On this episode of the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Sam Dorman, co-founder of the Build Tank, to find out how to properly resource your Salesforce team.
Join us as we talk about how Sam’s years of consulting have informed how you can properly implement Salesforce and resource a team to make that implementation last and be successful.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Sam Dorman.
Like many, Sam is an accidental technologist. He noticed that a lot of organizations he respected were on the platform, so he talked someone into implementing it at his business. “To be honest, it was a big failure,” he says, but it started him down the path towards helping organizations do what they need to do to have a successful implementation.
“We’re at a different level now with the way we approach technology. You can’t just hope someone sets it up for you and tosses you the keys, it’s this big complex machine that takes a lot of strategy, time, effort, patience, and focus,” Sam says. At the Build Tank, they focus on helping companies build the internal capacity they need in order to implement cutting-edge technology.
Sam and Build Tank put out a white paper to explain some of the common issues they see when people struggle with implementation. “When I first started consulting on Salesforce,” Sam says, he noticed that everything went well, “but only when I had someone internally that I was working with that could own all of the strategic decisions, that could communicate with people internally, and follow up on work.” Other times, they’d build great things only to come back six months later and find out that nobody’s using it, or the data collection is bad.
So initially, Sam’s work was all about making the case that the organizations he worked with needed to hire someone if they were going to implement new technology like Salesforce. But as an implementation continues to grow, “you see this great cycle of improvement start happening where people’s eyes start opening about what this system is capable of, how it can help them every day, and new ideas start coming out of the woodwork,” he says. Ultimately, technology like Salesforce can be transformational for every piece of the business and organization if that process is allowed to happen.
One way that the Build Tank conceptualizes what needs to happen is with a triangle of the three different areas of work: technical, human, and leadership. When you’re taking on a major tech project, you need to make sure that you have all three sides covered. As a Salesforce admin, you may find that you’re straddling more than one side of the triangle. The trick is to find someone to help you with the skillsets that you don’t have. That might be a new hire, or that might be someone already in your organization.
Another way that you can help supplement your leadership is to look for things to outsource. In the white paper, Sam gets into six areas you can look at: database administration, architecture and development, user support and training, tools and integrations, data guardianship, and product management and leadership.
Database administration and data guardianship should eventually be internal, “but if you’re in a situation where your time is limited, those can be done off of a ticketing queue,” Sam says. You’ll want to own those eventually, but you can get by with outsourcing them for a little.
On the other hand, there are some things that you can’t outsource. User support and training need to be something you own. “It’s just not good enough to have a firm give everyone two trainings and then say good luck,” Sam says, “and if you’re at the scale where you can have people full time on that that’s some of the best investment you can possibly make.” Similarly, there’s no way you can ask someone externally to do everything they need for product management and leadership. That comes down to diplomacy and internal relationships, which simply can’t be outsourced.
Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, where we talk about product, community and careers to help you become a more awesome Salesforce admin. I’m Gillian Bruce. And today folks, we’ve got another really fun, kind of best practices-themed episode for you. We talked to Shannon Greg, last week about a lot of things, but mostly about change management and adoption. And today on the podcast, we’re kind of following up that theme. We’re talking about how to properly resource your Salesforce team and in order to explain more about that and what it means and some great methodologies behind it, we are welcoming Sam Dorman to the podcast.
Gillian Bruce: Now, Sam is an amazing individual. He is super great person to know. He’s the co-founder of The Build Tank, and he’s done a lot of work with Salesforce organizations over the year as a consultant and has learned a lot of lessons about how to best set your organization up for success as you implement Salesforce. So wanted to get him on the podcast to share some of the things he’s learned and have a good conversation. So without further ado, let’s welcome Sam on the podcast. Sam, welcome to the podcast.
Sam Dorman: Oh thanks. Very good to be here.
Gillian Bruce: Thanks for coming to HQ on this rainy day to record with me. I appreciate it.
Sam Dorman: Yeah, it’s fun. Nice. I’m glad to be here.
Gillian Bruce: Excellent. Well, I wanted to introduce you a little bit to our audience. And I do that with the same question that I asked all of our new guests. Sam, what did you want to be when you grow up?
Sam Dorman: Yeah. What did I want to be? I think there was a moment when I wanted to be second baseman for the Oakland A’s. That’s kind of good in a way that’s good for a little kid, thinking he could be a professional athlete and it’s a little bit mediocre too.
