Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Michelle Wolfe, Platform Engineer. Join us as we chat about how she built a Flow-powered user management system to handle requests, approvals, user creation, permissions, communications, and even onboarding.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Michelle Wolfe.
It’s a good thing when your organization is growing, right? For Salesforce Admins, however, new hires need new accounts, and that means approvals, permissions, and onboarding. My guest this week, Michelle Wolfe, found herself in exactly this situation. She turned to Flow to build an automated user management system with no code, and she’s here to tell us all about it.
Michelle’s company was bringing in 80+ people per new hire class, but the account creation request process was a mess. Managers would email a random member of the three-person admin team, and then they would manually create the account. So the first step was to wrangle the business process with a screen flow to get the correct information into Salesforce and create a case.
But Michelle was just getting started. Now that everything was in Salesforce, she knew that she could use Flow to automate the rest of the process.
Once the new user’s information was approved by their manager, Michelle set up an autolaunched flow to spin up the account. This took care of data validation, configuring the correct permissions, and creating a username.
Finally, a second autolaunched flow would close out the case and send two email actions: one to confirm the request, and one to welcome the new user. With help from Flow and Einstein Copilot, Michelle transformed a complicated manual business process into something streamlined, simple, and scalable.
Michelle credits her success with how closely she works with her training team on enhancements. “Because they interact with new employees, they see things differently than someone who’s been here for years and knows how we use our Salesforce,” she explains. That fresh perspective helps her identify improvements she might otherwise miss.
Listen to my full conversation with Michelle for more on how she used Flow to automate user management—we really get into the weeds. And make sure you’re subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.
Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I’m joined by Michelle Wolf to talk about what happens when user onboarding stops being a string of emails and becomes a real platform process.
So Michelle built a Flow-powered system that handles requests, approvals, user creation, permissions, communications, and even offboarding, while keeping the admin team in control.
We’re going to talk about the automation behind it, but also the process decisions that make it accurate, secure, and useful for her business.
Now, because when admins design access and onboarding well, they’re not just saving time. They’re protecting trust and helping people get productive faster.
So listen in, subscribe, share this episode with an admin who has one too many user requests sitting in their inbox.
I’ll tell you who doesn’t have too many user in requests sitting in their inbox, and that’s Michelle.
So let’s get Michelle on the podcast.
So Michelle, welcome to the podcast.
Michelle Wolf:
Thank you for having me, Mike.
Mike:
I think this is exciting because I can’t recall the number of times I’ve had people on about onboarding users. And I think it’s because whatever cool tool we have come out, it’s the second thing people do. They’re like, “Oh, I could do this, and I need to figure out how to do X, Y, and Z when I onboard people.”
Because it was like that with Flow. There was stuff with Chatter when that came out, “How do I onboard people and add them to groups?”
And Jennifer Lee was at your session at Midwest Dreaming, and she thought it was just phenomenal. So I had to have you on the podcast to talk about it.
But before we get into that, tell me a little bit about yourself, how you got started with Salesforce and what you do.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. So my journey started as a lot of ours as an accidental admin.
I was working for a small family-run business who had Salesforce, and they were paying a consultant to basically be their full-time admin.
And one day my manager walked into my office and said, “I don’t want to pay them anymore. I need you to learn this.”
And I was like, “Okay.”
Mike:
“I suppose.”
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. Why not? So yeah, that’s what started my journey. And I skilled up on Trailhead and I was on it two, three hours a day trying to figure out how to be an admin in Salesforce. And this was back at the initial transition from Classic to Lightning.
Mike:
Ooh, fun.
Michelle Wolf:
So half of my early batches are on Classic. There just wasn’t a ton of Lightning stuff out there yet.
So I would build a lot in Classic and then flip it over to Lightning to see what it looked like because they did like the Lightning interface, which was great.
So that started my journey. And then when I decided to part ways with that company, I took a different position and paused my admin career.
