Follow Practical Admin Tips
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Apply strategic thinking to common Salesforce admin requests.
- Differentiate between completing a task and solving a business problem.
- Use admin wisdom to guide stakeholders toward better outcomes.
Practice Wisdom Every Day
In the previous units, you learned why shifting from task to solutions thinking is important. You dove into a scenario to compare the common way of doing things and how you can elevate your work to deliver more impact.
But how do you apply this approach to your daily work? Daily is a key word here because it’s important to make strategic thinking a habit. If you stop to take a look, you’ll see opportunities to deliver wisdom show up in everyday moments.
- A Slack message asking for a quick layout change or addition to a dropdown list
- A ticket marked urgent
- A meeting where someone jumps straight to a solution
In these moments you decide whether to simply complete the tasks or make an impact. The first step is to notice those opportunities.
It’s time to dive into a few more scenarios and learn practical tips you can take back to work today.
Scenario 1: Balance Speed and Automation with Knowledge and Insight
A sales leader asks you to automatically approve all discounts under 15% so deals can move faster. Your initial reaction is to configure the approval rule, test in a sandbox with a few sales team members, and deploy. You can easily and quickly check this box. But your strategic mind is activated.
You step back and ask a few important questions.
- Why are discounts being delayed today?
- Is speed the real issue, or is approval capacity the bottleneck?
- What risks are we accepting if manual approvals are removed?
Knowing the sales team, speed and volume are essential. So it’s understandable that they lean toward automating as much of the process as possible, especially if it leads to a faster sales cycle. But that can also be where the risks lie.
Instead of fully automating approvals, you partner with the sales and operations team to do the following.
- Adjust approval thresholds. It’s important to balance a fast, smooth sales process with the need to protect company profit margins and ensure deal value. This requires thoughtful automation, not blanket automation.
- Add reporting to monitor discount trends. Even after making collaborative decisions, monitoring trends is essential to gain key insights over time. These insights can include knowing where discounts are applied the most and when discounts make a difference.
- Revisit pricing guidelines for clarity. Success comes with consistency. If you can ensure the process aligns with clear pricing guidelines and leverage reporting insights to adjust over time, this ensures good business.
You still improve speed—but without removing necessary pricing and discount governance.
Scenario 2: Deploy AI Intentionally
Leadership asks you to add AI across Salesforce as quickly as possible. You explore available AI features. It’s fairly simple and straightforward to enable AI agents wherever possible to meet the request.
But what are the downstream effects of this task-based approach? Some users adopt them. Others don’t trust the results. Confusion grows.
Instead, you treat the request as a signal, not an instruction. You’ve come up with some strategic questions based on your research.
- What decisions are we hoping AI will improve?
- Is our data ready to support this?
- How will users know when to trust the output and when not to?
Because you took the time to bring wisdom into the equation, you’ve developed a more strategic approach that better meets current business challenges.
- Pilot AI in one use case. You start with a sales coach that helps sales team members get up to speed about products and discounts, and to refine their sales pitch. AI for customer service agents are close behind, but only when you have insights from your first use case.
- Well-defined success metrics. By clarifying your use case, you are better able to define what success means. In this case, it’s better adherence to process and pricing guidelines, high product knowledge ratings, and user satisfaction with the coaching agent.
By pacing adoption, you build confidence instead of resistance.
Go Slow to Go Fast
In situations demanding speed, being fully strategic may not be viable. However, applying wisdom doesn’t require you to slow everything down to ask endless questions. It means pausing long enough to ensure the work you do actually delivers value.
When a request comes your way, pause and ask yourself:
- Am I being asked to do a task or to solve a problem?
- Will this make things faster or improve outcomes?
- What happens if this works perfectly—and what happens if it doesn’t?
These questions are critical to getting at the heart of what problem you’re trying to solve. They protect your system, your users, and your credibility. And they help you uncover the value behind the request that comes your way.
Drive Long-Term Value
Delivering wisdom is not about saying no. It's about saying yes to the right things, at the right time, for the right reasons. As AI and automation handle more routine tasks, your value comes when you:
- Apply context.
- Recognize patterns.
- Make thoughtful decisions that scale across the business.
By applying context and wisdom to solve underlying business problems, you position yourself as a consultant who drives long-term value and growth for your entire organization.