July is almost over, and that means another special episode to recap great Salesforce content this month. This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, Mike and Gillian are back with a new What Do We Call It episode. If you have a better idea for a name, reach out on Twitter. We’re all ears.
Join us as we talk about the latest and greatest Salesforce content from this month, and all the great things that happened at TrailheaDX.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation between Mike and Gillian.
The first ever virtual TrailheaDX happened on June 25th, but don’t worry, you can still catch all of the great content. “What was really special about this was there wasn’t the barrier of having to pay to fly to San Francisco, there wasn’t the barrier of having only so many seats in the room, there wasn’t the barrier of conflicting sessions,” Gillian says, “we had so many more people getting the content we spent a lot of time creating.”
There’s some amazing blogs and videos you missed, covering everything from how setup home has changed in Lightning Experience to how to think through using the Einstein Prediction Builder. “Since the advent of having AI as part of platform, we’ve really tried to stress how important it is to think about the implications and the uses of this really powerful technology,” Gillian says, “it’s like training a dog: you train it for good, not for evil.”
If you didn’t listen to every episode, there are a few this month that are worth taking a listen to. We talk flow builder and automation tools, service cloud, and how to optimize your org for better performance. Something that is very top of mind for everyone these days is how to get back to work safely, and our episode with Wade Wegner about Work.com has a lot of information you should check out.
Trailhead Live honestly makes webinars feel dated—it’s on-demand culture. Tune in and you’re ready to go. This month, we’ve had a lot of great content for people newer to the ecosystem and maintenance for those that need a refresher, as well as Trailhead News to keep you in the loop.
We go back to see what was going on around now in days past. There’s everything from Einstein bots to a live episode from TrailheaDX with an amazing story and everything in between.
Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast and the We Still Don’t Know What to Call it episode, where we talk about product, community, and careers to help you become an awesome admin. I’m Gillian Bruce.
Mike Gerholdt: And I’m Mike Gerholdt.
Gillian Bruce: And Mike, we got a lot to talk about because it’s been a little while since we did one of these we don’t know what to call it episodes.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. We don’t know what to call it, but we know what to talk about. That’s for sure.
Gillian Bruce: There’s no shortage of us being able to talk about things.
Mike Gerholdt: No, we just can’t name things very well.
Gillian Bruce: Well, you know we all have strengths in other areas.
Mike Gerholdt: We we have a lot to taco about as we wrap up the month.
Gillian Bruce: Lettuce get to it.
Mike Gerholdt: That’s all I got. We’re going to shred the topics.
Gillian Bruce: I’ll meat your puns with…
Mike Gerholdt: Dammit, I was thinking of that one too. Now, I’m out, I’m out. Never getting a pun off with Gillian, especially if you’re like T-ball league. I’m like T-ball down here.
Gillian Bruce: Jalapeno in your face.
Mike Gerholdt: Right. Anyway, to try and switch gears to not be punny. TrailheaDX, holy cow.
Gillian Bruce: Oh my gosh. TrailheaDX. It happened, it was amazing. It was the first ever virtual TrailheaDX. And I mean, Mike, we pulled off a thing.
Mike Gerholdt: It was fun. So I think I just as we head into it, I don’t think anybody listening to the podcast really understands the work that we put into some of the events, the virtual event for this one was super fun to get ready for. Yes, you have yours, I have mine over my other side of my pile of [crosstalk 00:02:05].
Gillian Bruce: You got that TrailheaDX props you know-
Mike Gerholdt: I do. I have lots of props.
Gillian Bruce: Because he did a ton of video. I mean…
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, no, this is a fun, like seriously fun learning experience for everybody involved.
Gillian Bruce: We all became like Salesforce TV producers.
Mike Gerholdt: Right. Yes. And some of us are more TV producers than others. That’s for sure.
Gillian Bruce: But I mean, you know what I think was really interesting is normally for an in person event, we have hundreds of sessions that we put together and we are-
Mike Gerholdt: It’s almost too much.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, and we’re so used to that format. And maybe there’s 100 people in a session. What was really special about this is there wasn’t the barrier of people having to pay or fly to San Francisco, right? There wasn’t the barrier of having only so many seats in the room, there wasn’t the barrier of conflicted sessions and all of that. We had so many more people getting the content that we spent a lot of time creating, which I think was pretty rewarding.
