Description
If your business relies on Salesforce, then it relies on #AwesomeAdmins. Jack McCurdy, now DevOps Advocate at Gearset, demonstrates the crucial role admins play — not just on building reports, but contributing to releases and unlocking revenue.
This webinar covers how admins can:
- Deliver on Salesforce investment
- Improve customer experiences
- Advise on Salesforce strategy
- Develop and release powerful customizations
- Contribute to revenue growth.
Learn more:
Transcript
Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you for taking the time to, join me today.
My name is Jack Cody. I am one of the enterprise account executives here at Gearset. I've been with the company for just over two years now.
And in that time, I have, spoken to hundreds and hundreds of, Salesforce admins, developers, platform owners, executives, the the ultra bang, really.
And, over that time, I've learned a lot of things and, have been super fortunate to get a perspective on how all of those people play, a big part in, the companies that they work for and what they do on a day to day basis, impacts that.
And today, the focus is all about admin. So title of the talk suggests, suggests that. So the focus is all about admins. If you're in developer camp or elsewhere, then, sure, some of this might apply to you as well.
But the reason that I think this is going to be useful for for for you is that it's really important every now and then to take a step back and reaffirm or even look back at the first time at the real value that you provide to, your organization.
It's so important that we don't get caught up in the whirlwind of, you know, our day to day responsibilities and actually look at what our contribution to our companies is on the whole.
Stop worrying about the formula field or whatever it is that's causing you stress for a moment.
Take a breath and, look at the big picture.
So there's a few key topics and a few key areas that, we're gonna be looking at today, and talking about, and, hopefully, we'll we'll leave you with some points of discussion. So the first point, it's all coming back to me now.
Second point, since this is the Salesforce.
Third point, the customer. Reports reports everywhere.
The plan, gonna go down the rabbit hole, talk about the day to day, release me, can't refuse.
And then at the end, we're gonna do a q and a and discussion. So, what we're also gonna do is this presentation should take around kind of twenty minutes or so, and then have the q and a, at the end there. So, I might get some time back in your day. The session's booked out for an hour today.
We as we'll learn throughout the course of the talk, just about how important your time is. So you might well get some of that back today depending on the q and a at the end. But, like I say, love if you, if you want to engage, ask questions throughout. I'm sure, Ellis, if if you want to interrupt me at any point, please feel free to do do so, and, hopefully, we'll we'll leave with some points and some topics of discussion.
So the main thing that we need to keep in mind here is that you're pretty damn awesome. Right?
Salesforce marketing thing, and I wholeheartedly agree is awesome admins, and admins are awesome.
We're gonna talk about the topics that, I outlined, actually a little bit cryptically, but what we're first and foremost gonna be thinking about and coming back to is you. And it's you that does all of these amazing things to make your end users happy and keep your customers happy and help your business thrive.
Your businesses are paying you a decent amount of money.
I say that, go check out, the Mason Frank salary survey. If you haven't seen that already, they provide, an awesome scope about compensation in this space. But your businesses pay you an important amount of money to do business critical activities. And the things you do on the day to day basis and wider and slightly more strategic are incredibly valuable.
So as are you. So always remember that.
And this is, like I say, all about you, when we're thinking about these topics.
So the first main main point that that we wanna have in the back of our mind here is that Salesforce is expensive. So you don't get to be a seventeen billion dollar business to business company by being cheap.
Salesforce, as of last year, had around hundred and fifty thousand customers.
So if you dissect that, on a on a customer by customer basis, it means that each customer is spending kind of around a hundred k mark, with Salesforce on average. Obviously, that figure's not not totally accurate, but, pretty crude working out.
So that is that is the that is the first thing. The list price for Salesforce licenses is a hundred and twenty dollars per user. So, you're probably gonna be getting some kind of discount on that anyway. So, realistically, you might be hovering around a hundred to a hundred and ten dollar mark. So even just a hundred person, a hundred person org is likely likely running you up, a thousand dollars a year just in licensing and your sandboxes and any additional managed packages or Tableau or whatever else the, your business pays for, on top of that. Salesforce is a big, big, big investment, a huge investment even. And the bigger the investment, the bigger the team that looks after it.
And coming back to that first point, you and your colleagues, you're responsible for getting the most out of it.
The admins and the developers, if you have them, and, BAs, platform owners, those exist. So huge investment, that Salesforce is for your business.
We you're the people that look after it. You're the people, that are responsible for it.
Now you're probably all familiar with this image. This is the the new thing, that Salesforce are pushing, at the moment. And aside aside from the expanded paid for offerings that customer three sixty incorporates, from Salesforce perspectives, the rhetoric is is really important here. So the customer three sixty rhetoric is, integral to to every business, which is why, Salesforce's leaders in this space are are looking at looking at that and using that for businesses to to leverage and think about as they themselves look to become hyper successful. So the customer is the most integral part of your business, understanding where the customer is, what channels your customer visits, what they engage with, what they purchase, how often they purchase, what they see value in, your customer's processes, their motivations, detractions, survey feedback responses.
