Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Stacy Jacobs, Partner Ecosystem & GTM Leader at Salesforce.
Join us as we chat about why certifications and knowing how Salesforce works is even more important when AI is helping you build.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Stacy Jacobs.
Why Admins need to see the big picture
Certifications are a rite of passage for every admin. But now that AI can walk just about anyone through how to build a custom object, are they still worth pursuing? I sat down with Stacy Jacobs, Partner Ecosystem & GTM Leader at Salesforce, to find out why certifications still matter and how AI can help you prepare for your exams.
One thing that Stacy emphasizes is that as powerful as AI tools are, getting the most out of them requires a solid understanding of how Salesforce operates within your specific business context. Agentforce can help you put together all of the pieces, but it's up to you to decide what the puzzle looks like in the first place. 
Investing in the human in the loop
Certifications are more than something you put on your resume to get your first job. Even if you're a veteran of the ecosystem, they can help you get up to speed with best practices for things like security models, native features you might not be using, and how to confidently build with AI.
"We are the gas that's powering AI," Stacy says, "we have the long-term knowledge, the history of our organizations, the history of our industries, our platforms, and we have that common sense that maybe AI is lacking."
Certifications are an investment in the human side of this equation, and by deepening our knowledge of the platform we expand the possibilities for what we can accomplish with Agentforce.
Building the right solution
With Agentforce, it's never been easier to build whatever we want. But how do you know if you're building the right thing? Are you making an app that fulfills the requirements? Or are you making something that actually solves the problem?
Many Salesforce certifications focus on the soft skills that help you make sure you're building the right solution. As Stacy explains, these skills are more important than ever. In a world where AI can help you build just about anything, admins are there to build the best solution suited to their specific business problems.
Make sure to listen to my full conversation with Stacy for more on certifications and how to prepare for them. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast for a new episode every Thursday.
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Full show transcript
Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we're talking about certifications and with AI making it easier than ever to get answers, build apps, and figure things out on the fly, you might be wondering, does certification still matter? Well, my guest today, Stacy Jacobs has some thoughts on that. Stacy works with Salesforce partners on certification and learning programs, and she's been a part of the ecosystem since the ExactTarget days. We're going to talk about why knowing how Salesforce works is even more important when AI is helping you build. How to use AI to prepare for your next certification and why experience and credentials aren't competing with each other. Plus, Stacy manages to beat me to a food analogy on my own podcast. I don't even know if I've still recovered yet. So let's get to our conversation with Stacy.
So Stacy, welcome to the podcast.
Stacy Jacobs:
Oh, thanks for having me.
Mike Gerholdt:
Well, I think it's a really cool article that you also put out on admin.salesforce.com about certifications in the AI era. And I think I've thought a lot about this. I think we're seeing AI disrupt. Are we still disrupting? I feel like disrupting was a very 2010 word when we were coming out with apps, but maybe AI is also disrupting a lot of things. And certification is definitely one of them, but maybe not in the way that I'm thinking. So first off, I think let's start with what do you do at Salesforce around certifications and how did you get into the ecosystem?
Stacy Jacobs:
Oh yeah. So I've been within the ecosystem for several years. In fact, most of my career is within the partner ecosystem outside of Salesforce, and I've always wanted to be part of the mothership, and I've been here about seven years. Came in as a technical architect in ProServe, and now I am running programs to enable all of our partner audiences. And certification is a big part of that. So we run programs throughout the year to help enable, educate, motivate all of our partners within the ecosystem to get certified and learn more about our products. So that is a little of what I do.
Mike Gerholdt:
That's really cool. ProServe, what does that stand for?
Stacy Jacobs:
Yeah, it's professional services.
Mike Gerholdt:
Ah, okay. It's not like the tennis machine.
Stacy Jacobs:
No. Never been a tennis player.
Mike Gerholdt:
Me either.
Stacy Jacobs:
Ball [inaudible 00:02:53].
Mike Gerholdt:
That's why I was like, wow, we have a whole department of people that just sell. Nevermind. People that listen to the podcast know there's always going to be a few bad jokes right away and then probably some food worked in somewhere, although everybody's going to be at the edge of their seats to see how I work food into an AI certification podcast.
Stacy Jacobs:
Maybe also [inaudible 00:03:14] too.
Mike Gerholdt:
Buckle up. Just wait for it. It'll be there. So I think what's interesting is when you first came to us and started talking about certifications and AI, I immediately went to, oh, well, obviously people are just using AI to pass the certification, but I think it's a little bit different than that. It's also getting certified in AI, correct?
