Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’ve got Kel Wetherbee, Director of myTrailhead Marketing at Salesforce, to share all the details of what myTrailhead means for admins.
Join us as we talk about everything this amazing tool can do to create customized training for everyone at your organization within the context of their regular workflow.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Kel Wetherbee.
When she was growing up, Kel wanted to be an art teacher. “I spent so much of my time drawing and I went to art classes and I absolutely loved it,” she says, “and though I never turned that dream into a reality, I did get into the learning space.” As you might be able to tell from the smooth segue, her focus today is on marketing for myTrailhead.
“I love problem-solving, but I also love teaching people how to problem solve and sharing the knowledge I have with a broader audience so they can wear the superhero cape and not just me,” Kel says. That means helping people learn to use tools like automation, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Quip, and more, to bring scalability to what they’re doing. “There’s so much power in our platform, and I wanted a way to evangelize that,” she says, and what’s so great about her current role is that “I get to evangelize my favorite products in helping people rethink how they can transform their business.”
So we know Trailhead, but what is myTrailhead? Essentially, it lets you create your own instance of the platform and publish your own custom branded content. “Imagine you want to teach your employees at scale how to use your highly customized Salesforce environment,” Kel says, “you have a way of doing that but it doesn’t stop there.”
myTrailhead lets you create content to teach your team anything they need to know throughout their journey at your company. You can pull in existing Trailhead content or make your own. As Kel says, “you want to empower your employees on how to use tools, but what if you could take it a step further and ensure they’re learning in the flow of work?” You can create an onboarding journey that automatically recommends new content based on what they’ve already learned, or even what they’re doing in their org.
“Imagine a new sales rep is starting and they’ve never created an opportunity,” Kel says, “the moment they create that opportunity, right on the record, they see a widget that shows a recommended badge all about opportunity management.” You can do that right now for free, but imagine if you could also recommend custom content related to the ins and outs of your company you’ve created in myTrailhead. You don’t need to sequester everyone to a conference room to do training—instead, it’s seamlessly integrated into their normal workflow.
The best part about myTrailhead is that, as an admin, “you already have the requisite skills to do these amazing things,” Kel says. We already build processes and automations within our system to create business solutions, so it’s easy to shift those skills towards getting the most out of myTrailhead. Process Builder and Lightning Web Components can help, but Kel’s team has also seen people use Salesforce Surveys to get feedback on the content they’ve published the moment someone has completed a badge.
“One thing we firmly believe on the myTrailhead team is it’s not just about having great technology, it’s about having great content,” Kel says. If you’re looking to hone your creative writing skills, there’s a brand new Trailhead module called, “Writing for myTrailhead,” where you learn from the experts at Salesforce who create Trailhead content. If you want to take it a step further, Kel’s team has services that can help.
If you’re looking to get started with amping up learning at your business, start by downloading Trail Tracker. This free tool will help you figure out what your team’s been up to on Trailhead, which can help you plan your own content. myTrailhead is a paid product available for any user that has an existing Salesforce license, so get in touch with Kel’s team to figure out how you can take advantage of everything this powerful tool has to offer.
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, we’ve got a topic that I know is hot on everyone’s minds. It was officially launched just a few months ago. We are going to be talking about myTrailhead. In order to get the details on myTrailhead, we have in-house expert Kel Wetherbee, who is the Director of myTrailhead marketing, joining us to tell us the details of what myTrailhead means for admins. And I’m going to give you a sneak peek, there is a lot of cool stuff that we can do as admins with myTrailhead. It’s going to be a really powerful tool for us to use. Anyway, without further ado, please welcome Kel to the podcast. Kel, welcome to the podcast.
Kel Wetherbee: Thanks for having me. I’m super excited.
Gillian Bruce: Well, it so great to have you on the podcast. You are a first-time guest on the podcast. So I wanted to introduce you a little bit to our audience. And the question I love to use to do that is to ask you, Kel, what did you want to be when you grew up.
Kel Wetherbee: Well, back when I was five, I really wanted to be an art teacher. I spent so much of my time drawing, and I went to art classes, and I absolutely loved it. And though I never turned that dream into a reality, I did get into the learning space.
Gillian Bruce: That’s awesome. Okay, so going from wanting to be an art teacher, and now you hinted that you are in the learning space, what do you do now?
Kel Wetherbee: That was just a segue for me to tell you. So, a lot of my career I’ve dabbled in both IT and some admin work to sales enablement and also sales. When I first joined Salesforce four years ago, I ran a super tiny and scrappy sales enablement team. And my role at the time was to skill up our 9000 sales people. Now we’ve grown a ton since then, and I was looking for a way to scale, and that’s how I kind of got into what I’m doing now, which is marketing for myTrailhead.
