those are going to compliment many of the other clouds that you have.

Mike:

You have to think of if I don’t know the platform and Sales Cloud, if I start asking questions and build an agent, I better know where it’s going to grab those answers from. Oh, it’s ever-changing world. Speaking of content creator, I’m sure you do a lot of presentations and crafting stuff together, so do admins. When you’re getting ready or you’re putting together a demo or a presentation, what is some advice that you have that maybe as somebody that’s done it for a while or even a beginning Salesforce admin at a company, some best practices to kind of help them demo their new app or talk about something in front of a large group of people?

Megan:

So I think the number one suggestion that I would have is think about the user at the end of the day, because no matter if you sit with the business executives, they do know their client, but at the end of it, you have the same end game. It’s for your user. And if you go in there confidently focusing on, “Hey, I thought about this business process, which could expedite the agents and how they’re working, overall customer satisfaction and increase efficiency with the agents.” These things that are helping at the end game. I think if you go in with that thought first, then your heart’s in the right spot and everything else can follow.

Now in terms of presentation, I would definitely say this is your time to work with a peer. It’s time to bounce ideas off of with your coworkers. “Does this sound good? Am I making my point clear?” Because sometimes if we read our own article… I’m guilty of this, I’ll read my article, I’m like, “Oh, this is fantastic.” I’ll pass it off to somebody else. And they’re like, “What did you mean here?” So just passing it to somebody for peer review is definitely always helpful.

And then I would say maybe the last thing is a lot of visuals. One thing as a content creator and as a business analyst now is we all sit through meetings. We all have that Monday through Friday, 9:00 to 5:00 things can get overwhelming. There’s a lot of text. And one thing that’s helped me as a content creator is just making learning fun, making it understandable, making sure that you’re still getting the text side across, but also making the user excited and engaged and want to actively be on the platform. So that would be my little suggestion right there is just making it fun and going into it with excitement because your energy feeds off to the user and who you’re talking to.

Mike:

Megan:

Mike:

Megan:

There were so many different things that I was doing at once, where despite me learning… Because you’re balancing, you’re learning the tech, you’re also learning about the business. And I felt so confident on the tech and it’s a lot to juggle, but when I went into the business, they would kind of run through, “This is our business process, what could we do to improve it?” And it’s like, “Wait, wait, I thought I got this.” I thought I went through the website and understood things. I thought I had these sessions with them where I was breaking down things to understand their business better. But sometimes you’re going to have to figure out how to ask the same question in different ways, and you’re going to have to be okay with saying like, “Hey, I didn’t get this and what you were saying it, can you take some time to explain to me a little bit more in detail?”

And I think those are some of the challenges that people face because we’re not in the business that our clients do all the time. We don’t know exactly what goes on, but we know what to do for them. But we also need to balance configuring and advising with understanding their business. And I think learning to be okay to ask questions to follow up with clients and really show them that you’re fully invested, they’ll hear you. And I think at the end of the day, clients want to know that you have their back and being able to show that, they’ll work with you. So that was a challenging part for me. Some things I’ve seen from my coworkers as well, and being able to kind of talk through it.

Mike:

What do you advise maybe people that are switching careers because that can be a starting brand new or people just getting into tech as kind of like what is the minimum thing that you should do to make sure you have a solid internet profile, I’ll call it?

Megan:

It’s just about painting a picture. To our point, we were talking about Canva earlier. Canva is fantastic for having a vision board, and I think that’s something that from watching other YouTubers in tech, I’ve seen people be really successful with this. Is when they create a vision board of where they see themselves, let’s say in two years, I don’t want to jump to five or 10, but just keeping your goal small and achievable. I think that’s number one step. But number two, creating that vision board of where you see yourself and what certs are going to help you get to where you need to go. I think that’s a great starting point because it helps you keep aligned, it helps you keep in your lane of where you want to go. And then if you do have a new cert that comes out, then you’re able to figure out, “Okay, I want to do this. I’m excited to do it.”

I always tell people to act on the excitement. If you have it in you and it doesn’t take you away from your ultimate goal, go for it because then you’re going to start thinking about it. But kind of keep yourself aligned and then it allows you for more opportunity to be like, “Oh, this might be good for my career. I can put it in, or “This may not be good for my career, so I’m not going to put it in.” It really helps you see clear, and I’m actually going to be setting up my 2025 vision board and going to be doing it as a YouTube video, just to be able to help people. Yeah, I think just having that vision board is really helpful.

Mike:

Megan:

So while I think it’s going to be a challenge, I would love to be able to learn more of how to lead efficiently and be able to get my people promoted, teach others how to be a good leader. Managers make a huge difference in your career, whether you’re supported, listened to, and I want to be that for people. So that’s my goal is as I come into the new project, come the new year and lead this huge team, I’m excited and all types of nervous for it. But the goal is just to be somebody that they can look back in 10 years and hopefully when they get into a manager position, be like, “I want to lead like her,” because I lead other leaders that have made an impact in my life.

Mike:

Megan:

Mike:

Megan:

Mike:

Megan:

Mike:

Megan:

Mike:

The post How Agentforce Is Changing the Career Landscape appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Gillian Bruce, Director of Developer Marketing at Slack. Join us as we chat about how Agentforce allows you to bring Salesforce to Slack, and why every admin should learn how to build Slack solutions.

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

If you’re a longtime listener to the pod, you’ve got to be excited about this week’s guest. Gillian was my co-host for years, and I thought we should bring the dynamic duo back together to talk about her new gig as Director of Developer Marketing at Slack.

Ever since she went over to the Slack team, Gillian’s been struck by how friendly the platform is for admins. There are tons of solutions that you can implement with low or no code, and powerful features like Slack Canvas and Slack Lists that give you a lot of flexibility without the need for customizations.

All this is a cinch if you’re used to building things in Salesforce. And when you hear what Gillian has to say about combining Agentforce with Slack, you’ll want to get started today.

In our episode with Jim Ray about Slack integrations, he told us how Slack can be a multi-purpose tool. There are over 2,600 integrations currently out there, letting you bring information from Jira, or Workday, or Salesforce, directly into Slack. While that could be a lot of information to sift through, Agentforce is here to lend a helping hand.

You can now use Agent Builder to create employee-facing AI agents for Slack. There are special Slack actions, like searching and summarizing data in Slack, creating or updating a Slack Canvas, and sending DMs. This gives admins all sorts of new ways to integrate Salesforce into your business processes with less friction and more wow.

Agentforce is new and we know it can be hard to get your head around everything that it can do. That’s why Slack is building some templates for employee-facing AI agents. For example, a product specialist agent that can give you quick answers so you don’t have to comb through pages of documentation.

If there’s one thing Gillian wants you to take away from this episode, it’s that Salesforce Admins should start building on Slack. “It’s going not only set yourself up to be super valuable to your organization in this era of agents,” she says, “but it also is going to open up so much more possibility for you career-wise.”

There’s so much more in this episode about tricks for Slack and why you should look out for Gillian at your next Dreamin’ event, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Mike:

Gillian explains why learning and leveraging Slack is simply a must for an admin. I mean, it’s so easy to use. I love it. Now, before we jump in, I want to make sure that you’re following the Salesforce Admins Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. That way, you can catch every new episode immediately when it comes out on Thursdays. So be sure to hit the follow button on whatever podcast platform you’re listening for. So now, let’s welcome Gillian back and talk about Slack and Agentforce.

So Gillian, welcome back to the podcast.

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Well, we already have Salesforce channels live in Slack, as of Dreamforce. This means that you can have a dedicated record channel that automatically gets spin-up for that record in Slack. So you have a channel there where you can collaborate, you can talk about it, you can interact with folks, you can bring other systems data in right there. Coming in February, that same UI, that channel experience is going to be visible in Salesforce for those records.

Mike:

Gillian:

But then, that second piece of it, Mike, is that Slack is going to be the way that you’re going to be able to not just bring that systems and all of that data together, all those people together, but those agents are going to be able to interact there in Slack with you, and you’re going to be able to tell that agent to do things that are pulling from Salesforce, from all of your data cloud sources, and take action right there in Slack. And you’re going to be able to, come March, actually have that in a threaded conversation. So you’re going to be able to interact multiplayer style. So you’ll have a conversation with an agent and other people can join in in that conversation.

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

So you’re in Slack, and you have a question about how a product works, because you are in a conversation with a customer or you’re trying to answer a question, instead of having to go search all of the documentation and figure out, “Oh, who’s the right product manager to reach out about this?” You can just ask the agent right there in Slack your question and get served up an answer, as well as, “Hey, how do you want me to format this answer? Is this for a sales customer? Is this for a sales engineer?” And that is just one use case that I get excited about, because I’m always knee deep in product, and I can never keep up on everything. So that’s one good example, and that’s a template that’s going to be available, so that people can take that, put that in Agent Builder, and then customize it to sort from their own knowledge base.

Mike:

Gillian:

The next thing to that is you might have a situation where you have part of your company, part of your employee base that actually doesn’t even work in Salesforce. They don’t even need Salesforce seats, but you want to build an agent experience for them, in Agent Builder that extends an agent functionality to them, so you don’t actually have to buy a Salesforce seat for them. Maybe you have a group of, I don’t know, marketers who never go into Salesforce, which is probably a bad use case, maybe, but-

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

So let’s say the last time you checked, I don’t know, the marketing updates channel was a week ago. It’ll say, it’ll recap the last seven days in one paragraph for you, versus every day, there’s a recap that you have to go through. That is very helpful. The other thing that’s very helpful is just asking Slack search to summarize for you. So you’re going, “Tell me what’s going on with X, Y, Z project,” and it will give you the highlights, as well as links to all the source information there. That is really useful. I love Slack AI for that. It helps really kind of sift, and sort, and prioritize the information for me. The other thing that we now have, and you may have seen it, this is brand new, is we have what’s called a VIP, so-

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

It’s called Build an Automation with Slack. It walks you through building your first workflow automation. That’s a great place to get started. There’s also great content on Trailhead. There are so many ways to get your hands on Slack and start building things beyond just responding in channel, and I really, really hope that you do that, because it’s going to set not only yourself up to be super valuable to your organization in this era of agents, but it also is going to open up so much more possibility for you career wise, because so many organizations are going to be using Slack as their employee agent delivery mechanism and an operating interface, that it’s just, you got to get on. This is the time, I’m telling you right now, everybody get on board with Slack.

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Gillian:

Mike:

Anyway, that was fun. I hope you enjoyed listening to the podcast. If you do, can you do me a favor? There should be like three dots in the app that you’re listening on. Usually, you can hit those, and then you can share the episode. You can share it via social. There’s a lot of different social channels out there, share it on your favorite social channel. Text it to your friends, or, hey, you know what? Post it in Slack. That seems very appropriate, to post the Slack podcast in Slack.

Of course, if you’re looking for more resources and all of the links that Gillian mentioned, your one stop, your one place to go, admin.salesforce.com is where you can find that, including a transcript of the show. That ought to be fun to read. You know what we didn’t talk about? We didn’t get a recipe this time. There’s always been a recipe with Gillian. I’m going to have to maybe go back and see. You know what, we’ll have to have her back on again, just to get a recipe for some holiday thing, because I feel like that’s what we used to do when she was on the podcast. So anyway, remember, also, join the conversation. The Admin Trailblazer group, that’s over in the Trailblazer community. Don’t worry, like I said, links are in the show notes. So with that, until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

Gillian:

Mike:

The post Gillian Is Back to Talk Agentforce And Slack! appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Andrew Russo, Salesforce Architect at BACA Systems. Join us as we chat about Salesforce Foundations and why it’s a game changer for solo admins and small orgs.

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

Andrew calls himself a Salesforce Archi-admin-eloper. At BACA Systems he’s a team of one, managing a complex org with all sorts of flows and customizations. Despite his busy schedule, he also manages to get himself out there to all sorts of Salesforce events, so I wanted to chat with him about what caught his eye at Dreamforce as a solo admin.

Like everyone else, Andrew is psyched about the possibilities for generative AI and Agentforce. He knows that data health and cleanliness are crucial in order to take advantage of these new features, and he’s already started a project to implement Salesforce Knowledge in his org. But what he’s really psyched about is Salesforce Foundations.

Like many smaller companies, Andrew can’t easily do a pilot to test out larger features. “Having access to try things before you actually fully configure them is really helpful for us to look at where we can grow and move to with the platform,” he says.

Salesforce Foundations gives you access to all of the little features you wish you had from each cloud. For Andrew, they can swap over from using an external email marketing tool to doing everything in Salesforce. They’re also looking at implementing Salesforce Payments instead of doing it over the phone. While they may not be the shiniest tools in the toolbox, the time saved with these little features adds up in a small organization like Andrew’s.

One thing that can get tricky as a solo admin is handling requests while keeping the org on track. Andrew keeps a Lucidchart roadmap for where they’d like to be with things like data cleanup and their Salesforce Knowledge project, which helps him balance short-term needs with long-term goals. “We’re not trying to implement features just because we have them,” he says, “it has to align with ‘our company goals.”

