It’s time for another monthly retro on the Salesforce Admins Podcast. In this episode, we’ll go over all the top Salesforce product, community, and career content for July.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation between Gillian and Mike.
We had two new Admin Evangelists join our team! To learn more about them and their career journeys, there are two great episodes you can listen to. We also launched a major update to the Trailblazer Community — we’ve got all the details on the pod.
For Mike, Courtney Coen’s blog post about building reports was really impactful and highlights a great way to start getting more involved with Salesforce in your organization. J Steadman revisited a post Gillian first made five years ago. It’s a popular post, but a LOT has changed in the half-decade since it was written.
There was a great Expert Corner this month with LeeAnne Rimel and John Demby on Tableau advancements. Learn about this amazing tool and what it can do for you and your reports.
We won’t be seeing Gillian around for a couple of months because she has some exciting news: her second child is on the way! Mike will hold down the fort on the pod, but get psyched for some appearances from the rest of the Admin Relations team.
Gillian: Welcome to the Salesforce Admins Podcast and the July monthly retro, or should we say, put that sparkler away, you’re going to burn your cousin edition for 2021. I’m your host, Gillian Bruce and in this episode, we will review the top product, community and careers content for July. And to help me do that, I am joined by the one and only, my favorite podcast inspiration slash co-hosts slash all the things, Mike Gerholdt.
Mike: Hi, Gillian. I had to put that in there because that’s a thing that I heard constantly as a kid.
Gillian: Well, so that’s so funny because me growing up in San Francisco, we never see fireworks because it’s always foggy. So sparklers are about as close as we get.
Mike: Yeah, sparklers. We had sparklers. And snakes, right? It was like a little black pellet that you lit on the sidewalk and then it grew like a snake.
Gillian: Those were fun. Yeah, those were fun. We never really got to play a whole lot. The closest we’ve got were those little poppers that you throw on the floor and they explode.
Mike: Oh, yes. Those were fun.
Gillian: Because those are really popular for Chinese lunar new year.
Mike: Yes.
Gillian: So I actually think we have a box of them in our house right now. Should be fun. The dog hates them.
Mike: Well, yes, because they’re… Yeah, I wanted to look up because in addition to July 4th, July 1st is Canada Day for our friends up north, and July 14th is Best Deal Day.
Gillian: Oui, oui.
Mike: So we’re celebrating all of the things, all the revolutions.
Gillian: Need some maple syrup and rosé to celebrate those, right?
Mike: I mean, why not? And a sparkler with some American flag shorts.
Gillian: Totally. Yes. Well, Mike, we also have some podcast swag on the Trailhead Store in case everyone missed it. I actually got my shirt and my tumbler a few weeks ago and I love them, they’re so fun and colorful. So if you are listening and need some more Salesforce swag in your collection, go to the Trailhead Store and you can get some Salesforce Admins Podcast swag, which is pretty awesome. Mike, you got a t-shirt too, yeah?
Mike: I did. I saw your t-shirt in the no silly questions video, and fun fact, I was at a grill out around the 4th of July and a neighbor said, “Now, what do you do again?” And I pointed to my shirt. I was like, “I do the thing that’s on my shirt.”
Gillian: There you go. That’s a good explanation.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah, I’m pretty unique in that I could do that, but you could wear the shirt and then you can say, I listened to the podcast that talks about the things that I do on… That sounded better in my head.
Gillian: Yeah, and it’s fun, it’s colorful. It’s a happy shirt.
Mike: It’s a very colorful, bright, summer… If you don’t smile and giggle wearing that shirt, you’re having a really bad day.
Gillian: Yeah. Well, I got mine during the month of June which is also Pride Month so it worked out really well.
Mike: Perfect.
Gillian: There was one day I wore that shirt and I wore my rainbow patchwork Vans that I got and I felt extremely festive.
Mike: Love it. Big fan of it.
Gillian: Well, Mike, we had a lot of content this month, so let’s-
Mike: We did. You’d be surprised because we did TrailheaDX in June, you’d think we’d just take the month of July off, but we don’t stop.
Gillian: Party doesn’t stop.
Mike: Nope, not at all. We did some podcasts. So we got two new evangelists on our team.
Gillian: What? I know, it’s so exciting. I mean, that’s like almost doubling the size of our team.
Mike: Yes, which is crazy. So there’s two intro podcasts for you to meet J. Steadman and Jennifer Lee, who both joined the team. I think they’re fun. I stole some lightning round questions, if you watch TrailheaDX from Liam [McGallan Hare 00:04:13], to ask them, and it’s a great way to get introduced to our team and you can reach out to them on Twitter and say hello. They’re always looking for more inspiration and connections.
Gillian: And I think it’s fun too because it’s like getting to know the person, like why? Part of the reason that they are now part of our team becomes very evident as you listen to those episodes, so there’s a very clear passion for helping admins effect real change within their companies and their communities and their careers. So I got inspired listening to them, even though I know them both pretty well at this point. It kind of reinvigorates the energy and the passion and why we do what we do.
Mike: And we also will be the Royal. We launched a new Trailblazer community, which is super cool.