Gillian Bruce: Excellent. Okay. So teaching 9000 people sales enablement, I mean that’s kind of a huge task. So, what are some things that… you wanted to be the teacher when you were young. You followed kind of… you did IT, some admins stuff, now you’re in the sales enablement space. Tell me about some of the elements of that, that kind of drew you to that. What’s your passion that kept you in this space, and has led you down this path?
Kel Wetherbee: Absolutely. So, I love fixing things, I love getting my hands dirty, rolling up my sleeves, and I love problem solving. But I also love teaching people how to problem solve, and sharing the knowledge that I have with the broader audience, so they can wear the superhero cape and not just me. And that’s been one thing that’s really important to me. And I love figuring out a way to automate my job away, and taking things that are seemingly complex and long, and really simplifying that. So, I’ve been able to really hone in on all on those passions when I started my journey at Salesforce, by starting with sales enablement.
Kel Wetherbee: And I loved our tools and learning about all of the platforms. Not just myTrailhead, but I really honed in on a lot of our technologies. Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud, myTrailhead, Quip, I used all of those technologies and brought them all to life, and integrated a lot of them to scale what our tiny team was doing. And there’s so much power in our platform. And I really wanted to way to evangelize a lot of that. And what I love about my current role, I really do have the dream job.
Gillian Bruce: That’s awesome.
Kel Wetherbee: I get to evangelize my favorite products, and helping people kind of rethink how they can transform their business, and really learning meaningful, and valuable, and make sure that you’re getting a return out of all of this time and energy that you’re putting into these products.
Gillian Bruce: That’s awesome. I mean, that’s so well put. And that does clearly mean you’re in the right spot. Because you can really hear the passion in that. So tell me a little bit more about this myTrailhead thing. You’ve mentioned it a couple times. We haven’t really talked about it on the podcast before. So we know about Trailhead, the fun way to learn Salesforce. What is myTrailhead?
Kel Wetherbee: The easiest way to think about myTrailhead is, you take that same magic of Trailhead that you’ve all experienced, and if you haven’t experienced make sure you visit trailhead.com. But it takes that same magic of Trailhead and allows you-all to create your own private instance of Trailhead, and you can publish your own custom branded content. So imagine, you want to teach your employees at scale, how to use your highly customized Salesforce environment. You have a way of doing that. But it doesn’t stop there. You can really skill them up on anything that they need to know to thrive in their career at your company, throughout their entire journey from start and then continual learning ongoing, so you can grow and retain that talent.
Kel Wetherbee: Anything from skills on how do you Salesforce? Enable them to know how to pull their own reports on Dashboard, let’s face it, I know you-all are struggling with that. Tap into, pull in any of the content from Trailhead today for free, but also publish your own content. And that’s what’s key.
Gillian Bruce: This sounds incredibly exciting. Especially for admins who, a big part of their job is onboarding users and training users, right? And like you said, run their own dashboards and reports, what a concept. So I haven’t spent a lot of time figuring out how to roll out changes or just implement Salesforce and get users onboarded. This sounds like myTrailhead is the perfect tool to help them do that. Is that kind of one of the biggest use cases you see for why people are interested in using myTrailhead?
Kel Wetherbee: Yeah. It’s one of many use cases. It is a top one, and the reason it’s a top one is, imagine this. You want to empower your employees on how to use tools. But what if you could even take it a step further and ensure they’re learning in the flow of work, right? And it doesn’t just have to be on Salesforce, but learning Salesforce is very powerful for the audience that’s listening in today. So imagine if you create a new user in Salesforce, and you can have a process kicked off where the learner immediately gets recommended new content via an email or a Chatter. Or you can create an onboarding journey, where once they complete certain learning, they’re recommended new things.
Kel Wetherbee: And it doesn’t have to be limited to notifications. What if you could put that learning right in the flow of work. Imagine, maybe a new sales rep is starting, and they’ve never created an opportunity. The moment they create that opportunity right on the record, they see a widget that shows a recommended badge all about opportunity management. Now you can do that today, today, right now for free, by recommending Trailhead free content. But imagine if you could recommend content that you’ve customized and published on myTrailhead. This is an incredible tool for you-all to scale enablement at the right time, for the right people, with the right profile. So salespeople see certain things where your service reps will see something different in different places.
