This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we’ve got the first monthly retro of 2021. We’ll cover standout blog posts, videos, and all the other great Salesforce content from January.
Join us as we talk about the must-see content from January and listen to Mike and Gillian quiz each other on our new quiz show: Which Happened First?.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation between Mike and Gillian.
Gillian is hooked on Marc Baizman’s “How I Solved This” series, and this month’s article is a fun story about how to use emojis to highlight key pieces of data in your org. Mike’s must-read blog post from January covers some exciting new things on the product roadmap that bring us some much-asked-for features.
We had a lot going on with the pod this month. Gillian traveled across the globe—virtually—to speak to Preena Johansen. She’s an Einstein Analytics Consultant at Telstra, the biggest telecommunications company in Australia, and she had a lot to share about using Einstein Analytics and Tableau at such a large organization. Mike and Gillian also talked to Woodson Martin, the EVP and GM for Salesforce AppExchange, who started out as a Salesforce admin himself.
Gillian has been hooked on the “Essential Habits for Salesforce Admins Marathon,” which helps you build a solid foundation for all of the things you need to know to be an awesome admin. “It’s a great way to kick off the year if you’re wanting to set some goals and priorities to improve some things for your organization or how you administer Salesforce,” Gillian says.
Listen to the full episode to hear the first edition of the exciting new game show, Which Happened First?.
Gillian Bruce: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast, the first monthly retro for 2021. Oh, we’re finally out of 2020. Hurray. I’m your host, Gillian Bruce, and in this episode we will review the top product, community, and careers content from the entire month of January. And to help me out, I am joined by the one and only Mike Gerholdt.
Mike Gerholdt: Hello. I made it to 2021 too. The first version of 2020, for a second.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, sure. The 21st year of the 2000s? I don’t know.
Mike Gerholdt: There’s no 2020 loser. There’s only winning 2021.
Gillian Bruce: Can only get better. Can only get better. So, Mike, we had a lot going on this month, kicked it off with a bang, the new year. We had some blogs happening.
Mike Gerholdt: We did, and we did Essential Habits marathon on January 20th. So shout out to Mark Baizman for hanging around ye olde chat and chatting with all of our Salesforce admins on that marathon. You can binge watch Essential Habits.
Gillian Bruce: I mean, I think I binge watch everything I can on every other platform. Now I’m going to binge watch all of Trailhead live content. It’ll be great. But the Essential Habits series…
Mike Gerholdt: Cheaper than anything else, right?
Gillian Bruce: It’s true. Yeah, you don’t need a special app for that. But the Essential Habits series is pretty awesome. It’s also a great way to kick off the year if you’re wanting to set some goals and priorities to improve some stuff for your organization or just how you administer Salesforce. It’s some really great resources there.
Mike Gerholdt: Love it.
Gillian Bruce: Love it.
Mike Gerholdt: So must read blog for January. Gillian, what was your must read blog for January?
Gillian Bruce: Well, I’m a big fan of the How I Solved This series that Mark Baizman has been putting together on the blog. And I love it because it’s always featuring what a customer has done to solve a specific problem. So this one’s pretty cool, because guess what, it has emoji in it, and I love emoji. So this is How I Solve This: Easy Image Flags With Emoji by Michael Kolodner. It’s pretty dang cool. If you are looking for a really interesting way to make your data pop on the screen, you can use emoji for that and he shows you how he did it step-by-step. Just imagine, you’re in this list view and you would love to see very quickly which things are green or yellow or happy or sad. You can plug in some emojis there. It’s pretty awesome.
Mike Gerholdt: We use emojis in the org that we make the podcast with. Makes it easy to find the episode.
Gillian Bruce: Sure do I. Hey, if I had it my way, there would only be emojis. Screw those letters. I communicate solely in emojis.
Mike Gerholdt: Which episode are you at? I’m at the dog cat left foot shoe up arrow episode. Awesome. Okay.
Gillian Bruce: Mike, what was your most read blog from January?
Mike Gerholdt: So this one came out in January 18. It’s the Three New Ideas on the Product Roadmap post. And I picked it mostly because it’s three, not new ideas, but three ideas that just make me feel warm and cozy inside. The first one is field history tracking for tasks and events. I won’t say how old it is, but oh my goodness am I glad that this is out because I have been asked for this since I was an admin back in my wee early days, and I know that admins all over have wanted field history tracking for tasks. So that made me happy. And then just the old man in me loved the analytics winner, which is the ability to print dashboards, because we all got executives, stakeholders that don’t log in Salesforce. I mean, they log in all the time and they totally never ask you to print a dashboard. Never-
Gillian Bruce: Never. Never.
