From Chaos to Confidence: Tips for Thriving as a Salesforce Admin

00:03 - Jodi (Guest)

I've been fortunate to work with some of the best admins in the business, and one of the things that I have witnessed on all too many occasions is what I refer to as the Salesforce admin conundrum, which is the more value that you provide, the busier that you get. Suddenly everybody wants a piece of you and they see the busier that you get right. Suddenly everybody wants a piece of you and they see the auto magic that you have done and the value that you've provided to different groups. And you know, suddenly this group wants in and this group wants in, and what often happens is, as the footprint expands, there is not a corresponding increase in resources.

00:56 - Fred (Host)

Hello listeners and welcome to Banking on Disruption. I'm Fred Cadena. This week, I am so excited to have Jodi Hrbek on the pod. Jodi is the author of the Amazon bestseller Rock your Role as a Salesforce Admin. Create Value, calm the Chaos and Supercharge your Salesforce Career. She has spent the last two decades implementing and optimizing Salesforce for startups and enterprise organizations alike. Jodi's mission is to elevate the role of Salesforce admin and to empower Salesforce professionals to improve the quality of their solutions by asking quality questions. If you aren't already following her on LinkedIn, you should stop right now and follow her. Her tips are a must read for everyone in the Salesforce ecosystem. While you're listening to this podcast, why not also take a moment and follow us on LinkedIn at the Banking on Disruption podcast, and on Instagram at Banking on Disruption? Now sit back and strap in, because our show is coming to you right now.

01:59 - Fred (Host)

And welcome back this episode. I'm really excited to welcome Jodi Herbeck. Jodi is the author of the Amazon bestseller Rock your Role as a Salesforce Admin. Create value, calm the chaos and supercharge your Salesforce career. And let me tell you, that book does not disappoint. If it's not in your library, you need to run to Amazon right now and grab it Now.

02:21

Jodi spent the last two decades implementing and optimizing Salesforce for startups and enterprise organizations. Her Salesforce journey includes four years working directly for Salesforce and the launch of an independent Salesforce consultancy. She's played pivotal roles, leading Salesforce implementations for several fast-paced startups within the Blackstone portfolio, and she's also held leadership positions overseeing the Salesforce platform at several top enterprise companies. Jodi's mission is to elevate the role of Salesforce admin and to empower Salesforce professionals to improve the quality of their solutions by asking quality questions. Hopefully, if you're a frequent listener to this podcast, you're already familiar with Jodi and you're following her on LinkedIn, because I'll tell you her tips and her tricks. There are not to be missed. Jodi, I am super excited to welcome you to the podcast. Thanks for joining.

03:14 - Jodi (Guest)

Thank you, fred, it is so good to be here. And thank you for all those plugs. I certainly appreciate that.

03:20 - Fred (Host)

You bet. I mean, I'll tell you, I've been in the game a long time and I get a lot still from consuming your content. So I think, whether somebody's just new to the role or anywhere along the career path, you're definitely somebody to follow. Like I said in the intro, your book is definitely a must read, either if you're new or you're an experienced admin. I'd love to know what, know what, inspired you to write the book and what do you hope that your readers take away?

03:48 - Jodi (Guest)

Great question. So thank you. I wrote the book with two different audiences in mind and both of them, frankly, were you know they talk about, have your ideal persona in your mind, and I had very specific people that I had worked with in the past. I've been fortunate to work with some of the best admins in the business, and one of the things that I have witnessed on all too many occasions is what I refer to as the Salesforce admin conundrum, which is the more value that you provide, the more the busier that you get right.

04:22

Suddenly everybody wants a piece of you and they see the auto magic that you have done and the value that you've provided to different groups.

04:31

And you know, suddenly this group wants in and this group wants in, and what often happens is as the footprint expands, there is not a corresponding increase in resources to support the platform, and I think it's.

04:46

You know, generally speaking, when we're talking about bigger projects, resourcing is addressed up front, but what often happens in-house with Salesforce admins is you're doing incremental benefits, you're bringing on a few, you know new groups of users and you're, you know, supporting a little bit more automation here and there, and so you don't necessarily have that recognition that this is going to be impactful, but yet, over time, the cumulative effect is holy smokes. How is it that I'm delivering so much value and yet feeling like, at the end of every day, I'm having to make apologies for all the things I haven't done and the emails I haven't answered? So you know, part of writing this book was figuring out, you know, or or wanting to empower the admins that I've worked with to to have some tools and techniques where they could get out of that. I don't know, does that resonate? Have you seen that in your world?

