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Identify the Top Five Things Salesforce Admins Can Do

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

  • Relate your role to the Five Most Important Questions.
  • Create a plan for how your system can be used for management effectiveness.
  • Take steps to enhance your use of Salesforce at your organization.

The Salesforce Admin Contribution to the Five Most Important Questions

Coming up with answers to the Five Most Important Questions requires participation across the organization. And, as an admin you have a much bigger role than most—both directly and indirectly. Let’s close the module by running through each of the five questions to see how you fit in!

1. Determining Salesforce Contribution to Purpose

A good way to proactively contribute is to examine how you can use Salesforce to help align your company’s efforts with key mission-related objectives. You might establish better performance metrics in the system, automate reporting and feedback abilities, and so on. It can include meeting with managers to get a better understanding of their key objectives for the year, and how your data can provide insight to achieving these objectives.

You are in a unique position to look across the organization and see where there might be obstacles to achieving customer success, and can provide insight to overcoming these obstacles. If you spot conflicting performance objectives between departments in the dashboard reports or other part of the system, use it as an opportunity to have a conversation about how to get better alignment. Table 3 provides a starting point for you.

Table 3. Contributing to understanding purpose

This question…

Helps the organization…

Admins contribute by…

Emphasizing these Salesforce solutions…

What is our purpose?

Develop its vision and mission to guide actions and decisions, align resources, and motivate the workforce

Making sure key performance indicators (KPIs) on reports and dashboards align with the mission of the organization.

  • Sales Cloud
  • Reports and Dashboards

2. Enabling Effective View of Customers

A good way to answer this question is to examine who is buying your products/services. It’s also helpful to examine this in reverse, by examining retention—that is, who’s leaving and why? As you know, the best place to keep this information is in Salesforce.

And, as an admin, we’re willing to bet that your data has revealing information about who your organization’s customers are, and how they are changing in terms of what they're purchasing, how long they stick with your organization, and more.

Senior managers need this information. Be ready to help! You have your finger on the pulse of the customer through your data and so you can play a critical role in getting the whole organization to feel that pulse! Table 4 can help you down the path.

Table 4. Contributing to understanding customers

This question…

Helps the organization…

Admins contribute by…

Emphasizing these Salesforce solutions…

Who is our customer?

Clearly understand who the customers are now, and in the future.

Making sure customer information is usable, and can be analyzed to determine customer characteristics.

  • Sales Cloud
  • Marketing Cloud Engagement
  • Service Cloud

3. Ensuring Systems That Capture Customer Value

This might be the trickiest question of them all—and one that requires constant attention. As an admin, you can provide great value here by enabling managers with access to information on the products and services that customers are buying (or not buying). In addition, many Salesforce users link customer survey information to existing customer data to provide richer insights. Listening to users on social media to detect trends in customer sentiment is also a best practice. You can also take it up another level by adopting predictive analytics to help determine the products and services customers might like based on the buying or search history of other similar customers. See Table 5 for ideas on how to contribute.

Table 5. Contributing to understanding what customers value

This question…

Helps the organization…

Admins contribute by…

Emphasizing these Salesforce solutions…

What does the customer value?

Understand exactly what the customers value so it can work to provide it!

Enabling analysis of customer information that can indicate what they value—such as purchase histories, survey feedback, social media listening.

  • Sales Cloud
  • Marketing Cloud Engagement
  • Service Cloud
  • Reports and Dashboards
  • Einstein

4. Providing Measures to Track Key Results.

There are two main ways you contribute in this area. First, generating performance measures out of Salesforce—typically in the form of reports and dashboards—and going a step further with Einstein Analytics. As such, you help the organization stay on top of its performance. You also understand the needs of stakeholders across the organization, and often know when things are out of alignment and need attention.

Second, you help drive results. You enable others to be more efficient and effective in their jobs, such as the folks in the Sales, Service, and Marketing departments—they rely on you. And, since you are probably the person at your company that’s most familiar with the capabilities of Salesforce, you’re in a good position to spot opportunities to use Salesforce more effectively, and to extend the use of Salesforce to produce better results (for example, reduce inefficient process with Flow Builder, or improve collaboration by using Chatter and Slack). Table 6 shows the way.

Table 6. Contributing to results

This question…

Helps the organization…

Admins contribute by…

Emphasizing these Salesforce solutions…

What are our results?

Establish balanced performance measures to understand how it’s doing meeting its purpose, vision, and mission.

Generating reports and dashboards to enable effective decision making throughout the organization.

  • Reports and Dashboards
  • Einstein

5. Incorporating Salesforce in the Plan

Start by working with your executive team to clearly understand the future vision of the company. Understand the implications for the system, and develop a plan specifying how your Salesforce implementation can support the vision.

If you do not have a good systems plan, then you are reacting to the demands of managers vs. helping to drive the changes.

Also, your executive team likely relies on you to be the system expert, that is, to know its full capabilities, and how to apply them. So, you are in a good position to act as an internal consultant to suggest systems capabilities—for example, adoption of Chatter, mobile app development, and so on. Check out Table 7 for ideas.

Table 7. Contributing to the plan

This question…

Helps the organization…

Admins contribute by…

Emphasizing these Salesforce solutions…

What is our plan?

Define what needs to be accomplished to meet its mission, deliver value to customers, and achieve results.

Making sure that your system plan supports your organization’s strategic plans (so you are not reacting to changes).

Seeking to enable the plan by knowing Salesforce solution capabilities that can enable initiatives—perhaps ones that haven’t been thought of yet!

  • Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud Engagement, Service Cloud
  • Chatter
  • Einstein Analytics
  • Salesforce Mobile App
  • AppExchange
  • Flow Builder
  • Data Cloud

Summary

To conclude, The Five Most Important Questions provide a foundation for organizations to identify, refine, and execute purpose-related initiatives aimed at enhancing customer value and retention in a measurable way. Salesforce can provide essential elements to this cause!

If your organization isn’t using all the Salesforce solutions covered in this unit (for example, Einstein Analytics, Chatter), then perhaps your contribution is simply to get the right people thinking about adopting them!

In the next modules, we explore how to be even more customer and market driven!

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