Stacy Jacobs:
A little bit, yeah. We have a lot of AI aspects to all of our certifications and it is definitely sprinkled in as a common theme around the board for our products. So naturally it's going to be part of our certification process and I think we need to embrace that.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, absolutely. Now, so I was looking back a few years ago because I remember the first time I was introduced to a cassette tape, my mom showed it to me and how you could rewind it with a pencil. So everybody that's my age and older knows what I'm talking about and everybody younger is like, "What are they doing? Thought this was a Salesforce podcast." I also remember the first time I was kind of, I'll call it introduced to AI, and it was Josh Burke got on a team call and he talked about, I forget what it was called, but he's like, "I just told it to render a cat on a pirate ship and here's the image." And I was blown away because up until that point in my life, if I wanted a cat on a pirate ship, I would've had to Photoshop or do some work. And this was just a prompt that he told me.
And I look back at that now as like, wow, that's so easy to do because I think my understanding of AI, I know my understanding of AI has increased, but also the tools have gotten so much stronger and so much smarter, I'll call that. How in the certification world do we keep up with certs and the rapid pace of how AI is developed?
Stacy Jacobs:
Oh man, one step at a time. I mean, one of my most favorite sayings is asking somebody how they multitask and nobody can do everything altogether. We always do one task at a time. So it may be overwhelming at first seeing how many certifications we have out there, the advances we're making in all of our products. But I guarantee you, if you learn little bits here and there, you can reach any goal that you set your mind to.
And I've actually used AI to help study for certifications and I encourage a lot of folks to do that as well. It's not as much of what questions are on the exam and how do I get answers to all the questions on the exam? That is not something that anybody should be doing. But for the matter of gathering all the materials that we have out there to help enable not only any audience out there, anybody looking to learn more, that is a powerful thing that we have now that we did not have back when I started my career. And I was reading PDF documents and printing out papers and taking notes here and there. But now we have wonderful skills in Slack that can help you study for exams as well. So little bits at a time, you can't multitask everything and definitely just do one thing at a time.
Mike Gerholdt:
Right. Yeah, no, that's actually a really good point because a lot of the AI, I always feel like I sound old, like the AIs out there. There's a comedian that's like sound old, you just add the and pluralize it. The AIs out there. But they have access to a lot of information and you think of they could pull all of that together and then start quizzing you to really help you prepare. Because I know when I read material, I consume it a certain way, but then I never think back to, well, how will the question come that's going to quiz me on this? So very good point.
Stacy Jacobs:
Yes.
Mike Gerholdt:
One thing that as we kind of head into this, so it's a brave new AI world, there's a huge maturity curve in our Salesforce ecosystem that I think a company we're just starting to really realize Salesforce is 27 years old. Which is nuts because I remember starting working in the ecosystem and I was like, oh, Salesforce not even 10 or whatever. But because of that, there's a lot of people that have been doing Salesforce for a long time. They've seen the evolution of, they were around when Chatter was launched or Service Cloud and they've seen the tools released, they've seen the features come about. They've implemented them, they've seen them sunset, their skillset is pretty solid. Why would somebody like that go and get just any Salesforce certification, let alone an AI certification?
Stacy Jacobs:
Yes, this is something that I hear a lot too, Mike. And first off, I never downgrade any experience anybody has regardless if it's with Salesforce or not. I think that's what makes us human and being a human is a big part of this AI world we're living in. So what I would recommend everyone thinking about, encouraging them to be open-minded about is that you may learn something. If you're somebody who's been within the ecosystem for the 27 years, you might be surprised at what might be under the hood that you can turn on out of the box and all of that.
So when you're fine-tuned in one organization, in one org or one mindset, it's really hard to see what you're missing. And certifications really help you hone in on the fuller picture. So understanding more of those security models, the native features that maybe you're not using because we all have bad habits and we're not adopting best practices, but certifications help you stay on top of what those best practices are so that you can scale even easier for the AI future we're in.
There's a lot of things that we're building on top of, especially the platform that AI is loving. And if you are using it now and if you can massage your organization into some of these standards, you'll be able to scale and go way further with AI. So that's why you should get certified.
Mike Gerholdt:
So let me ask you then, because I can see people sitting back and saying, "Well, I mean, if there's apps out there that'll help me, I could just go to any one of these AIs, ask it a question, how do I build a custom object in Salesforce?" And it'll tell me that and I can kind of prompt my way through building an app. What's the benefit if AI is available to bring us all of that information on demand at my fingertips, do I really need to spend all that time studying for a certification?