Mike Gerholdt: Have I tried to print a dashboard in my life. And we can do that now. So what’s old is new again. And then the third one, custom fields for dashboard gauge values, just like, yes, thank you. Amazing that we can put in exactly what the field is for the value, as opposed to what my Thursday used to be, which was readjusting gauge values.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I mean, those are just… These are the things that make admins happy. Just to save us some time, make our lives easier. It’s really exciting to see that these are going to happen. So huge shout out to everybody who voted on them because that’s how they happen.
Mike Gerholdt: Absolutely. Yeah. So go back and read that post, check it out. You can see there’s some really great screenshots in it. It made me happy.
Gillian Bruce: We like happiness. I mean, we’re talking about emojis and all kinds of good product roadmappy things. Happy start to 2021. We also had some happiness for your ears in 2021 this year.
Mike Gerholdt: We did a podcast.
Gillian Bruce: We did quite a few. Quite a few.
Mike Gerholdt: What was your must listen?
Gillian Bruce: Well, I had the opportunity to transport as much as you can these days to the other side of the world, and I had a really wonderful chat with Preena Johansen, who is an Einstein Analytics specialist at Telstra, which is a huge, probably the biggest communications company in Australia. And she’s talking to me from Brisbane where it’s nice and hot, and she’s going to go hang out by her pool and have a nice cocktail. And I am sitting in my basement with the heater on full blast because it’s cold here in San Francisco. So it was great chatting with her. She had some really, really great insights about how she works at such a huge organization using Einstein Analytics and Tableau, and really what that specialization looks and how admins can really benefit from thinking about using some of those same approaches and strategies. So that was really fun. But Mike, I think we had another podcast that both you and I were pretty excited too.
Mike Gerholdt: I did, and I also offered up, it could be your favorite podcast too. So we talked with the very important Woodson martin, who is the EVP and GM for Salesforce AppExchange. What a fun pod, if you haven’t picked this up. I won’t spoil it for you, but Gillian, just to highlight one part of the podcast where Woodson said, “Behind every successful Salesforce project, there’s an admin who’s sweated the details, really invested to understand their users, what people are trying to accomplish, see beyond what may be executive objections, and tune into the users and the jobs they need to get done every day and the circumstances in which they need to get those jobs done.” And I just was so… I need a moment of silence after that.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I mean, what a way to fire up the awesome admin community in the new year, because Woodson dropped not only that, but he also dropped that he is a former admin. That’s how he started with Salesforce, which is pretty awesome. I always love learning about super senior exacts who started as Salesforce admin. So he’s got admin in his heart and fantastic podcast, really fun interview. I highly encourage everyone to listen to it if you have not already.
Mike Gerholdt: Yes. I mean, at some point, it being January and all, at some point we will have interviewed someone who will be president of the United States that was a Salesforce admin. I have to believe that, right?
Gillian Bruce: I love that. All right. Let’s put that out there. Just put that out there.
Mike Gerholdt: It was great that Woodson… What he does, and literally I was just in AppExchange tweaking something for an app for a video I’m going to shoot for you, Gillian, so the admin AppExchange, it’s Batman and Robin. Peanut butter and jelly.
Gillian Bruce: Totally. Peas and carrots. I love it.
Mike Gerholdt: Peas and carrots. Right.
Gillian Bruce: Well, that was a lot of great content that we had, Mike. I still want to keep this fun vibe going for the beginning of 2021. What else you got?
Mike Gerholdt: Well, I think we kicked off talking about video so we can end this portion talking about video. I don’t know if you had a must-watch video for January that you enjoyed?
Gillian Bruce: I mean, I was enjoying the Essential Habits marathon, so those deep dives that Mark put together are pretty amazing and help with all of the things you need to know to be an awesome admin. So it’s a good go-to, it’s a solid foundation and a great… Like I said, great way to kick off the year.
Mike Gerholdt: Yep. I concur. I thought that was the must watch videos for us in January. So then the fun thing, if you listen to the December pod, we wrapped up December and all the topics of what we enjoyed or binge watched. I thought it’d be fun to start January off with, “Hey, which happened first?”