05:47 - Fred (Host)

I mean, I've seen it and, honestly, I lived it. You know my longtime audience have probably heard me tell this a couple of times. But I first got introduced to Salesforce, you know, going on 18 years ago now, and this was the intro that I got. My boss came to my office one day and kind of stuck his head in and said hey, we just signed this contract for Salesforce. Actually, I think he said something called Salesforce, it's part of your portfolio responsibilities. You've got six months to give us some value. Good luck, and that was it.

06:20

And I did know a little bit about what our use case was. I was working for an online broker dealer at the time. At the time, account openings were easy. Customer service and actually dealing with the servicing of the accounts was difficult. So it was a service cloud use case and the first thing I did is I ran out and I hired an SI. There weren't very many SIs at the time. I hired one that doesn't exist anymore Model Metrics. I became Salesforce Professional Services and, off to the time, I hired one that doesn't exist anymore. Model Metrics became Salesforce Professional Services and off to the races.

06:48

And you know the hiccups in that process, as there always are, but there was no plan on the back end, and so I had a lot of responsibilities at the broker-dealer, but one of which was like chief, admin, like chief and generally only admin right. There was no real consideration of now that we have this tool, how are we going to support it? And for better or worse I guess for better because that's how I ended up having a longer career in Salesforce I became the proverbial guy with a hammer. You know, there were so many areas that we could leverage Salesforce beyond that original use case, but resourcing became difficult. I relied on SIs, I relied on people that were kind of voluntold, like hey, I need you to help me build this out. Luckily, there was a few people that were interested in learning it as well, but there was no formal plan, and I've seen that story play out time and time again in my 10 years of consulting.

07:47 - Jodi (Guest)

Yeah, and it ends up involving a lot of personal heroics from the admins and, by the way, who, I think, by nature are people that love to say yes, love to solve problems, and it's the reason why it's such a great job is, you get to go talk to people about things that have been vexing them for a long time and, you know, pull a rabbit out of your hat, and so we want to do it, we want to say yes, and sometimes do it at our own detriment. So that was a big part of why I wrote the book. And then the other part was kind of the opposite of that, which is I've worked with a lot of admins that were maybe newer in their career or maybe had just simply never worked somewhere where they understood that the value in the role is not just executing what you're asked for. The value in the role is really when you get to figure out how to ask those questions and uncover the real business need and deliver the right and I like to call it right-sized solution, which very often is very different than what the original ask was. And I think a lot of us that grew up in sales organizations I mean many of the original Salesforce admins. We were part of sales organizations, we were embedded. We also did you know now they call it sales enablement, Back then we would just call it sales training so we understood these concepts around asking questions to uncover business needs and then marry it with the right solution.

09:19

But more and more people are coming into the role as technologists or without that exposure, and so some of those concepts that I think I always just took for granted, that were kind of how do you put that consultant hat on or that BA hat?

09:35

What I have found is that they just weren't concepts that people were familiar with and I'll give you a really good example were familiar with, and I'll give you a really good example. Somebody came up to me after I wrote this book and said I had no idea that I could ask, let alone that I should, that it was part and parcel of my job, responsibility, and so I think you know my second question point of view in terms of writing this was really empowering admins and that you know that's actually part of your job, that you're not being insubordinate but that is actually part and parcel of the role, and that there's some real you know techniques and skills and ways to get you more comfortable doing it and make you more effective at it. So it was really those two things combined, and it's the reason that I call it the subtitle. Create value and calm the chaos is. I think both of those things are equally important.

10:28 - Fred (Host)

No, I absolutely love that and it is something that I echo frequently. I tend to be a frequent contributor on the Salesforce I don't remember the name of the podcast Josh Matthew and Vanessa Grant's podcast and frequently we're talking to people that are looking to break into Salesforce. You know, get their first Salesforce gig, their second Salesforce gig, and I'm always like it's way harder to build the right thing, like to know that you're building the right thing, than to go build it. And the idea of coming in with a business hat, with a functional hat, with really trying to understand the objective, is frequently that gap.

11:08

And one of the things and especially in the recent kind of more difficult, more challenging Salesforce job market I've recommended to people either you know there or even one-on-one conversations is you know, look at the industry you've been working in, where you already kind of know a lot about how things work, and try to get your first gig there, because you can bring all of that knowledge and understanding to your new set of knowledge, of understanding about how to actually execute it on the platform. So I absolutely love that. To continue on that. Like reduce the chaos Salesforce admins like everyone I've ever talked to, they're juggling all kinds of priorities, all kinds of projects. You've got three, four, five light of business leaders asking for different things. What strategies would you recommend that they employ to over-deliver and not feel that overwhelm?

