Build Your Admin Skills: User Management, Communication, and Change Management

Prefer to read instead of watch? Here’s a breakdown of the episode.

User Management

User Management is all about how admins use Salesforce to customize the user experience and manage profiles, permissions, roles, and groups. It's about supporting your users on a day-to-day basis—being the subject matter expert, or go-to person, for all things Salesforce. It's about building a customized user experience to boost productivity and, ultimately, drive success.

Christine Stevens, a real-life #AwesomeAdmin, shares her top three user management tips.

1. Develop a user adoption strategy. As an admin, you want to help grow the Salesforce skill set across your organization. Helping your users skill-up maximizes user satisfaction, productivity, and adoption!
2. Encourage user feedback and involvement. As an admin, you want to provide a safe space for users to communicate and collaborate with feedback. By involving users and incorporating their feedback, admins foster a sense of ownership and user satisfaction.
3. Stay informed about Salesforce best practices. As an admin, it’s important to stay informed about trends in the Salesforce ecosystem and best practices in user management. Admins can proactively adapt their user management approach and leverage new tools to enhance the user experience with Salesforce.

Communication

With Communication, you can collaborate with business and technical stakeholders to design, configure, and implement Salesforce. It's about building strong relationships with your stakeholders and providing ongoing support and training to end users; for example, for the creation and delivery of workshop materials or when demoing new features. And employers are ALWAYS looking to hire admins with great communication skills.

Vicki Moritz-Henry, who works with employers, shares the top three communication skills employers look for when hiring an admin.

1. Someone with a proven track record of working in a collaborative team environment. This doesn't necessarily need to be direct Salesforce experience—also think about previous jobs where you worked as part of a team. This type of communication skill is a transferable skill that can definitely help you succeed in a Salesforce Admin role.
2. Someone who has a clear and concise communication style. Giving too much information or detail has a tendency to overcomplicate things, and the listener might get lost. Keep your answers simple and straightforward!
3. Someone who isn’t afraid to communicate what they do and don't know. Employers would much rather you tell them that you don't know something but you know how to find the answer, rather than making something up or guessing. There's no way to know it all—and you should communicate that!

Change Management

Change Management is the ability to manage changes to business processes, technology, and people within Salesforce. A key part of change management is about working closely with stakeholders to ensure business readiness for any upcoming changes related to Salesforce. This could mean designing and implementing new processes within Salesforce, and the facilitation of user adoption of these processes. It also means making sure we know about deployment strategies and processes; for example, staging environment versus production.

Mike Gerholdt, an industry expert, shares his advice on how to develop your change management skills.

1. There are three Salesforce Releases per year. Familiarize yourself with any upcoming changes affecting your org AND be sure to communicate these changes to your users, whether that be by distributing a newsletter or perhaps hosting a training session.
2. Set up In-App Guidance to highlight changes within Salesforce. These are little informational walkthroughs of features that users can see in Salesforce to help them navigate around.
3. Create and maintain sandbox environments for testing. Your future self will thank you, I promise!

To learn more about these skills, check out the Salesforce Admin Skills Kit.

Tune in for new episodes of "Skills for Success" every Wednesday!

Additional related resources

• Salesforce Admins Blog: Skills for Success: A New 14-Part Blog Series for Salesforce Administrators

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