And then about five years ago or so, I had an opportunity to be a product SME for Salesforce. And I was like, “Yes, I miss this product. I miss doing this. I miss being able to make things better with just the click of the button. So let’s go do this.”
And I jumped in both feet and never looked back. And so I’ve been an active admin for a little over five years now.
And I’m a Flownatic. Anything I can automate, I am doing it.
Mike:
I love it. Active admin as opposed to passive.
Michelle Wolf:
Exactly.
Mike:
I don’t know. So I love when you started because I remember those times and the reason there wasn’t enough Lightning things is we were all writing it as fast as we could.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah, I know it.
Mike:
It’s kind of like learning to drive with a manual. And then they’re like, “Oh, well, here’s an automatic.” And you’re like, “Oh, I already know how to drive with a manual.” I mean, if you knew how to do things in Classic, then doing stuff in Lightning was just that much easier, in my opinion anyway.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. I agree. I agree.
And the user experience was better for my users. They liked the layout and the feel. It jived with their personalities better instead of that very formal grid-looking everything.
Mike:
I mean, that was the internet at a certain period in time. And then it grew up and it was like your eyes don’t have to squint with white space.
Michelle Wolf:
Right.
Mike:
Every field just went from tight polyester pants to sweatpants. And it was like, “Yay.”
Michelle Wolf:
Exactly.
Mike:
Let’s talk about being a Flownatic because I’ve talked with Jen. I know Jen said she was in your session.
I really think, I mean, outside of just it’s so incredibly powerful, the amount of things that you can do on the Salesforce platform without writing a single line of code. Flow is one of those.
And I remember it was 100 years ago that I saw Flow for the first time at Dreamforce when I was a customer. And I think they called it Business Process Management or something. And it was an app you had to download, and then you had to upload schemas to it.
It’s since graduated into a much more robust tool. But the nice thing is once you know that, I mean, caveat emptor because AI runs off of all the flows. I mean, if you’re good at Flow, there’s very few things you can’t make Agentforce do.
So tell me a little bit about why you built onboarding with Flow.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. The company I was with found themselves in a really big period of growth, which was really amazing.
But the new hire classes were like 80 people. And I just could not bring myself to want to spend a week of my life just filling in these boxes to make new users.
It was really so time-consuming. And one typo here, one missed field here. My validation rules didn’t check out. It was just a pain. It’s just very mind-numbing.
And I was like, “There has to be a better way.”
And I went through the different variations of the Add Multiple Users. It’s an out-of-the-box function, except I couldn’t put my custom fields on there, which means I couldn’t save my users because we had validation rules in place.
And then I experimented with a bulk upload, but it was such a pain because if I would typo a field, I would mess up my entire formula.
Mike:
Yeah.
Michelle Wolf:
And I was like, “There has to be a better way. There just has to be a better way.” And-
Mike:
Plus then all you’re doing is just creating the user.
Michelle Wolf:
Exactly.
Mike:
With Flow, you can do so much more.
Michelle Wolf:
Exactly. So by converting it to a Flow, I had a screen. I used my screen flows, and I leveraged the fact that the onboarding team is already putting that information into an email or something. Well, just go here and put it in a case for me. Just hit this button, pull out the fields. Now I don’t have to do this.
And then I used that screen flow to make a case so I can track my productivity, when the requests are coming in, when the requests are due by, who’s doing the request.
We started with just managing cases manually and making the users off the cases. And we had built in the approval process to make sure that someone else was double checking the inputs. Did they spell their name right? Did they put in the email right?
Because I don’t know these people. They’re not going to be reporting to me. I’m not part of the onboarding team. I’m just making a user.
So we had the managers do the approvals and make sure all that information’s correct, make sure they’re requesting the right… We use a field called Team Name that we made custom to make sure they’re getting put on the right team, the customer service team or senior customer service team, whatever.
So someone else is double checking it and then approving it.
And I was like, “From here, I have to be able to automate something because the information’s already in Salesforce.”