Andrew has more to share about tips for solo admins, why you should get started going to Salesforce events, and the best cold pizza, 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 Gerholdt:

Hey there, Salesforce Admins. So, buckle up because today we got Andrew Russo on board, who’s not just managing the Salesforce org, but is essentially the captain of a one-man cruise ship. That’s the analogy that we made. So, you like that? I said on board. No, but seriously, this guy is juggling a lot of flows, customizations, and data, much like we all are, and he’s steering the ship solo, so single Salesforce admin.

Now, in today’s chat, we’re talking about everything from taming data gremlins to rolling out Salesforce Knowledge, but big is what he found impactful at Dreamforce this year, which was Salesforce Foundations. And we’re also getting some insight into how Andrew’s planning on keeping his org ready for the next wave of AI. And of course, we reminisce a little bit about Dreamforce, and it wouldn’t be a Salesforce Admins podcast without food. This time we’re talking pizza. No surprise.

So, before we get Andrew on though, make sure you’re following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on your favorite podcast app or wherever you listen to podcasts. That way, as soon as a new episode becomes available, it will download. So, that being said, let’s get Andrew on the podcast. So, Andrew, welcome to the podcast.

Andrew Russo:

Thank you for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:

Absolutely. Well, it’s been a little bit since you’ve been on, so let’s refresh everybody’s memory. What have you been up to and what do you do in the Salesforce ecosystem?

Andrew Russo:

So, right now, my role is as the Salesforce architect, admin, developer. I mean, we’re a small company at BACA Systems, so I’m the solo Salesforce resource. So, I kind of play a lot of hats and I manage our entire org. So, that’s the main thing that I do here. We have a lot of flows, of customization. So, I’ve been trying to learn a lot about that and how to manage our complex org.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Captain of the ship, which is what most admins play.

Andrew Russo:

Yeah. It’s a big ship though. It’s challenging.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know. Yep. Well, the whole goal is to grow the ship and then maybe you get a fleet of people to help you.

Andrew Russo:

It started as a rowboat. Currently, it’s like a cruise ship with one person in charge of it, and cruise ships are hard to drive with one person.

Mike Gerholdt:

They could be, yes, but you need to have resident comedian, house band, buffet. I’m sure those are all fun analogies to things.

Before we go down the cruise ship line, that’s for another podcast, let’s talk about, you were at Dreamforce and I think a few Salesforce Admins were at Dreamforce. If not, they definitely saw some of the content that’s online. I’d love to know when you get back from, was it three days of Dreamforce now? And the content that you’re a part of and the notes that you’ve taken, what are some of the things that you do to think about what’s next or to put into action some of the things that you learned?

Andrew Russo:

Yeah. I think when I’m there, really the big thing is I like to take high-level notes when I’m there. I think if you get too in the details trying to take notes, it’s hard for me at least to go and actually take actual things. So, generally what I’ve learned to do is I take some of the high-level notes of key areas and then I go back to them. So, when I’m there, I’m able to just focus on the content and the learning and connecting with other people in the community, and then I go back to the content that I thought was really helpful and I look at it.

But for me, right now, if I think about some of the big takeaways, one of them was data quality and really getting everything in shape is probably the most critical thing that you can do for an existing org like us. Trying to fix those type of things that are just foundational to support all of our future things we’re trying to do.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I mean, I know anecdotally from seeing some of the session data, all of the sessions that were about data and cleanliness were really well attended, and it makes sense, right? Because good data in, good data out, and now good data for AI to consume.

Andrew Russo:

Exactly. I think that’s probably one of the biggest drivers is looking forward of the AI, and it’s also thinking about what can we do to position ourselves to be ready for generative AI and how that will play a role. Thinking about on our service side, one of the big projects that became probably one of our top projects we’re going to be rolling out, Salesforce Knowledge, I think was probably one of the biggest takeaways or actionable things that I now am … That’s my big project for this fall is to get our Knowledge base for service up and going to help our customers.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, that’s no small feat. I feel like that’s building your own library.

Andrew Russo:

It is building a library, an organization system and structure for a library, and then getting everyone who hasn’t gone to the library in years to want to go to this library, and authors.

Mike Gerholdt:

Free library cards for everybody. Exactly. Yeah, I know authoring, ah, fun times.

Andrew Russo:

That’s probably the hardest part is getting the content created.

Mike Gerholdt:

Mm-hmm. You mentioned you’re an admin of one, and I want to get into some of the stuff that was announced at Dreamforce because that’s why I had you on. But one other thing that crossed my mind, for admins of companies that are smaller and everybody defines their own size, how do you see AI and some of the new Agentforce features rolling into orgs like that?

Andrew Russo:

I think, for me, I was actually lucky enough to be able be part of some of the pilot stuff that happened. And one of the biggest ones, which it sounds crazy, but the formula one, that’s to help you with formula fields. So, you could do it when you’re making a formula field for a row level summary for reporting as well as on the admin side to just explain a formula. It sounds so simple, but the amount of effort that that has saved me from finding those pesky, you’re missing the parentheses, or you had a curly comma or the curly single quote instead of it being a straight single quote. So, it doesn’t work. Those kind of things, having it where it just fixes it, it’s like the quality of life features for an admin that are amazing.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, I never thought about it that way. That’s a good perspective.

Andrew Russo:

Especially if you think about copying and pasting. That’s where it’s challenging.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, that’s 90% of how I wrote all my formulas was copy and paste. “Somebody else, please write the formula. Okay, there’s about 90% of the formula that I need. Let me just plug in the fields that it makes sense to.”

A lot of this stuff … I mean, obviously Agentforce was the big headliner at Dreamforce this year, but you pointed out you really see also the not off Broadway show that Salesforce talked about, which was Foundations. So, tell me from your perspective why as a Salesforce admin, Foundations was so big at Dreamforce this year for you?

Andrew Russo:

Yeah. I think Foundations, I mean, when I was watching the keynote, it was almost, I think kind of the last … I think it was soft announced just right before Dreamforce, but then during the keynote it was also kind of re-announced it. I think that what was announced of what’s included with it, having some of the different parts, like we’re a small company, I don’t really have the opportunity to just go try out some of the big, more expensive or larger features. I don’t have the ability to just, “Oh, well let me go try and do some pilot…” It’s kind of challenging. So, having access to a try before you actually go fully configure is really helpful for us to be able to look at where can we grow and move to with the platform?

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, are you looking at data integrations across marketing or commerce or service? I mean, I know you mentioned Knowledge.

Andrew Russo:

Yeah. So, having Knowledge now is definitely a big thing. So, some of the little parts like sales and service cloud that were really heavily overlap, but just a little couple things, now that it’s kind of more unified to be one thing, it makes it a lot easier. So, now we have access to Knowledge for all of our search [inaudible 00:08:41]. So, it kind of enabled that project, which we need to support generative AI as we go into the future too.

Mike Gerholdt:

I suppose we jumped maybe a little bit of the cart in front of the horse. For you, if you had to describe Foundations to another Salesforce admin, maybe they didn’t hear about that, how would you describe it?

Andrew Russo:

All of the features that you wish you had five months ago that you now have. Just the little bits of the features, I think, that’s how I look at it, as like, they’re the features that you wish you had, but you would’ve had to go buy multiple cloud to just get the small, little piece that you wish you had.

Mike Gerholdt:

Gotcha. Well, that sounds awesome. So, it can be, like I remember sitting in Dreamforce keynotes and hearing sometimes about features that we were using, sometimes about features that we weren’t using. With multiple features being announced as part of Foundations, for you, how did you prioritize your one admin, your one org? Obviously, you just can’t go and it’s like a gym locker and turn all the light switches on. How are you kind of prioritizing what features to use and how to roll them out?

Andrew Russo:

Yeah. So, for us, it’s really about looking at where do we want to be strategically. So, I actually have a lucid chart, which I took one of the … I think on the architect website, they have a roadmap one, so I kind of just copied that and then I just changed it a little bit and did a lot of copy paste and modified it. So, it’s just a really high-level view of what we’re doing as a company with Salesforce, just so that I can also show from a strategic point of view when people have these requests of like, “Oh, well, I want this.” “Okay, but here’s kind of what we have. We don’t have an unlimited bandwidth here, so is that more important than all of these?” And then, that helps to keep requests that don’t really make sense or align with the company goals.

So, that kind of became still the guiding light to it, and I think that even after Dreamforce, that didn’t change a lot because it’s still what are the company priorities? We’re not just trying to go implement features because now we have them. It has to align with what our company goals are.

Mike Gerholdt:

That makes sense. That definitely also helps you prioritize, right?

Andrew Russo:

It helps me prioritize and also it helps me keep focused on what’s the important thing that we need to do to keep our business growing overall?

Mike Gerholdt:

So, I realized this when I was sitting down, what are we going to talk about? A lot of the times we talk about the benefit to the admin, because that’s the person listening, right? “What’s it matter to me?” But so often, everything that we implement, everything that we do is on behalf of a user because we know sitting in their chair what their pain points are. How for you, is the admin looking to communicate some of the benefits of Foundations to your users?

Andrew Russo:

Yeah. I think it’s looking at where the challenges are. An example for us that’s why I’m also really excited for it is today we use an external marketing email sending tool that we just take exports of emails, put them in, send email list. So, on the sales side, we use sales engagement to send the sales cadences, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Sure.

Andrew Russo:

Just a very small tree one just for trying to drip information about a specific product, but we’re not doing full-scale marketing across the board, but for that use case today, right now, we’re sending it out like that, but with Foundations now, we can use the marketing emails that get sent and it’s essentially can do exactly what that is, but just from Salesforce. So, we can skip the whole having to send it out, then the emails will log in Salesforce, so our sales team can see when they were sent. Right now, the ones that are sent as bulk mail don’t show up in Salesforce.

So, just that little quality of life thing and it’s just easier overall. That’s kind of a big thing, but we don’t have a strong use case to go get a giant marketing automation system because honestly, we don’t have the people to go generate all the content for that. Right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think it’s always, you never have to apologize for the size that you are. I think that’s, “Oh, we’re not a big organization.” That’s okay. You’re the size that you are and you’re also proportionate. You always need a couple more admins, right? But you’re proportionate to the size that you can support. You don’t need to apologize for, “Well, we’re not this massive $10 billion email monster.”

Andrew Russo:

It would be nice, but also I feel like if I got a bunch of emails from us every day, I would be a little … Just thinking from the customer point of view, who I get emails from vendors and stuff like that all the time. I’m like, “Lululemon, how do you get me an email every day, 5:00 to 6:00 PM?” But I look at them like, “I should unsubscribe.” But I also am like, “Okay. Well, I haven’t yet, but I get them every day 5:00 to 6:00 PM.”

Mike Gerholdt:

No. Sure.

Andrew Russo:

So, somehow it’s enough that … So, it’s like, how do we become the company that can give information that’s valuable enough that people don’t want to unsubscribe because they find value in the content, but also be able to manage doing that?

Mike Gerholdt:

I know. I’ve got a whole folder of emails that’s like that, that I don’t want to unsubscribe because that one time that I need to get something, chances are they probably will have emailed me maybe a 20% off code. I’m just cheap enough that I want to keep those emails going to get that 20% off.

You mentioned marketing and email and stuff like that, that makes you think of the app exchange and the upgrade includes access to third-party extensions through the app exchange. Are you looking at ways or maybe things you could do now with that?

Andrew Russo:

Yeah. I think for us, a couple of the areas that we’re excited also to extend out is one of those is on collecting payments and stuff. Right? We’ve got sales cloud, we’ve got service, which means we’ve got revenue, but we need to collect payments.

Mike Gerholdt:

It’s very important. Right?

Andrew Russo:

It is very important. Today, right now, when they want to take … They just log into this separate system. They type in a card number, right? The customer calls over the phone, they type it in, they process the payment, they download the PDF receipt, they send it to the customer. Right? So, it’s not a good experience. It also takes time. But if we could send a link-

Mike Gerholdt:

Sure.

Andrew Russo:

… that then the customer could put their stuff into themselves. And maybe we include that link on the invoice ahead of time so the customer could self enter it in and we don’t even have to have that phone conversation because it’s just not a good experience. That’s kind of big, and we could do that now.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. And I mean, you think of that person’s time, rarely are they hired to just do that. There’s also other things they need to do, but they’ve … It just so happens, I imagine maybe over the lunch hour they get busy because that’s when everybody calls in to make their payments really quick because they have to talk to a person.

Andrew Russo:

Exactly. The exact problem of like … Or, they’re busy working on sending out invoices to some of the other customers and now they’re, “Oh, well, a phone call came in.” You can’t hold off on a phone call because you don’t want to put a customer on hold or have it just ring continuously. So, you have to pick up that. Trying to prioritize ways to not have to do that type of thing.