Gillian Bruce: That is awesome. So, it’s really kind of bringing that training experience into the context of their job and what they’re doing, without having to go take two days and sit in a conference room, or all of the normal training things that our admins put together for users, that users may or not be excited about. But if they’re, like you said, about to log their first opportunity, and they get prompted in the app to, hey, learn more about this, learn about the customized version of that for their org, I mean, that’s awesome. It’s really cool.
Kel Wetherbee: It’s so powerful. It really takes away the communication management and change management. Let’s face it, that takes up a lot of our time. And it doesn’t have to just be on Salesforce. I know a lot of the folks that are running their Salesforce environments, that’s kind of key. But you can take it a step further. And if you happen to manage other systems, you can contextually show recommended learning on other topics like how to use other systems. So it’s not just limited to Salesforce.
Gillian Bruce: So, let’s talk a little bit more about that actually. So, other systems, we know Trailhead is the fun way to learn Salesforce. We have a lot of great content on there. But how do you put learning about other systems within myTrailhead? Tell me a little bit more about how that works.
Kel Wetherbee: Absolutely. So, the good news is, you don’t have to start from scratch, because you-all might be already familiar with all of the awesome content that already exists on Trailhead today. You’ve got over 500 badges, you’ve got things on all sorts of different technologies, the hottest technologies of today, Google, and Amazon, and Get, and I could go on and on. But what if you have other systems that you want to skill people up on? You can publish content on really any topic. So whether you deploy a custom app that is Salesforce, that’s awesome. You can skill people up on how to use it, and have rich text and videos.
Kel Wetherbee: Or if you wanted to publish content on another system, maybe it’s a process that you’ve built, a request from, or process that you want people to follow. You can publish that content directly on myTrailhead. And then make sure that you can spread the word on it in an automated fashion by using ProcessBuilder and Lightning Web Components to get the word out to the right people at the right time.
Gillian Bruce: That’s awesome. So I’m hearing a couple things. So the first thing that I’m hearing is, as an admin, we are already familiar with building these processes and building these automations within our system to streamline existing business processes. All of that knowledge that we have to do that can apply to deploying myTrailhead as well.
Kel Wetherbee: That’s the wonderful thing. You already have a lot of the requisite skills to do these amazing things. Some of the top things we’ve seen admins use to automate learning are going to be… I’ve mentioned two of them, ProcessBuilder and Lightning Web Components. But also Salesforce Surveys has been a new tool in the admins tool belt, where you can also get feedback on the content that you’ve published. So the moment that a learner completes a badge, you can kick off a process where a survey is sent out to the learner asking them for feedback. So you can figure out whether or not that content is actually meaningful to the learner and make it even better.
Gillian Bruce: That is so cool. So, another thing that kind of struck me is the ability to create and publish your own content. How does that work. Because, as an admin I’m used to creating, training with Trailhead to get my users up to speed. Now I can leverage the stuff that’s in Trailhead. But I may not feel that I know how to write a Trailhead module. So, how does that publishing process work?
Kel Wetherbee: Well, I would say first, I feel everybody’s pain. Writing is a challenging skill. Creative writing can be tough. And one thing that we firmly believe on the myTrailhead team, is, it’s not just about having great content, I’m sorry… and it’s not just about having great technology, it’s about having great content, and also great change management. Well, you-all can solve the change management through the automation, and we can provide you the great technology. So what do you do with this content? Well, you’ve got a couple of options. We have got self-service options for those of you that are adventurous and really want to hone in on creative writing and creating content that’s meaningful, it’s fun, it’s bite-sized and conversational.
Kel Wetherbee: And you can do that by taking a brand new module that was launched recently on Trailhead.com, and it’s, Writing for myTrailhead. And so you can go ahead and earn yourselves a badge and learn all about it, and learn from the experts on Team Trailhead that actually write this content. And if that’s not enough, and you want to step up your game, and maybe you need a little bit of hand holding or help, we’ve got some amazing partners that can help. Or, even in-house, here on the Trailhead Team, we have content services. Our User Adoption Services Team can either help with advisory services, or if you want to just have us write your first module from start to finish, we can do that too.
Gillian Bruce: That’s awesome. Because I know one of the things that people love about Trailhead, is the fun vibe that it has, how the content is engaging. Like you said, it’s not just about the technology, but having great quality content. And I think for me, especially, it keeps me engaged, right? It’s like, “Oh, well that’s a silly answer.” But I’m like totally excited that I saw that and it makes me giggle, and it makes we want to continue learning and continue on that next step in this module, which is really fun. So it’s great to know that there’s resources out there to help people tap into that, or maybe get learn up on how to do that.
