Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’ve got the Monthly Retro for April.
Join us as we talk about all the great Salesforce content from April, including some World Tour travel content. We have to say, we’re really excited to see people again!
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation from our Monthly Retro.
Gillian and I recap all of the exciting World Tour stops that have been happening this month, including Sydney and DC. If you haven’t yet been to an in-person Salesforce event, now is the time, especially with Dreamforce coming up in September.
“The Salesforce Admins Skills Kit is basically a way for us to put really concrete data and language behind the nontechnical skills that make a Salesforce Admin successful,” Gillian says, things like problem-solving, business analysis, and communication. While we’re really good at telling you all of the parts of the product you need to understand to be a good admin, we’re looking at how we can help you build those soft skills that create that legendary admin magic. We also wanted to highlight an article Gillian wrote about how different admins have built to better manage user requests.
Jennifer Lee is now doing a live series on YouTube we like to call “Automate This!” — in my opinion, this might be the coolest thing we’ve done since starting the podcast. “It’s like a cooking show, but for building Flows,” Gillian says.
We think you should check out our episode with Antoine Cabot, who is in charge of building Orchestrator. It’s the Flow of Flows. Multi-user workflows started as a dream a few years ago and to see everything that we’re able to do is truly thrilling.
Mike Gerholdt: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast in the April monthly retro for 2022. I’m your host Mike Gerholdt and in this episode, we’re going to review the top product community, careers content. Hey, you know what? Just going to make a quick edit and say world tour travel content too, that we did in April because we’re so excited to say that. And of course to help me do that, the very familiar voice of Gillian, Bruce. Hello, Gillian.
Gillian Bruce: Hey Mike, happy to join, it’s good to be back with you again. It’s fun getting back in the swing of things because we actually have been able to see people as you hinted with the world tour teaser in your opening.
Mike Gerholdt: I know, seriously, I got a plane and took a cab somewhere and ate at a restaurant and saw humans.
Gillian Bruce: I get to stay at a hotel away from my family, it was awesome.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Oh, when they bring back room service. I’ve never been more excited for room service.
Gillian Bruce: So my hotel didn’t have room service. It was modified room service. There was a dropped it at the door kind of thing.
Mike Gerholdt: Fine. Actually that’s better as an introvert, that’s even the perfect room service. Just “Knock, knock, knock. Your food is at your door.” Oh, perfect. I don’t have to interact with you. “Nope, have a nice day.”
Gillian Bruce: Anyway, we’re back. Everyone’s coming back slowly. It’s really exciting and gosh, well it really was a world tour, because the first stop was not even on this continent that we are both on right now.
Mike Gerholdt: And neither of us went.
Gillian Bruce: Nope. But that’s okay.
Mike Gerholdt: Yes. Down under.
Gillian Bruce: Down under.
Mike Gerholdt: So World Tour Sydney happened and shout out to Judy Fang who you’ve seen at Trailblazers Innovate back in 2020.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, Judy’s awesome.
Mike Gerholdt: She was, it’s a shame I didn’t get down there. And Philip for presenting admin content in the Trailblazer theater down there in Sydney. We would love to hear your thoughts if you went.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. We want to hear everyone’s thoughts from of any of the events that are happening, especially the event that’s happening right now as you’re probably listening to this because TrailblazerDX is happening right now, today.
Mike Gerholdt: You could be listening to this as you’re walking up Market Street, headed to Moscone West.
Gillian Bruce: There you go. Yep. To see people so exciting. But then our next stop on the tour was one of my favorite cities, D.C. And Mike, you and I got to be there together, it was so fun,
Mike Gerholdt: And present, I got to get a badge. A credential to hang around your neck. It sounds weird but virtual events we didn’t get the little thing and it was dangling and it felt important.
Gillian Bruce: I had to think about what to wear on the bottom half of my body, because it wasn’t just from the chest up.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Shoes, oh man, shoes. Break your shoes in. Hey, you know what I forgot to do? Break my shoes in. Broke my feet in. Let me tell you.