12:00 - Jodi (Guest)

Yeah, I think you hit it on the head in that there's very few other jobs that require so many kind of spinning plates and different kinds of focus. Right, we're, by definition, reactive and we're troubleshooting and we're taking care of prod issues and user questions, but at the same time, we are deep in the weeds, being strategic and moving big projects forward and we're solving small user issues. But we're also sitting down with our C-levels to talk about business issues and impact, and I think it's one of the reasons that the role is so challenging, also, again, why it is so rewarding. So there's a couple different things and I the entire second half of my book covers, you know some of the different recommendations.

12:48

I think there are certainly some processes that help, so you know whether it be something as basic as making sure that there's a ticketing track or some kind of a ticketing system in place, right, that every single piece of work that we do has an intake, it's documented.

13:06

We have a way to point to that, both because it helps keep us organized, but it also goes a long way in making that case and having the metrics for showing not just the volume of work but often the breadth of the work that we do. I think you know, again going back to this idea, that the footprint has expanded, but not everybody understands how large our constituency is or how deeply embedded we are in supporting some of those business processes. So something as simple as making sure that you've got a ticketing system can go a long way, making sure that you've got a deployment schedule and you know, certainly people that work for larger organizations are going to have these things, but it's not uncommon inside smaller organizations, for we deploy whenever we're ready whenever somebody asks, and it puts you in a situation where A you don't have an easy way to say no, I'm not doing this tonight, right?

14:04

And it also means that on any given day, we're always in that hyper care, post-deployment mode. So those are just a couple examples of when I say process things. Something else that I like to talk about is the concept of having a warranty process or an extended warranty, and these are ideas that we can socialize up front, so nobody is surprised when we say we're out of warranty, and so what I mean by that is we might say, okay, we're going to deploy this piece of work for you, and immediately afterwards and how long that lasts whether it's hours or days is going to depend on the complexity, but I'm going to be all in on how I support it. I'm literally watching users log in, I'm making sure that everything's there, nothing breaks. We're going to meet at the end of the day. We're going to see if we need to make any tweaks, changes, et cetera, and then we're going to move into at some point the extended warranty, which is.

14:57

We know that there's going to need to be some tweaks and some things that maybe, in the edge case, we didn't account for something that maybe is going to make this a little bit smoother, and so we're going to agree that you know, every four days we're going to see how we need to adjust this, and that might last for two weeks and then after that it's back in line. And I think when we don't set those expectations, some of the reason that it gets challenging is that new group that you just brought on, that leader thinks, oh, that new group that you just brought on, that leader thinks, oh, this is how you work with us, I get to call you, text, you get 911 assistance, and so you know, sometimes just having some of those kind of ways that we describe how we're gonna work together and language that we all agree on upfront can go again, a long way in not being the bad guy, as I like to say, but in making sure that everybody understands what the expectations of how we're going to work together are.

15:47 - Fred (Host)

I absolutely love that technique and it definitely is something that from a consulting perspective, you know the whole, you know release and hyper care and warranty period definitely. I mean obviously within a consulting firm environment. You know we're talking about billable hours, whether it's time and materials, or even if you're doing it on a fixed cost basis, and so they have a reason to plan for it. But in-house admins have the same motivating factor right. They should definitely be approaching it that same way and I love that advice.

16:17 - Jodi (Guest)

I was going to tell you one other thing that you just made me think. I'm sorry to cut you off, but the third group of kind of guidance I give around calming the chaos is a list of things that I call things that you can stop to make the chaos count, drop right. There's certain things that I think you know where we have agency, where we're culpable in our own busyness, and one of them you just hit on the head was providing more realistic estimates, and you know, I think to the point you just made, consultants are really good at this, or at least better at this. There's training around it. It's time and material. You are at least trained to be aware of the things outside of hands-on keyboards that need to be accounted for and ensuring that those whatever that time and material bill is, or whatever that estimate, takes some of that into account.