So, because January being the first month of the year, so Gillian, I put some questions together for you and it looks you put some questions together for me and-
Gillian Bruce: Yes I did.
Mike Gerholdt: And at home participation is encouraged, so we will give you a few seconds to think about it and just randomly shout out your answer.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, make sure you shout it really loud so people around you get really confused.
Mike Gerholdt: Absolutely, yes, because it it’ll be fantastic. Or you could put a little Twitter video together of us answering. I would enjoy that. That would make me happy. Okay, so Gillian, I have three questions for you, all of which are, I want to know what you think which happened first, and of course I got to queue up the answers here. Okay. So Gillian, which happened first, the AppExchange or Visualforce.
Gillian Bruce: I think I’m going to say Visualforce.
Mike Gerholdt: That’s what I thought.
Gillian Bruce: But it’s not right?
Mike Gerholdt: However, bonk, you’re incorrect. AppExchange launched in 2005, and the development of Apex Visualforce and more happened in 2006.
Gillian Bruce: Wow, okay.
Mike Gerholdt: It’s close, but AppExchange came first. What a great segue from the Woodson Martin podcast, by the way. It’s a great podcast.
Gillian Bruce: Seriously, yeah.
Mike Gerholdt: Okay, Gillian, second question. Chance to redeem yourself, which happened first, Dreamforce or the Salesforce IPO?
Gillian Bruce: Well I just missed one of these as an employee by about a year or two, so I know for sure Dreamforce happened first.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, I was… Let’s see, I’m scrolling through just to double check your answer, because you’d think I put the answer inside of the doc, but I didn’t. But I was shocked to find that Dreamforce happened in 2003, and that was actually what helped launch the IPO.
Gillian Bruce: Yep. And I remember the IPO, I think, was 2008, I believe, which was-
Mike Gerholdt: [inaudible] after.
Gillian Bruce: Two years after I started at Salesforce, so I just missed that two years before I started.
Mike Gerholdt: Oh, 2004.
Gillian Bruce: Oh, it’s 2004, then nevermind. I missed it by way more than what I thought. So nevermind. I still got the answer right.
Mike Gerholdt: Dreamforce annual convention was held at the Westin Hotel in San Francisco in 2003, and then coming off that had 8,700 customers and numerous potential investors. Salesforce held an initial public offering in 2004.
Gillian Bruce: There you go.
Mike Gerholdt: The company’s day one stock price stood at 17.25. I’m getting that from thestreet.com, so public information. $17. Oof. Here we go. All right, so then ending on a fun note, because we love musicians and I think one of these is your favorite band, which happened first, Red Hot Chili Peppers or Metallica playing at Dreamforce?
Gillian Bruce: Such great memories. Such great memories. Again-
Mike Gerholdt: I will say the first time Metallica played at Dreamforce.
Gillian Bruce: Right, before they became the house band. I very vividly remember this moment in the basement at… Well, the basement. In the big hall at Moscone, And it was for sure, my man James and Metallica rocking the house with the worst acoustics possible. But I didn’t care, because I was in the front row and I was making eye contact with James Hetfield and I was in heaven. It was one of my best experiences ever.
Mike Gerholdt: Ding, ding, ding, ding. So you went two out of three. Metallica played Dreamforce 9 in 2011, and Red Hot Chili Peppers played Dreamforce 10 in 2012. That was in front of-
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, the Chili Peppers, they were in the front of city hall with the cool light show on the facade of city hall. It was pretty awesome. I miss concerts.
Mike Gerholdt: Yeah, it was fun going through looking at the concerts, but I was like, “Oh, some of these are too obvious.” Except for Foo Fighters. I had no idea that Foo Fighters played in ’08 and in 2015. They were the first returning band. So for those of you quiz [crosstalk 00:15:40]-
Gillian Bruce: Salesforce trivia. This is a bevy Salesforce trivia. Okay, Mike, I-
Mike Gerholdt: Here we go.
Gillian Bruce: I’ve got some for you. You ready?
Mike Gerholdt: Boy, I got to run the board.
Gillian Bruce: You sure do. You sure do. Which happened first, Astro or Cody used as a release logo?
Mike Gerholdt: This is hard. I feel like… I feel like I want to say Astro, but no. Okay, I’m going to go Astro because I think we didn’t have a cartoon release version of Cody soon enough.
Gillian Bruce: Well, you are correct, sir. But so close between the two of them because Yeti Astro first appeared for the winter 18 release, followed by a Cody watering his bonsai plant for spring 18. And then a Cody was the release logo again for summer 18. So we have quite a Cody celebration there for two releases in a row.