And that’s when I got into utilizing that approval flow to trigger an autolaunched flow to actually make my user and create the alias and create the username and update the profile based off of what was entered on the request form in my screen flow, and just physically make my user.
Mike:
Wow. We spent a lot of time talking about the tech part of it. I want to dive in because I feel like you conquered a lot, but you probably had to sell it. Maybe you didn’t.
Tell me about all the non-tech stuff that you had to sell. Who did you have to go to, and what were the people you met with in order to say, “Here’s how I’m going to onboard users moving forward”?
Michelle Wolf:
So the onboarding process had already been moved to our team. And it was just that it was coming to us in a very casual way. We’re getting an email request.
So it was part of the struggle was they started emailing us individually. We were a team of three, and they would just pick which admin they wanted to work with.
Well, if I’m out of office or I have to leave unexpectedly and forget to put my out of office on, then their stuff’s getting delayed.
And so that was the first big conversation of how do we take out that portion? How do we get them to just put it in so we can decide who does the work?
Because if I’m heads down on a project, I don’t have five minutes to go make a user. I need to be heads down on my project.
Mike:
Right.
Michelle Wolf:
So this allowed us to divvy up work more easily and really even just check our own productivity of handling these types of requests and making sure it’s not one person that always gets stuck with the work because they’re the one that’s always being emailed.
So that was the first thing.
And so the three of us, we were a really tight-knit group, and we’re all very aligned with not wanting to be the only human that was pinged or emailed.
And so it was like, let’s just get it to a centralized place.
And so we just went to our manager and said, “We’re going to build this. We need this to be more productive.”
And they were like, “Yeah, makes sense. Do what you need to do.”
Mike:
I mean, that’s awesome.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
Sometimes when I was an admin would happen and sometimes it wouldn’t. But I do think some change has to happen that way of, “No, here’s how I’m going to be more productive, and here’s what I want to set up.”
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
So then were there… I guess what I’m getting at is, for admins that hear this and like, “Oh man, this is me,” were there other checks that were already in place that you didn’t have to deal with?
There was already a check with HR or the person in payroll in terms of onboarding these people. You didn’t have to go and say, “Can you…”
Because I was the same way, to be honest with you. I would find out when I was an admin, “Oh, so-and-so needs a Salesforce license,” two days after they started when HR sent out the announcement of the new hires.
And I was like, “Hey, there has to be some process that you onboard these people to the company. Can I be part of that?”
And I kind of had to unwind HR and figure that out because they didn’t know that Salesforce was a part of this department and they didn’t know that people need to be onboarded for it.
You sound like you didn’t have to deal with any of that.
Michelle Wolf:
We did not. That onboarding process was already handled by a team.
And so when the hiring manager said, “Yes, we’re going to offer,” and they accept, they already knew what systems, what equipment they need, what systems they need access to, and then what types of permissions they would need to ask for from Salesforce.
So like what team they were going to, so that that request could be put in. All that hard legwork was already done.
So to those who might not have that, I think the biggest selling point could be onboarding experience.
A lot of companies are focusing on what that hiring process, what that onboarding experience is. And as someone’s starting a new job, I want to prove myself early on. I want to say, “I’m here, I’m ready to work.”
And if I can’t access my systems, even though it’s fully out of my control, I still feel like I’m not doing my best as an employee, as a new employee.
So you can leverage just even the onboarding experience that they have, the equipment they need, they have the logins that they need on day one, on the day that they need it.
Mike:
Yeah. And you don’t have to go into detail, but what are the key, I guess I’ll call them, milestones in your onboarding flow that the new people get sent?
Do you have training materials, or do you have a video that’s Michelle being like, “Hi, I’m your Salesforce administrator”?
Michelle Wolf:
If only.
Mike:
I know. I always say that and everybody’s like, “Oh, that’d be a great idea.”
Michelle Wolf:
It would be. It would be.
Mike:
“It’s just 4,792 on my list of things to do.”