17:07

Salesforce admins, I think, are notoriously bad at this, and I'm raising my own hand. This is my own personal Achilles heel, and so in the book I give something called the estimate equation, which is a number of different factors that we need to remember, whether it's the gotchas right, we, you know, hit an inevitable gotcha. It's the fire drills, it's the time for documentation and decision-making, whatever those things are, and I essentially do a little equation and say, at least start with kind of 3X-ing your initial gut reaction, and then there's some additional guidance around. You know, if there's data involved, like whatever you do, do not give a timeline until you've had a chance to look at the data. You might give an estimate for everything but the data and then say you know the data itself is going to take what it takes. I can get back to you at a certain time period and do that, but that's just an example that I wanted to call out is there's processes, there's certain things like that that we can do.

18:06

And then I think the last piece I wanted to note as well is I think there's just some certain techniques that fall more into I'm going to call them the soft skills side of the equation, and a couple examples would be using the concept of trade-offs.

18:25

So you know we started out earlier saying that you know, by definition, I think Salesforce admins love to say yes, yes, yes, yes, but we need to get in the habit of saying yes, but yes, but I can't do it all.

18:35

The answer can't always be yes if we want to be in a sustainable position to be able to deliver value. So how do we get comfortable saying, yes, I can do this, but I'm either going to need to have something else drop off the plate or I'm going to need more time to do both, or I'm going to need more resources, and I think those just aren't concepts necessarily that people are comfortable asking about or talking about. The other example would be providing context that a lot of times we don't necessarily give our stakeholders, I think, all of the context that they need to understand how long something is going to take, how much it's going to cost, and to be able to make some of those design decisions. So again, just two examples where I think there's some very you know, very specific things that we can get admins a little bit more comfortable doing some concepts that you know, frankly, take practice just like anything else.

19:32 - Fred (Host)

Yeah, no, that's all spot on. And I'll say I look at the yes, but more as a yes, and and I've actually been historically always put my consulting teams through improv training where it's the dealing with the client, the answer is always yes, right, the other day they're writing the check, right, but it's yes. And here's the implication yes, and we've got 40 hours this week, we can deliver this or that, right, you have to choose. You can't have everything, and I think that that message is something that you know. If you don't learn that early, you're going to be working 60, 70, 80 hours a week because the requests are never going to stop coming in.

20:15 - Jodi (Guest)

I love that you have improv training and you brought that up because I have also been a big fan of improv and in fact the question game is one of my absolute favorite, especially for BAs and Salesforce admin. But the reason I always laugh is I generally say yes, and is for improv, yes, but is for admin. And I say we got to get a lot more comfortable flexing our yes, but muscles Because it takes practice and a workout. You got to do the reps just like anything else.

20:45 - Fred (Host)

No, absolutely, that's absolutely true. One of the things I also loved in the book was the emphasis of Salesforce admins figuring out their specialty. How are they going to be an in-demand specialist? It's a question I get asked all the time. I have an opinion my listeners are probably tired of hearing my opinion on those key specialty skills or areas of knowledge, but, from your perspective, what are those key skills that admins should focus on, especially thinking about this industry?

21:16 - Jodi (Guest)

if you have any perspective on financial services, I think, without a doubt, the table stakes are you have to know I say know thy company, know thy peeps and know thy org, and I think that sometimes you know every. It's always hard to generalize about the admin role because they are so different, and there are admins that are embedded inside sales organizations, there are admins that are way in what I call the back of the house and technology teams I mean, and there's every flavor in between. So anytime I'm talking in general about admins, I always like to throw that out there as a caveat and say you know they're all over the board. So it's always going to be. It depends, just like anything else in Salesforce.

21:56

But I do think that it's really critical that everybody has deep understanding of their company, their company's business objectives, their industry, particularly in a regulated industry. You know without a doubt and that is true even if you consider yourself a technical resource that that doesn't mean that you don't have the onus to really spend time. You know, following along, what are the hot topics inside your organization. Even speaking the language inside your organization, right? Every company has different vernacular. Every company has different projects, priorities, like. You have to know that, even if you're way in the back of the house, I think, understanding where are we heading in this industry, having some domain knowledge again, whether you're front of the house or back of the house, to understand where the trends are. Where are we going.

22:48

I think that is again table stakes for everybody.

22:52

And then from a Salesforce perspective, I think increasingly we're seeing that I always like to say, from RevOps to DevOps isn't feasible. So I think increasingly we're starting to see that we're going to have areas of specialization and that may be that you want to specialize a little bit more on again what I'm going to call front of the house activities, where you're really involved with facilitating those conversations and eliciting requirements and working with the business. Those conversations and eliciting requirements and working with the business, that might be the skill set that you want to focus on, whereas there are going to probably be increasing number of people that are going to want to go deep in the weeds on more of the back of the house type activities. And you know, I think in this day and age there's so much that we need to learn to stay on top of with this pace of change that it is going to start making more sense to figure out, kind of what's your zone of genius, what's your sweet spot, and really go all in on that.