All of that information is is vital to the success of business. So as an admin, you make sure that your objects, workflows, processes are all equipped to record that information and stored in a digestible, analyzable way that'll allow your teams to dive into those customers and make sure that they're happy and that they're being supported.
If you don't have a place to record all this information, where else will it be? So you as an admin will design the solutions, the fields, the flows to auto update records, the layouts for each business user to digest what they care about, all of those kind of things. Sure. There might be some, initial help in the initial setup or the configuration of your org, but on a day to day basis, it comes back to you. You're responsible for for all of these things. Because you provide that structure and a place to record it, all this gold dust, you empower your sales reps to make the best decisions, your service reps to to provide the best customer service using all of that right information to close your customers and to nurture that customer, into the the most value that they can provide to, to your company.
So the customer, hyper important, and it's you that's going to be providing that view, of that customer.
Let's talk about reports. So if you haven't created hundreds of reports, are you even an admin? Right? So one of the greatest selling points that, Salesforce offers is to your to your internal decision makers will be the ability to report on all the fabulous metrics and information, that you populate Salesforce with, that your sales team populate Salesforce with, service, etcetera, that you've already provided the structure for. So we've just spoken about the configuration and surfacing quality, impactful information to your business users. So that's awesome at an individual record level. Really helpful, but this becomes absolutely supercharged when you can present full datasets and reports back to business managers.
Reporting then, of course, forms the foundation of dashboards, and your lightning experience. As a salesperson, like, I personally love the dashboards that I use on a daily basis. Ours just looks so damn good that I can't even tell you. So shout out to our growth manager slash admin slash all around extraordinary Ben for creating those for us. If you happen to be listening to this now or listen back to it, our dashboards, they're digestible, and they're actionable. Really good examples of, of what we can use.
Those reports and those dashboards that you create for your VPs, MBs, team leads, whoever it is, are integral to focusing and driving the activity, in the most impactful areas. So we use an example. If you can identify that ninety percent of your customers are in x location, great. The business can look to nurture that area and create plans to expand into others.
Notice that seventy percent of your customers buy x product or service routinely at x kind of time. Right? You can build a marketing campaign and strategy around that to make the buying process smoother ahead of that time. Make sure that we're the first port of call at that renewal, slash ready to buy again stage and that they they don't attract elsewhere.
The conflict that you create can create masterful reporting, opportunities for both day to day activity and for team focus. Think hot leads, identifying declining product usage, number of visits to your site, as well as big strategy decisions such as product line direction, process efficiencies, customer loyalty, and retention programs.
And, throwing as little shade as possible, as some of you will know and surely experience, building effective reports and dashboards isn't the easiest thing for a VP or, other person to do that doesn't spend, their time doing this. So it's down to you to, provide all of that. The plan. So not just any plan.
This is the plan. Every business has a plan. Everywhere, we'll call it different things. Maybe it's a five year strategy company mission, etcetera, etcetera.
But at the core of it, is the plan.
You'll also have the plans within the plan as different business units, will, identify, to to drive their units in accordance with the bigger plan.
And as Hannibal from eighteen once said, I love it when a plan comes together.
So CRM forms the backbone of every company's plan, whether that's grow x territory by x time, increase revenue to x by x time, whatever it is. Even if you have the best product or service on the planet, if your org isn't set up to help achieve the plan, you're not gonna succeed.
This is where you as an admin can have the biggest impact and start putting your BA hats on. Some of you might already be admin slash BAs. And if you have dedicated BAs, they're already gonna be asking you questions that you answer and can provide the answers for that will help determine your org's fit for purpose purposefulness of reaching the goals that are set out in the plan.
So, for example, if your sales team are looking to reduce their average sales cycle, by x percent over the year, US admins always have this goal in your mind as you analyze your opportunity object, your quote to cash process, and determine where improvements can be made by the way of automation or giving your sales reps a place to store more critical information about the customer's processes, serving sales reps the information back in the most digestible way that we spoke about in, the configuration stage that will allow them to act quickly.
Conversely, if there's things about your objects or processes that don't meet or contribute to the aligned objectives within the business that contribute to the plan, your responsibility is there to to streamline that, and you do streamline that.
And that's really important to making sure, that those, that those plans can be achieved. And guess what helps build the plan? Reports, dashboards, customer insight.