Gillian Bruce: D.C. was amazing. Not only did we get to physically be in person at an event, but we got to see community members there. There is a very vibrant D.C., Maryland, Virginia community. I think there were five community groups that were all presenting big time there, so it was great to reconnect with folks. And what was really great, Mike, is that not only did we get to present three times in the Trailblazer theater with great, amazing admin content, but we also got to feature local Trailblazers and part of our presentations.
Mike Gerholdt: And who were they Gillian? Because you found them.
Gillian Bruce: I did. I feel like I struck gold. It was great. We literally and I did. Brittany Charles, she joined us. She’s been working with the Salesforce platform for a long time but she’s just now getting involved in the community and she has a lot to share in terms of how you can really hone your awesome admin skills, about the different kinds of instances that she’s worked with. Keep an eye on her, follow her. She’s got a lot to offer the community.
And then, we also featured Carmel James and when I say I struck gold, so Brittany well for sure, she’s a golden, amazing, wonderful member of our community and she’s got a lot to offer. But Carmel literally was award in the Golden Hoodie. She has lot to share, she’s turned into a consultant so she’s working with many different kinds of Salesforce instances, but she is an admin at heart and has so many great things to share. In fact, you are going to hear her or you have heard her on the Podcast.
Mike Gerholdt: You’ve already heard her, she was last week. Yeah, April 21st. I just had to look that up because we wrangled the Golden Hoodie.
Gillian Bruce: We wrangled her, yes.
Mike Gerholdt: Onto a Podcast.
Gillian Bruce: Yes.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. That was cool. We also had in addition to the theater sessions… Which by the way I thought I had presented in, I’ve done stuff in front of the camera and whatever. Oh no, it’s standing up again, clicking a clicker.
Gillian Bruce: The energy is back.
Mike Gerholdt: Whole different new realm of like, and people are looking at you and you say something then they laugh at your joke and you’re like, “Oh my God,”-
Gillian Bruce: Or they don’t,
Mike Gerholdt: “This is great.” Or they don’t, that’s fine. I’m used to that too. We had demo station, I want to thank Nick, Justin Anne and Morgan for staffing that. That was amazing. And hopefully you had a chance to stop by the demo station. I saw there was a lot of people hanging around, questions all the time.
Gillian Bruce: We did hand out a bunch of stickers and pins, there’s always that swag.
Mike Gerholdt: You did. Yeah. If you were at world tour D.C, you could have got a Salesforce admin podcast sticker.
Gillian Bruce: Those are hot items people.
Mike Gerholdt: I bet if you’re listening this now and you find us at TrailblazerDX, you could probably get something too.
Gillian Bruce: I’m pretty sure it’s not the way it’s going to happen.
Mike Gerholdt: Probably walk around with stuff in our pockets. I wrote down another thing that was fun. I got to do a selfie at World Tour D.C.
Gillian Bruce: Selfies are back.
Mike Gerholdt: I just remember somebody was like, “Oh, I don’t know how…” I like, “Just give me the phone, I know how to do it. it’s like riding in a bicycle.”
Gillian Bruce: Just came right back to you.
Mike Gerholdt: Just came right back to me. So yeah, I got selfies. I Get selfies with a podcast listener too. I tweeted it out.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, it was really great. I think what’s really fun about these Salesforce tours is that they’re very localized, right? So it’s like, a specific community, they’re free, so you can come. You get a lot of people who have never been to a Salesforce event before, especially given the last couple years at these events. And so I met so many new people and we’re like, “Hey, welcome. Welcome to this really fun community. And I am so happy that this is your first event and I get to talk to you and I get to welcome you in.”
And there were so many people that made connections at the event. Listener, if you’re picking up what I’m putting down, go to a Salesforce event because it is such a valuable way to make connections, to learn, to get stickers, because that’s also really important. But yeah, come to an event, there’s plenty of opportunities. The tour is going to all kinds of different cities in the next few months. And then we have a little something called Dreamforce that’s happening in September.
Mike Gerholdt: Oh, it’s going to be awesome. Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: It’s epic. Okay. There’s more than just, this amazing vibe of we’re going to see people in person, events are back.