Mike Gerholdt: Yes, no, it was… There was a wide array of things to talk about and we fit a lot into short sessions and it was interesting. It was a lot, boy, it was just a ton of fun to put together, seriously like working with the PMs. This is from a content creator standpoint, this was the first time that we really got to see the polished product before it got broadcast. Usually it’s you walk out and you’ve been through rehearsals and you’ve seen people present, but this was wow. Here’s what it looks like now. We’re ready to go. It was just very cool. Very cool.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, and I think what was also interesting is it forced us to kind of bubble up the things we thought were the most important, because it’s very hard to take hundreds of sessions and boil that down into what we had, eight 18 minute episodes, so to speak.
Mike Gerholdt: Ish. Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: And you had the live ask me anything panel that you hosted with some of our other PMs. It was very cool and the great thing is that this content is also totally available for anyone to go watch it on demand, which is…
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, you didn’t miss it. You didn’t, so if you didn’t participate on the June 25th date of TrailheaDX, you didn’t miss anything. Right? I feel like this is a fun analogy. I binged watched Breaking Bad a few years ago and I didn’t miss anything that people that watched it in the moment we’re having. Right? And you can go back and watch everything in the moment just as it was happening. You could do TrailheaDX tomorrow if you wanted to.
Gillian Bruce: You could, although you do miss out on the fun little interstitial things that we did.
Mike Gerholdt: Right, because Gillian you were the MC.
Gillian Bruce: I did, I got to MC for five hours, it was a marathon, but it was really fun because we had a Trailblazer Lounge where we had trailblazers from all over the world. So we had like [Olay] from Ukraine, and Roy from Israel, and we had several people from India. We had Tiffany from Florida. I mean, we had seven different trailblazers from around the world, joining me in the lounge to do live chats about what they’re doing in the community, which was really cool. And we had a master Lego brick builder, [Aaron] joining us in the lounge. He built a live… Live, he built it live, I don’t know. He built it over the live [crosstalk 00:05:50].
Mike Gerholdt: He live built.
Gillian Bruce: He live built. Instead of dead built? I don’t know.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: Anyway, he built a Lego [Cody] that’s like over two feet tall over the course of the broadcast and it was so cool, because if you were live, you got to help vote what went on Cody’s base and it was really cool to [CA 00:06:08].
Mike Gerholdt: A nose.
Gillian Bruce: A nose? Yeah, so it was really fun and fun fact, I get to go pick up the Lego Cody structure this weekend.
Mike Gerholdt: Oh my.
Gillian Bruce: So maybe next broadcast you’ll see.
Mike Gerholdt: Get some rope and stanchion outside of your house and have walking tours.
Gillian Bruce: Totally. Drive by.
Mike Gerholdt: So there’s the admin channel, which was a lot of what I got to work on. And there was a ton of episodes, well eight episodes there, and the ask the experts. Ask the experts was really fun because we dove into service cloud mobile and security, which I felt were three areas that don’t get a lot of ask the expert people, and so those were really cool. But if you missed any of this, your user groups are having global gatherings. In fact, I’m going to do one tomorrow, which would be last week when this airs, and we’re going to sit and chat about what was some of the stuff at TrailheaDX. And there would be people there that watch some of the videos, people there that didn’t watch some of the videos. The last user group I was at, we talked about some of the people that watch just stuff in the developer channel or just things in the architect channels. So that was really cool.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I just did a global gathering myself for the Santa Barbara community group and it was interesting. There was about half of the people at the meeting had not watched any TrailheaDX content. So it was a great way to highlight some of the things I was like, “So you need to go watch this one.”
Mike Gerholdt: I feel like it’s like showing up to the book club, having not read the book.
Gillian Bruce: Oh, you’re supposed to read the book? You’re not just supposed to drink wine at book club?
Mike Gerholdt: Sure [crosstalk 00:08:02].
Gillian Bruce: Oh, I’ve been doing it wrong.
Mike Gerholdt: It’s that commercial where the guy asks his Amazon card to like, tell me the story behind something. Nope. It’s funnier in my head, like a lot of things are.