Gillian Bruce: When you think of the A’s.
Sam Dorman: Well, yeah. Thanks a lot. No not just the A’s but the second base thing. It’s not like even shortstop would have been more respectable or center fielder, pitcher but I don’t know what little kid wants to be the second, it’s just a little bit of if you’re going to pick a position, it’s a little mediocre.
Gillian Bruce: I played second base for five years in softball, so I am partial to second base.
Sam Dorman: Me too, so I kind of just insulted us both but since I was in on it, I think it’s okay.
Gillian Bruce: There we go. Okay so how did you go from wanting to the second baseman on the Oakland A’s to now working in the Salesforce ecosystem? Tell me a little bit about that path.
Sam Dorman: That’s sort of a depressing way to put it … When did your dreams get … Oh, no, it’s inspiring, right? I don’t know. How did I get into this work was, I was I think an accidental technologist. Like a lot of people. I was working with organizations and you had to figure out, do your technology and actually there was people that I respected that were on Salesforce and so I sort of haggled someone down and we implemented it. And to be honest, it was a big failure because we didn’t do it justice, and we didn’t staff it and whatnot. So that was the beginning of a long progression that really led towards helping organizations approach projects like this with with the capacity it needs, and with the kind of robust effort that it needs to be successful.
Gillian Bruce: Okay, so technology crossed your path because you were doing other things and trying to accomplish big things, and now here you go, “Oh, I need technology to make this happen.” And then you try Salesforce for the first time and you have a big lesson. So tell me a little bit more about that.
Sam Dorman: Right. Well, that’s not unique to Salesforce. Every technology undertaking takes a good amount of focus and time and yeah, and so that’s, that’s what we do now, what we help organizations do is just sort of realize that we’re at a different sort of level now with the way we approach technology. It’s no longer something that … You can’t just hope someone sets it up for you, tosses you the keys, it’s as big complex machine, right? And it takes a lot of strategy. And it takes a lot of time and effort and patience and focus. So yeah, I think it’s a lot of hard, hard earned, hard learned lessons to get there.
Gillian Bruce: Okay. So tell me a little bit about who is we, what are you doing now? What organization you’re working with, and tell me a little bit more about the work you do.
Sam Dorman: Right. We are called The Build Tank, we are a consultancy, we help groups build really good high quality technology but with an extra focus on the internal capacity, building that kind of internal capacity saying, “We’re past the point now where you can think of technology as something that you do off the side of somebody’s desk or that you give to someone else.” I mean, I guess this is the right podcast to be talking about this because this is probably the choir to be preaching to. But for a while it was a real fight, just to say, you need an admin, if this is going to work, get an admin.
Sam Dorman: And nowadays we’ve gone way past that, which is this actually can … As your ambitions grow, and as what you’re trying to do with the system grows and as the return on investment grows, you’re going to need more capacity and more different types of capacity to support that. And there’s an incredible return on that investment of those staff people, but sometimes there is an education in trying to get organizations to approach it in that way.
Gillian Bruce: Excellent. So one of the things that crossed my path when I was first introduced to you is this amazing white paper that you helped put out, not too long ago, and it was about kind of exactly this, kind of resourcing capacity, kind of how you set up your organization for success with namely Salesforce. So I’d love to dig into that a little bit. One of the high level things that came out to me originally is keynote, you’ve already kind of touched on this. We already know you know, we’ve been through the, “Hey, if you’re using Salesforce, you do need to actually hire an admin or label someone as your admin.” But now it’s beyond that. So tell me a little bit more about kind of dedicating a resource and how you talk to leadership, how you talk to organizations about making that a priority.
Sam Dorman: Yeah. And maybe this is to your earlier question a little bit, too. When I first started consulting on Salesforce, you’d really notice there was a group I was helping in particular and there would be times when everything would be going great. And it was when I had someone internally that I was working with, that could own all the strategic decisions and could communicate with people internally and follow up on work. And there are other times where we’re building great stuff and handing it over and then six months later, you come back and no one’s using it, or they’re using it wrong and the data is bad. And I think every one who does consulting can relate to those kinds of experiences and a lot of people that use it internally in their organization. So I think you start to see these patterns after a while and really in the old days it was, the old days is only-
Gillian Bruce: Just a few years.