Also, from a customer point of view, if I got a link that I could pay with Apple Pay or that I could put a card into myself, and when I’ve got an iPhone, it auto-fills my card that I have saved, that’s a lot better of an experience.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I had no idea, not that I want to turn this into an Apple Pay podcast, about a year and a half ago, finally the Luddite in me got to using Apple Pay, and since then, the frictionless payment method of Apple Pay has caused me to buy a lot more things than I probably should have.

Andrew Russo:

I think, honestly, for me, if I think about as a customer experience, everyone hates paying utility bills, right? Became a homeowner, I have utility bills that come in. The easiest one I have to pay, that’s not an auto-pay one, because auto-pay is kind of scary to an extent. You don’t realize how much money goes out. It’s nice. But the one that I have is the water bill. It literally has a QR on it. It comes quarterly. The QR code, you scan it with your phone, it opens. You can click Apple Pay. You put in the amount, which you just type the amount that’s on it. You click pay and it’s done. It’s the easiest thing I’ve ever had.

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s nice.

Andrew Russo:

That’s the kind of experience we want to deliver as a company.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Well, congrats on being a homeowner. That’s a big step.

Andrew Russo:

It is a big step. Midwest homeowner life.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, did you just become a homeowner over the summer?

Andrew Russo:

No, it’s a year now.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay. So, you’ve been through a winter, so you already know.

Andrew Russo:

Oh, yeah, we had an ice storm last winter.

Mike Gerholdt:

The water bill isn’t the scariest thing that’ll come in.

Andrew Russo:

No, the water bill is not. The when you get sod bill after that with the water bill is. Also, when you have woods around you and I have corn fields that are relatively close, that’s really fun when there’s a big ice storm.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yes.

Andrew Russo:

And you go to Harbor Freight to get a generator, so the next move that I did during that.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Those battery generators, I will tell you, I stumbled across one of those over the summer to go for a lot of the shows that I do. And man, I really like that, having that in my house. I got one that’s just big enough that’ll run a refrigerator for a day. I hope I never have to use it, but knowing I have it, it’s peace of mind.

Andrew Russo:

It’s peace of mind. Exactly. Going back into the Salesforce world for off of our Midwest problems and woes.

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, every now and then, you got to … It’s like a commercial break. You got to have a commercial break.

Andrew Russo:

Well, if we want commercial, I know that you don’t unsubscribe to the Casey’s Pizza email coupon.

Mike Gerholdt:

No, I don’t. And they use Salesforce too.

Andrew Russo:

You got to be careful when those come through.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. Well, speaking of which, they have a jalapeno popper pizza, and if you listen to this podcast and you get Casey’s Pizza and you get the jalapeno popper pizza, which say that five times fast, let me tell you how amazingly good it is when you put it in your fridge right away and eat it the next day. Don’t eat it hot. It’s okay hot. It is amazing as cold pizza because then the cream cheese sets up. Aces.

Andrew Russo:

Honestly, cold pizza, for me, I’m a big fan.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, yeah. I mean, I’ll always eat cold pizza, but this pizza in particular, Andrew, I’m telling you it is life-changing because it tastes like a jalapeno popper, but when you get it and it’s fresh and it’s warm, it just doesn’t work for me. I don’t know. Also, I want them to bring back their bacon cheeseburger pizza because that was the best pizza they ever had.

Andrew Russo:

That does sound good.

Mike Gerholdt:

It’s amazing. It’s amazing. And they put some sort of brisket thing. They keep dancing around, not bringing back the best pizza they ever made, which people would argue is the taco, and their taco is good.

Andrew Russo:

They might be listening and it might come soon.

Mike Gerholdt:

I hope, man.

Andrew Russo:

It’d be a wish.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, God. Anyway, we should talk Foundations. Back to the show. Ladies and gentlemen, now resuming progress. Already in progress, whatever. I mentioned a lot about Foundations. What haven’t I mentioned that stands out to you is like admins should know about this?

Andrew Russo:

I think one of the biggest areas that admins haven’t all been able to fully touch, like I think if I step back and look at what was the most impactful thing at Dreamforce? I had another admin who was talking to me. They did the Agentforce launchpad and they have said that experience, just sitting down and you’re just talking with your voice and it generated an agent for you, a proof of concept of it, they said that alone was worth going to Dreamforce.

Mike Gerholdt:

Wow.

Andrew Russo:

So, that type of thing, Agentforce, as much as it’s like, “Okay. Well, is it just hype?” I think it has a lot of utility. Even yesterday, I was having a conversation with someone and they were asking, and I didn’t know exactly the context. They had asked, “Is there any way to chat with your Knowledge-based [inaudible 00:22:18]?” I was like, I think I just said, “What do you mean?” And then it was, “Elaborate…” Like, what do they mean? And they were like, “Well, if you wanted to just have a conversation with it and ask question about how to set stuff up.” And I’m like, “Um, that’s called Agentforce.”

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Andrew Russo:

It can do that. That’s kind of the whole point of it. It’s like, think about the customer experience of it. You’re like, “Well, I don’t have a thing.” Say that you’re selling software. Your customer installs the software, like a trial version, wants to get up and running. They want help setting it up. Do you want them to have to call and wait on hold possibly and then not buy the software? Because they’re like, “Hey, I’m going to go to this other company who’s got it that you don’t have to wait on hold talking to somebody.” That type of experience, it starts to make a lot of sense.

Mike Gerholdt:

Absolutely. It’s a good example. As we wrap up, you go to a lot of Salesforce events. As a Salesforce admin, if you had advice for other admins out there looking at the breadth of what is available for them to go to, because there’s user groups, there’s world tours, there’s TrailblazerDX, there’s obviously Dreamforce. How do you kind of plan out … I know you go to a lot, but strategically, if you had to give admins advice on what events should they go to, how should they plan their year so that they stay up to date, they stay knowledgeable, they stay connected?

Andrew Russo:

If I was going to pick, I’m going to say one Salesforce official event that Salesforce hosted, if I had to choose one, I would probably say TrailblazerDX. Honestly, if you’re an admin, that’s the one to be at. Dreamforce has a lot of announcements and stuff, but it was a lot more technical, I will say, this year than ever in the past. But TrailblazerDX, it’s a smaller event. It’s a lot more manageable to go to. You’re seeing a lot more. It’s admin focused. The admin is the heart of TrailblazerDX.

But the other thing is, go to a local community event that’s there, or even just Trailblazer Community groups are a great resource to go to. And for me, when I go to the events, like I said at the beginning, it’s like full circle. When I go, I focus on high level and then I come back to the content after. I’ll take the notes and I’ll try and go back to it. But I really like just connecting with people. I think the friendships that you build in person are the most valuable thing out of going to different events.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. No, I couldn’t agree more. Andrew, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and opening my eyes to Foundations because I know I was knee-deep into Agentforce at Dreamforce, so I appreciate that.

Andrew Russo:

Yeah, no problem. It was a really great time. And also, pizza. I think I might get pizza or Culver’s.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’m telling you, if you’re a regular listener to the podcast, the food diversion is going to happen at some point in every episode. I’ve had people call out the fact that I’ve talked about Casey’s Pizza before. And if you don’t live in the Midwest, it’s literally mind-boggling for people to be like, “That’s gas station pizza.” Yeah, it’s gas station pizza at another level. Also, their breakfast pizza, in my opinion, now that they got rid of the bacon cheeseburger, their breakfast pizza might be the single best pizza on the planet.

Andrew Russo:

I just realized something, and we might talk, there might be food diversions, but the caramel apple spice or pumpkin spice, or what is it? Do you remember? I’m thinking back, it’s October though. It’s like the exact month.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I mean, it’s pumpkin spice season right now. My mom’s huge into pumpkin spice. I think growing up I had too much pumpkin pie as a kid. I can’t do pumpkin pie.

Andrew Russo:

Well, is a PSL pumpkin spice latte or permission set license?

Mike Gerholdt:

No. I can do that. I know, right? Both. And that’s the one exception that I make to the ick of pumpkin spice is I do like at least one pumpkin spice latte, which sounds weird.

Andrew Russo:

I can say I haven’t had one in probably three-plus years.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, when you have one-

Andrew Russo:

I don’t know-

Mike Gerholdt:

… you’re going to realize the mistake you’ve made by not having one.

Andrew Russo:

I know. I might get one tomorrow.

Mike Gerholdt:

You should, along with some Casey’s breakfast pizza, because that sounds amazing. Literally, all the time. Andrew, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Andrew Russo:

Thank you for having me.

Mike Gerholdt:

So, that was a fun conversation with Andrew. I hope you enjoyed the episode. He really seems to have his head wrapped around a lot of different things and is really paying attention to both keeping in sync with features that Salesforce is rolling out, along with the needs and direction that his organization is looking for him to go to.

And of course, I warned you, if you’re hungry, and probably not hungry no more, you’re going to order pizza tonight. But if you’re looking for some tips, not necessarily pizza tips, although there are a few podcasts with recipes in them, you can find all of that over at admin.salesforce.com for everything that you’ll need, including a full transcript of the episode. And if you’d like to get more information, follow along, connect with other Salesforce Admins, be sure to join the Admin Trailblazer group in the Trailblazer Community. Of course, all those links will be in the show notes for the episode.

So, with that, I think we’ve covered a lot. We’ve laid a good foundation, as you would say. Until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How Can Small Teams Benefit from Salesforce Foundations and Generative AI? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, Josh Birk talks to Jagan Nathan, Technical Architect with Customer Success at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about guest user anomalies and what you can do about them with the Threat Detection app.

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

Jagan works as a Technical Architect with the Customer Success Group at Salesforce. He’s focused on helping businesses use Data Cloud to de-silo their data so they can get a full picture of their customers.

Jagan estimates that 60-70% of the time you spend on a Data Cloud migration is used to make sure you understand what needs to be done. That’s because the most important decisions are around what objects and data sources you want to map and how it all fits together. If you need help getting started, his team has put together the Data Cloud Workbook Template to walk you through everything.

The biggest security issues Jagan encounters in orgs come from changes made to profiles and permissions over time. All those consultants can begin to add up! At some point, you need to do an audit of who can see what and apply the principle of least privilege.

And that’s the reason we brought Jagan on the pod, because one way this can happen is through something called a guest user anomaly. Essentially, it’s when a guest user account has more access than it otherwise than it should. For example, an Apex class that allows them pull all of your data. It’s the kind of thing that’s difficult to identify but can leave you primed for a data breach if you don’t know about it. 

The good news is that there’s something you can do about guest user anomalies. If your org has Event Monitoring, you can use the Threat Detection app to identify problematic accounts and take action. It uses the power of machine learning to figure out where the gaps are in your permissions and flag them for you.

In fact, the Threat Detection app can help you monitor all sorts of other anomalies, too. Like if a user who does their reports in the same time window each week suddenly logs in at 3 a.m. to pull a bunch of data, or someone based in Albuquerque logs in from Finland. It can even monitor your APIs. And the best part is that enabling Threat Detection is as easy as turning on the permission set.

Jagan gets into more specifics in our interview, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Josh Birk:

All right. Today on the show we welcome Jagan. Did I do that right, Jagan?

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

So when it comes to threat detection, threat detection is one of the submodule of the event monitoring, which comes free of cost. If customer has event monitoring, then they would be able to use threat detection free of cost. So threat detection has a lot of events built into it and one of the events is a guest user anomaly event. So guest user anomaly is one of the interesting event because there are a lot of customers who are using guest users in their communities or back then they used to have a Force.com site. So they have built a business process surrounding guest user. So here at Salesforce what we thought is why can’t we build a guest user anomaly even so that customers would be able to identify if there is any threat around the guest user.

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

Jagan Nathan :

Josh Birk:

The post Key Security Best Practices for Salesforce Admins Using Data Cloud appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to John Demby, Director of Solution Engineering at Tableau. Join us as we chat about Pulse for Salesforce, Tableau Einstein, and how easy it is to get started.

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

John leads a team of demo engineers for Tableau. What that means is they get their hands on all the new solutions and products ahead of time, and use them to make cool things. And two of the coolest, newest things out there are Pulse for Salesforce and Tableau Einstein.

Tableau Einstein takes all of the goodness of Tableau, the powerful features of Data Cloud, a new semantic layer called Tableau Semantics, and brings that into Salesforce. There’s also a Tableau Agent, allowing you to open up the power of business intelligence and analytics to everyone on your team through Agentforce.

“We started thinking about how people consume data,” John says, “and I think it’s changed.” People want to consume data within the flow of their work. They don’t want to have to go looking around for things, or sift through multiple dashboards to figure out what information is relevant.

That’s where Pulse for Salesforce comes in. It provides contextual, relevant insights from your data directly into Salesforce. With a simple KPI scorecard, you and your users can see what metrics are up, what metrics are down, and get insights about the next steps you should take.

The scorecards Pulse for Salesforce provides are just the beginning because you can also ask it questions. Pulse is AI-infused, meaning you can ask plain language questions to generate specific insights about your data. It’s also built for collaboration, so it’s easy to take these insights and start a conversation with anyone else in your organization.