Gillian Bruce: It’s all right Mike. It’s all right. So TrailheaDX was fun.
Mike Gerholdt: Hmm. It was. I thought, so. We also have Salesforce Anywhere, anywhere.
Gillian Bruce: Anywhere.
Mike Gerholdt: And everywhere.
Gillian Bruce: All the places.
Mike Gerholdt: And we have a link that we’ll put up in the show notes about the blog post that we did about Salesforce Anywhere. Gillian, I think it was the most interesting, fun launch was when we got Salesforce Anywhere for our team.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I think it was… Was it like an all hands call or something was going on?
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: And I was around in our own like [62 org 00:00:08:57], which is our own Salesforce instance. And I was like, “Whoa, there’s a new button up by my profile picture. Let me click that.” I was like, “Salesforce anywhere.” And I was like, “Oh my gosh.” And so I started sending all kinds of trailmoji, and gifs, and really putting the Salesforce Anywhere technology to the test for our team.
Mike Gerholdt: It’s what we do.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. So it’s really fun. Salesforce Anywhere is… I mean, it’s live collaboration within Salesforce. It just kind of continues to bringing that ability to work with your peers no matter where you all are on the same thing within context, which I think is really powerful.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Or Quip.
Gillian Bruce: Yep.
Mike Gerholdt: Or mobile like that was the nerdy part for me, was, oh, wait a minute. I can publish this from a chat in Quip, and it showed up in Salesforce Anywhere on my phone right away. It was, I don’t know.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. It’s all connected.
Mike Gerholdt: It’s anywhere.
Gillian Bruce: Anywhere and everywhere.
Mike Gerholdt: Okay. So true to what we do in this episode is help you dig through the month that was and get ready maybe for the month that is, I don’t know about that.
Gillian Bruce: I think they’re really like new months at this point, I feel like we’re still in a holding pattern since March, but…
Mike Gerholdt: July is long. June happened. May didn’t feel the long. We had a, in the U.S., we had a holiday. I guess we had a holiday in July too, but it still feels longer. I don’t know why. It’s like when you sleep and you wake up in the middle of the night and you’re like, oh man, it’s got to be time to get up, and it’s like 02:00 AM.
Gillian Bruce: Well it’s the summer where you take a vacation, but you can’t go anywhere. So yeah, everything seems longer.
Mike Gerholdt: Where did you go for your vacation? The edge of my yard.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, my backyard or the weird corner in the living room, that I never go to. I don’t know. It’s exciting.
Mike Gerholdt: Okay. So let’s dive into some blogs and videos that came out that maybe read, maybe you didn’t read, maybe you should go back, much like all of the TrailheaDX video content you can go back. So the first one I have on the list is take a tour of Setup Home in Lightning Experience.
Gillian Bruce: I mean, if you haven’t done this in a while, it’s a highly, highly recommended activity for all admins to do because Setup, I mean, gosh, you think about what Setup was like four years ago.
Mike Gerholdt: It was painful.
Gillian Bruce: Oh man. Now you’ve got things like… I mean, remember when the object creator tab, like the fact that you could see all of your objects just in one tab in Setup was like, boom, mind blowing.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: But that was kind of the beginning, and now there’s a whole bunch of stuff now and Setup Home that, I think the team’s done a very good job of listening to feedback.
Mike Gerholdt: Yes. I also… I mean, looking through this post, here’s what I probably have taken for granted is if you’re an established user, and I mean, geez, I’ve been using Salesforce for like 14 years now, the new Setup Home, you just kind of like intuitively know where stuff is. But if you’re a new user, which I think a lot of people listening to the podcast might be, you just didn’t intuitively know where things were or new things appear, right? Like the create button off to the right, or you probably just went to the familiar things. I don’t know. I found this post incredibly insightful in calling things out that I had just taken for granted.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I mean, I think as most admins do, we just tinker and we figure it out, but then to actually understand the why and all of the rationale behind designing some of the things, why they’re designed, makes it a lot easier to understand how to best use them.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So moving on Einstein Prediction Builder, thinking through predictions with bias in mind. So this is like a re-publish. I helped the team go through this and kind of reread this. I thought this was… I love reading about how we can use Prediction Builder. I think Prediction Builder for admins is so incredibly easy to use that it’s almost wrong of us to not have a conversation about what can we use Prediction Builder for, and also thinking through, so are we gathering all of the right data to help guide say, sales, and what opportunity they should most call? Because I mean, time’s valuable, right? So if you’re going to go through, yeah, I got to make all these phone calls, but boy, if you’re like me, I’d really want that momentum early on. Give me the calls that I know I need to make, and also how do I make sure that I’m going through and grabbing the right data so that I’m not perhaps building a prediction that sways us in a certain way?