Sam Dorman: A few years back, yeah. But it really was about making the case for a single person. And that used to be the pitch when I was helping consult with groups I would say, “Yeah I’ll help you but you gotta hire someone, because I don’t want to build something and I don’t want to help you do something that just doesn’t achieve its mission.”
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, it’s got to be very unfulfilling.
Sam Dorman: Yeah exactly. And then of course there’s lots of blame to go around too when something doesn’t work. That’s not fun from anybody’s point of view. So really it became about saying … So initially it was about making that case and then as the organization … You see this great cycle of improvement start happening where people’s eyes start opening about what is this system capable of and now it’s starting to help everybody do their work in better ways every day and every week and then new ideas start coming out of the woodwork, and when you really limit our capacity, then you’ll just limit on your own ability to innovate and take advantage of those opportunities, and eliminate those frustrations and eliminate those places where staff are repeating work or doing things in a duplicative way.
Sam Dorman: So we really sort of learned working with a lot of organizations over time how to increase that capacity a little bit proactively when possible, so that the organization didn’t have to slow down on its own innovation cycle. So many times systems like Salesforce have the super chargers, these technologies, super chargers, right? Where they affect … It’s not really just a technology thing, it affects every piece of the business and every piece of the organization around it, if you can let that cycle happen. And so after having helped enough organizations do that kind of thing. But you know, we’ve stayed small as a consultancy sort of on purpose. And so people would be asking us, how do we structure this? You help that group, you help this group and so we the purpose of the white paper was really about can we put these resources out so more people can take advantage of them more than a couple groups we can work with at any given time?
Gillian Bruce: Right? Because yeah, you have limited capacity.
Sam Dorman: Right. That’s right. Yeah. I guess I should be taking my own medicine on that one. But-
Gillian Bruce: Well, you’re scaling by sharing-
Sam Dorman: There you go, yeah, well done.
Gillian Bruce: So another aspect that you kind of covered in the white paper was that it’s beyond just the technical skill set and kind of building those other skill sets as well. So knowing technology, knowing Salesforce, and how it works is great, It’s very necessary, but that’s like one level and one layer to all of this. Can you talk a little bit more about some of the other things that you’ve kind of come across in terms of what are really important to help you increase the capacity and the resources?
Sam Dorman: Yeah, absolutely. There is in the white paper, which I should say you can download for free at thebuildtank.com. That’s thebuildtank.com.
Gillian Bruce: It’s also in the show notes.
Sam Dorman: Oh, there you go. In the show notes, people. There is a triangle diagram that shows the three different areas of work covered and people said, “This is very helpful for them to get their minds around.” So a lot of times, we think about the admin role. And we think about tech capacity in general as very technical. And by all means, that’s a piece of it, that’s a piece of the capacity needed. But that’s just one side of the three sides of this triangle. The other two are human, meaning all the support and training and re-support and retraining that people need on an ongoing basis, right? And then the third is leadership. And that’s all the diplomacy and the communication that has to happen around the organization. And budgeting and a strategic roadmap to say, “This is where our investments are going to go, the highest value return on our time and our effort and our money.”
Sam Dorman: So really, it’s those three sides of leadership, the technical and the human, you have to cover all of them and you can outsource some pieces and you have to in-source other pieces. But the point is, all three of those sides have to be covered or you’re going to be in trouble at one of them.
Gillian Bruce: And that’s a lot. I mean, we talk about that, Salesforce admins are often at the intersection of all these things at a company. And so you may be super well-versed and process builder, and writing flows and all of those things. But if you don’t have that element of understanding how to connect to your users, and to your stakeholders, and kind of get buy in, and adoption, all that stuff, that is kind of that secret admin magic that we like to talk about a lot.
Sam Dorman: That’s so well said. And my partner Chris Zezza who comes up with a lot of the most brilliant stuff that I get to talk about, he wants sort of said, just out of nowhere, he said, “Everybody likes to geek out on something.” And that’s really true, but often it’s not the … Sometimes you get the same person who wants to do two sides of this triangle or maybe even three, but more often you have some people who just they’d love to be under the hood fixing the car full-time, and that’s their strength.
Sam Dorman: You have some people who are great trainers, and they love training and they love supporting and they don’t see that as a burden or like a ticket queue they have to fear, they’re like the best investment the way they’d love to spend their time is looking over someone’s shoulder and saying, “Yeah, here’s how you do that. Yeah, no problem. I’ll show you again.” And that’s where the value of that is incredibly sky high.