Michelle Wolf:
Exactly. When I have that free minute, I will absolutely get to that next.
Mike:
Yeah. And also my other two admins, because it can’t just be me.
Michelle Wolf:
Right. “Here’s your Salesforce team. We’re here to support you.”
Mike:
Yep.
Michelle Wolf:
So what we built into our process was, in my Flow automation, there was actually a second autolaunched flow that would close out the case.
And this did a couple of things. One, it closed out the case so they had a complete close of the loop and updated the reason as completed by automation because a human didn’t have to touch any part of this request.
Mike:
Ooh, that’s cool.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
I like that.
Michelle Wolf:
Clean reporting. Who doesn’t like that?
Mike:
I mean, for a while, I remember doing approvals or something and somebody asked me, “Well, did you actually do this or did Salesforce, the Flow do it?” And I was like, “Well, the Flow did, but the Flow ran as me.” Then it marks that. But I like that you added that completed with automation.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. But we also added two email actions.
And one was to the requester. So the individual that opened the case through the screen flow, it sent them an email telling them that the request had been completed.
And then the second thing was, when the user record was created, it then updated the Requested For field, which was just a custom field we made on the case for a user lookup with the new user that we’d made.
And we sent a welcome email to them and said, “Welcome to Salesforce. Welcome to our company. Here’s how you access our org.”
And it had the link for the SSO. Yeah.
Mike:
Because at the point that the person’s creating the case for you to create the user, they’ve already had an email assigned to them.
Michelle Wolf:
Correct.
Mike:
I like it. That’s pretty sweet.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. It was just a nice clean way to close multiple loops that ended up getting started.
Mike:
So then, not to dig into it, and this is where I wish I should have seen your presentation, do you also have a process for adding them to… I don’t know if you guys have Slack or different things like that.
How, outside of maybe that user emailing you, do they have not necessarily an open loop, but at least a channel to ping back the admins and say, “Oh, hey, I got everything except this doesn’t work, or, “I’m not seeing X,” or, “How do I upload a profile picture?”?
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah, absolutely. So for our new hires, basically all of that was handled in their new hire training, a lot of that initial setup support.
However, in our screen flow, we actually made it a full-service utility where when you went to launch the screen flow, you could say, “I need help with Salesforce. Something’s broken.” Or, “I need a new user.”
So it was this full access path to us where they could put in multiple requests depending on what they needed.
Mike:
I like that. And I’m assuming it’s not Michelle, but you have people in the organization that do training. How much do you have to keep them updated in terms of, “Here’s what the new user experience is like for Salesforce”?
Michelle Wolf:
As far as?
Mike:
Just anything. Anything that would change or anything that they may encounter, new features.
Michelle Wolf:
Oh, yeah. So anytime we would build any type of enhancement, we worked very closely with our training department.
We knew if we’re going to help make starter material for an announcement for the call center for X, Y, Z enhancement, training’s also going to need that material and probably a deep dive hands-on demo so that they can incorporate it into their training materials.
So any new builds like that, our training department was really involved even from early-on stages of the development because they interact with new employees, and they see that interaction differently than someone who’s been here for five, 10, 12 years and knows how we use our Salesforce.
Even just how we design and where we put things on the Lightning page, they would often give us input from a new hire perspective to ensure that we’re building good things.
Mike:
Now, just because we’re nerdy here, did you have a way of capturing that? Was that a case as well?
Michelle Wolf:
That was just conversations.
Mike:
Oh, okay.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. It was, “Hey, we have this thing. We want a demo for you. Give us feedback,” type of stuff.
Mike:
I didn’t know if you were capturing that in terms of tech debt or things we need to build, things we’d like to build, and things we need more money to build.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah, depending on what it was. It was just good old-fashioned scope creep.
Mike:
Okay. Yeah, that usually happens, unfortunately.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
I’ve talked about Flow and AgentForce. I’ve been around now. I remember from 2006 when we finally had drag-and-drop WYSIWYG page editors to now we have… Well, I’ve seen agents build apps now. So I feel like I’m coming full circle.