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I mean, it’s a topic I think that we very early on, since the advent of having AI as part of our platform, we’ve really tried to stress how important it is to think about the implications and the uses of this really powerful technology. And it’s not that hard to think about these things, you just have… I mean, we have frameworks for this and it’s really just like paying attention. I mean, you train Einstein, so it’s like training a dog, right? Train it for good, not for evil.
Mike Gerholdt: Right.
Gillian Bruce: I mean, unless you want one of those like crazy junkyard dogs, I don’t know.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, I think it’s a great post Mike and I think it’s really cool because it’s one of the things that admins can do to be AI experts, which is pretty awesome.
Mike Gerholdt: AI experts.
Gillian Bruce: AI experts.
Mike Gerholdt: AI experts. So how I solve this, which is part of what Mark on our team is fostering, these are just fun to read, right? So we had how I solved this intuitive record links. I think these spawn for those people that haven’t read it or missed out on Dreamforce. We collect a lot of data at Dreamforce and our team sat down and we kind of brainstormed, what do admins want out of all of this? And we looked for the answers in the data and a lot of the answers was, show us an example of literally how you solve this, and so that’s where that came from. And Mark’s been doing a great job fostering going out into the community, getting these stories, helping them build these blog posts, and so that’s kind of where that came from. So I anticipate these will continue because you’re solving really cool things that I think other people need to know how to solve.
Gillian Bruce: Well, yeah. And this example was from the Nonprofit Success Pack, but it’s totally relevant to any, basically any record or any object that you want to put this on. This is a really cool concept that you could absolutely find relevancy for your own org.
Mike Gerholdt: Yep.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Very cool.
Mike Gerholdt: Yep. I love that series. Fun series.
Gillian Bruce: Very fun.
Mike Gerholdt: So those are the blogs.
Gillian Bruce: Lots of blogs, but you know what? There were also a lot of podcasts.
Mike Gerholdt: There were a few podcasts, just a few, hey, in no particular order, but in the order that they came out, let’s see Gillian, you kicked off July with Flow Builder and Automation with our friend of the pod, John Kucera.
Gillian Bruce: John is one of our long time friends of the pod, long time awesome admin advocates, even before we had this program, had begun this program. I mean, his roots are back in trying to improve that Setup experience for admins. John has now the amazing responsibility of overseeing a lot of the flow tooling, and it was so cool to talk to him because again, we talked about, think about what flow looked like three, four years ago and think about what it looks like now.
Mike Gerholdt: Do I have to? Please don’t make me.
Gillian Bruce: I know it gives me anxiety. I mean, I remember way back when one of the first projects I worked on with John was trying to figure out how we were going to end of life, Google AdWords for Salesforce. And now he’s like, “Yeah, look at the cool, shiny things my team are building now. We’re not just killing old stuff we’re making the future happen.” So it was really cool to talk to John about Flow Builder, automation tools in general, talking about the future vision of where Flow is going, and hint, hint, nudge, nudge the future is Flow.
Mike Gerholdt: Very much, very, very much. Okay. And then Gillian, we had a fun episode of getting to know Work.com with Wade Wegner, who I think probably has forgotten more than some of us have learned.
Gillian Bruce: Wade, I don’t even understand how he does everything he does, but fun fact, Wade is definitely vying to get some time with the Lego Cody structure that was built at TDX, because apparently he and his kids are huge Lego fans. So we might have to arrange some Cody visitation, but Wade, I mean, Wade’s team built Work.com in like what? A month and a half, not even?