Getting Pulse for Salesforce is as easy as installing a managed package in your Salesforce instance. “We’ve made it really for a Salesforce Admin to set this up with little to no Tableau experience,” John says. There are nine premade dashboards to get you started, and it’s easy to customize things to get something that works for you.

John shares a lot more great stuff about Pulse for Salesforce and Tableau Einstein, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

And then I got to do all sorts of cool things, like move into the office of the chief product officer where I worked on Salesforce Tableau integration strategies, and now I get to lead my fun team.

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

I scroll through and I find something, maybe the latest story about Taylor Swift and that other dude she’s dating.

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

It has AI infused in it, it has the ability to really give you insights very quickly. So then what you need to do is to take action, either early warning or corrective action, or even if something’s going great, letting your team know it’s going great.

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

The good news is, we gave you permissions to be able to create all the metrics you want on any of the data, as long as you surface it inside of Salesforce from that perspective. If you’ve got some external data that your salespeople would really value and seeing right there on the opportunity record or the home page or something like that, you can actually add those metrics, not just the nine that we ship. It’s just embedded in Salesforce. It works on Salesforce mobile. We actually made it to pop up off the utility bar, which people think is really cool. So I’m right there in the sales app and at any point I want, I hit the button and I’ve got Pulse metrics. But yeah, you can stick it anywhere inside of Salesforce. We give you those nine pre-built ones, but we don’t limit you to that. It’s a simple app but it is a very powerful app, and we’re already seeing demand. We’ve got hundreds of customers already lined up that want to get onboard with Pulse for Salesforce.

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

But when you look at it, only about 30% of the potential knowledge workers … think of a knowledge worker as really anybody that could use data to influence a decision, so that could be all the way down to the shop floor. So knowledge workers are everywhere, they’re not just behind a desk and things like that, but only about 30% of those actually have access to data. Sometimes, like I said, it’s locked away. It may be in a dashboard, so we actually ask them to go find it. But the future is really bringing it in the flow, embedding it in where they are, being able to show it on things like mobile devices and tablets and all those accelerated devices where you can get more information. Yeah. I think admins will find that it’s a very common conversation to have with the business. We’re happy to have it with you, to talk to you about all the different industry use cases and all the different options that we’ve seen people use Pulse for.

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

I simply ask it, tell me the Pulse metrics for Loyalty Management and next thing I know, I had about 10 Pulse metrics they called out that you could actually write on Loyalty Management. It was very simple, very clean. I could actually take those definitions, create my dataset for Loyalty Management, and build out those metrics just in a matter of minutes and then share them with the organization. So AI is helping us even figure out what ways to deploy our software, which I think is really cool.

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

John Demby:

Mike Gerholdt:

And don’t forget to join the conversation with other Salesforce admins over in the admin Trailblazer group that is over in the Trailblazer Community. Again, you know where to find the link, it’s in the show notes. So until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post What Makes Tableau Pulse Essential for Salesforce Admins? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, guest host Josh Birk talks to Katie Villanueva, Golden Hoodie winner and Salesforce Administrator at 10K Advisors. Join us as we chat about her work with mental health advocacy and mindfulness principles that you can apply to your work as a Salesforce Admin.

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

Katie started out as an accidental admin, getting her degree in radio and television. These days, she works as a Salesforce Administrator for 10K Advisors, where she’s hard at work updating legacy code with flows and improving workflow processes.

Katie’s also the founder of the Mental Health and Illness Trailblazer Community Group. It’s a space in the ecosystem to make meaningful connections, share resources, and share stories. “We’re not alone in our struggles,” Katie says, and what’s important is to build that support network and talk about it.

Recently, Katie gave a talk at Midwest Dreamin’ entitled “Appreciate Your #AwesomeAdmin Self,” based on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s seven principles of mindfulness. The principles are a skill and something you have to practice, but they can help you overcome fear, doubt, imposter syndrome, burnout, stress, and negative self-talk.

The principles are:

In the talk, Katie gets into how you can apply those principles to your work as a Salesforce Admin. 

At Dreamforce, Katie presented “Automate with AI: Prompt Builder, Flow, and Slack,” about the magic you can make when you get all three working together. If you missed out, she recently covered the same topics on How I Solved It with Jennifer Lee. 

Katie has so many great insights to share, so be sure to listen to the full episode to learn more. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Katie:

Katie:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Katie:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Katie:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

Katie:

Josh:

The post How Can Salesforce Admins Overcome Imposter Syndrome and Stress? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Eddie Cliff, VP of Product Management at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about Salesforce Foundations and how it can give you access to even more capabilities within Sales, Service, and beyond.

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

Eddie is the lead PM for Salesforce Foundations, and he’s here to tell us how it can be a game changer for orgs looking to incorporate AI. Now, if you’re a longtime listener to the podcast you know that AI tools are only as good as the data you give them. And while Data Cloud is meant to help you bring all your data into one place, it’s not always easy for customers to make the transition.

That’s where Salesforce Foundations comes in. It adds the basic capabilities of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud, and Agentforce to your org, for free.

The goal with Salesforce Foundations is to make it easy to get that 360° view of your customers. As Eddie says, their philosophy is “Easy by default, advanced by choice.” And you’ll find that as you start doing more with segmentation and personalization, you’ll realize just how much further you can go.

Right now, customers with Sales or Service EE or UE can get Salesforce Foundations for free. All you have to do is go into Setup and click on the Salesforce Foundations node, and you’ll be presented with a handy-dandy checklist with everything you need to get started.

Foundations makes it easy to get your org ready for Agentforce. That’s why Eddie and his team have included a freemium version of Agentforce in Foundations. “What’s really cool,” he says, “is that as you do more and you use more of these cross-cloud capabilities, your data in Data Cloud gets richer and more powerful and so does Agentforce.”

There’s a lot more in this episode about how Foundations was developed, what’s coming in the future, and the ins and outs of sea kayaking, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode of the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Mike:

Now, before we get started, I just want to make sure that you’re subscribed to the Salesforce Admins podcast on whatever platform you get your Salesforce podcast on. Go ahead and click that subscribe, or sometimes it’s a follow button. And that way, when new episodes come in every Thursday morning, they will be downloaded to your phone. So with that, let’s jump into our conversation with Eddie where he explains how Salesforce Foundations is designed to give customers access to even more capabilities within sales, service and beyond, including all of their existing Salesforce implementations at no cost. So Eddie, welcome back to the podcast.

Eddie Cliff:

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

Now, bringing all that data into one system will lead to happier customers because now you can do targeted marketing, smarter commerce, and more effective sales. And what’s really cool is that this also gets all of your data centralized and ready for AI, but it’s not easy for a lot of our customers to go from say just Sales Cloud or just Service Cloud on their own to the full Customer 360 that we talk about a lot. You need time and resources, and I know from a lot of customers I talk to, that’s not something that they have the luxury of having. And so that’s the goal here with Foundations is we’re making this easier by bringing all of these capabilities to all of our customers through Salesforce Foundations.

So Foundations gives all of these sales and service customers access to more of Salesforce included with their existing Salesforce implementation, and this is free. I want to make sure that’s clear. That’s not something we’re charging for, and you can add this to your existing organ, we’ll talk a little bit about that. But ultimately, with Foundations, we’ve made it easier than ever before to get started with that Connected Customer 360 by building our foundational apps into your CRM. And this includes the basic capabilities within Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Data Cloud, and now Agentforce, which is really exciting because as of today, it’s now available at no additional cost as part of Foundations.

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

And so that’s why we launched Pro Suite last year to allow for that seamless upgrade from Starter, and to allow our customers to get that enhanced set of capabilities and customization options. And again, we were getting really great feedback, which is awesome. And so what we started to hear from customers is they wanted to go up, they wanted to expand to Enterprise or even to Unlimited Edition, but they didn’t want to lose any of that 360. They didn’t want to go to Sales EE and lose the marketing and the commerce and the service capabilities that came with Starter and Pro Suites.

So that was the beginning of, “Well, let’s create this in a way that we can allow customers of Starter and Pro Suites to upgrade and not lose any capabilities.” But at the same point, we realized, “Well, we should make this base set of capabilities available for all of our customers so they can get that value, and they don’t have to start with Starter or Pro Suite. So they can do this directly in their EE or UE org.” And so doing things like allowing sellers to speed up things with payment links, and so they can send people to a digital storefront to take care of transactional deals that might free them up to focus on more strategic opportunities or doing cross-cloud scenarios like driving loyalty with Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud, working together to create onboarding journeys and loyalty campaigns.

And then also allowing marketing teams to get into the mix with really targeted Data Cloud segmentation and personalization tools to execute their email marketing campaigns. And ultimately allowing all the teams within an organization to get better cross-functional visibility by working out of that same system, all underpinned by Data Cloud.

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

And again, as I was talking about before, we realized that there was a large opportunity here to say, “Hey, there’s a lot of EE customers.” It’s by far and large the most adopted addition for us. There’s an opportunity to bring this starter level functionality from marketing, from commerce and from service to let’s say, a sales EE customer to start taking advantage of, to start trying out and using and see if it’s a good fit. They can start to bring in more team members across the organization, and then those solutions will scale and grow with them. But again, all can underpin by Data Cloud. So this makes it really easy for them to create that 360 view and sets it up really nicely now for the launch of Agentforce.

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

And so that’s near and dear to my heart, my team’s heart, on everything that we do in Starter and Pro and Foundations to hopefully make their products experiences as easy to use as possible and as delightful to use as possible as well.

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

And so you’ll have to accept some terms and go through that process, top power via your account, hopefully everybody’s seen that really cool self-service capabilities to manage what you have access to in Salesforce. But again, this is free. You’re not paying anything. It’s just adding these capabilities, accepting the terms because it’s some addendum cinema says, and that’s legal terms and the lawyers required it. But once you agree to all that, then we take care of the rest and provisioning and adding everything to your work. And so then all of the necessary pieces will then be present. And so you can go through the rest of the steps once you’ve added it in. There’s some more sections in that set up node. So if you want to go ahead and enable Data Cloud, you can go through that process. If you want to get started with Marketing Cloud, you can enable that, and Commerce Cloud and so forth.

And we’re going to continue to add on to this page as well to make it simpler, and so that you can take advantage of some of the experience pieces too, like being able to add the Left Nav, to get our homepage in the quick settings enabled for your users. So we’re really excited about that. So it’s just the beginning of what you’ll see if you log into your org today. More will be coming in the following months and releases.

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

And as I mentioned, all those pieces that you need are there. And so you get Data Cloud out of the box alongside Agentforce, and you get that full Foundations Suite experience across sales, service, marketing and commerce. And what’s really cool here is as you do more and you use more of these cross-cloud capabilities, your data and Data Cloud gets richer and more powerful, and so does Agentforce. So a great example of this, you think about the service use cases, which I’m really excited about the possibilities and what our customers are going to do with the Autonomous Service Agents. Really, really cool stuff, where you get that base level of Service Cloud now that has knowledge base. And so you can create those knowledge articles and you can start to build out that wealth of information that can then flow into Data Cloud and be used via Agentforce, which is just really cool and not something that you’d been able to do without Foundations previously.

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

And also the utility of keeping me dry because it’s got these pedals that you have to use with your feet to propel the kayak. So it’s really important that you have a comfortable seat so that your back isn’t killing you at the end of the day.

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

Mike:

Eddie Cliff:

Mike:

And if you’re looking for more resources, we’ve got those. So you can learn about Salesforce Foundations. Just head on over to admin.salesforce.com for a wealth of content, all for Salesforce admins, directly for you, including a transcript of today’s show. And don’t forget to join our conversation in the Admin Trailblazer group, that’s in the Trailblazer community. Again, link is in the show notes. Show notes are at admin.salesforce.com. We keep it all together for you in one place. Speaking of keeping it all together, until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How Can Salesforce Admins Leverage Foundations to Prepare for Agentforce? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Cole, Director of Business Intelligence and Automation at 908 Devices. Join us as we chat about how Salesforce Admins can bridge the gap between business processes and data accuracy.

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

Jen gave a stellar presentation about business processes and data strategy at World Tour Boston, and I wanted to bring her on the podcast to learn more. “Data isn’t helpful if you don’t know your process,” she says, “it’s just interesting facts on a screen that maybe make pretty graphs. But what does it tell you if you don’t know what questions you’re answering?”

More often than not, the people doing a business process don’t understand why they need to log data a certain way. That’s why as Salesforce Admins, we need to understand the “why” behind data entry. If we can bridge the information gap and explain why having accurate data is so important, we’re more likely to get people on board.

With new AI tools like Agentforce or Next Best Action, having accurate data is more important than ever. As Jen puts it, “Inaccurate data creates inaccurate business decisions.” But in order to get there, you have to explain why it’s important.

Jen supports a lot of sales teams, and it’s a great example. Sales teams want to sell things, and they don’t always understand why they need to log an email into Salesforce or create the next step on an opportunity because they don’t know how that information will be used.