If you haven’t already, if you were to bake some AI into your Flow, are there things that you would change or things you’d want to change and do different?
Michelle Wolf:
I don’t know yet because I spent so much time getting it to do what I wanted it to do with all my magic formulas in that Flow. I don’t even know if AI could have helped. Now, AI did help me make those formulas. But I don’t know how I might leverage AI to improve this process even more.
Mike:
Yeah. No, that’s fair. I mean, I have friends, and they always razz me a little bit because I work for a tech company, and they’re like, “What’d you put AI into today?”
And I think that’s a call that admins need to make is, “Where do I need to add it?” Not just for the sake of adding it.
I think we always talk about internally when we’re creating content, “Well, don’t AI wash everything.” You don’t have to include AI in it if it doesn’t make sense because for yourself and your other two admins, that’s one more thing you have to update or keep track of.
And if it doesn’t need it and you could do it somewhere else more effectively, then you should.
Which sounds crazy, but it should be in the right places for the right interfaces, as opposed to, “Well, I included it because I could include it everywhere.”
It’s like putting frosting on everything. The bacon cheeseburger doesn’t need frosting just because you’re a frosting company.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah, exactly. And I think maybe the next iteration that could include AI would just be on the initial request, especially for individuals wanting help with Salesforce. Maybe leveraging an FAQ-type of document for the things we do get commonly asked questions about. But for the user management, I’d really have to sit down and think of how that could apply.
Mike:
Yeah. Or even an agent to serve up, “Here are three questions everybody asks and here’s links. Do you have any other questions besides that?” And be a little proactive in terms of FAQs and stuff like that.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
So outside of email and stuff, does that seem to work okay? Or are you more leaning towards if we had Slack or anything different, we can maybe change things?
I always worried when execs were like, “And then I want it to email me.” I’m like, “You do know you have 10 salespeople. And if they have to close four deals a day, that’s 40 emails on top of the eight billion you already get.”
You didn’t have any executives with concerns on email velocity when you’re onboarding 80 people?
Michelle Wolf:
Oh, no, because of the 80 people, the emails from the requesters were really going back to the onboarding team.
And so it was a way for them to check off the list that that system is done.
So just like they would do it for other systems or other access for Jira or their Microsoft Teams access and all that stuff. It’s just closing that loop with the onboarder.
We did have one concern when one of the managers was new, and so 20 of the new hires was theirs.
Mike:
Oh.
Michelle Wolf:
But that’s not the norm. You know what I mean? It’s not necessarily that all the time you’re going to be hit with all of the approvals, but it did happen.
“You’re new, you’re getting a full class of newbies. Good luck.”
Mike:
“Congratulations. You now have 20 more emails.”
Michelle Wolf:
Exactly.
Mike:
When you presented this, I’m curious, fresh eyes, sometimes you can sit in silence and between you and your other admins, you’re like, “This is boss. I can’t wait to show people.”
And then you show people, and they have a lot of questions.
Is there questions that people had that maybe caught you off guard or you didn’t think they would ask you about?
Michelle Wolf:
I don’t think any questions really caught me off guard, but the types of questions that came up were, “How did you come up with your approval process?”
I was lucky that my approval process was already established within my organization. You get a new hire, it’s the direct manager that approves it.
Other organizations, it’s the system admin that approves that this position and title in human deserves and needs access to do their job function.
So it just depends on how your organization slices that cake, but someone should be approving access to an org.
Mike:
And you know what’s funny is, I probably asked you at the beginning of the podcast, but those are always the questions that I try to get out of people because especially when me and my team are building demos, the process behind what we’re building, we just don’t even think about.
It’s like, here’s how the tech would do it. But the tech is only there to support the process.