23:53 - Fred (Host)

Yeah, no, I love it. I think all of that really resonates very strongly with me. I want to like ask a bit of a you know, kind of a follow-up to that. So, as you're thinking about the future and you've been in this game a long time, how do you see where the Salesforce admin role has gone recently and where is it going in the next two years, five years, especially as quickly as we see technological advancements coming and really customer expectations evolving?

24:24 - Jodi (Guest)

Yeah, it's funny. When I wrote my book I was very focused on making sure that it didn't have a lot of specific features, because I wanted it to be Greenfield. I wanted it not to be about any particular piece of functionality, and I think I did a really good job with that. The piece that I didn't expect was going to evolve so much was the actual role of the admin itself in just such a short amount of time. And I always say, despite the fact that I wrote a book that has the word admin in the title, so I have a vested interest in ensuring that title stays relevant I really do think it's time that we rethink the role relevant. I really do think it's time that we rethink the role, and probably not just rebranded in terms of what we call it, but really rethink it, because I think we are at an inflection point and for years Salesforce admins generally did do both front of the house and back of the house work and you could, when it was a tool buy-in for the business with much less complexity than is there today now, really leveraging the platform as an enterprise tool. It is simply not realistic or feasible that one would have enough hours in the day, let alone the skills to be able to manage that entire spectrum of needs from front of the house to the back of the house. And so I think that is why we have seen in just the last couple of years such a proliferation of the role of business analyst or product owner, kind of that recognition that, just like traditional everything else, software development, where you really see kind of somebody working as the liaison between business and technology who's not doing hands-on keyboards.

26:14

We didn't used to have that and just in the last couple of years of years, that is starting to become a staple inside many, many organizations.

26:23

And the other thing, fred, probably until the last year or two with Flow there was no such thing as somebody who really was an admin and a developer.

26:33

Those were very different skill sets and I used to be very suspect or skeptical if somebody told me they did both right. But increasingly, with you know Flow now as the go-to, in fact the only declarative tool. You know that is a tool that, truth be told, has a lot of programmatic concepts behind it and it's starting to be, you know, very critical that somebody who's building complex flows understands a lot of things that used to be only necessary in the domain of the developer. And then you put on top of that concepts like DevOps and GitHub and all of a sudden that's a technical role, much more so than it used to be, and I think we're going to continue to see kind of a split between hands-on keyboards peeps, and non-hands-on keyboards peeps, and there's always going to be a little bit of an overlap. But I believe that we'll continue to see that evolve and start having Salesforce teams look very similar to the teams that manage any other part of the tech stack.

27:38 - Fred (Host)

Yeah, no, I think that's a great point and, to your point, the role is only getting more and more technical. At the same time, that where Salesforce wants to be in the enterprise continues to get broader and broader and something has to give. You're not going to be good at both. And I tell people all the time, like when I started in Salesforce and I believe this to be true you could know everything 18 years ago. You could know the platform back and forth. It wasn't easy, but you could. You could know how to do everything.

28:08

There are things and products and SKUs in Salesforce. I've never even seen right and I like to think I know quite a bit about what the platform you know is able to do. So I don't know when I think about, like, the guidance I give my clients on putting together a Salesforce team and I'd be interested to see, like you know, do you view this as like a career progression thing from an admin perspective? Like where do you go from an admin? But I think about, like we want people that are product owners, we want people that are business analysts. You know, primarily we want people that are more technical, that are kind of those real, to your point, declarative programmers. You know they're not writing Apex, but you know it is very much a programmatic tool.

28:55

And then I think about, you know, on the industry cloud side, all the things in OmniStudio. Those are also, you know, fairly declarative but also fairly programmatic. So how would you you know I'm not trying again, I know you have a vested interest in the admin title, but like where do you, how do you give guidance from navigating? You know kind of all of those nuances.

29:25 - Jodi (Guest)

Yeah, I think the admin title in two to three years is going to go away and I think we're going to see more of declarative developers and solution architects and product owners and MBAs and there's no longer going to be this. You know, this generic Salesforce admin that we've talked about for years, and I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing. I think that this is really going to give everybody the opportunity to find those again. If you think about the front of the house, back of the spectrum, be able to go into the areas that they are really good at and most passionate about, and not having to be the person that's like I really want to be sitting with business users but then I have to also go and do all this testing in the background. They're just really different skill sets and different kinds of activities. So I actually think this opens up a lot of opportunities for people that want to come in and really focus on the part of what I call Salesforce and that really lights them up.