Mike Gerholdt: A Cody parade. I was only going off the fact that we had that one scary bear costume Cody for a while.
Gillian Bruce: That’s right. Just a random person walking around in a very realistic bear costume. That was Cody,
Mike Gerholdt: Just bear hugging executives in keynotes. It was wonderful.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, you get in the elevator and you’re like, “Oh, okay, hi.”
Mike Gerholdt: “Oh hey, this is happening.”
Gillian Bruce: Oh man. There were so many fun release logo questions I could have asked, but I thought that was the least challenging of them all.
Mike Gerholdt: Oh, we could do a whole show on release logos.
Gillian Bruce: Yeah. I got a lot of release logo trivia. Anyway, that’s another show. Next question. Which happened first, the headquarters of Salesforce at Rincon Center or at One Landmark in San Francisco?
Mike Gerholdt: Man, this one’s even harder. One Landmark is what I know, but I feel like, from that video, was it Dreamforce 2019 that they put together the history of Salesforce? I feel like there was a picture of maybe Parker in Rincon before One Landmark. So I’m going to go Rincon Center.
Gillian Bruce: Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You are correct. That is a fun… It’s a really tricky trivia question because the first headquarters that was not in the Telegraph Hill apartment where Benioff and Parker were hanging out was in Rincon Center, but they quickly then vacated for a larger space at One Landmark. And then we were at One Landmark for many years before coming back and expanding back into Rincon Center. So we did a little hopscotch there.
Mike Gerholdt: Sure. One Landmark was the first time I’d been to Salesforce headquarters.
Gillian Bruce: Now we have a tower. a couple of them. Okay, my last what happened first question, Mike, is also an office related question. What happened first? Which location was the first non-US Salesforce office? Was it Tokyo or London?
Mike Gerholdt: This one I have a little experience with, in that I know we opened the London office after I joined Salesforce. So I have to believe that the Tokyo office happened before that. So I’ll go Tokyo office.
Gillian Bruce: Congratulations, you are correct, sir. But I thought I was going to trip you up because in fact it was 2001 where we opened the first offices outside of San Francisco, and that was Dublin and Tokyo.
Mike Gerholdt: Oh, I had no idea. I knew it would be early, because I remember as a customer seeing the Chatter use case with Toyota. I had to have believed that we would have had a Tokyo office or something. That was what I was going with.
Gillian Bruce: So there you go. So you got all of them right.
Mike Gerholdt: Ding ding, I ran the board.
Gillian Bruce: Three out of three. Mike Gerholdt, you are the winner of What Happened First?
Mike Gerholdt: And by winning, I don’t know, you don’t get anything, there’s no prizes. It’s all [inaudible 00:20:37].
Gillian Bruce: It’s pride. You get pride as your price.
Mike Gerholdt: One million Schrute bucks for you.
Gillian Bruce: I’ll send those in the mail right now.
Mike Gerholdt: Redeemable nowhere. Awesome. Well, this is fun. I think we had a really great kickoff to 2021, Gillian. If you’re listening to this podcast, I would love to hear what your answers you thought would be right. So tweet them, send us a video. That would make my Twitter timeline super fun and enjoyable.
Gillian Bruce: Or submit some more Salesforce trivia questions. Those are always good.
Mike Gerholdt: Oh yeah, that would be super fun. Taking questions from the listeners to answer. Yes. I’m also really afraid what they’re going to ask, but that’s okay. What happened first? I don’t know. We’ll find out. If you want to learn more about all things that we just talked about in today’s episode, please go to admin.salesforce.com to find the links and many, many, many more resources. You can stay up to date with us on social for all things admins. We are @SalesforceAdmns, no i, on Twitter. I’m on Twitter @MikeGerholdt, and Gillian is @GillianKBruce. So with that, stay safe, stay awesome, and stay tuned for the next episode. We will see you in the cloud. This is all I could find. Kind of fun, huh, that one?
Gillian Bruce: Yeah, I feel I’m getting ready to start a Jazzercise class or something.
Mike Gerholdt: Okay everybody, it’s Peleton riding time. Okay, we’ll get rid of that. I have no idea. Some of these buttons… Oh, there we go.
Gillian Bruce: That’s a good one.
Mike Gerholdt: Awesome.
Gillian Bruce: Score.
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