Sam Dorman: And then you have some people who just get the big picture, and that’s what they want to do. They want to sort of say, “Okay, I don’t need to know all the details under the hood, but I know where we’re headed.” And so let me help us get there. And let me try to get rid of hurdles before they come and get buy in from people and leaders around the organization. So what we found is when you know that you’re trying to cover these different sides of this triangle that helps you really form the roles and hire for it. So you’re not just hiring all technical people for what are non-technical positions and vice versa.
Gillian Bruce: Absolutely. Because, I mean, there are so many ways to build up those skill sets, right? And a lot of times, I find a lot of really, truly awesome admins. Rockstar admins, actually kind of learned Salesforce as the last piece of that, right? They kind of already have some of those other skill sets either the kind of the strategic vision stuff or wanting that drive to be able to help and enable others and then they layer on top kind of learning Salesforce as they go and oftentimes that kind of sets them up for being the most successful.
Sam Dorman: Yeah, that’s such a great point, and it reminds me that often when we’re working with groups we’ll say, a lot of times you can find great talent, just latent talent in your organization. Because the primary thing that you’re looking for a lot of these types of positions, this is not true across the board, but a lot of positions, the primary thing you’re looking for is not a ton of depth with the Salesforce platform. That can be learned, that’s one of the great things about the Salesforce platform. If someone gets the bug, they can train themselves up, they can experiment with this. They can get a developer account or whatever they want to do-
Gillian Bruce: Got Trailhead for that-
Sam Dorman: Trailhead. Yeah, exactly. I mean there’s so many resources. So every organization we’ve ever worked with, there are one or more people who are just sitting there in a job that’s not using them as well to their potential, who are just excited about, it just clicks for them, and you can recruit them into this, and oftentimes it’s a promotion for them or a learning opportunity for them. And they know the organization and they have relationships and they know who to talk to, and they know what the organization is trying to do. And that can be so much more effective sometimes. So that’s the first place we’ll start when we’re looking to hire, we’ll do job listings and we’ll help organizations screen people, who are brand new and you can get great people that way too, but we’ll often just start by just trying to find who’s in here, who’s an untapped superstar in waiting.
Gillian Bruce: That’s a really excellent point, because I literally have heard hundreds of stories of people like that who are in an organization where they were in a role but not really using all their skill sets and then they kind of get this opportunity or it gets presented to them or they seek it out themselves of taking on Salesforce and then boom, their career just completely takes off. –
Sam Dorman: Yeah, you see a left and right and so you figure … And there’s such a … Salesforce talent is so in demand. So if you’re always waiting for the person who proved themselves with their last job, we figured it out at their last job or two jobs ago, it’s a lot harder and you’re paying a lot more, and they’re worth it, I should say that. But at the same time there’s people left and right who could become those next stars for you, who they’re happy to be learning and you probably get a little bit of a deal on their salary, at least initially. And then once they’re superstars then you really got to pay them well to retain them.
Gillian Bruce: Well, you get to help them grow their career.
Sam Dorman: That’s right. Right, as long as you don’t continue to take advantage them, right admins?
Gillian Bruce: Exactly. I’m sure we have lots of people saying, “Yeah.”
Sam Dorman: I probably said something poorly there, but I meant well.
Gillian Bruce: I think it came across all, we got the good part. So one of the things you kind of mentioned was outsourcing specific task or specific type of work. Can you dig in a little bit more to that because we talk about kind of looking for the things that help make a Salesforce implementation successful, we talked about kind of the different skill sets. When can you figure, you’ve got a tight budget or you got take resources, how do you figure out what to outsource, what not to outsource?
Sam Dorman: Yeah. The white paper has these three sections, one talks about the essential areas of work. The second session is what you can and can’t outsource exactly. And then the third section is about how the … Actual structure for how the team can grow. And so I think people are sometimes surprised by this piece of what you can and can’t outsource. The six areas just to fly through them real quickly are the database administration, that’s the sort of setup menu stuff, you’ve got architecture and development, all the building and making sure that it’s on a solid foundation, user support and trainings already talked about, tools and integrations, all those amazing tools you can plug in, but somebody’s got to be the expert on those. Data guardianship, make sure you have data integrity and then the on I talked about already, product management and leadership.
Sam Dorman: So then we say, “Okay, well, what are the things you can’t outsource?” Well, there’s a couple of them that people really … They often do outsource which are the architecture and development, usually groups will pull in a partner for a good reason because you want someone that’s just got a lot of depth on the platform has seen a lot of different things and will have that lockdown.