30:19

But I think, as an ecosystem, I think we have to rethink how we train and how we career path people and one of the beefs that I have with Trailhead and I mean it's a great tool.

30:33

It's delivered a tremendous amount of value.

30:36

It's enabled a lot of people to come into the ecosystem at no cost and be able to start a new career. So not to badmouth them, but it is a tool that is very focused on people that are going to be in a hands-on keyboard role and if you are going to come in now and be a product owner or be a BA, there's a lot you need to know around the platform and the art of the possible and why it is or isn't like developing on traditional software and what the feature sets are and what's hard and what's easy. And I mean all of those things are Salesforce specific knowledge that we need our non-hands-on keyboard people to have, and there's not an easy way to come in and get it. If you're going to sit down and start taking trailheads, you're going to find yourself deep in the weeds of, you know, setting up a sandbox and creating profiles and doing things that I think aren't necessarily value-add for those roles. So I think that's a gap that we have to figure out how to fill.

31:45 - Fred (Host)

Yeah, no, I agree To the extent that there is that kind of stuff on Trailhead. It is very fluffy, it's not very substantive. I think Salesforce recognizes it a little bit. You know, on the partner side, in the partner learning camp and with the accredited exams. In the partner learning camp and with the accredited exams they've started baking in more like project lifecycle management and business analysis and agile concepts into those trainings and those accreditations. I don't know I've asked and I've never gotten a great answer if that's coming to the trailhead side or if Salesforce just thinks you know there's plenty of other places you can go to learn to be a BA, or if Salesforce just thinks you know there's plenty of other places you can go to learn to be a BA or a scrum master or something along those lines. But it definitely means and I hear a lot of people in the ecosystem echo this right, you can't just learn trailhead and that be enough.

32:33 - Jodi (Guest)

Well, and I do think there's excellent places to go learn to be a BA Like, for I mean, there's some great resources out there but there's not a place to say if I'm going to be a BA or I've already been a BA, so I have those core BA skills or those core product skills, but where can I go?

32:51

Get just enough about the platform and in the context that I need it, meaning I'm never going to set up an org and config, but I need to understand how flows work and what's possible in a flow, not all the back end, how to move an element and do this, that and the other but I need to understand the difference between what's the user experience if I'm creating a screen flow versus just using something out of the box. And when would I want to bring in an LWC and what are some of the pros and cons. Like those are what product managers and BAs need to know in order to really be empowered to lead those conversations, and I think it's a challenge right now to figure out how to package just that. Go deep, but not, you know, deep in the weeds, to get them to be able to bring that value that they really want and can deliver.

33:45 - Fred (Host)

Yeah, no, absolutely, and I'd love to see that as well. I know we've talked about a lot of challenges, but you know, what would you articulate as like the biggest challenges that you feel Salesforce admins face today, especially in more regulated industries like banking and financial services?

34:04 - Jodi (Guest)

Yeah, I mean, I think it's all of the above right, it's the pace of change. It's, I think, also something else that we don't talk probably nearly enough about is the amount of tech debt that everybody has. I mean, salesforce has now been around for, you know, two decades, so the early adopters have they were. Those orgs were set up at a very different point in time A lot of times. Yeah, I was on an org. My last job that was NA0. We were the very first server that was ever rolled out and eventually they moved us because there started being weird ghosts in the machines. But back then we didn't even have process builder, we had workflow and code and nothing else. So there's a lot of old orgs right now that I think are particularly code heavy, not to mention, you know, just business has iterated and changed over time Workflow and process builders getting retired. You know that's a lot of tech debt.

34:59

We've already talked about the fact that a lot of orgs were set up and iterated over many years, maybe without the governance that we would have liked to have in place if you knew that your org was going to end up being such a critical part of the enterprise. So I do think that there's a big challenge right now that people that have been working in an org that's been around for a while. We have to figure out how do we get our house in order so that we can iterate and take advantage of what's coming. I mean, ai is the great unknown, right, and we already know it is going to revolutionize how we work. I don't think any of us really can even articulate what that means yet. We just know it's coming on strong, right, but we also know that it's worthless if we don't have good data, clean infrastructure, the ability to iterate our systems to be able to take advantage of that. So I like to say that I'm a huge fan of eliminating tech debt.