Stacy Jacobs:
Yes, I think you do because we are the gas that's powering AI. We have the long-term knowledge, the history of our organizations, the history of our industries, our platforms, and we have that common sense that maybe AI is lacking. I don't ever recommend an AI situation where a human is not in the loop. And so us understanding what the platform is, how it works, and being a Salesforce admin really sets you up for success. It sets your organization up for success, and it sets the AI that you are buddying with, becoming your coworker with, up for success too, because you have that knowledge and that experience that you've had for years that you can bring to the table and fine tune the AI logic in ways that even it couldn't even imagine, right? We're in this together. So absolutely, it's definitely worth getting certified.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, and I didn't mean to impromptu put you on the spot, but the other thing I would add to that, again, Josh pointed this out to me, I feel like this podcast is, here's what Mike knows in terms of what Josh has taught him. Mike's learned other things. For a long time, if you asked a model how many Rs were in strawberry, it told you one or two and there's three, and then you'd ask it to spell it for you and it'd spell it with three Rs and it would still confidently respond, "Well, there's only one or two." And I think that's also part of the difference of getting that certification and going through and getting that experience. Of I hear what you're saying the answer is AI to building this app, but you're making this part up because you don't know and you're doing it. And I feel like there's a term for this, I should look it up, but there's a term for when AI tells you something so confidently, even though it's making it up.
Stacy Jacobs:
Yeah, it's hallucinating. It's definitely hallucinating. So the way I look at it this, and Mike, I'm going to beat you to this food insert to our podcast today.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, look at that. That doesn't happen.
Stacy Jacobs:
But here's how I think about it. So we are starting to speak the same language as AI. We are definitely in this together. We need to be coworkers, we need to be colleagues, we need to be best friends with AI because you're starting to speak the language of AI. Now, I like to think of this as you're ordering food. Let's say we go to a restaurant, you might have a general idea of how a pizza is made, but if you don't know the typical ingredients, you might really be surprised once it comes out and there's cheese on it. And if you have a dairy allergy, that is a huge problem.
So once you know it comes with cheese, once you know you're speaking the same language as the pizza makers, you have a general idea of what a pizza consists of, then you can start customizing it. You can order it any way that you want with, even without cheese, you can add items on there that you enjoy, maybe your audience enjoys. You can customize all of that and get exactly what you need.
So AI really works the same way. So let's take this and transfer from pizzas into the platform. So if you ask it to build a flow, if you ask it to design a data model and you really don't know what any of that means, you're going to take whatever it gives you and it might hallucinate. It might pull in personal information that should not be there. So thinking of highly regulated industries, but these are all things that you learn when you go and get certified. You understand the components of the platform, you understand what it's built up, you know what an object is, a custom one, a standard one. You know how it all fits together, and that's how you can work with AI to kind of build your pizza.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. That's a really good analogy. I can't believe you beat me to the food analogy. I'm stumped. So there's a TikTok I keep seeing where a guy walks in, orders pineapple on his pizza. Where do you fall? Are you pro-pineapple, not pineapple?
Stacy Jacobs:
Maybe once a year I'll do pineapple, but only because I'm really hungry.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Yep.
Stacy Jacobs:
But I don't order it.
Mike Gerholdt:
I've done it once.
Stacy Jacobs:
If it's in front of me, I'll eat it just to be polite, but I don't go out and say I want it.
Mike Gerholdt:
No, there's five people in the world that crave pineapple and ham pizza. Just made me think of that. You really brought up another interesting point, which is once you're certified, it's kind of like the beginning of your learning because we also have maintenance exams, right? I mean, actually they're Trailhead modules now.
Stacy Jacobs:
Right. And they are so nice in Trailhead. And those are really, really important too. I always encourage everyone, if you're going to spend so much time studying and learning and applying yourself to something that stays with you, you better keep it. And these modules only take minutes to complete. They don't take months, in some cases, to study for some of these exams. They can be quicker than that, but keep what you earn and definitely stay up in the know with the latest and greatest because it really prepares you and all of your decisions in the future when it comes to career. Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, and getting certified, I know the few times I've been certified, getting there and then taking that exam is not cheap. I don't want to scare people away with price, but to your point, if you're going to spend money on the investment, don't just do it for a one-time thing, do it because it's durable and you can maintain it. I think the coolest thing that we did was moving to Trailhead for the maintenance part of it because you can get hands-on and actually see some of it.
I know some of it is just multiple choice answers, but some of it you can really get hands-on and do and actually, oh wow, be a part of that. Whereas a hundred years ago, we would just get a developer org that had the newest release enabled, and then it was up to you to figure out a scenario to use it.