Gillian Bruce: It’s a nice way to build the thing, right?
Sam Dorman: All the best practices, exactly. And we’ll struggle through all that learning so that you can get the benefit of it. And tools in integrations is in the same category. You want to ask the partner, “What are my choices for my needs for mailing tools?” Or whatever the things might be. Then there’s another category we call semi-outsourceable. And this is I think where a lot of admins first start but we actually say this is sort of semi-outsourceable, which is database administration, all the Setup Menu stuff and data guardianship. And some people will be like, “No, we have to be internal with that stuff.” And it’s true you should eventually bring that stuff internal.
Sam Dorman: All that, so many stuff and making sure that the data has integrity. But if you’re in a situation where your time is really limited, those can be done off of the ticket and queue. You can pull in a partner, that’s a really good partner, and you have good communication and you’re managing that and they can execute that kind of stuff, even if it’s as simple as setting up new licenses for somebody or customizing those pieces.
Gillian Bruce: That’s a really interesting point. Because yeah, I think, I mean, I’ve never thought of those as things that you would have an external person do.
Sam Dorman: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: But I mean, to your point, those are things that any external person you hire is going to know how to do and if it takes some time off of your huge list and you can focus on more kind of important things. It’s a great perspective, I’m really proud of that.
Sam Dorman: Yeah, well, and I think in an ideal world you would bring those in. So even if you have those externally, it’s not going to make sense for very long. But the only reason you would outsource those is because there’s a cut … The other two areas you are not outsourcable, or absolutely cannot be outsourced. And those are two things. One is the user support and trainings. It’s just not good enough to have a firm give everyone two trainings, and then say, “Good luck.” Because this is not how human beings work, right?
Gillian Bruce: People do that all the time, right?
Sam Dorman: People do that all the time, which is, it’s sort of like we’re checking the training box on some checklist somewhere. But it’s not how human beings learn. You learn by someone shows you and you’re like, “Okay, it makes sense.” Then you go back to your desk, and if you’re lucky, you do it that day, but probably don’t do it for a few days or maybe weeks. And then you’re like, “How did this happen again? How does this work?” And so you need someone you can turn to and say, “Hey, can you show me how to do this again?” And they come over, “Share it here. Let me show you how to do it again.” And as many times as it takes. That’s how humans learn. And once they do it as part of their day-to-day, then they start to get it. And so if you’re pretending everybody should just come to a training once or twice and then get it you’re asking for trouble. You’re asking for people to either make mistakes in how they use it or just eventually bail out and keep their own shadow systems.
Sam Dorman: So user support and training is just something that we say, “That’s got to be managed internally.” You got to have people whose job it is. And if you’re at the scale where you can have people full time on that, that’s some of the best investment you can possibly make. And the second part is the leadership piece, product management leadership. There’s no way you can ask someone externally to do all of the diplomacy, all of the communication, have the really relationships with leadership, be arguing for budget, being able to create a product roadmap that takes your priorities, your organization’s priorities into account, it’s just asking too much. So those are the top two things that cannot be outsourced. And everything else relative to that can be outsourced.
Gillian Bruce: So it’s like, prioritize those things and then kind of continue down the list if you can. One thing that popped up for me is, we talked in the beginning about the different skill sets and so it seemed to me that those last two we talked about the ones that absolutely cannot be outsourced are those human and strategic skill sets, and that technical skill set can kind of … There’s pieces, you can definitely kind of outsource especially as you’re getting up and running.
Sam Dorman: That’s exactly right. And I think that’s what’s really … It’s unintuitive to people initially and just like myself, when I started it was it’s the technical pieces that I was all excited about doing. I would just want to geek out on … In the setup menu and whatever else.
Gillian Bruce: Totally, it’s super fun, yeah.
Sam Dorman: Yeah, that’s where the fun stuff is. And so we certainly wouldn’t discourage anyone from doing that. But I think for organizations that are setting up new it definitely is a mind shift to say the highest order things that we can manage internally are the leadership pieces and the human-to-human support and training. And the technical stuff, there are so many resources to outsource that and you do want to bring it in at some point. As soon as you have even three people on a team you have one leadership, one technical, one human, that’s great. So it’s not that it’s unimportant, it’s the most outsourceable out of the three sides you have to cover.