35:59

Hashtag housekeeping, if you spend any time with me, is one of the things that I love to prioritize, and there is no better feeling than deleting old, defunct infrastructure inside your org. But it's historically been difficult to make the case for that, right. Which is part of the reason that we all have so much junk sitting in our orgs is everybody can make the case for the new shiny stuff and you know whatever the business is asking for and you know it's not really bothering anybody, right? It's just kind of sitting back there. But I would say, now more than ever we have an opportunity to make the business case, to say, if we're going to be in a position where we can take advantage of all that is coming, we've got to have good data, we have to have clean infrastructure, we've got to have descriptions inside all of our metadata, all of that. And so I think now we have the opportunity to set ourselves up for success, see if we can get ahead of that curve so we can be prepared to take advantage of what's coming.

37:02 - Fred (Host)

Yeah, you're absolutely right. One of the things that I always try to give guidance to, especially with clients that are getting ready to really kind of take things on themselves, is that they reserve a certain percentage of every release to address that tech debt. And usually I say as a rule of thumb somewhere between 10 and 20%. You know it's hard, it's hard frequently to justify more than 20% to your point. Anything less than 10, it's hard to get anything done right, like it's hard to really move the needle and you can't necessarily address everything that way. There's some things that are just, you know, kind of bigger, especially when you deal with data and integrations and stuff like that. But I don't know if you have a rule of thumb or any guidance around that as well.

37:44 - Jodi (Guest)

That's very in line with what I would advise and generally my guidance all the time to admins, particularly ones that are now working in teams where there is product that's driving kind of the prioritization and maybe what's in the sprint that we're working on.

38:00

The admins have to advocate for the health of the platform. That is part of the job, because your product owners they don't know, they don't know what's in there, they don't know how messy it is under the hood, they don't understand that because you've got some of that old, defunct stuff sitting in there, things are taking 2x or 3x as long as it needs to. So to me, that's a really important role of the Salesforce. Admin is beating that drum and advocating for it, and if the answer continues to be no, because business issues keep coming up, then you've got to throw the flag and figure out how do you periodically work a sprint in there to get that stuff cleaned up, because you do pay a tax over time with having that. It makes you a lot less agile, makes things cost a lot more to fix, to iterate, to change, and so to me that is one of the important hats that admins wear One of many, might I add.

38:55 - Fred (Host)

Yeah, there's no free lunch. You either pay, have to pay now or pay later and, like any pay later, you know the interest accrues, right. So another critical thing that and I realize admins are not change managers and it's a it's a different skill set was a critical and in some ways, the most critical factor for success and ultimately getting to your business outcomes. From the perspective of a Salesforce admin, what are some things that they can do to help drive user adoption and manage change?

39:33 - Jodi (Guest)

Yeah. So I think there's a couple different elements to it. One is spending time in the business right, both before and after deployments. You know before is really how you understand what it is that business users are doing, how they're working in the system, literally. What's their clickstream? What are they doing that they shouldn't be doing? Where can we save time? I mean, you can't be an effective Salesforce admin if you don't know how your users work, if you don't periodically, on a regular basis, sit with them. These days it might be virtual, that's okay, but that has to be a critical piece, and if you don't have that, I promise there's going to be a gap in what you ultimately build or to deliver, because more often than not, if you're getting quote unquote requirements from stakeholders, they're often not deep in the weeds enough to understand some of the nuances of how their team is or is not working in the system. So I think that's part of it.

40:30

I think again, once you roll something out, then you again have to spend time back in the field watching to figure out did we get it right? Where do we need to make tweaks, changes? A lot of times it's real small things. I mean, we spend a lot of time on the really big stuff. But sometimes you sit with somebody and realize you know what, if we added a field to a related list or spent a little bit more time looking at what we put in our search results or whatever those things are, it can really go a long way. So I always say solving problems doesn't have to be grandiose. Sometimes it's just the smallest things that can have the biggest impacts.

41:08

And then I also caution admins as it pertains to change management is phone a friend, like leverage. Your colleagues, like you, can't do it all, even if you want to. So you know having concepts of super users who are empowered out in the field to be a conduit to. You know getting back to you what's important to making sure that. You know that maybe they're the first line of defense when there's an issue. You know it's a. It's a. I call it a twofer strategy because not only do you get that benefit having another set of eyes and ears, but you get stuff off your plate and you know.