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. And it continues to get better too.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. So it was great talking with him, Work.com it’s new, but it’s a really cool way to help get your business back on track after all the disruption that we’ve all encountered this year, whether you’re ready to reopen offices or you’re just trying to get all of your employees back into the groove, really enabling your business to get back on it. And it’s a great set of tools and the team did such a cool job of pivoting real quickly and developing this for our customers.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. And it helps you think through, I think the one thing that I learned from that podcast, it helps you think through at executive level, what is all involved and how do we track this all in one place? And as an admin, hey, you’re perfectly positioned because you understand Salesforce. So you’re in the driver’s seat to help set this up and it’s going to be really fun and you get to be in all of those conversations. Plus I like logistical conversations, figuring out how to move people and get in elevators, and that just, I don’t know, it seems kind of neat.
Gillian Bruce: Well, and that’s the thing I think that’s interesting about Work.com for admins, it gives us the opportunity to work with different business units, right?
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: So now, we’re very familiar with working with our sales teams, and our service teams, and our IT teams, but now it’s working with HR, it’s working with facilities and when those teams realize the power of Salesforce that you can bring to them to help make their lives easier as we get back into this next phase of pandemic life, I think it’s-
Mike Gerholdt: Quarantine.
Gillian Bruce: Right.
Mike Gerholdt: Quarantine life.
Gillian Bruce: Quarantine life.
Mike Gerholdt: Be positive, quarantine life.
Gillian Bruce: Well, why are we in the quarantine? Anyway.
Mike Gerholdt: Well, I know, but…
Gillian Bruce: I think in the U.S. we’re feeling it a lot more than other places, unfortunately, but it’s cool because it gives admins the opportunity to become an advocate of Salesforce with new parts of the business and establish themselves as leaders with new parts of the business, which is kind of cool.
Mike Gerholdt: Yep. And then if you listened to the podcast last week, which I’m sure you all did.
Gillian Bruce: Absolutely.
Mike Gerholdt: Just edge of your seat, Lightning Speed with Chris Marzilli, so that was another fun episode that we kicked off. I think Gillian, that was the first episode with my new microphone.
Gillian Bruce: Yes. It sounds… Your voice-
Mike Gerholdt: Which is the highlight of the episode.
Gillian Bruce: It sounds so smooth. It’s like syrup dripping off the back of a spoon.
Mike Gerholdt: Right.
Gillian Bruce: Right?
Mike Gerholdt: I wonder who’s going to…
Gillian Bruce: Anyone remembers that you get bonus points.
Mike Gerholdt: I know seriously, that is…
Gillian Bruce: Callback.
Mike Gerholdt: [crosstalk] machine. So Chris came to us with this presentation because he actually works with varying customers of different size on their Salesforce implementation, really optimizing their Salesforce implementation. I think if you listen to the podcast and you should, I had a big takeaway of lazy load, but a lot of what I took out of the podcast was really, it’s almost thinking of it like a delivery truck culture, kind of like how do you deliver, put what needs to be on the truck for that time, as opposed to everything. Right? And it’s the same with pages, and he talks through that and using Dynamic Forms, and thinking through user experience to optimize page load times. So it was a really unique way, because too often I feel like Salesforce admins are just throw it in the truck, and next thing you know, you got this huge thing that you’re trying to load all the time when [user just needs a field. 00:00:22:53]
Gillian Bruce: Well, yeah. And I think we get… There are so many cool new ways to customize things and admins we have all these options. Chris really breaks it down as like, look, if you want to make it speedy, this is how you do it. And I think that, that’s really… It was great to talk to him. I mean, I learned a ton, so I thought it was great. And Mike, we almost forgot to talk about Purvi, Purvi and Service Cloud.
Mike Gerholdt: Oh yes. I know. Well, I was saving the best for last.
Gillian Bruce: Oh, okay.
Mike Gerholdt: That’s why.
Gillian Bruce: All right. That makes sense.
Mike Gerholdt: I was saving that because I have a renewed respect for Service Cloud, and I really feel like as Salesforce admins, if we’re not in those service discussions by now, we need to make them happen or get in those doors, because I mean, just the other day I had one of my vacuums break down, which it’s so odd that machines break breakdown anymore. Right? It used to be commonplace, but I called the service center and they said, “If you’re on a phone that we can send you a text message, because so many of our service centers are shut down. We would like to do that. So press one, if you’re on a phone,” which mobile phone, yes, boom. And literally, it was like six texts, they troubleshot what the issue was, and vacuum’s fine.