It’s up to Salesforce Admins to bridge this gap and spell out what the data is used for. If your sales team knows that logging their calls accurately will help you tell them the best time to call each prospect, they’ll be a lot more attentive to how they enter that data into Salesforce.

Jen points out that trainings are a great time to get started with explaining the why behind data collection. When they fill in this field, who else will use that information and how will it help the business as a whole? You need to get them invested in the process and help them see the broader picture.

Finally, it’s important to establish feedback loops that help your team stay invested in the process. If they can see how accurate data impacts their day-to-day, they’re much more likely to be invested in the project of data collection.

There’s a lot more great stuff from Jen about how to look at your business processes and data strategy, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to hear more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Mike Gerholdt:

This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’re talking with Jennifer Cole about data strategy and process. Well, yeah, a little something different because in the world of AI and a lot of tools just in general, not to mention automation tools, it’s good to know what you’re doing with your data and do you have a process in place to make sure you’re collecting good data. Also, I ask her about bad data, so that’s an interesting answer. But really understanding what data are you collecting, and does everybody know the process for data collection because as we know, it’s going to be even more important to have great data so that AI can give us even better insights. But if we don’t know the process, then I think we’re in trouble. So Jennifer’s going to help us with that.

But before we get into the episode, just a reminder that if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, be sure to click the follow button, that way this podcast can automatically be downloaded right to your device so that when you’re out on your dog walk, you don’t have to worry about downloading it because it’ll already be there. And of course, I always appreciate a good review, so let me know how we’re doing. With that, let’s talk process and data quality and maybe data strategies. There’s quite a few things in this podcast with Jennifer. And let’s get Jennifer on the podcast. So, Jen, welcome back to the podcast.

Jennifer Cole:

Thanks, Mike. I’m really excited to be back.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, last time, and I’ll put a link in the show notes because you won’t hear that a thousand more times today, but we were talking about documenting your process as an admin when you’re solving things.

Jennifer Cole:

Yes, good stuff.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know. Well, I really enjoyed that. I could spend, again, probably another two hours doing that because, first of all, I constantly forget, “What was I doing here?” I should have wrote that down better. But we’ve since caught up a thousand other times and wanted to expand on that conversation because with AI, there’s so many more shiny tools out there.

Jennifer Cole:

There are.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know, seriously.

Jennifer Cole:

A lot.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’m getting the cart in front of the horse. Let’s refresh people about the amount of awesomeness stuff that you work on and what you do in the community. So let’s start there.

Jennifer Cole:

Sure. Yeah. I am Director of Business Intelligence and Automation at 908 Devices, which is a super cool title that basically says, “I am still an awesome admin.” I’m building apps and supporting my team. I run a team of awesome admins and have recently been able to co-present with one of my awesome admins at the Boston World Tour last, what, two months ago? Wow, time flies.

Mike Gerholdt:

I know. Yeah.

Jennifer Cole:

Oh, so much. Talking about process and data strategy. So that is my sweet spot and what I’m still rocking out at 908.

Mike Gerholdt:

I feel everybody now is paying attention to data with AI. Data, data, data. Pay attention to your data, clean your data, wash your data, put your data in a dishwasher.

Jennifer Cole:

Give me your data.

Mike Gerholdt:

Cascade is going to have special data tabs here pretty soon. Tide’s going to have data pods, right? I’m kidding.

Jennifer Cole:

I was going to ask if they were going to be Salesforce branded, that would’ve been fun. I would’ve bought those.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, I know, right? But they only work in the cloud, so you’d have to stand outside in the rain. That wasn’t a well-thought-through joke, so that’s okay. You can’t have a zinger every single time. But you bring up a good point. So what good is data if you don’t know your process, right?

Jennifer Cole:

Yeah. I don’t know that it’s helpful if you don’t know your process. It’s just interesting facts on a screen that maybe make pretty graphs, but what does it tell you if you don’t know what questions you’re answering?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I guess in the scheme of things, if we’re sitting down and we’re looking at our data and we’re cleaning our data, we should really take a step back and think about, “What are we doing with our process?” And maybe to your point, and you can expand on this, does everybody know the process? Do you run into a lot of organizations that don’t know their process?

Jennifer Cole:

Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

Or a process, I should say. The process, like there’s one.

Jennifer Cole:

Can I choose C, all of the above?

Mike Gerholdt:

C, all of the above.

Jennifer Cole:

Yeah, actually quite a few. And I would expect most people assume it’s certain pockets of the organization or those who just aren’t doing the day-to-day work, but I don’t think that’s true. I actually experience people that are doing the day-to-day work don’t even fully understand the process or why they’re doing what they’re doing or what information downstream or upstream their process is being leveraged in. So it’s everywhere, honestly.

Mike Gerholdt:

Look, we all go to work. People are probably listening to this podcast going to work, like, “I’m going to go to work and send some emails and do work.” And they do things. So when you say they don’t know the process, what about that do you… Is it there’s no organizational book or they don’t know where the data comes and they don’t know what they’re shipping out or where it goes?

Jennifer Cole:

I think a little bit of both, but if I think about the group of folks I support the largest amount of my time against is the sales organization. They have an objective to make sales, right? They’re in sales. It’s literally in their title. And for them, they just want to get the job done, right? They want to make a customer happy, they want to book that order, and they want to move on to the next one. And they don’t always understand why they have to log an email into Salesforce or why they need to create this next step on their opportunity, and who is actually using the application field that they’re tagging about their customer.

I think they get rightfully so focused on what they’re trying to achieve, they don’t see the broader picture of where their data’s going and how that helps the company refine what they’re doing or tweak the customer they want to focus on or tweak how we do things to make them more efficient. So I think in that particular very specific example, they’re just so focused on their job, they don’t understand why or how it matters.

Mike Gerholdt:

You bring up a very good step in the sales process. If they don’t understand why that step’s required and the data they’re gathering for that step, then they’re less likely to do it, right? They’ll just do it in a spreadsheet and then when the deal’s closed, they’ll just go in Salesforce and just bang through the opportunity as fast as they can, right?

Jennifer Cole:

Right. There’s nothing enriching in that. I can’t look at a bigger scope of data to understand, “Geez, a lot of our opportunities close faster when they do a follow-up call 20 days after X event.” And that would be juicy information to know because then it becomes a feedback loop in the process to say, “Hey, it looks like the odds of closing your deal faster if you do this particular step.” But if all of that is being logged outside of the system and we don’t know how many follow-up calls there are or face-to-face meetings or customer demos that are taking place, then we can’t provide that intel back to help them achieve their goals faster and smarter.

Mike Gerholdt:

So if they’re logging, let’s say, a required field, which is an arbitrary date because they’re trying to get through to the closed one because they think they’re following the process, but they really did the whole thing out of Salesforce, and then it’s Friday night and the quarter closes and they’re trying to get their opportunities in, by not understanding the process, are they then creating bad data?

Jennifer Cole:

Oh, bad’s a funny word. I would say inaccurate data. I would say data that’s going to mislead you. Yes, there’s technically bad data, but in that case, it’s not intentionally bad. It’s more just inaccurate to the true story. And I think that can make it very misleading for the business because they might adjust their workflow based upon the intel they have and it actually isn’t improving anything because nobody was being honest about what they were entering.

Mike Gerholdt:

So CEO goes to, we’ll use your example, Boston World Tour and sees the new AI, Copilot and Einstein stuff, and maybe wants to use Einstein Next Best Action, but because they’re just putting in arbitrary dates, the new shiny isn’t really helping them.

Jennifer Cole:

No, it just becomes a very expensive toy. Sorry, but it does. It doesn’t help them move anything faster, right?

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. And I think it’s an interesting concept because we always go back to, “Well, this one thing will just help you do stuff better.” But ultimately, before you even look at those things, it’s, “But what is the process that you’re trying to get to? Do you even understand the process?” Is that where you start with a lot of things?

Jennifer Cole:

It’s where I start everything. When a person comes for an enhancement or wants to report out on this particular metric or get data to understand what’s happening with their business, the question always begins with, “What questions are you trying to answer? I understand you are asking for this data point, but why? Is it something you’re doing today or you’re not doing today and you want to understand how well you are or are not filling that information in or following that process?”

Because understanding the process for me and my experience and my team’s experience helps us serve our customers better. And when I say customer, I mean internal employees in this case because we’re an internal team. We help them achieve so much more when we can get underneath and get to the why. Understanding their why is what drives bigger change for us because it often is not just them who need the help or need the change, but actually other people in the organization have that same why. So process is almost like a keystone in the bridge for us. We have to get to it. We have to understand it before we start building across and bridging islands together.

Mike Gerholdt:

Man, the number of times understanding the why has come up. I should get a shirt that says that.

Jennifer Cole:

That’d be a great shirt.

Mike Gerholdt:

Understand the why. So let me dial in specifically for an admin that’s listening. Are there things that you build into your application when you create something, let’s say for sales or customer service, that helps remind the end user about the why?

Jennifer Cole:

Sometimes, yes. Actually, a recent deployment we did was to enable sales to capture who should get automated booking and shipping notifications. And we moved that into Salesforce so that when it replicates over to our ERP, it’s auto-fed. It’s just more accurate. The sales rep knows who should be getting those notices. And we have those fields there to fill in those addresses, but we did something super simple. We added a little text bubble, an actual text component on the lightning page that explained what field did what, and critical reminders about which field you should fill in and which field you should update this address only.

And the feedback we got was, “That was great. I need that. That always will remind me because I can never remember what I’m supposed to do or why it matters.” And it was just a really simple little text component on the screen. So we try to do small things like that where we nudge them through the workflow with those gentle reminders, conditional visibility reminders, anything that helps them in that moment for that particular step in the process to remember the critical reason why it matters helps.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. That’s really great because you think about the level of complexity that is getting added to everyone’s job. I remember as an admin, I’d spent two, three months with maybe a department or a team working on what their process is and getting their app right in Salesforce. And by the end of it, man, you could have quizzed me Jeopardy-level on what was going on with that team and how the data flowed and I would have nailed it, but two months later-

Jennifer Cole:

It’s gone.

Mike Gerholdt:

… no idea. It’s gone.

Jennifer Cole:

What’s my name? Yes.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’ll take, nope, I don’t know, hodgepodge for 500, Alex.

Jennifer Cole:

Yes. Real admin life.

Mike Gerholdt:

Exactly. But somehow you just expect to turn that app over to your users and like, “Oh, I’m sure they’ll remember this.” So when you’re creating an app and have those epiphanies, “Let’s add this box that reminds people,” how important is it for you? Or how important do you feel it is that admins make sure that their users know where the data that they’re working on comes from and where it goes?

Jennifer Cole:

I think it’s actually critical to adoption. Everyone loves to throw this word adoption around, and it’s more than just logins. It’s actually usability of the system and following the process. And we had a sales meeting, was it two years ago, a year ago? And we were asked to present as a Salesforce team to the sales team about critical fields they need to fill in. And everyone’s done those trainings. They’re painful for the salespeople. They’re just sitting there, “Yeah, okay, I have to fill in the application. Yeah, okay, I have to update my close date. Yeah, okay.” And they go through this monotony. But what we found was so successful and an incredible adoption to following the process was when we told them why.

We said, “Okay, when you fill this in, here are the people after you that are using this data. Here’s your marketing team and how they’re using it to refine the drip campaigns to send to your customers. So if you classify them right, they’re going to get special content against their industry or application usage.” And we found, Mike, it was the coolest thing, we found in our support channel, we use Slack for issues and questions by the business, people after that sales meeting we’re just saying, “Now, what if I choose this and what happens if I choose this?” Because they knew who was using the data that they input and where it went, they started to care. And then we just saw greater adoption and questions around, “Well, what happens if I choose the wrong thing? Can I fix it?” And that’s a win as an admin in my book when your business suddenly cares about the data they’re putting in.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, especially for salespeople. I did an exercise like that where the salespeople went through the call center. And I remember sitting in the break room and the salespeople sitting down with call center agents and like, “Well, whenever we get this from sales, it says this.” And them sitting there going, “Well, we fill it out because we think it’s this.” But those two people had never talked. And the second they talked, it was like, “Oh, well we could 100% get this.” And then the customer service agent is like, “Oh, that would be so helpful because then when they call in and ask, we don’t have to spend 20 minutes looking something up.”

Jennifer Cole:

It’s amazing. It’s powerful.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’ll take ownership of this too, it’s the fact that when you sit down sometimes, you work at processes at a stage gate level and you forget, “Okay, well, I did sales and then sales ends here.” Well, sales doesn’t end there. There’s that gray area, and I just didn’t bring those groups together. I jumped over to service and obviously everything shipped and it was fine or then they’d call, except that gap in between there is the parts you got to work on.

Jennifer Cole:

The bridging of the teams and how the data flows between them.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah.

Jennifer Cole:

I think that’s where the secret sauce is.