One of the greatest things about Salesforce as well is that you have the potential to be a an expert in a specific area. If you look at the, channel structure of Salesforce forums like the Salesforce Discord Exchange or the Ohana Slack, you'll see sections for specific areas, of the Salesforce product lines. So, sales cloud, service cloud, health cloud, CPQ, experience cloud, slash communities.
And with that specific expertise becomes supercharged capabilities and the potential for your business to be equipped to the max when it comes to achieving specific objectives, like CPQ. CPQ can be a massive boost to the company, and the efficiency of sales team when it's implemented to the highest standards, communities, or experience cloud, can bring your customers closer to you.
And all of this specialization takes time for, you to learn. You've built up that experience, build on, understand the implications of and because these specializations typically are so closely aligned to the plan, the impact that you have on the bottom line of the business can be substantial. Mhmm.
It it can't be put into words really how just quite how substantial that can be.
And, hopefully, now we're starting to start to form the bigger picture the bigger picture impact that you have on the business.
If you think about day to day so day to day gets in the way.
The fact of the matter is that pretty much every day, there'll be an issue with someone somewhere in your business, one of your end users.
Now if you have a case management system or you use Jira tickets or something along those lines, then there's probably a backlog. So you'll probably be checking the odd one off here and there. You might have a day where you blast through a bunch, but, ultimately, there is likely gonna be a case after case after case, of something day to day that needs fixed.
More importantly, you're responsible for getting people access when things go wrong, with their logins or any number of things that our users can struggle with for, for for for lack of, lack of a better term maybe.
There's things that you'll do routinely as well that might might not be day to day, but will definitely be a week to week or month to month such as, deployments or security and permissioning reviews, license reviews, backups, health checks.
These things take time, and they're essential to maintaining the health and integrity of your org.
So you make sure you that your org doesn't go down and that people aren't prohibited from doing their jobs, which has the potential to cost thousands of dollars. Just by doing those simple day to day tasks, you're ensuring that, your business is protected and your users are protected and that everybody can continue, doing what it is that they, are tasked with doing on a day to day basis to to drive, your companies towards the plan, the goals, the objectives.
We've made it pretty clear that you're awesome. So we might as well call you a superhero, and with every release comes great power. And as Peter Parker was once told, with great power comes great responsibility.
So there's no way that your executives read release notes. Sometimes your VPs might, your products owners are more likely to even than that if you have them, but you do. And, yes, a lot of it may not be relevant, but you still read it because with every release comes new opportunities to leverage newer improved functionality that drives us towards the plan or improves our day to day in some way, and you have that knowledge.
Think about conferences. So Dreamforce, road tours, etcetera, these are all huge learning experiences and have enormous benefits to both your morale and the ideas that they can generate for you to apply to your org and your business as well.
And Salesforce are really, really good at giving us useful things, with every release that they do. But what we do is, as admins in determining just how useful, those updates and those changes are, is imperative to the velocity of our success.
And with every release, something is probably gonna get broken as well. So, yeah, we fix that too.
Now that we've empowered ourselves and had a thought about the big picture and what we contribute to, reaffirmed what we already know about ourselves, it's time to have another look at ourselves and what we want. Look at how all of what we do contributes to a business's bottom line and real dollar values.
When it comes to getting the things that you want, whether that's a raise or software, you can use all of that information to achieve that. So a little less Marlon Brando horse's head vibes like the godfather, that's a bit too extreme, but there are a number of examples and a number of ways that you can start to realize this, into something real.
So I'm gonna use software as an example. Obviously, I work for Gear Set, so I'm gonna talk about Gear Set and use that as an example. It'd be silly not to.
One of the key things that we think about here and one of the key value propositions, that our customers experience is the time saved for admins and developers when it comes to the development life cycle.
We all know how long deployments can take, building of changes, etcetera. This isn't a sales pitch, but that's ultimately what, products like GearSet and other, ISVs or what have you will be will be looking to to achieve for you is is some kind of time saving, and return on investment. So Gearset costs x amount depending on the number of people in your team that would use it. Your time is valuable. Gearset saves you x hours, days even sometimes maybe, and that's hours that you get paid. So we talked about they pay you a lot of money to, look after your org.
So that's those hours. There's hours that sales or service have to use new features if you can get those features into their hands faster, if this piece of software you're looking at makes it makes delivery of service or information to those people faster, then they can use those new features, features that can improve the buyer experience sooner, create loyalty sooner. These things affect the business's bottom line.
So I encourage you, if you don't already, start thinking individually about how the configuration of your org and your time contributes to the dollars and the customer satisfaction, of your business as this is what your business leaders actually care about. Once you have a good handle on that, you can relay what you want backed up by real examples and demonstrate real real ROI and real worth. So what I encourage you is to go and ask for that new app or service or the raise or the Dreamforce ticket, and do so with the confidence why you deserve, and or need it.
And that forms the talk.