Gillian: Oh man, it’s so exciting. It’s long overdue and thank goodness it is out because it is totally a new world in the online Trailblazer connection space because I mean, hello, 2020. We came from the 2000s, we fast forwarded 20 years within one update.
Mike: Yeah. No, it was good. You did a podcast with the community managers about that, so I enjoyed listening to that.
Gillian: Yeah. It was fun to hear about the thinking behind why they rolled out what they did first and what is coming soon and the strategy behind it because it was huge. I mean, it is, not was, it’s an ongoing, it’s a huge effort. So if you have not yet checked out the new Trailblazer community, definitely do it and then listen to the pod to find out a little bit more about the details and maybe some Easter eggs even.
Mike: Ooh, I like Easter eggs. Easter eggs are fun.
Gillian: We also had some blogs, Mike. We had a lot of blogs.
Mike: Let’s talk about those. I picked out, so you might have heard Courtney Cohen on the pod earlier this year, but she did a post source on how building my first Salesforce report changed my entire career. And I really enjoyed reading this, partly because I think reports for me actually are a way that users would get also on my radar as an admin. Generally, that’s a good way to strike up a conversation with an admin in your organization if you’re a user, and it sounds like that’s the path that it led Courtney down.
Gillian: Yeah. I think it’s always interesting to connect, hey, this is how you use the technology in Salesforce and this is how you connect it to actually your career progression, you know? And I think that that connection there is so important, especially for admins because hey, admins, we are literally at the crossroads between the business and the technology so if you can harness that and then use that also to your personal advantage in terms of helping you grow your career, that’s kind of the secret sauce there.
Mike: Yep. And then J. Steadman revisited a post that you had done, which is crazy to think that it was five years and 15 releases ago.
Gillian: I can’t even… That’s just crazy to me.
Mike: That was back when you were Gillian Bruce.
Gillian: You mean Gillian Madill? Yeah.
Mike: Gillian Madill, yeah.
Gillian: Who was that chick? Yeah. So J. took a very much needed update and refreshed approach to five steps to setting up your Salesforce org, which was one of our top posts that kept getting a lot of traffic. And we decided, hey, we should probably update this because the platform’s changed a lot in five years. So J. did a great job revisiting the original ideas and flushing them out, and then also adding some additional context and some updated input from the community as well. So great posts, especially if you’re a relatively new admin or you’re starting at a new company with a new implementation, this is kind of your cheat sheet to get things up and running and set up in a way that is going to make your implementation successful in the longterm.
Mike: Yeah. And I still look at, one of the easiest things is theming because I know towards the end of their posts, J. points out themes. And I still am just amazed at what theming can do to drive adoption and how it feels when an app is themed towards your company. I mean, we even have that at Salesforce because we use different applications for stuff, and you can always feel when it’s someone else’s app or when they’ve made the app feel like it’s for us.
Gillian: Yeah, it really helps with user adoption because they open it up and they’re like, “Oh, this looks familiar. This looks like something I should be using.”
Mike: This looks like us. It’s got our orange or our yellow or chartreuse or whatever your company’s colors are.
Gillian: Yeah. Or as in J.’s post, they write about Poblano Grill, which makes me want to have chips and guacamole. So-
Mike: 100%.
Gillian: So yeah, that’s a great post. Check it out. Mike, we also had some videos this month.
Mike: We did. So I know you did a no silly questions. Those are fun and spoiler alert, I’ll be picking those up, but I loved Leanne’s Expert Corner that she did with John Denby on the Tableau advancements. I feel… Well, first of all, admins, if you have not reached out to John Denby, man, you’re missing out because he is just one of the coolest dudes in our universe and he’s totally from our admin perspective. He was an admin once at a company and found Tableau, and he just knows so much. But I think that we got to pay a little bit more attention to all the cool stuff that Tableau can do because back to what Courtney was writing about with careers and reporting, man, that’s a way to draw attention to yourself, is bringing insights to the company that executives want to see but don’t know to ask for.
Gillian: Yeah, and John, not only is John a actual, in-person real life mascot for Tableau, I feel like at this point, between the hat and the voice, he’s amazing in so many ways. But as you said, he was an admin. He has admin at the heart of everything that he talks about and does, and Tableau very much thinks about admins. And you can tell on some of the tools that they’ve developed that really are targeted for us, for admins, which is so cool because it’s a very powerful tool that we can use. And I mean, come on, it makes you look so cool to your stakeholders.
Mike: I’m constantly, every time I work in a Tableau dashboard and when Liz was with us last year, she really brought the team into Tableau. And I would sit down with John on a call and he would just go and click through, and the way that I feel admins work with low code tools is the way that Tableau is built. You drag things in there, it does what you expect it to do. And then filtering, it’s kind of intuitive, a little bit more so than some of the other report builders.
Gillian: Yeah, and one of the ways that I think, especially listening to John talk, the way that he explains things, he has such a passion for it and the way that he explains it makes you want to go learn more. I remember the first call I was on with John, he mentioned that there was this public repository of dashboards that you could go nerd out on. There was a Game of Thrones one and all these other really cool dashboards that people have created. And I think I easily spent at least an hour poking around, because he’s a true evangelist and he definitely is a good person to listen to you to get inspired to really dig in and do more with analytics in general.