Mike Gerholdt:

A lot of it is. So let’s touch on this. Automation has always been huge, and I know we’ve talked a lot with you about integrations and bringing data over. How does not knowing the process really impact automations?

Jennifer Cole:

How much time do we have? No, I’m kidding.

Mike Gerholdt:

As much time as you’d like.

Jennifer Cole:

I think it can have a huge impact on the business in not a good way. I think it could accelerate inaccurate data faster. If you don’t understand your process and why you’re filling in what fields, you could be filling in fields that mean nothing to your business, that mean nothing to you learning how to change your process, adapt your process to better suit your business and your customers. I think it can actually be an unfortunate waste of energy for your admins and money for the organization if you just don’t understand what you want to do and who’s doing what and why. Remember the TV show Lost, which is very controversial, no one likes the ending of Lost. But remember-

Mike Gerholdt:

I remember it. I’m one of the few people that never got into it.

Jennifer Cole:

Okay, consider yourself lucky.

Mike Gerholdt:

So I’ve been told.

Jennifer Cole:

You’ve saved so many hours of your life that you’ve done better things with.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh no, I’ve wasted them with other TV shows.

Jennifer Cole:

Well, I will quickly say, for the audience that does know the show, there’s this scene or episode where this guy just keeps pressing a red button and he has no idea why. And then he leaves and someone else has to take over pressing this red button. And ultimately, it ends up being not as critical as anyone might think, but they’re just doing it because they were told to do it and they have to do it, but nobody knows why.

And I think businesses, if they don’t understand their process, are doing the same thing. They’re demanding fields to be populated by their users that are never used, that are never actually aggregated to understand if there’s value or something to modify an existing workflow or change the direction of how you advertise to customers. They’re just pressing red buttons. So I think it can be dangerous if you don’t understand.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. So is that perpetuated by the fact that a lot of products and services are sold with, “Here’s the easy way to fix your X”?

Jennifer Cole:

Short answer? Yes. And I understand why that’s done. They want to show the ease of use of the tool. But I think the piece that’s really hard is we can’t get underneath to see how it’s built to know if it’s going to work for our challenging business problems that we’re trying to solve. And what isn’t really discussed either is why understanding your data strategy is so important and how that tool fits in. I think that’s missed.

And I don’t think that’s always understood by the C-suite or the folks that are paying for these tools. They just see this really cool tool like, “Hey, AI is going to do this for you. I want to be able to do that too. Let’s just buy it.” But somebody has to understand how it works, and somebody has to understand the process so that it actually becomes valuable. It’s missed. It’s truly, truly missed. And it’s hard for admins.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, I think you said something that’s even bigger than process that I’m realizing now, which is process exists in a world where there is a data strategy.

Jennifer Cole:

It’s a piece.

Mike Gerholdt:

We’ve probably not sat down, I’ve never sat down, have you ever sat down and written a data strategy with an organization?

Jennifer Cole:

Written it down? No. It’s desperately needed, but conversations are a good place to start, for sure.

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah, but it’s something that we as a Salesforce admin should think about because then we can create a world in which process can exist because data strategy tells me, “We know where the data is going to originate from, how we’re going to use it, and what our end goals are.” And end goals could be many endpoints. And then within that data strategy world is where we start to build different processes that take that data and transform it into useful things that the business can then use to make decisions on. So we just haven’t sat down and wrote data strategies.

Jennifer Cole:

I think so. And I think that’s hard day one. My own experience has been the process that was just built over time because somebody needed this field or somebody wanted to do this. There wasn’t a broader conversation of, “Well, who else wants to use this field?” And it’s something I need, do you need it too, Mike? Those conversations, I don’t think they happen at the beginning because businesses are just trying to get off the ground and they’re just trying to get customers engaged.

So we’re a little bit backwards in the whole process, but it is critical, I think, for businesses to start and stop… Well, how do I want to say this? They need to stop and think about, “We’ve got all these processes, do they still make sense? Are they where we want to go and do they fit into our larger strategy for what data we want to use to navigate the ship of our business truly?” So I think unfortunately, the data strategy doesn’t come until after processes are baked in, but hopefully not too solidified that they can’t rip them up and start something from scratch if it doesn’t fit the strategy they want to achieve.

Mike Gerholdt:

Right. Yeah, because I’m thinking early day one, which who knows where people are at, but early day one of a sales process is, “How do you get the widget to the customer as fast as possible?” Right?

Jennifer Cole:

Yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

Later stage day one, as the company matures, “How do we efficiently get the widget to the customer and understand our operational challenges?”

Jennifer Cole:

It’s an evolution, yeah.

Mike Gerholdt:

We’re still shipping widgets, it’s just why does the widget sit for six days at this stage? Is that six days lost or is that six days… I don’t know. And that’s where data strategy figures that out because are we even capturing that data to make that decision to figure that stuff out? And if not, then we need to start doing that.

Jennifer Cole:

Yes. And it makes me think about how I’m hearing more in the community, which very much excites me, of reverse thinking, “Well, what do you want to measure? Okay, let’s go backwards and figure out do you even have the fields to start measuring it. And are you measuring it because you’re curious or are you measuring it because it’s something you want to bake into your workflow and your process there?” So I’m excited to hear more in the community of folks starting to think about this reverse modeling of, “Well, we want to understand what our customers are doing with our widgets. Now that they’re using them, we’re super excited we’ve got this customer base, but should we start to target certain types of customers? Well, what are they doing with our widgets?”

“Okay, great question. Are you set up to even track that? And what do you need in order to start tracking it? And then who’s going to fill it in and do they know why they’re filling it in?” That whole reverse model. So that’s an exciting shift that I’m hearing more of in the industry and fellow admins to support that data strategy. But I think you’re right, that next step is really sitting down to define on paper what that strategy is and then communicating it to everyone in the organization at every level of the organization because that just goes back to the why. When folks understand the why, they get excited, they want to help.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’ll flip back and forth. So then you sit down, you look at process, you think of data strategy. When looking at tools, what are some things that admins shouldn’t be afraid to ask or should really get behind and get their hands dirty looking at?

Jennifer Cole:

Oh, thank you for the question. I think it’s setup. As a customer of Salesforce, your poor sales reps, I’m tough because I always want to see what’s underneath. Don’t give me the shiny YouTube video, let me play with it, let me get in there. So I would love for fellow admins to be just as precocious and go into setup. Let me physically see my options. And that’s super cool what you just showed me, but how did you set it up? Let me in your demo org. And Salesforce demo orgs are incredible, like what your solution engineers build and play with and what’s in there. Ask admins, ask for a sneak peek because you, as an admin, not only need to understand how your business would apply the tool, but you need to understand how it works and how it can scale to solve all the crazy problems that you’ll come across because in a way, you’ve got to sell it to your business. Admins are diverse. They’re builders, and they’re also internal salespeople to their own executive suite. So I would encourage them to say, “Show me how it’s made.”

Mike Gerholdt:

Yeah. I also, as an admin, liked showing my users if they wanted to see how I made the app or parts of it that, say sales, for example, if they asked, “Well, what happens if we add a step here?” Well, then I can just go click, click, boom, and now that new step shows up in path and shows up in the opportunity. And it lets them know two things. One, I understand the value of being agile and changing because if we’re working on a new process, we’ve got to be ready to, “Hey, this really isn’t working despite what we thought it would do on paper.” And also two, when we get to that point, you need to know I have the skill to change the application at the speed of business so that we can make that adjustment and keep moving forward.

Jennifer Cole:

Yes, I fully agree. And it’s interesting too because even my user population loves to see under the hood, even though they’re never-

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, really?

Jennifer Cole:

… going to use it. Oh, they love it. When they like to see those changes on the fly that you were just speaking to, like, “Yeah, I do know how to manage this application. I do know how to customize it. I can improve it for you.” When we do on-demand changes for them in a meeting when we’re getting app feedback or process feedback that we’ve implemented in Salesforce, they just think it’s so much fun.

Number one, they gain a lot more confidence in the team because they’re seeing something happen in real-time. But number two, they themselves love to see it and enjoy how quickly we can support the business. And also, it allows them to understand when sometimes it takes us more time because it’s more complicated, there’s a better understanding. So totally diverging topics on you, but yeah, users love it too.

Mike Gerholdt:

It’s getting behind the scenes, which is digging into process and digging into data strategies. So a follow-up to that, do you regularly share that, and would you recommend admins regularly do that as well?

Jennifer Cole:

Yes, I would actually. And it’s funny, as an admin, we’re often tagged as being a tiny bit controlling in our orgs and love everything to be precise and buttoned up. But I think it actually gains business trust when we crack open the org in setup for them and they can see how we click around because there’s no risk. If someone wants to join the admin team and they’re that curious and inspired by what they see in setup, oh my gosh, come on over. But at the same breath, admins can gain so much trust, I feel, from their business when they expose what they’re doing.

Because if you think about it, admins are going into the business every day and saying, “Show me your process. How are you doing it? Let me see what you’re doing.” We’re putting our business under the microscope to improve it. I don’t think there’s any harm in the reverse. It just helps build that mutual trust and relationship of sharing how to build something and what the possibilities are or are not. And I encourage it. I think it would be great. Actually, I encourage my team to do it. They do it in front of our users all the time, and it’s been a positive experience.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, I can’t think of a better way to wrap up the conversation than having brought it completely back around on us where we’re being as transparent with our processes, we’re asking the business to be with us while we create the technology to support it. Thanks for coming back on the pod and sharing your thoughts on this and giving us data strategies to work on.

Jennifer Cole:

Thanks, Mike. It was really great.

Mike Gerholdt:

I’m excited.

Jennifer Cole:

Me too. I’m excited [inaudible 00:32:28] admins do, have fun out there.

Mike Gerholdt:

Well, I don’t know about you, but I was thinking of a thousand different times that I needed to have a conversation between different departments so that they understood the importance of putting fields in. And really, it was interesting, after the call, Jennifer and I talked a little bit because so much of what we do when we sit down with our users is, “Well, how are we going to document this? What are we going to put in Salesforce?” And we get wrapped up with what we’re going to put in Salesforce, which we should, but we forget to talk of why.

And that came up in this conversation is why are we putting this down? Why is this a critical stage? Why is it critical that we capture this data at this point? And then who’s going to do something with it to make us a better organization? When talking sales, it’s not just shipping out the widget as fast as we can, but maybe as efficiently as we can and understanding different parts of our organization so that we can capture data. And I got to agree with Jennifer, boy, it was such a good point, having all of your users understand where the data is coming from and where the data that they create goes, where in the process they sit, and having those individuals meet with each other. I think that was such a great insight that Jennifer brought to this episode.

I hope you enjoyed listening to it. And of course, if you did, you can share it with your friends. Just go ahead and click on those three dots. There’s usually three dots in just about every application now, and you can share it on social. I would so appreciate that. And if you’re looking for resources or anything that we mentioned in the episode itself, show notes are right there. They’re also on our website, admin.salesforce.com, which has got everything you need to read, blog posts, other podcasts you can listen to, and a transcript of this show. And of course, you can join the conversation in the Admin Trailblazer group, which is in the Trailblazer Community, that is also a link in the show notes. A lot of people talk in data quality and process there too. All right, so until next week, we’ll see you in the cloud.

The post How Business Process Documentation Enhances Data Collection 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 Workflow Builder, Slack integrations, and what happens when you put them together.

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

Jim is here to tell us that Slack is much more than a chat tool. Automations and integrations can open a whole new world of utility for your organization. And while Slack integrations have always been a thing, you used to need some technical knowledge in order to build your own.

All that’s changed with the launch of Workflow Builder. This tool allows you to build automations in Slack without ever having to code or host an app. Once you get started with making your own Slack integrations, you’ll never know how you got by without them.

You can do a lot of cool things in Workflow Builder, like create a new channel or automatically post a formatted message at a certain time each week. But Slack integrations are where it really gets interesting. 

For example, let’s say you have a weekly status report meeting. You can create a scheduled workflow that automatically drops the relevant Salesforce info into a Slack channel so everyone can refer to it for the meeting. Slack integrations go both ways, so you can also use a Slack automation to execute a flow in Salesforce.

With Workflow Builder, you can bring your Salesforce data directly into Slack and vice versa, and the possibilities are endless.

Finally, Jim had a lot to say about Slack AI, which gives you the ability to search Slack with natural language queries and summarize or format the results. When he came back to work after his paternity leave, he needed to prep for a first meeting with a new skip-level manager. So he asked Slack AI, “What does this person think about the Slack platform?” It gave him a summary of everything they ever posted on the subject, complete with footnotes so he could look at specific comments.

Most importantly, Jim points out that the automations you create in Workflow Builder are exactly the kind of structured data that Slack AI loves to work with. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities for how you can share information across your organization without the need to put everyone on Salesforce.

This episode is full of use cases and tips for how to get started with Slack integrations, so be sure to take a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe for more from the Salesforce Admins Podcast.