Stacy Jacobs:
Yeah, absolutely. It was such a game changer, especially in the marketing cloud world where I come from. But really having everything in there in an easy to digest and kind of a fun format, right? Everyone likes to get points and earn badges and things like that. It definitely changed my perspective and my willingness to go and keep my certifications because it is an important piece of our ecosystem pie here. You know, you have your experience, you have your certifications, and then we have AI and all three together, just kind of a super place to be right now. And that's what motivates me and my role and how important it is for all of our ecosystem to understand we're in this together and all these three things definitely do matter.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. You bring up a point that I can't believe we didn't talk about, but you're not just at Salesforce having been part of the ecosystem and, oh, now I'm on this team and cheering for certifications. You're actually certified.
Stacy Jacobs:
Oh yes. Yeah, absolutely.
Mike Gerholdt:
What was one of the driving factors for you to get certified even before you joined Salesforce?
Stacy Jacobs:
Yeah. Back in the day, I was a marketing cloud administrator back when it was ExactTarget before the acquisition. So that kind of time stamps me here, but I knew there was more that we could do with the organization I was a part of. I knew personalization was really important. I knew because of my marketing background, a target audience and understanding what they want and listening to their needs and what they value in the messages they were receiving. Whether it was marketing or... I'm sorry, through emails or through SMS, I knew that we could do more than just blast emails out, but I didn't have the eloquent ways to talk about it then.
I just knew that the platform controlled and had this power that I wanted to unlock for my marketing audience here. And so I decided to step out of my comfort zone, understand what it was the platform was. And mind you, this was way back in the day when Marketing Cloud was acquired by, or ExactTarget was acquired by Salesforce. And so I wanted to know more about Salesforce. And the very first admin or certification I got was Salesforce Admin because I learned the basics. I learned how we could pull in all of this great information about our audience at the time that it mattered and then extend the conversation with Marketing Cloud.
So target audiences, hitting them in time periods that made sense, right? I worked for a travel agency company and we had a publication line as well. So print magazines, if those are still a thing out there where you could hold them, you can feel them, you can smell them. We also ran the digital side of all of that. So hitting our audience, the moment really, really mattered when it came to events and travel packages and things like that.
And I knew to unlock all of that experience and make it better for the end users, our customers, and better for the business, I needed to learn more. I needed to understand what needed to be unlocked with the platform and core and that I did just that. I studied, I went, I passed, and then I was able to connect the pieces for my team and it was a great experience.
Mike Gerholdt:
Wow.
Stacy Jacobs:
Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
I remember this would've been 2008. I got my first certification and I remember walking into the president's office because I reported to the president of the division and saying I was certified and they were like, "So what does that mean?" And I thought to myself-
Stacy Jacobs:
What'd you say?
Mike Gerholdt:
Funny you should ask.
Stacy Jacobs:
What did you say?
Mike Gerholdt:
I told them, I said, "It means that the company that builds the product that we use has faith in me to configure the product in a manner that's the best possible way for our use." And I kind of always leaned against that. I would also say I want to bounce this idea off you because my entire Salesforce career changed and it was like October, ironically. It was October of 2008 because I finally felt like I had the confidence in what I was doing as opposed to just the ability to do it.
And so I didn't feel like I was impersonating anybody. I was no longer impersonating a Salesforce admin. I was a Salesforce admin. And I was a Salesforce admin, not because the certification said so, but because it told me back that this is the skill level you're at and it's the skill level measured, not just one you think you can do. I don't know, you think you could run a 10-minute mile, but you've never ran a mile.
Stacy Jacobs:
Yeah. I mean, there's a sense of validation in getting certified, especially for those individuals who have worked in an org or several orgs for several years and then they aren't certified. But there's a validation that goes with it and you get to keep that as long as you maintain your certification. And when you are presenting yourself and your brand, it does have volume to it. I'm not saying experience is higher or anything like that than certification. They go together and your exam, your certification definitely doesn't replace experience. Absolutely not.
There's so much I have learned by messing up email sends, by using the wrong merge field, but your certification really shows you what you can do on the platform as a whole in any org, right? And yeah, it is a very powerful piece and you need to advocate for that too. I love that you answered the way that you did with your employer because we also need to advocate for ourselves and say, "This does matter. I can do this." And that's what I urge everyone out there listening to just take it one step at a time because it does matter and AI is here and knowing the base where we crawl, walk, run is definitely going to set our whole ecosystem up for success in the long run.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. It just felt like, I really felt like it's not that I didn't have to explain myself. I didn't have to explain myself as much.