41:44

Going back to where we started, fred, this is, you know, one of the hardest jobs in the world, just because how much Salesforce admins have to do. So we got to figure out how to leverage our resources, and I know a lot of people say well, I'm a solo admin or I'm a small team and I don't have any. I guarantee you have more than you think. Leveraging super users. That's one way to get resources that you didn't know you had. Just as one example, setting up task force right, so you don't have to go it alone. It's not yours alone to solve your problem with dirty data. Might be yours alone to raise that there is a problem with dirty data, and it might be yours alone to orchestrate getting the right people in the room to solve it, but you don't have to go it alone, and so I think that is what I would always advise on the change front as well.

42:29 - Fred (Host)

Yeah, no, I love all of that. I think those are perfect examples and I think to your point. The message is you never have to be alone. Even if you're a solo admin, you know your users. I think can often be some of the biggest advocates and some of the biggest help. And I found in my experience like they're usually like especially when they see the power of what they can do the first ones to put their hands up and say like how can I help? So I love that. This has been a phenomenal conversation. I really appreciate the time. I know that you've got some exciting stuff coming up, so tell me about some of the things you're getting ready to launch, either now or in the next week or two.

43:10 - Jodi (Guest)

Yeah, hopefully by the time this airs as a matter of fact. So I'm super excited. I am launching kind of a follow-up to my book. It is an audio learning series called Listen Up Salesforce Admins and it is talk tracks, tips and tactics to help you level up and rock your Salesforce role. Don't say that three times fast, I can barely even say it once. But it really is a culmination of all of the questions that I've had since I wrote my book.

43:43

What I've heard from a lot of people is okay, jodi, I get it. I know I'm supposed to be asking questions, but it's not always that easy, right. Easier said than done. Stakeholders can be tricky and sometimes they're quote unquote too busy, or sometimes they get on the defensive, or sometimes they want it their way. So a number of the lessons are really designed around talk tracks and conversations. And again, how do we practice just hearing and saying some of these concepts that we've talked about? And then it also addresses what I continue to hear from everybody, which is I know I'm supposed to be doing a lot of things, but I am so frigging busy I can't come out from under the weeds. So a lot of what's in there covers things that we've talked about here Again, just tips and tricks and techniques that have been impactful over my career of how do we find some more hours in the day, how do we find resources we didn't know we have?

44:39

How do we communicate be it to our boss, to our stakeholders about the breadth of what's on our plate so that everybody can understand how to resource the system effectively? I always say part of our job is in that we have to do everything, but part of it is that we have to articulate everything that needs to be done so that we can ensure the health of the platform. So I'm super excited about that. That'll be coming up going live sometime in the next couple weeks.

45:05

I should also say it's a little confusing because it's audio, but I just finished recording the audio version of my book. Took a while to basically find enough quiet spot in my office with four rescue dogs where I could actually kind of get through that, but so that'll be coming out as well. And then, last but not least, I'm really excited this summer I'm going to be doing a roadshow where I'm going to be doing some in-person training around the art of asking and really helping Salesforce professionals improve the quality of their deliverables by improving the quality of their deliverables, by improving the quality of their questions, and I believe wholeheartedly that, without too much work, every single person can really wow their stakeholders simply by spending a little bit more time up front on the ask.

45:52 - Fred (Host)

That's awesome. I can't wait. I'll be honest with you, I have read your book, but it's rare because I usually only listen to audio books. It's hard for me to find time to actually kind of read a physical book. But I noticed you didn't have an audio version, so I'm excited to hear that's coming up. I'm excited for the other release in the audio learning series and that roadshow. I'll definitely put a link in the show notes. But where can people go to find information on all of that?

46:26 - Jodi (Guest)

sfadminsuccesscom is my new website that will be launching in conjunction with the course sfadminsuccesscom.

46:35 - Fred (Host)

Well, I love it. Well, I can't wait. I hope the roadshow is coming to a city near me, or at least a city that I've traveled to over the summer. I will definitely look out for it, but thank you again and look forward to talking soon.

46:46 - Jodi (Guest)

Thank you so much for having me. It was great to chat with you. I appreciate it.

46:53 - Fred (Host)

Well, everyone, we hope you enjoyed episode 27 of Banking on Disruption. Don't forget you can find show notes and a full transcript of the show on our website, bankingondisruption.com. New episodes drop every other Thursday, so we'll see you in two weeks and in the meantime, don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram at at Banking on Disruption. Until next time, this is Fred Cadena, wishing you success in your digital pursuits.