And nine times out of 10, everybody in the audience watches your presentation like, “Got it. Now I know how to build it. It’s going to take me three months to get this process ironed out because either there’s a lack of one or there’s a shared understanding of how people think things work.”
And those are the questions to really ask. Are there questions that they came up with that your company hadn’t figured out yet?
Michelle Wolf:
No, of course not. I had all the answers.
Mike:
Perfect.
Michelle Wolf:
No, I don’t think so. Because my solution covered 80% or more of the situations.
Even in the event of your admins, say your admins are responsible for giving an individual an access to the org, but then they’re also responsible for giving them access to some connected program that integrates with your org, but your admins are responsible for providing that access.
My Flow included that if a manual comment is added or if a checkbox is selected that they need this access, it adds a comment to the case using the case comments and then leaves the case in an open status, like in progress, so that your admins can go in and finish that process.
Mike:
Oh, cool.
Michelle Wolf:
And then when they close the case, it just still does the rest of that email magic to tell everybody that it’s all done. So we left openings for those situations where manual changes would be necessary to complete the full onboarding from our team.
Mike:
That opened up a host of questions in my head. So can you create a user without going through your case and Flow?
Michelle Wolf:
Manually. Yeah. None of that’s turned off, but we do prefer them to use the Flow.
Mike:
Right. I didn’t know if you flagged it as, “This went outside the Flow,” or something.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. The only situation where it wouldn’t… No. No, we stopped making users manually because the user would still get created. It would just leave the case open. So no, it’s physically possible. We do not make users manually.
Mike:
Nice.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
That warms my heart to know that. Well, it’s always, you build the coolest solution and then the process goes around. And I remember having a manager tell me that. He’s like, “Nobody’s going to use Salesforce as long as they can put orders in on spreadsheets.”
Michelle Wolf:
That’s fair.
Mike:
Yeah, that was the truth.
So the opposite of that, do you have an offboarding process? Is it like a similar Flow where if an employee decides to leave, does somebody create a case and that triggers your team to shut down the license?
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. We actually built in a deactivate. We called it remove because our business calls it remove users, but it deactivates the user. When you choose that option in the flow, you get to use the lookup to deactivate the user. And then we also had a freeze, and I call it thaw instead of unfreeze. So we had a freeze and thaw process.
Mike:
I like that. That’s awesome.
Michelle Wolf:
So yeah, we did a freeze and thaw process and we also had an update permission. So if somebody was changing teams, so somebody got promoted from customer service to sales, you can just put in the change request and once it’s approved, off it goes.
Mike:
See, that’s what differentiates what you built from everything else, because nine times out of 10, an admin will, “Okay, I’m going to build an onboarding thing.”
You’re building a user management system, and you have the organization bought into it. “This is how we do this for this system.”
And it keeps a chain of custody, and it keeps a nice record for you as well. Especially the permissions update stuff, that’s got to be handy.
Are you ever asked to report out people whose permissions have changed or, for whatever reason?
Michelle Wolf:
I don’t know that we were ever asked to report that. And the company that I built this for actually had an Apex that did all of the permission and groups assignments. It was built out with metadata and permissions because when they built that out, user access policies didn’t exist.
Mike:
Gotcha.
Michelle Wolf:
So when I built it for my demo, I’m not a developer, I’m not going to build out that Apex solution, but I used the user access policies for providing those permissions and assignments for that portion of the automation and access.
Mike:
Yeah. I have a million more questions. I think one that people would ask. Usernames. So I don’t need to know usernames, but did you put in a way to make sure that the person submitting the case doesn’t have to think about the username and it’s still for-
Michelle Wolf:
Yes.
Mike:
Okay.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. So I use a [inaudible 00:32:21].
Mike:
So you knew the answer.
Michelle Wolf:
I did.
Mike:
It took me longer to put the question together and you’re like, “I already know the answer, Mike. Spit it out.”
Michelle Wolf:
So they only gave us their first and last name, their email address, and then the identifier that we used for our SSO or Federation ID, and then what team they belonged to.