Mike Gerholdt:

Okay, this week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we are going to have a lot of fun because we are talking about Slack automations with the director of developer relations and advocacy, Jim Ray of Slack. Now, you’re probably a Salesforce Admin, you’re like, “Oh, but we don’t use Slack. I’m not going to listen to this.” No! This is a fun episode and it’s going to give you a ton of ideas for, hey, maybe we should think about using Slack. I’m not here to sell you anything. I don’t get any commissions.

I just love when I can give you ideas and creative answers to challenges that you’re facing. And Jim talks us through a whole bunch of fun stuff that you can do in Slack and gave me a ton of ideas. We talked about canvases. I don’t know if you use canvases, but it’s a ton of fun. Now, before we get into that, I want to tell you about, hey, what we got coming up in April, because this is last episode of March. I have architect evangelist Tom Leddy coming on to talk about decisioning. I reconnected with Lizz Hellinga at TrailblazerDX.

Remember, she was on a previous episode talking about the importance of clean data and why that’s important for AI. She’s coming back. I’m working on getting Skip Sauls with the Data Cloud update, so Data Cloud. And then I’m going to introduce a new episode at the end of April where I’m bringing my co-worker, Josh Burke, on, and he’s going to do a deep dive episode with a product manager. We’re working on getting somebody really cool to help you change the way you do some of your thinking.

That’s all I’m going to tease out for right now. But of course, if you’re not already subscribed to the podcast, make sure you’re doing that, make sure you’re following it. It’s a different word on every podcast platform. But if you do that, new episodes automatically get downloaded to your phone. That way when you wake up in the morning, you put the leash on the dog, you go out, boom! You press play, podcast is going, and you can get some great information. You don’t have to think about it, or maybe you’re riding the bus to work or bicycling.

It’s starting to become summer now. So anyway, that’s a whole long way. This is fun. You’re going to enjoy this podcast. Let’s get Jim on the pod. So Jim, welcome to the podcast.

Jim Ray:

Thanks so much. It’s great to be here, Mike.

Mike Gerholdt:

I always have fun talking Slack. I feel like the last time we talked Slack was with Amber Boaz and she was telling us how to replace meetings with Slack. And then you did a presentation in the admin track at TDX about automating in Slack, and I just feel like that’s the next level for people that use Slack is getting it to do stuff automagically. So that’s what I’d love to talk about, but let’s start with how did Jim get all the way to Slack?

Jim Ray:

That’s a great question. I’m also glad you mentioned Amber Boaz. I had the opportunity to meet her at TDX.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh, she’s wonderful.

Jim Ray:

She’s from my neck of the woods, so I’m going to try to drive down to Durham in a month or so and hang out with the user group that she’s got.

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s pretty country down there too.

Jim Ray:

It is. It’s nice. I went to school down there too, so it’s pretty great. So if we’re talking background here, my background is actually in journalism. I have a journalism degree from the University of North Carolina. That’s what I did.

Mike Gerholdt:

So it’s obvious that you would work in tech.

Jim Ray:

Obvious that I would be working in developer relations at Slack. It’s maybe not as much of a leap as people might think. I was always kind of the techie guy that was looking for… My degree is in this multimedia storytelling. This was the late ’90s. We were trying to figure out how to do interesting new ways of telling stories on the web, and that’s what I was into. So I always had a tech mindset inside of the newsrooms that I worked in. And then when I switched over to tech, I still brought that media background with me.

And interestingly enough, DevRel has merged those two things. It wasn’t something that I’d set out to do, but I was really interested in what was going on at Slack. I started working at Slack in the middle of 2016, so just as the company was really rocketing off. It was a really incredible first year. The user growth was happening a lot. The company itself was growing tremendously. It was a different place every year for the first couple of years that I was there. And so I’ve been working on the DevRel side for most of that time.

And then recently, about a year and a half ago, I took over our developer advocacy team. And so on developer advocacy in Slack, what we do is we work primarily with our customers who are building on the Slack platform. The platform is multifaceted in some ways. We have our Slack App Directory where you go and you install apps that are built by our partners, or they’re built by companies that are building their business on top of Slack.

But the bulk of the work that happens on the platform is custom apps and integrations that are built by our customers to solve their own needs. We’re always looking for ways to engage with that audience and help them understand how to do automation in Slack.

Mike Gerholdt:

I mean, I think too often people just look at Slack as like, oh, it’s just another communication tool. But just as we were chatting before we even got started, the number of features that it has and the way you can configure things to, lack of a better term, almost communicate back with you and make life easier, which is what the point of automation.

I remember the first time I built an automation, which I believe was just for a simple Slack group where it was like, I really want questions in the Slack group formatted in a certain way, and so I just stuck up that form and they just auto created that post. But the cool thing was somebody on my team pointed out, you know it could also put all of that text into a Google Doc so that you have this running FAQ?

I was done at that point. I was like, oh God, no idea, right? Because for so long, you mentioned you started in 2016, but you got a degree in multimedia storytelling, who would’ve thought like, VHS, what are we going to do? DVD now for a certain period. Now, so many of these communication apps are not just like remember the days of MSN Messenger. It’s not just text back and forth. It’s actually managing of information and context.

Jim Ray:

I think that’s such a good point, and I really love your example of formatting your questions. I think one of the things, and this is something that I learned from working more closely with my friends on the sales side of the house, is that if you’re just using Slack for communication, you’re overpaying for a chat tool, as they like to say. And there’s a lot more that you can do to broaden your usage of Slack, and we’re increasingly trying to be a surface area for getting work done. Obviously, Slack doesn’t have any desire to be the only place where you come and do your work.

It would pretty well constrain the work that I think people could do. But it’s definitely a place, particularly those quick interactions, and that’s where some of the automation comes in. But things like approvals, things like questions, even quick bug reports where you’re already interacting with your colleagues, automation allows you to bring in your other tools, and that’s where the power of that lies. And the platform has really expanded a lot in the early days. Slack came with some built-in integration.

So if you wanted to do things like get an alert whenever somebody uploaded a file to Dropbox, then we had that automatically configured. But if you wanted to do something outside of the bounds of that automatic configuration, then that wasn’t really possible. Then we launched the API and along with that we launched the app directory. And so we were approaching it from a couple of different ways. You could build custom integrations, or you could install apps and integrations that other people had built from the directory.

And then that’s where we saw that usage explode, where people were really building custom use cases. The problem was for those early days of the API was that it really did require a fair bit of technical knowledge. You had to know how to program against our APIs, which means you had to know how APIs work. You also had to host the app yourself. And so in those early days of the APIs, you had to build out an application. And it worked very similarly to how you might build a Twitter app or something like that, but you were responsible for hosting that.

And then we built a lot of tooling around that to help improve that. We built some frameworks to make it easier to build with some of our most popular programming languages. And then we acquired a company called Missions, and this is where Workflow Builder really… Where its origins lie. We acquired this company called Missions, and the team that built Missions, they were a team that was actually inside of a consulting company called Robots & Pencils, and they were like, “We’ve got this idea for our product that can interact with Slack.”

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s a great name.

Jim Ray:

It’s a cool name, right? And so the Missions app was all about making it easier to build automations without having to write any code. So we acquired that team, fantastic team, really love working with them. A number of them are still at Slack, thankfully, and they’re doing fantastic work. And that became the first version of Workflow Builder, and Workflow Builder was our no code automation product. And that was a way to use the platform without having to know how to program, without having to host an app. And so that was the first big expansion beyond just writing applications.

Mike Gerholdt:

Jumping ahead to your TDX presentation, because we talked about automation, because the example I gave was just literally Slack just automating within itself, what were some of the examples you gave in that breakout presentation?

Jim Ray:

The evolution of Workflow Builder also mirrors the increased complexity of things that you can build. The initial version of Workflow Builder allows you to do exactly what you were just talking about, allows you to automate work within Slack. So if you wanted to do something like create a new channel or post a message that was formatted in a certain way, then you could do that with Workflow Builder.

The second version of Workflow Builder that we released, and this is the current contemporary version, allowed hooks into other applications. And so apps could build custom steps that could then be inserted into workflows. And so you could install an app, and then that app would bring custom steps along with it. And what we’ve done now is continue to expand on that surface area.

So now anyone can write a custom step and you can actually deploy that up to Slack and we’ll run that custom step inside of Workflow Builder. We’ve also built out a number of what we call connectors. These are connections to other third-party tools. So Salesforce is a great example. So if you want to create a new record in Salesforce, then we have that connector built in.

And what’s nice about the way that we’ve built it is we handle things like authentication. We handle all of the API communications so that you don’t have to worry about that, and then all you have to do is off with your credentials. And then when you run the workflow, then it will just essentially act on your behalf. And so we’ve got about 70 of these connectors into a whole bunch of apps.

So Salesforce is obviously one. The Google suite, so if you need to create a new Google Doc or if you need to insert a row into a spreadsheet, if you want to upload files into various file providers. So we’ve got a number of steps that do things like that. And then one of the Salesforce steps that we’ve also got is to kick off a flow.

So if your organization is dependent or you’ve built out a lot of custom flows or things like that, then you can insert a step into Workflow Builder and then we’ll kick off that flow. So it’ll actually execute a more complex workflow instead of just creating a new record or updating a record or something like that.

Mike Gerholdt:

I think the really cool automation stuff, at least cool to me, was giving Salesforce admins the ability to, lack of a better term, expand the footprint of Salesforce within an organization, but without having to add per se more platform licenses. And we did an example where like a warehouse manager really deals with the data, but a lot of people also needed to just know about things. And with automation, they could follow records and channels and get updates, but they never needed to update any of the physical data on the Salesforce record.

Jim Ray:

That’s such a good example, and it’s something that we see from our sales and customer success friends all the time as well is… So at Slack, the way that our channels are organized is that every account that we’re attached to gets its own channel. They all have their own prefix and stuff like that. So it might be Account-Salesforce and Account-Acme. And then you can actually build automations that will do things like one of the ways that you can trigger your automation is you can have your automation set to go at a certain time once a week.

So maybe you’ve got a Monday morning meeting and you want to get the entire sales team around that, but you want to pull some data from Salesforce. So you can go grab some information from Salesforce. You want to get the latest updated figures that have come in over the past week, and then you can just drop that information into channel, and then now everybody’s got the context. And so you’re not just blindly talking about, “Hey, what’s going on with the customer this week,” you actually have some information, and then you can start a conversation around that.

It’s actually a great way that teams have eliminated those regular meetings that we have so that everybody stays in sync. There’s often good reasons why we have them, but maybe not good reasons why we keep them, especially now that everybody’s working in a more distributed way these days. This works across all kinds of teams, not just sales team, but you might have a marketing team and maybe you want to pull some data from Google Analytics or any of your social analytics platforms or anything like that.

You can drop that information in there and then the team can have a conversation around that. Maybe you notice something’s right, or maybe everything’s great and then you just don’t need to have a meeting. It’s just like, “Looking good and all systems go,” and then you’ve just saved your entire team half an hour. Translate that over a quarter or a year, and that’s some actual real-time savings.

Mike Gerholdt:

Am I understanding you right by also saying it could pull from reports or dashboards in Salesforce?

Jim Ray:

Absolutely. Because everyone’s Salesforce instance is special, we operate on the record level, and so we’d be able to look at how those records are set up. And one thing that we’re interested in getting a little bit closer to is things like Tableau and MuleSoft where there might be some complex records that run in the background, and then how do we pull that information into Slack? So we haven’t quite fully figured out that level of automation yet, but it’s absolutely something that folks on both sides are working on.

Mike Gerholdt:

On top of it just being cool, the part that really appeals to me is the lack of having the context switch. So this concept came to me, oh, I want to say four or five years ago when we were trying to work through a ticketing system for what my team does. We really tried to narrow down, what is the hardest part of your job? Well, the hardest part of your job is regardless of where your mind is at at say 12:30, you have to join this meeting. And for me, oftentimes I’ll sit down at my desk, I don’t know what the priority is that morning.

I could get working on something. And then to your point, oh, it’s 10:00. I got to join this team meeting. Boy, if I didn’t have to and I could just stay in my mindset and do another 45 minutes, I could finish this project. But now I have to context switch. Join this meeting, look at 20 people on a call, waste an hour, and then spend another 20 minutes getting my brain back to where it was. I could have been done with this project and maybe my update was five minutes.

And I bring that up because I think like, wow, just the ability to, hey, we’re still going to have that Monday team call at 10 AM, except it’s going to be a scheduled Slack post. And then I just expect you, the directs, to respond to as needed throughout the day. Because if you’re a sales guy, you probably have a 10 AM with a customer, and that’s bringing money in as opposed to, well, my update was only five minutes anyway, I’m going to add this update at 11:05 after I’m done with my customer call.

I’m not going to prevent anybody. I bring that up because I think the value of not having to context switch by just putting in simple automation is so important when you think of it’s not just automating and putting a dashboard in a Slack channel.