Gillian Bruce: Well, and I think when you think of an organization, the technical skills, those are pretty similar. You could be a Salesforce admin and have an admin certification and, you know all those skills, you could apply them to many different types of organizations. But when you’re talking about that human element, and that strategic, that leadership element, that’s going to be really different, depending on which organization, right? Because it’s about the human connections and the different relationships and things like that.
Sam Dorman: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the human piece, we’re constantly sort of sending out write ups, we’ll sort of think through things by writing. So if people want to sign up for our updates, you can go to thebuildtank.com and sign up.
Gillian Bruce: I like the plugs, this is good content.
Sam Dorman: Yeah, I’ve got to, working on that. But, we were just talking about this human piece as technology in service of right? And this idea of get off from behind your ticket and queue. There’s this sort of traditional mentality, which is people need things, users need things and that’s a burden on my time. It’s like okay, “Enter the thing in the ticketing system, I’ll get to when I can.” And what we’re trying to say is, there’s a whole shift in mind-frame that can really supercharge your organization. And that is to say, let’s get out from behind that ticket and queue and get out there and help people that need help with the system. Because your best advocates, your best users, your best ideas are all out there. And if you get out there and mix it up with them, that’s when you start to see the cycle improvement really start take off.
Gillian Bruce: So there’s a term that we have talked about a few times over the years and it’s called SABWA. It’s a abbreviation of Salesforce Administration by Walking Around.
Sam Dorman: Nice.
Gillian Bruce: Mike Gerholdt, our original Salesforce admin evangelist, came up with this and he’s like, “Yeah.” He said, “You can get stuck behind your ticketing system, but if sit down and have a cup of coffee with your user and ask to see how they’re logging a call that does so much more to improve your relationship with that user, improve your understanding of user experience and then you understand as an admin had a better build and customize too, enhance their experience.”
Sam Dorman: Amen. I love that, SABWA.
Gillian Bruce: SABWA.
Sam Dorman: I like it.
Gillian Bruce: Or you see like a machete movement when you do that, SABWA.
Sam Dorman: SABWA. They can’t see that on the recording. But Gillian does a nice little motion along with that. They can’t hear it, right?
Gillian Bruce: Totally.
Sam Dorman: Or in tweeting it.
Gillian Bruce: Absolutely. Everyone do SABWA as you’re listening to the podcast.
Sam Dorman: Right. I wonder how many people just did.
Gillian Bruce: I want a photo or video of that.
Sam Dorman: Yeah. Tweet it or something.
Gillian Bruce: Exactly. Well, Sam, I so appreciate you taking the time to chat with us. I feel like we could talk for probably hours about all this stuff.
Sam Dorman: I’m down. Let’s keep going.
Gillian Bruce: Hey, we told you-
Sam Dorman: Two-hour podcast.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, we will definitely have you back. Don’t worry, we’ll do part two. But before I let you go for this one, I have to ask you lightning round question.
Sam Dorman: I don’t know what that means. But I’m up for it.
Gillian Bruce: Excellent. First thing that comes to mind, no right or wrong answer. All right, so it is winter time here in Northern California. What is one of your favorite wintertime activities?
Sam Dorman: Oh, okay I love walking in the rain with my daughters.
Gillian Bruce: Walking in the rain?
Sam Dorman: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: Tell me more.
Sam Dorman: Well, because I feel like with kids you can either sort of model that you’re scared of something like, “Oh we have to hide from the rain.” Or you can just sort of embrace it. Our house started to flood that wasn’t at first very fun and I’m sitting out there because the storm drain backed up so, I’m sitting out there scooping bucketfuls of water into the garbage can. I look in the window and they’re looking at me with this sort of like there’s a crisis face, this worried crisis face and I was like, “Oh yeah, this could be fun.” So then we made a game out of it. They came out we’re all getting wet and scooping bucket fulls of water into the trash can to wheel them away into the street. So it just like you get those opportunities to make some fun out of something challenging.
Gillian Bruce: That’s awesome, that’s great. I’m envisioning lots of great rubber rain-boots, and splashing of puddles.
Sam Dorman: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: Good times.
Sam Dorman: Exactly, yeah.
Gillian Bruce: That’s great.
Sam Dorman: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: Cool. Well, thank you again so much for joining us.
Sam Dorman: Thanks for having me.