And so I’m assuming that was a bot that did that, but as a Salesforce admin thinking through service, this is where we need to be, because our sales teams are probably out there hammering out phone calls, but our service teams are what are going to retain those customers. And to me, that was just like, okay, that was amazing. And I also have adapted to the culture of I don’t really want to, if I don’t have to talk to somebody on the phone, I know it’s so weird to use your mobile phone to talk to people.
Gillian Bruce: I know we shouldn’t even call it a phone anymore.
Mike Gerholdt: I know.
Gillian Bruce: I mean, it’s mostly a texting and internet device in my [land 00:25:06].
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Yep. Yep, but so the podcast that we did was with Purvi was we covered a little bit about what was in her TrailheaDX session, but really dived, I think, deeper into the idea of personas, and working through personas in the call center, and understanding how what types of case solvers you have, and how they operate the fastest. Because for me, and working with Purvi on her TrailheaDX session was amazing. She had really fun ideas about how to shoot the video and get the video and the demo done, but also just thinking through Salesforce Service Cloud, the end user is really consuming the product at the moment of interaction with the customer, as opposed to like Sales Cloud, where they could be entering their call notes later or prepping before. This is like real time [how to search 00:26:10] knowledge articles. So yeah.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I mean, it’s like, your customers are actually touching Salesforce, right? As opposed to just you using it, and then… I think that’s a really good point. I hadn’t thought about that.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. And she walks through chats and she’s a huge macros fan, which coincidentally, we may have a Did You Know video on macros.
Gillian Bruce: Macros are awesome.
Mike Gerholdt: Macros are amazing.
Gillian Bruce: Macro tacos. All right.
Mike Gerholdt: [crosstalk] Taco.
Gillian Bruce: Speaking of taco, you know what else starts with T? Trailhead Live?
Mike Gerholdt: Right. Nice segue.
Gillian Bruce: Thanks.
Mike Gerholdt: That was smooth.
Gillian Bruce: Like syrup dripping off the back of the spoon.
Mike Gerholdt: Right.
Gillian Bruce: So we had some really cool Trailhead Live content this month. In fact, we’ve now got a regular cadence of every Friday, every Friday morning, Pacific time, we’re doing an admin essential habits session.
Mike Gerholdt: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yep. And I would say Trailhead Live for me is like, it makes webinars feel so dated. I was thinking through this the other day, I was like, remember when he used to have to register for a thing and then try to get in, and it was at this one time, and oh, the room’s full. Now, it’s just like, no, it’s on demand culture. Oh, it’s 10:00 AM Pacific, I tune in to Trailhead Live.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, easy peasy. It’s the modern experience. It’s amazing.
Mike Gerholdt: Right.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, and I think Mark [Baseman] has been running most of those. So you get to see his beautiful fascia and have him tell you about some essential habits for Salesforce Admin. So anybody who’s new to the ecosystem, maybe you got a new admin starting on your team, or somebody who’s newer in their role, this is a great session to recommend to them.
Mike Gerholdt: Or you’ve been in your role forever and you need a refresher kind of like what’s on the homepage.
Gillian Bruce: It’s quick little kind of maintenance session for ya, inspiring you to get back to those good habits.
Mike Gerholdt: Exactly. And then in addition that Gillian, I think you’ve seen these, the Trailhead News.
Gillian Bruce: Yes. I think that I have been on a Trailhead News. I think you have as well. Haven’t you?
Mike Gerholdt: No, not yet.
Gillian Bruce: Not yet. Oh, don’t worry. It’s coming,
Mike Gerholdt: Still waiting on my invite from Meagan. I’m sure it’s lost in the mail.
Gillian Bruce: But Trailhead News is awesome. Meagan Peterson from just outside Sydney, Australia, location.
Mike Gerholdt: Right.