Mike: Yeah, 100%. So I think that is most of the content. I’ll be honest with you, we skipped over a lot of blog posts because we published so many blog posts in July, I had a hard time finding one to pick that I thought was the best. Because I was like, no, these four. I can’t talk about four, I got to find one.
Gillian: And on that note too, not only did both of our brand new evangelists make their debut on the podcast, they also made their debut in the blogosphere. So both J. and Jen posted amazing blog posts on the admin site, so we talked about J.’s a little bit. Jen, also, I’m going to give her a quick shout out because she also posted a great blog about how to create to-do lists using actions and recommendations. So, hey, our new EVs are here and they’re already creating content and hey, listeners, give them some love.
Mike: Yeah, and wait until you see what we got up our sleeves for Dreamforce.
Gillian: Dreamforce and the next release.
Mike: Oh yeah, that’s right. That’s also September.
Gillian: Yeah. At Salesforce, we do all the things all at the same time. That’s how we roll.
Mike: For sure. I mean, July’s done, August, we’ll do something and then September, boom, Dreamforce, release.
Gillian: Yeah, well, y’all are going to have a great time with that because I’m doing something else in August. So Mike, you mentioned you’re going to be taking over no silly questions. Thank you.
Mike: I did, I gave the spoiler away.
Gillian: Yeah. Thank you for taking that on. You’re also going to be manning the reins of the podcast for the next few months because I got my own release coming in August. We are welcoming our second little baby boy. I can’t believe I’m saying that.
Mike: Two Bruces in the world. Bruces, Bruci.
Gillian: Yeah, Bruci. It’s the house of Bruci. Yeah, so we’re excited, it’s going to be a lot. Jack, the first Bruce turns two at the beginning of August and then this next one is due towards the end of August, so we’re going to have our hands full. But it’s going to be fun and I’ll take a little time off and then I will be back.
Mike: Yeah. You could name the other kid, Jack Jack. Then you have Jack and Jack Jack.
Gillian: That would be a lot, yeah.
Mike: No, that sounds funnier in my head. So for everyone on the pod, we’ve got a fun thing lined up for the rest of the team on the monthly retros. So I’m going to bring in a rotating guest to help me retro-ize every month and go through different content that we’ve published, and give you an opportunity to meet a little bit more of the depth of the admin relations teams. So in addition to our evangelists, we have an amazing marketing team, an amazing social. So I want the chance for everybody to get a chance to say hello and also give their perspective on some of the content that we did. So every month, the retro is going to be switched up a little bit, just to keep things fresh while Gillian’s having Jack chapter two.
Gillian: Yeah, it’s like a retro round-robin you’re going to do.
Mike: Right. retro round-robin. There we go, three Rs.
Gillian: You know, I got to leave you with some alliterative fun there.
Mike: I know. And then we’ll come back and maybe we’ll have to do a no silly questions retro round-robin pun off or something.
Gillian: I think that sounds great.
Mike: … to welcome you back into your podcasting.
Gillian: I’ll be excited to talk about things that aren’t revolving around children.
Mike: Yes, right? Well, maybe the next no silly questions should be, when you come back, the community has to send you a video of what they’ve done since you were gone.
Gillian: I’m going to ask them the silly question and they have to answer.
Mike: Right, yeah. Turn the tables. So it’s on you now to answer this.
Gillian: Speaking of which, if you have a no silly question, since Mike is going to be taking this on for the next few months, feel free to send him a video.
Mike: Yeah, just shoot the video and tweet it to me or something. I’ll figure out how to get it.
Gillian: Yeah, just a little iPhone video saying what your name is, where you’re calling from and your question, that’s the formula.
Mike: And you can ask questions about the pod or the team. It doesn’t have to be strictly super hard core-
Gillian: It could be about Dreamforce.
Mike: It could be about Dreamforce, yeah.
Gillian: It could be about the release.
Mike: Yeah. Oh yeah, that would be fun.
Gillian: Yeah. Whatever you want. Michael will attempt to get an answer for you.
Mike: I can’t get them all answered, but we’ll do our best. Anyway. If you’d like to learn more about all things that we just talked about today in the episode, I will include the links in the show notes, but of course, everything is published on admin.salesforce.com. You can stay up to date with us on all things social. We are @Salesforceadmns, no I, on Twitter. The Twitter handle turned six years old this last month too.
Gillian: Crazy.
Mike: Yeah. So imagine that. I’m on Twitter @mikegerholdt. You can still tweak to Gillian K Bruce, even though she’ll be out taking care of the other Bruces. All the Bruces, crispy gooses.
Gillian: I’ll leak some Bruce photos here and there.
Mike: Oh boy. Well, fabulous. Well, Gillian. It’s fun having you back for a short period of time and send you on your way.
Gillian: Well, thank you, Mike, for holding down the fort, and I look forward to seeing all the amazing things you all do while I’m out and then coming back and getting going again.
Mike: There we go. So with that, stay safe, stay awesome, and say tuned for the next episode. We’ll see you in the Cloud.
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