Mike Gerholdt: But we are really excited for that.
Gillian Bruce: We are very excited, but we also did a lot of other really cool things this month for the community. So Mike, can you give it’s a little recap of some the cool things.
Mike Gerholdt: So when you say we, we really mean the Royal we of admin [inaudible]
Gillian Bruce: Very Royal,
Mike Gerholdt: The Royal we, if you know me, you know that joke. So the one thing I want to highlight that I think is just one of the coolest things we’ve launched since maybe the Podcast, Genly now doesn’t automate this session. It’s a live video on YouTube.
Gillian Bruce: Live,
Mike Gerholdt: Live. You’re sitting around and you’re like, “Man, wonder how Genly would build this flow. Let’s just watch it live.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: I’ll just give you a moment to gather your head, has it exploded. Because all of the amazingness, and so we’ll link to a blog post where you can watch the recorded version of the live.
Gillian Bruce: Replay.
Mike Gerholdt: Butthat Blog post has all the information, so you can tune in and watch all the automated this. It’s so exciting. This is such a neat idea.
Gillian Bruce: It’s so cool. It’s like a cooking show, but for building flows and automations you’re watching it happen in real time, you can follow along, you can watch the replay, so you can go replicate it and follow along in your own pace. But just getting that live brilliance directly from Genly is just chef’s kiss to continue the metaphor.
Mike Gerholdt: That also gives me a really fun idea for Dreamforce. It’d be fun to do live flow building and then have Genly on the side commentary. You ever watched that food network where like, “He’s shaving the radishes, which will give a-
Gillian Bruce: Like Iron chef.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, like that kind of thing, that’d be fun to watch.
Gillian Bruce: She could be the, what is it? The Alton Brown?
Mike Gerholdt: Alton Brown. Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. And you could be the sideline reporter in the kitchen being like-
Mike Gerholdt: I’d just be the guy that’s relief. That sounds really cool.
Gillian Bruce: “Looks we’re retiring a workflow here and,”
Mike Gerholdt: Right. Yeah. All this stuff you’ll see at TDX today, I promise you’re going to see how to turn a workflow into a flow at TDX today, if you’re listening this on April 28th.
Gillian Bruce: Guaranteed. Yes.
Mike Gerholdt: Like you should. We’ll do a full TDX wrap up next month because it’s literally happening right now. Oh, it’s like multiverse, you could be listening to this Podcast now and then standing across from me or you. And we wouldn’t even know it. It’s like, “Whoa,” wonder what that’s going to say.
Gillian Bruce: Really in the Salesforce matrix there.
Mike Gerholdt: I just thought of that, makes no sense.
Gillian Bruce: But yeah. Well, I’m launching a little something right now at TDX.
Mike Gerholdt: A lot of something.
Gillian Bruce: A lot of something. We’ve been working as a team on a really big project for the last year and it’s super important and it’s very timely. And we are launching the Salesforce admin skills kit at TDX. And you may be saying, what is the skills kit you think of? Well, the skills kit is basically a way for us to put really concrete in data and language behind the non-technical skills that make a Salesforce admin successful. We’re talking about things problem solving, business analysis, communication. We’ve done so much work over the last year between serving actual admins in the community, talking to workforce development organizations, employers, experienced admins, job seekers about how we can really help, beef up.
We’re really good at telling you all of the different parts of the product that you need to know to be a really good Salesforce admin, but we’ve been lacking in that business skillset that you also need. To me, that’s the admin magic, right? That’s what makes so amazing. So we have this amazing, very robust skills kit that goes through all of these different skills that you will absolutely benefit from. If you are looking to grow your Salesforce admin career, if you’re looking for your first Salesforce admin role or if you’re looking to hire a Salesforce admin. It’s huge, it’s awesome. You can go to admin.salesforce.com/skills kit, and you can find all of the great resources there.