Gillian Bruce: Ranger Meagan does a great job wrapping up all of the things that you would want to know about being in the Trailhead Salesforce ecosystem, including new Trailhead content, great events, other Trailhead Live sessions, podcasts that are coming out, and all kinds of great stuff in that vein of learning and continuing to beef up your Salesforce skills. So definitely check it out. It comes out, I think every Tuesday is her schedule. So…
Mike Gerholdt: Every other, every other Tuesday.
Gillian Bruce: Every other Tuesday.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, every other, because there’s a lot, she does a really good job. It’s like this episode, except she knows what to call it.
Gillian Bruce: It’s a little more put together.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Ours is very put together. We have a Quip doc.
Gillian Bruce: It’s true. We do. We have that. This is so true.
Mike Gerholdt: That’s a lot put together for us.
Gillian Bruce: It is. It is.
Mike Gerholdt: Okay. So I always add in kind of at the tail end of this, the way back machine. I hope you’re not sick to your stomach watching this on video now, but I think it’s fun to look back at stuff that we published or things that were going on. And so two years ago, Gillian, do you remember you had this really great, speaking of bots, great conversation with Molly Mahar about Einstein Bots.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. We had a whole series of bot pods. So we had…
Mike Gerholdt: Bot pods.
Gillian Bruce: I love my bot pod crew. This was so fun. Essentially, I got wind of how admins can really use Salesforce bots. And I was like, cool, let me learn more about this. And I went down the rabbit hole, and I learned so much, and I met so many amazing people that I had three of them join me on the podcast. So we had, I think it was Molly, George, and Greg join us and talk about different aspects of what it means to use a bot, some best practices about a bot, and some cool things that bots can do. It was really, really cool that actually ended up turning into a couple of really cool Dreamforce sessions that year too.
Mike Gerholdt: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yep.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: I like that. And then three years ago…
Gillian Bruce: Oh, my God.
Mike Gerholdt: Gillian, you and I were at TrailheaDX. So very apropos that we kicked off the episode TrailheaDX talking… I remember doing this interview outside. I believe it was the third floor on some tables.
Gillian Bruce: Third floor, Moscone West.
Mike Gerholdt: Moscone West. We talked with John Schaff.
Gillian Bruce: Yes.
Mike Gerholdt: About how he had reinvented his career.
Gillian Bruce: I mean, amazing story. It’s someone that we met through the JVS program here in San Francisco and he had a very significant accident that he wasn’t sure he was going to recover from. And as part of his recovery, he engaged his brain by doing Trailhead, and now he is a rock star in the Salesforce community. And that was the first time we had met him. He was just beginning, I think he had just gotten his first Salesforce job, and now, I mean, I can’t believe that was only three years ago. It feels like a lot longer.
Mike Gerholdt: I know, that’s why I had to look it up. I was like, really? That feels like yesterday. And then four years ago, so it just kind of builds on itself. I was just blown away by the number of things that I found like July, July has always been a good month for us. So this was, I remember doing this interview at Midwest Dreamin’. It was [Leanne] and I, because you, Gillian, were off shooting videos somewhere, but we talked to Zac Otero, so we’ll link to that. And that was just an amazing story, just floored us, and I, the previous year at Dreamforce 2015 had met Zac when he came up to me to tell me his story and it was… Boy, that was one of the hardest, yeah. Hardest podcasts to get through.
And I remember Gillian, you said like, “When you sit down and talk to Zac, make sure you ask him about the rainbow.” And I, to this day recall sitting there and thinking like, okay, I made the note and Leanne and I were looking at each other and I said, “Okay, so tell us about the rainbow.” And I was not expecting the answer that I got, like I was just absolutely floored, and four years ago, hard to believe, four years ago.
Gillian Bruce: It’s wild. I mean, I’m getting chills and I’m getting tears thinking about that, because that was the moment where you realized how special Zac was, what he had done, and also just the significance of how Salesforce has enabled people to completely change their lives. I mean, gosh, it’s crazy. I mean, a lot of people know Zac Otero’s story now, but it was really like, okay, there’s a purpose here and it’s really got… It’s amazing. So anyway.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah.
Gillian Bruce: I love that. That was four years ago, oh my God.