Gillian Bruce: I think that module that you mentioned is great, regardless of who you are in any role. Because there’s just amazing tips and tools in there on how to beef up your writing style, just in general. I love that module. We’ll put the link to that in the show notes for sure. So let’s say I’m an admin, I’m super excited about all of these things that myTrailhead can offer. I am like, “When can I get it? How do I get it? I want it now. How do I sell it to my stakeholders? What’s next?” Kel, where do I go, what do I do?
Kel Wetherbee: Well, there’s good news. It is available today for all of you. I do recommend if you’re looking to just get started and kind of try it on for size, you can do that for free today using Trailhead, and download Trail Tracker today. Just visit the AppExchange, search for Trail Tracker, install it into your org, and start playing around with tracking who at your organization has already been earning them badges. And play around with some of the automation. If you want to take it a step further, and you realize, “I’m ready to start publishing my own custom branded content,” this is where myTrailhead comes in. And, it is a paid product, and it’s available for any user that has an existing standard Salesforce license.
Kel Wetherbee: And the easiest way to find out more, or to speak with somebody about it, is just visit trailhead.com/mytrailhead, or just visit Trailhead and then go to Four Companies in the dropdown, and then click on myTrailhead. And then you’ll find the myTrailhead page with more information. There’s a quick demo video, and there’s also a form where, if you fill it out, someone from our team will reach back out to you.
Gillian Bruce: That’s awesome. Well, that’s great. We’ll make sure to definitely put those links in the show notes so people can access them. I appreciate you coming on and sharing about myTrailhead. I think it’s really exciting. Especially from an admin perspective, it’s going to be a really great tool to help with user adoption especially. And so, taking a lot of the annoying parts of change management out of what an admin has to do now that myTrailhead can do that. Now they can focus on-
Kel Wetherbee: Set it and forget it.
Gillian Bruce: Set it and forget it. And then focus on the bigger picture stuff, right? The vision and the direction instead of the little details, which is really awesome.
Kel Wetherbee: That my favorite part. Because when I ran sales enablement, one thing I was looking to do is get out of repetition, and get out of manual tasks, and avoid doing repetitive training over and over again. It wasn’t helping me in my career. So once myTrailhead came along, it really helped shift me into kind of this thought leader across the organization. And it helped me gain a lot of trust from our sales leaders and our sponsors on the possibilities. And it helped me home in on, “Okay, now I’ve got these amazing metrics and I can see how this learning is impacting the business, so I can make better business decisions on what learning comes next.” And I never had that type of information. So this will really open up a whole new world for all of you.
Gillian Bruce: That’s incredibly well said. And I could not have put it any better. So I think that was awesome, thank you. Well, before I let you go, I am going to ask you some lightning round questions.
Kel Wetherbee: Do it.
Gillian Bruce: All right. Nothing to do with Salesforce. First thing that comes to mind. The first question is a this or that question. Dine in or delivery?
Kel Wetherbee: I would say delivery. I’m not a very good cook. I’m really good at cleaning though.
Gillian Bruce: Well, that’s excellent. That’s to bring to the table, that’s great. All right, the next question is a would you rather. Would you rather take a European sight seeing vacation or a relaxing Caribbean vacation?
Kel Wetherbee: Definitely European. I definitely love adventurous stuff and driving around. My favorite thing to do is get in the car and have no destination in mind. So, I’ll go with the first.
Gillian Bruce: I love that, that’s great. Okay. And last one is, what is one of your go-to snacks these days?
Kel Wetherbee: Hm. I hate to admit it, but it is organic Dorito, the cheddar ones.
Gillian Bruce: They make organic ones?
Kel Wetherbee: Yeah, I didn’t believe-
Gillian Bruce: I didn’t even know this.
Kel Wetherbee: … they have them here in this office, they do. It’s a great snack.
Gillian Bruce: Oh. So it makes you feel better about eating Doritos?
Kel Wetherbee: Kind of. Because the word organic is in front of it, so I feel like maybe it’s a little bit better.
Gillian Bruce: How do they make it so orange if it’s so organic.
Kel Wetherbee: Actually, these ones are like a light yellow.
Gillian Bruce: Oh, okay.
Kel Wetherbee: They’re pretty tasty. They’re even better with guac.
Gillian Bruce: All right. Now it’s added to my list. Thank you. Kel, thank you so much for joining us, I so appreciate your time. And thanks for all the amazing work you do for myTrailhead, and to enable learners everywhere.
Kel Wetherbee: Thanks everyone for tuning in, really appreciate it. And thanks so much Gillian for inviting me.