Gillian Bruce: I’m really happy to have connected with you and I’m excited to keep connected with you and get you back on the pod and not too long.
Sam Dorman: Likewise, I enjoyed it. But what did you want to be when you were growing up?
Gillian Bruce: Oh man, I wanted to be She-Ra, Princess of power.
Sam Dorman: Oh, nice.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah.
Sam Dorman: And it came true.
Gillian Bruce: Well, that’s nice.
Sam Dorman: No, no, no.
Gillian Bruce: You’re the owner of SABWA!
Sam Dorman: Nice.
Gillian Bruce: All right, Thanks again so much Sam.
Sam Dorman: Thanks Gillian, yeah, bye.
Gillian Bruce: Well, that was fun. I had a great time chatting with Sam. He has so much expertise to share with us from all of his years in consulting and helping organizations implement Salesforce and learn how to properly resource a team to make that implementation last and be successful. Some of the top highlights I got from our conversation were first this idea of this magic pyramid, this admin magic pyramid, if you will, there are three sides to it. The technical side, you have to understand how to technically use the platform and build on it.
Gillian Bruce: Secondly, the human side which involves a lot of support and training, and that is ongoing. And then thirdly, this leadership side about diplomacy and communication, things like budgeting, setting a vision, all three of those are really key to making your Salesforce implementation work. One of the terms he used was that Salesforce can be a technology supercharger for your organization, which is a really powerful way to view what Salesforce can do. But it can only do that if you give it the proper resources and you set your organization up in a way to really take advantage of the power of the platform.
Gillian Bruce: Now, when we think of those three sides, some of the things that Sam pointed out was think of those three sides as you’re hiring your Salesforce team. So find people who like to specialize and maybe one of those three things. Maybe they like to get really knee deep in the technology. Or maybe you have someone who’s a very great people person, loves to help people solve problems. Or maybe you have someone who is very much about the big picture and setting that strategic vision.
Gillian Bruce: Now, if you could get all three of those in one person, fantastic. But as your Salesforce organization grows, you’re probably going to want to make that a more robust team and make sure that you’ve got someone to fulfill each side of that pyramid. Now, the other great conversation we had was about outsourcing versus non-outsourcing. Now you can find all of this in the white paper. Of course, I’ve linked to it in the show notes that he wrote. But just as a quick high level overview, there’s kind of three categories of outsourcing, stuff you can, stuff you kind of can outsource, at least in the beginning, and then stuff that you absolutely cannot. It has to be internal. And then that first bucket of stuff that you can outsource, things like architecture and development, tools and integrations, those are absolutely things you can use a partner for.
Gillian Bruce: Now that semi-outsourceable bucket, at least in the beginning is interesting because these are things that you maybe not would typically think that you can outsource. But you absolutely can, especially if you’re just trying to get up and running. Now those are things like database administration, data guardianship. Now I know a lot of organizations get a little nervous about outsourcing that, but think about it as a great way to kind of get up to speed, so that you have your implementation in place. Because that last bucket of stuff, you cannot outsource things like user support and training, product management and leadership. Those are the most important pieces, that kind of human element to making sure that your Salesforce implementation is successful.
Gillian Bruce: So lots of great stuff from Sam’s conversation. As you heard us say, we could probably talk for hours about all of this. I hope it was really helpful for you. If you want to learn a little bit more about some of the things I chatted with Sam about in this episode, we’ve got lots of resources for you in the show notes. First of all, go check out Sam’s organization thebuildtank.com. You’ll find the white paper there resourcing, your product team. And we’ve got content on trailhead that talks all about implementation. So check out the innovation solution module and the Sales Cloud rollout strategy module. Both of those links are in the show notes as well. Great places for you to get started as you’re thinking about kind of putting together your teams and rolling out Salesforce.
Gillian Bruce: As always, please remember to share this great episode and the podcast with your friends, your Salesforce Ohana. Anybody who’s interested in learning more about being a more awesome admin or maybe getting into the Salesforce ecosystem. Make sure you subscribe to get the latest and greatest episodes delivered to your platform of choice the moment they are released every Thursday. As always, you can find more great content on admin.salesforce.com, including blogs, webinars, events, and even more podcasts. You can find us on Twitter @SalesforceAdmns. And you can find our guest today, Sam @Samdorman, pretty easy Twitter handle and myself @gilliankbruce. Thank you so much for listening to this episode and we’ll catch you next time in the cloud.
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