Mike Gerholdt: I know it was hard to believe. Very inspiring, and it also speaks to if you have the mindset and you really set that goal, that following through with it pays off. So that was, it was crazy four years ago. Skipping ahead to 10 years ago, it was a long time ago. I think Gillian, we had 10 years ago on here, because at that time, the other month, you are celebrating your anniversary, but I looked up because I had something come across my Facebook of like, hey, you feel old when these songs are turning 20. And so I thought, well, I’ll look up and see what was in the box office and what people were listening to 10 years ago. 10 years ago in the box office, we were all going to see Avatar.
Gillian Bruce: Oh my God. IMAX 3D!
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Yep. I remember that. It doesn’t feel like 10 years ago, it feels longer.
Gillian Bruce: It sure does.
Mike Gerholdt: And Katy Perry had the top song, California Girls.
Gillian Bruce: That’s right.
Mike Gerholdt: So in case you didn’t remember, that’s 10 years old.
Gillian Bruce: I think that earlier that year, or maybe the year prior, I had actually seen Katy Perry at the 9:30 Club in D.C., because I was still living there, and it was like a small venue, and she had a huge Hello Kitty stage prop. And she spent most of the time talking and she was pretty funny, but I went only because I had heard two of her songs and I’m like, “Sure. It’s like a $15.00 concert. I’ll go.” Then she’s headlining the Super Bowl. So you never know.
Mike Gerholdt: Yep, imagine that. Yeah. I remember, funny story, was it 10 years ago? Yeah. I think I was at an HR Tech conference for a company and they played that song prior to the keynote opening, and the colleague I was with was like, “Oh dear Lord, I can’t believe they played that song prior to the this,” because you’re in HR, tech conference.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. That seems a little weird.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. Yeah. It totally was.
Gillian Bruce: I mean, it could have been her other song, which was, I Kissed a Girl, but you know.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, it’s more of like, let’s play all the HR violation songs.
Gillian Bruce: Maybe it was played ironically? I don’t know.
Mike Gerholdt: I to this day don’t know, but I was like, “Oh, okay, great.” Well, there we go. Fun stuff. So, okay, sure, 10 years ago.
Gillian Bruce: Well-
Mike Gerholdt: Don’t look up songs that were that long ago, because you’ll be surprised. You’re probably still listening to them.
Gillian Bruce: Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with that.
Mike Gerholdt: I haven’t watched Avatar since I’ve seen it though.
Gillian Bruce: I have once because I think it was on TV or something and I was like, “Oh,” because you know what? The marine bio nerd inside of me loves-
Mike Gerholdt: Oh yeah.
Gillian Bruce: All of the creatures they made up, because it looks like you’re underwater, but you’re not. I don’t know. Anyway. Aren’t they still making another one? [crosstalk 00:36:58].
Mike Gerholdt: Well, they’re taking a while.
Gillian Bruce: Isn’t James Cameron making like Avatar Two or something?
Mike Gerholdt: Okay. I mean, in the span of… Other films have released sequels, and sequels, and sequels.
Gillian Bruce: I mean, no one’s releasing much of anything right now, but yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. I enjoyed watching how they filmed Avatar, because I feel like the actors had to be on these stilts, like the stilts they use to hang dry wall or whatever, and then arm extensions.
Gillian Bruce: Like Cirque de Solei people? Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah. That’s always like, man, okay, great. That’s got to be hard.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. Well, we made it through July, Mike.
Mike Gerholdt: We did, much like we made it through this podcast. Surprising. If you want to learn more about all things Salesforce admin go to admin.salesforce.com to find more resources. Everything that we have, that we talked about, we will link in the show notes and is also blog posts and videos that you can watch. And of course, as a reminder, please go to iTunes, give us a review. I just looked to see if we had anything new, got some new stars. Thank you.
Gillian Bruce: Yay stars!
Mike Gerholdt: You have kind words. We appreciate that. And you can say up to date on all things social for Salesforce admins on Twitter. We are @Salesforceadmns, no I, and of course you can find me, I’m @MikeGerholdt and Gillian…
Gillian Bruce: @GillianKBruce.
Mike Gerholdt: Awesome. And with that, stay tuned for the next episode and we’ll see you in the cloud.
Gillian Bruce: Bye.
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