Gillian Bruce: Huge thanks to Kel for taking the time out of her busy myTrailhead life to join us and talk to us about all the goodness that myTrailhead can offer us as admins. So, some highlights from our conversation. I was very excited, because I think that myTrailhead is an amazing tool that every admin should think about using. If nothing else, we should all be downloading Trail Tracker and using Trailhead as a way to onboard and train our users ongoing. But, myTrailhead is a great way, especially if you’ve got a very customized version of Salesforce, an app that you’ve built out for your business, myTrailhead is an amazing way to continue that learning for all of your users.
Gillian Bruce: No matter where they are in the organization, no matter what their job, you can provide training within the context of their flow of work, which is really cool. Because I love the use case that Kel described about, you’re logging your first opportunity. And within the app, as you’re creating that opportunity, you can have training, customized training pop up right there to help coach you along in the process. How great is that, right? Because we set up trainings all the time for our users, that they may or may not be into, or be distracted all day, checking their phones, and trying to squeeze meetings in. And they’re like, “Oh, I have to be in this training.” MyTrailhead enables a whole new way of thinking about training, and how to deliver that to your users when they need it, and so it can be really valuable.
Gillian Bruce: So that alone is a great reason to learn about how you can maybe use myTrailhead at your organization, talk to your stakeholders about it. It is an ongoing way that users cannot just learn about Salesforce, but other systems. So if you’ve got other systems that you’re using to help people do their jobs, you can also use myTrailhead to help them learn about that. It’s not just about Salesforce. And just general career growth. I mean, we already know that on Trailhead there’s all this content about how to grow your career, develop skills outside of tech, and you can access all of that within myTrailhead as well.
Gillian Bruce: So, you get to use the existing Trailhead learning, you get to customize and build your own on top of that, and you can customize how you deliver that to each person in the organization, depending on what their job is. Which is really cool. So, kind of endless possibilities here. I am super excited to kind of see use cases develop and see how admins all over the world are using myTrailhead. The good news is, that if you know how to use things like ProcessBuilder, and Salesforce Surveys, you can absolutely use myTrailhead. Salesforce Surveys works really well with myTrailhead as Kel described to you. So I thought that was a cool use case to point out. And if you’re worried about creating content, don’t worry.
Gillian Bruce: We’ve got a lot of resources to help you create awesome Trailhead level content. We all love the witty fun keeping Trailhead weird vibe that is on the content already on Trailhead. We have resources on Trailhead to help you learn how to write that way, if you’re creating your own content. Also have a whole team here at Salesforce that’s dedicated to user adoption. So, you can actually engage with them, they can help coach you, maybe even write your first module if you really need some help there. And that’s a really great way to start learning how to create your own custom myTrailhead content. Overall, myTrailhead is great, because it allows you to set it and forget it, and focus on that big vision, instead of those manual tasks, that repetitive training that you might have to do for all your users.
Gillian Bruce: So it enables you as an admin, to kind of grow into more of a leadership role, and think more big picture about where the system is going, and what you’re doing with it, and how your users are interacting. So, give myTrailhead a gander if you will. You can definitely check it out at myTrailhead on the Salesforce website. I’ve put the link in the show notes. You can also learn more about writing the myTrailhead way. So there’s a module on Trailhead that I’ve put the link to in the show notes called, Writing for myTrailhead. And if you haven’t already, I really encourage you all to download Trial Tracker from the AppExchange.
Gillian Bruce: Kel mentioned this, this is a great way to see what your users are doing in Trailhead. You can assign maybe modules or trails, and you can track their progress, you can create reward systems, more incentives, in addition to what they already get on Trailhead with badges and points. So, make sure you check those resources out. As always, if you want to learn more about being an awesome admin, go to admin.salesforce.com for blogs, webinars, events, and even more podcasts. The best thing, you know, we talked a lot about Trailhead. But the best thing about Trailhead is, it really does prepare you to get those certifications.
Gillian Bruce: So whether you have yet to get your first admin certification, or you are on your 10th or your 20th, getting certified is an amazing way to prove your skillset, and really open up doors for you in the career world. So, make sure that you keep certifications in mind as you’re working your way through Trailhead, because it really is a great way that you can further amplify and propel your career. Please also remember to subscribe to the podcast, so you can get it delivered directly to your platform or device of choice the moment it is released, so you don’t miss a single episode. You can find us on Twitter at salesforceadmns, no I. Our guest today, Kel Wetherbee is @kelwetherbee, keeps it simple, love it. And you can find 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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