We’ve got expertise from different community members that we’re talking about each different skill, showing you examples of how you represent this on a resume, how you would represent this in a job out description and then also resources for how you learn, how to develop that skill further. So I could go on and on about it. I got a whole session at TDX about it. I will be talking about this for probably the rest of my tenure at Salesforce. This is really important stuff. And I cannot wait to see what the community does with it, because it’s a great resource.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. And more to come when you join us at Dreamforce this year.
Gillian Bruce: Ooh. So much more. This is just the beginning, everybody. There’s a little much more.
Mike Gerholdt: Just the smidge, just the corner. You think you know, you have no idea. A couple pieces of content I want to point out and then we’ll wrap up so that you can get on your way, on the road to TDX. Should we say [inaudible]
Gillian Bruce: On the road from TDX? Is it the last
Mike Gerholdt: Maybe they’re taking a car, rail car. Why can’t I think trolley?
Gillian Bruce: A cable car.
Mike Gerholdt: Cable car. Why is that such a thing?
Gillian Bruce: Well it’s-
Mike Gerholdt: The Mr. Rogers neighborhood thing came to mind.
Gillian Bruce: That was technically a trolley, that was not a cable car. It’s different.
Mike Gerholdt: Okay. No. Yeah. There we go. Now nobody’s listening. Two things to point out, one, there’s an amazing Podcast. Gillian, you did this Podcast with Antoine Calvet, who is the PM for Flow. Is he?
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. He and his team are basically the ones who build Orchestrator, which is the Flow of Flows thing. I love talking to Antoine because also I’m getting back up to speed with everything that happened while I was on parental leave, and talking to him was so fun because it’s like we had this concept a year ago, two years ago, and now it’s really happening where you can really take those multi-user workflows, all these processes that involve different departments, maybe external internal users and you can put all of that into one beautiful process automation using Orchestrator.
You don’t have to rebuild each individual Flow, you don’t have to link them together and external things, you have one beautiful representation. It was really great to talk to him about what he and his team have built, where it’s going, what they’re excited to share at TDX, which is happening now. Yeah, it was a really fun episode to record if you haven’t listened to it. Go listen it.
Mike Gerholdt: Go back and listen. And Gillian you highlighted an article that you wrote too.
Gillian Bruce: Oh, okay. I can’t take full credit for this article. This is really like I put a question out on Twitter and got overwhelmingly awesome responses from the community. I was talking to a colleague like a month ago and I was like, “Hey, don’t we have a good example of an app that someone’s built to manage users?” And for some reason I thought that this content already existed, I couldn’t find it. So what do I do? I just post on Twitter, “Hey, does anyone have a good example of how they’ve built an app to manage user requests?” Okay. The responses I got were incredible. I got some amazing examples of really robust and really powerful apps that people have built to better manage user requests and go read the posts. There’s actual screenshots in there and actual outlines of different parts and features of these apps that people have built, so many great things you can learn and incorporate.
Things like how to really get real data on your ROI of the things that you have built to really track the time to some best practices in terms of capturing requests, in terms of forcing people to fit into the structure of a user request. It’s great. Check out the post. I’m sure you’re going to get something out of it that will help you as an admin, be more efficient and help you and your team deliver more powerful results and just show how amazing you are. So read it. And huge shout out to all the collaborators that contributed to it. Because let me tell you, I just put the quest out there and then just put all of their great info in there.
Mike Gerholdt: You just put the legos together, you didn’t build the bricks.
Gillian Bruce: Exactly.
Mike Gerholdt: Right. Cool. Well that was great. We will do a wrap up of TDX in May, hang out for that because we’ve also got some stuff that we’re going to try and record live there. We’ll see how that turns out. But if you want to learn more about all the things that we just talked about, the Podcast and that really cool article, go to admin.salesforce.com to find those links and many more resources. You can stay up to date with us on social for all things admins. We are at Salesforce admins. No I on Twitter. I am on Twitter @MikeGerholdt and of course Gillian is @Gilliankbruce. I bet there’s a few selfies going on our Twitter right now.
Gillian Bruce: Oh, yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: Just because it’s TDX. So with that, stay safe, stay awesome and stay tuned for the next episode. We’ll see you in the cloud.
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