Jim Ray:

I think it’s a hugely important point, and I think it really emphasizes how we work today. So the instance that you were just talking about about the meeting interrupting your day, so if you can eliminate that standing meeting, obviously we’re not going to eliminate all of our meetings, I still have one-on-ones with all my reports and all that, but eliminate those kinds of meetings where the sharing of information is important, but having to sit together in a room is less important. So that’s one great way that we can eliminate context switching.

I think it’s really important. One another way is to eliminate what I think of as alt tabbing. So every time you alt tab between applications, that actually… Even if you are actually working on the same project, we know, and I’ve studied this a little bit because it has to do with the customers that I work with and the kinds of applications that they’re interested in building, but every time you alt tab between apps, it actually does a little mini version of that context switch.

It’s almost like going into a new meeting, especially if you haven’t offed in, or you can’t remember where you’re supposed to go, or you have to pull some information from one system of record and put it into another. So those are the kinds of things that we know are real drains on people’s productivity and actually their ability to get into that meaningful deep work state, that flow state that we know is really important for knowledge work. I mean, we’re all really lucky we get to sit in front of computers all day for the most part.

I’m not worried about getting black lung or anything like that, but the work actually does have a drain on our brains, the thing that we’re using to do the work. And we know that by eliminating some of that context switching, we can actually help people get back and do some important work. There’s some really great examples about how bringing some of that automation, and again, not bringing all of your work, but bringing some of that automation into Slack can be really helpful.

So a couple of ways that we’ve been using it for a long time is, again, at Slack, we will set up channels for specific projects or features that we’re working on. So we’re working on a new feature, and that feature gets its own channel. And the team that’s working on that feature will start working on it. And then when we release it internally, we create a feedback channel. And the feedback channel is where everybody who is starting to use that new feature, they’ll come and they’ll offer up obviously their feedback or give bug reports or maybe just things that they think could be tweaked.

And so oftentimes we’ll set up a workflow, and we’ve got some examples of it that teams across the organization can use, we’ll set that workflow up in that channel. And then what it’ll do is it’ll post a message in the channel and we can have some conversation about that feedback. And then you can take that conversation and you can submit a bug report. So if somebody says, “Hey, this doesn’t look right,” then it doesn’t automatically submit the bug report, but then the PM or the engineer or the designer can come in and say, “Oh, you know what? I can reproduce that. Let me file a bug.”

And then what they can do is they can kick off another workflow that will log that entire conversation in JIRA and create the new bug. And then once the bug has been created in JIRA, attach the URL for the bug into the thread. So then you’ve got the context in both directions. So the person who submitted the bug, they don’t have to go through and figure out how JIRA works or whatever. The PM or the engineer, they don’t have to context switch out to another application.

And then if you want to come back and get some context about it, maybe I reported this a week ago and I want to see what the update is, I can go back to that original conversation. I can search for my name or whatever, and then I can click on the link and go in JIRA. And then JIRA remains the system of record. We’re not trying to replicate all of JIRA. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, but JIRA remains the system of record, but the actual filing of that bug report didn’t require switching between lots of different systems.

Mike Gerholdt:

That’s along the lines with the automation that I saw where Salesforce remains a system of record. Slack just hosts the conversation, right?

Jim Ray:

Yeah, exactly.

Mike Gerholdt:

Back and forth and keeping people up to date. And also it reduces training, right? If I’ve got somebody like I think the example we used was a retail manager, if all the retail manager knows Slack, they don’t need to know the back ends of everything. That’s the best part about the apps and stuff.

I was singing the praises of canvases before we started this call because I’ve started to use canvases a little bit more. I’d love for you to help me understand what are some examples that admins could use of automating with canvases or creating canvases as a result of automation? Is that even possible?

Jim Ray:

Totally, and it’s a great question. So if listeners aren’t familiar, canvases are kind of our document project or product inside of Slack. It’s built into every Slack. You can create as many canvases as you want to. And think of a canvas just as kind of a lightweight doc. If you remember Dropbox Paper from back in the day, it works very similarly. It’s not all the formatting that you get from something like Microsoft Word or Google Doc or something like that, but it’s just enough formatting so that you can lay things out in a pretty consistent way.

And the nice thing about canvases is they can exist anywhere inside of Slack and you can attach them in different places. So you can create a canvas that is attached permanently to a channel. If you want to provide some context, maybe again, it’s one of those feedback channels, so you want to provide some information about how a person gives feedback, what to expect, is there an SLA, things like that, you can write all of that up inside of a canvas. And the cool thing is canvases can be automated.

They can be automated with workflows. So one of the options for steps that you have inside of Workflow Builder is to create a new canvas. But the other thing that you can do is you can insert variables inside of canvases, and then the information that you collect from a previous step in a workflow can be inserted into that canvas where those variables are. We nerds, we call that variable interpolation. So basically you create a canvas that acts as a template.

So maybe you want to create across your organization, you want to say, every time we spin up a new feature, we’re also going to spin up a corresponding feedback channel. And every one of those feedback channels should have a canvas attached to it that provides some information about the channel. Maybe it’s going to be who is the DRI for this feature? Maybe it’s a PM or maybe it’s an engineering lead and that person is the DRI for this. And so you should expect to hear feedback from them.

And then maybe we also want to point you to a workflow that says, hey, this is the workflow to use if you want to give us information or if you want to give us feedback about this. And so you can create that workflow and then you can attach the workflow into canvas and we’ll create a nice little widget for you. And then we’ll put all of the information about the person, about the people who are responsible for that feedback channel into the canvas as well.

And so you can create a setup feedback channel workflow, and maybe you gather some information, maybe you say, “Who’s the DRI for this? Point me to the tech spec,” and then any further information. Well, you can fill all that in in your workflow and then we’ll automatically create a new canvas from that template, fill that information in, and attach it directly to the channel that gets created. And the workflow can also create the channel too.

Mike Gerholdt:

I don’t want to get into different channels because right now I feel I need a workflow to manage my channels, but that’s probably… I mean, well, let me ask about that. That’s probably where the AI is going to go, right? So I see AI now in Slack in the search, but I got to envision that it’s going to start heading into channels and other things, right?

Jim Ray:

Absolutely. And that’s kind of where we’re starting to think about some of this. And so back in February, I think it was actually Valentine’s Day, we dropped a little Valentine’s Day gift for everybody, which was Slack AI. The initial version of Slack AI was really all about improving your ability to search and find and summarize. And so now if you have the Slack AI, and it is an additional product because it’s pretty expensive computationally and just in terms of resources to run.

So if you have Slack AI enabled on your workspace, then search will be able to do things like take natural language queries. I was on paternity leave for about half of last year, and I came back and we still had a pre-release version of Slack AI running on our instance. And it was really great for me because I could do things like… I had a new skip level manager. And so I was like, what does this person think about the Slack platform? And it was just a very open-ended query.

I was testing to see how the system worked, but it was also some information that I really needed to do my job. And it came back, and not only did it come back with a standard search result that we give you now with just here are some bits, but it uses the generative AI piece to say it actually found all of the relevant posts, composed a response for me as if a human had written it, but then it also has footnotes to the relevant posts. And so I was just like, oh, what is this person? That’s fantastic.

So I was ready for my one-on-one with them coming up. And then you can also do things like summarize. So if I wanted to be able to summarize a channel, again, that was super helpful for me coming back from a pretty extended leave, I was able to summarize some of the channels that maybe they were new or maybe it was the kinds of things that I keep an eye on, but I hadn’t been there in a few months. So I was able to get those summaries. And so right now, Slack AI works on all of the data that gets put into your Slack instance.

Most of that data is unstructured data, and so it’s conversations that you’re having. We know that generative AI, large language models are really good with that kind of unstructured data. But we also know that search and AI and just computers in general do really, really well when we give them a little bit of structured data. And that’s where automations in the platform come back in. And that’s where we’re really going to be able to enhance some of these AI capabilities.

So if you are adding context to all of these unstructured conversations with information back to your systems of record, that’s the kind of thing that the AI is going to be able to ingest and get more information about. So if you need to know, hey, what’s the latest with this customer, then we’ll be able to grab that information. It will be inside of Slack. And then you can imagine, we’re working on some ideas about this, we don’t have any products or anything like that, but a whole bunch of…

Even our customers are building custom versions of this where they’re using these large language models, they’re accessing their various systems of record, and then they’re pushing it all into Slack. So you might ask a custom AI bot that you build or someone else builds for you some information and then it goes out and spiders the various systems of record and then brings back a comprehensive result.

Mike Gerholdt:

I will tell you that we use the summarize this. I tried it on a few Slack channels, and then I put the summaries into a canvas as a way to summarize a big channel internally for my team. It was interesting to see how it came back. It’s also fun because it talked about me in the third person, and I just let it continue doing that because it’s an ongoing Seinfeld joke.

But last question for you. I mean, I got a million. We could go for hours, I think. If a Salesforce admin has… Obviously they’ve got Salesforce. They probably have Slack, that’s why they’re still listening. What is some automation that they should think about to get started with?

Jim Ray:

I think the easiest thing would probably be the ability to create or update a record. And this is for the low friction entry points. So obviously we’re not trying to be the only interface to Salesforce, but Slack has a great mobile client. I know Salesforce does as well. But maybe you’re out on the field and you just want to make it easy for folks that are out in the field to quickly update or create a new record and have that send the information. And you still want Salesforce to continue to be the system of record.

So an example, and this is an example that I showed during one of my demonstrations, I’d built out a Salesforce instance and I’d put a bunch of data in from a real estate management company. It’s just one of the data back-ends that we have with a lot of sample data in it. And the idea was that you might be out on the road and you might want to quickly add a new property that you had gone to see or inspect or something like that. And so you could pull that up in Slack. You could pull that up.

The form is automatically formatted using our what we call Block Kit, which is really just our UI Kit, and you can create all of the fields that you need. So maybe there’s half a dozen fields that you need just to get started on a new property. And then maybe when you get back to the office, you’re going to fill it in. But maybe you’re out there, you snap a quick pic and you want to add the address and a couple of quick information about it. That’s something that you can do very quickly inside of Slack, quickly generate that, throw it in there, but then also have it update the rest of your team.

So it’s not just storing the information in your system of record, but you’re also posting that inside of a channel. So now your team knows like, “Oh, okay, Jim was out in the field. He added this quick record in here.” And then maybe somebody else who’s already in the office, they can add some more contextual information about it, or it can kick off a chat and people can start conversing about what we want to do with that and where to go from there.

So anytime that you have an instance where you want to keep the system of record, Salesforce in this case, you want to keep that updated, up to date, add new information, but then you also want to have a place where people are discussing that, and that could be a Slack channel, those two things are happening simultaneously, well, that’s a great use case for a workflow.

Mike Gerholdt:

I would agree. You mentioned my favorite thing, which is Block Kit Builder. So I’m going to put you on the spot. Promise me you’ll come back on and we’ll do an episode on Block Kit Builder.

Jim Ray:

I would love to. Block Kit Builder is fantastic.

Mike Gerholdt:

Oh my God, I have so much fun with Block Kit Builder. You have no idea.

Jim Ray:

Fantastic.

Mike Gerholdt:

I have a million questions too.

Jim Ray:

Excellent.

Mike Gerholdt:

When you said that, I lit up and thought, oh, I have to do a whole episode on Block Kit Builder.

Jim Ray:

Well, schedule me up. I’d love to talk about it.

Mike Gerholdt:

l will. Thanks so much for coming on the pod, Jim. This was great. I’ve always been excited for Slack and just the cool stuff we can do, especially when it doesn’t require code. The Block Kit Builder episode is going to be fun because it’s both code and not code.

Jim Ray:

Absolutely.

Mike Gerholdt:

So we’ll tease that out.

Jim Ray:

Thanks so much, Mike. I really appreciate it. It was great getting to talk to the audience.

Mike Gerholdt:

Am I right? How much fun is automations with Slack? Also, I might’ve gotten a little too giddy about Block Kit Builder, and I promise you that I’m already working on my schedule to get Jim back to talk about Block Kit Builder for Slack. But he gave me a ton of ideas for automations, including creating canvases and just the management of information. This was such a fun episode. I hope you enjoyed listening to it. And if you did, can you do me a favor?

Maybe you’re heading to a community user group with other Salesforce admins, or you’re going to dinner, or you’ve got a large social following, just click the dots there in the podcast app and choose share episode. And when you do, you can text it to a friend or you can post the social. And then that way you help spread the word and spread all this really cool stuff that we’re learning how to do without code.

Now, if you’re looking for more great resources, of course, everything that you need is at admin.salesforce.com, including the transcript of the show. And of course, you can join the conversation in the Trailblazer Community. There’s a lot of great questions being asked there. A lot of admins helping other admins with stuff. And that’s in the Trailblazer Community, in the Admin Trailblazer Group.

So I’ll include all the links to those in the show notes, which is on admin.salesforce.com. And until then, I’ll see you in the cloud.

The post What Can Salesforce Admins Do with Slack Integrations? appeared first on Salesforce Admins.