So we knew what permissions and then who their manager was so we could get the right approval.
Everything else was done through the formulas. And that’s the tricky part. That is one of the ways in which the automation can fail.
And it’s the unique username and the unique alias. Because when you’re on the new user record, Salesforce does all that magic for you. They do all the hardlifting to figure it out.
And so instead of a one in four, because it uses the first initial, the first name, and the first four of the last names, so instead of a one in four, I made it a two and four for the alias to increase my chances of not having a duplicate.
Mike:
Right, because there could be a lot of Susan Smiths out there.
Michelle Wolf:
Exactly.
Mike:
Yeah.
Michelle Wolf:
And so what I did was I also built in on a fault path, essentially a loop. So if it failed, I would add a digit to the end and then have it try again.
Mike:
Oh. Would it incremental the digit?
Michelle Wolf:
Yes. Yeah.
Mike:
Well, that’s smart.
Michelle Wolf:
And that way I could… I’d still have a chance that it’s going to not work.
Mike:
I mean, if that poor guy hired 20 John Smiths, we’re going to work that formula.
Michelle Wolf:
To the bone, for sure. I used Flow. I used the power of Flow to really be as hands-off as possible with it, up to and including, we wanted to keep a minimum of 10 licenses available.
We always wanted 10 emergency licenses available. So before I create a user, I have it go get my org data to make sure I have 10 Salesforce licenses at least available.
And if I don’t, then it won’t make the user. It just leaves a note on the case and leaves the case open.
Mike:
Saying, “You’re at your minimum of 10.”
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. So we built in some of those custom safeguards that were special to us. We wanted that. So we put that customization in there.
Mike:
I like that. That’s really cool.
Michelle, you’ve enlightened me. I’m excited. I want to go build a Flow and onboard people and make perm sets a thing. I don’t know. I feel like you probably have some solid time with an AI writing a lot of formulas.
Michelle Wolf:
Yes. Copilot and I got real buddy-buddy.
Mike:
Yeah. I mean, AI is really good at writing formulas, so thank goodness for that, right?
Michelle Wolf:
Yes, yes. I can do them, but those complex ones were a little on the edge of my capability.
Mike:
Oh, yeah. I can do with validation rules and stuff, and it requires parens. Once we get past one set of parens, I’m done. I’m cooked.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
That’s it. Nope. I bow out early. I can’t swim in the deep end of that pool. And I’ve seen people work with 15 nested statements. I’m like, “I’m exhausted reading this. How do you even know what it’s doing?”
Michelle Wolf:
Right.
Mike:
Well, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and telling us about this.
I think it’s really cool. I hope you have an opportunity to share that onboarding Flow with more people and present it at more user groups.
Michelle Wolf:
I had a suggestion to make it a hands-on training.
Mike:
Yeah, it sounds cool.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
That sounds really cool. Maybe you should suggest it for TDX next year.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
Because that’s a very technical, hands-on… People would love that.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah. Well, they didn’t pick it up this year, but I’m not sure I sold it very well. So we’ll try next year.
Mike:
I mean, it’s all in how you sell it sometimes.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
And also whether or not places have space for stuff like that. Not every track gets certain kinds of… It’s a thing. That’s a whole other rabbit hole within a rabbit hole that we could go to. I could do a whole series of podcasts on it, and nobody would listen to it, but I would think it would be interesting. And five people who write submissions would.
Michelle Wolf:
Yeah.
Mike:
Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being on the podcast.
Michelle Wolf:
Thank you so much, Mike. It was a pleasure.
Mike:
A big thank you to Michelle Wolf for sharing how she turned user onboarding into a thoughtful, scalable Salesforce process.
My takeaway for admins is simple. Flow can automate the clicks, but your understanding of approvals, access, permissions, and business context is what makes the process work.
Now be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast and share this episode with somebody who is ready to get their user management out of their inbox and into Salesforce.
Until next time, we’ll see you in the cloud.
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