Insight: Trailhead as an Adoption Tool

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’ve got the one and only Megan Petersen, Senior Manager of Trailhead Marketing out of Sydney, Australia. We’ll be talking about how Trailhead can help you drive Salesforce adoption at your company.

More about this Insights session: using Trail Tracker, Chatter groups, and Trailmix to boost Trailhead at your company and elevate your own career at your company.

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

Ranger Megan leads the way.

Megan has gotten a bit of a promotion since the last time she was on the podcast— she’s now Ranger Megan. “I’ve been going out to a lot of customers here in Australia to talk to them about how they can use Trailhead within their businesses,” she says, “which is a really great way to up-skill your career within your own business.” You can use Trailhead to do onboarding programs or re-skill your workforce, and there a lot of great tools to help you, like Trailmix and the Trail Tracker.

Trail Tracker is available on the AppExchange that you can download directly into your instance of Salesforce. This tool gives you reports and dashboards for keeping track of how your users work in Trailhead. “I encourage people to set up a Chatter group when they’re doing this,” which lets everyone share their Trailmixes and discuss. “The Chatter group brings it all together, “you can put the shareable link to your Trailmix in there, snapshots of your leaderboard from Trail Tracker, and get a friendly competition going.”

Megan was just working with a customer doing their second phase of their Salesforce rollout and they decided to make Trailhead non-mandatory. Instead, they presented it as an opportunity to take your career to the next level. “Within the first day there was like 40 badges from this group of people,” she says.

Using Trailhead to get back time as an Admin.

“When we talk about training programs,” Megan says, “we need to remember that training’s not just done in isolation, you don’t just do it at the beginning when you welcome someone into the company, things change and evolve, especially with Salesforce, and this is how we can get people to learn about those new features in an ongoing, fun, and digestible way.”

At Salesforce we know it’s been a major challenge for Admins to do training in a consumable way that doesn’t suck up your time. We also know that many people have heavily customized orgs, so it can be hard to see how Trailhead will work for them. However, once you actually break your training you’ll find that Trailhead can really give you back time by covering the basics of navigation and general knowledge of how Salesforce works. The content is also maintained and kept up to date with the latest releases, so you know it’ll stay relevant.

Upcoming customization options with My Trailhead.

Keeping on the subject of customization, the most exciting thing coming down the pipeline is myTrailhead. “You might have fallen in love with the Trailhead experience, but you’re trying to find a way to take that back to your business which has its own cultural values,” Megan says, and myTrailhead lets you do that by writing your own content. You can customize it with your company’s colors, logos, and create the perfect mix of current Trailhead content and your own stuff.

“The best way to get ready for myTrailhead is, ultimately, to start learning on Trailhead the way it is today,” Megan says, “because it gives you users an understanding of how to engage and go through the units,” which gets them used to the fun, gamified, bite-sized learning experience that we all know and love.

Trailhead Webinars

• Webinar: Getting Started with Trailhead

Trailhead

• Get Your Company Started with Trailhead Trailmix

Twitter

• Megan: @MeganPTweets
• Gillian: @gilliankbruce
• Salesforce Admins: @salesforceadmns

We want to remind you that if you love what you hear, or even if you don’t, head on over to iTunes and give us a review. It’s super easy to do, and it really helps more Admins find the podcast. Plus, we would really appreciate it.