Stacy Jacobs:
Yes. I loved getting my first cert. Oh man, that feeling of relief when I left the center, I don't know if you did. Back then we couldn't do it virtually, right?
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, no. I had to drive-
Stacy Jacobs:
We had to get into the center.
Mike Gerholdt:
I had to drive an hour and a half. I had to drive all the way to Des Moines and I remember it was, I forget what kind of testing center it was. I was the only one in there because this is also 2008. Computers had barely been invented and they were like, "Oh, you're here to take a Salesforce test." And I was like, "Yep." I think probably that was their third one they'd ever administered. And I got done. And at the time, do you remember this? They used to end the test and yes. And then there would be a preview screen that would come up and it would show you all your answers.
And you don't remember the questions, like question 49, C, awesome. I guess so. I picked C back then. I'm still going to go with it. And it would give you all your answers and you're like, "Okay, I'm going to click submit, submit." And it turns for a second. And then it's like, "Before we give you your results, they'd like feedback." So I'm like, "No, God." Because hitting submit, it felt like it's like the first time you pay online with your credit card, you're like, "Well, here goes the whole world."
Stacy Jacobs:
Yeah, there's no turning back.
Mike Gerholdt:
And then it came back with that prompt of, "Give us your feedback." I was like, "Can I give you my feedback after I find out if I pass?" But I hit that button and I just remembered I stood up. I was like, "Yes, I passed." And the instructors, because it was glass in between us, they looked like they were scared because I knocked the chair over. I was like, "No, I'm fine. I'm okay."
Stacy Jacobs:
Oh, wow.
Mike Gerholdt:
I'm fine. It's okay.
Stacy Jacobs:
Oh, but that feeling, and now it's yours. And how many release cycles have you been through with that one and maintaining?
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh yeah. I mean, three a year. Yikes. A lot. But yeah, I mean, I've maintained my certification. I'm sure there's always stuff you can learn, but I feel like having got that first credential, it also... I didn't get the bug like some people of I have to keep getting a lot of credentials. I was good at two or three. Mostly because I really enjoy being proficient and having the credentials in the space that I'm working in the most. And at the time, some of the credentials like your Marketing Cloud, the organization I was at didn't have Marketing Cloud. Now, it wasn't on the roadmap. If it was on the roadmap, I definitely would've sat for it.
Stacy Jacobs:
Yeah. Marketing Cloud is one of the harder ones to get in, but with our newer products and whatnot, Trailhead is really the place to be for all of our products now. But I do remember that same feeling back in the day, especially with Marketing Cloud engagement, having your hands in an org. Oh, it was like gold. It was a wonderful place to be. But we have made strides to get Marketing Cloud more hands-on, and that's part of where my role here at Salesforce comes into play too, is making sure that we can get enabled in these products. And we have safe places to do that too.
I think a lot of it is having that safe place, your Sandbox, a different business unit. Now we have data spaces. All these things matter and just keep looking. If you're not in there, I would always recommend folks who wanted to learn Marketing Cloud. Where can I get started? How can I do this? Well, now there's a lot of options out there. And I definitely remember that survey pop-up as well as trying to find your-
Mike Gerholdt:
You thought it was your score for a second. You're like, oh, no. I feel like I need to fill this out. Maybe you guys got to calculate some stuff back there.
Stacy Jacobs:
Yeah. Yeah. But to your point, you bring up something interesting, and I do get asked a lot about this as well is, well, what's next? I can go get my Salesforce Admin certification, or maybe I already have one that's in Marketing Cloud or Tableau, but really what's next? Where should I go from here? Because we have several paths to follow, and I think you need to start with your persona. What are you comfortable with? It doesn't all have to be technical. You don't have to know a single piece of code to get certified in many cases, but we also have our technical paths as well.
So I think it's coming down to what you want to specialize in. Marketing Cloud, I have a small bias towards it because it has powered my entire career up from that first... Surprisingly, my first certification was not Marketing Cloud though. And so it really propelled me forward. And I think you need to look at where your comfort levels are, the industries you're interested in and where you want to specialize. Because those basics like the Salesforce Admin, Data Cloud is a great place to be, those AI specialists, all of them have value, but perhaps looking at what you want to specialize in would be my recommendation.
But I don't know if you have any extra insight on that or what you say. What do you say is the next one?
Mike Gerholdt:
So I think a couple of things. One, I would read into the certifications because I think everybody thinks they're all technical. And one thing that I learned with Sales Cloud Consultant, I don't know if that's what it's still called, what I really enjoyed about that certification was it taught me how to ask better questions of my users and it taught me how to almost act as a third party when working with my company and not assume answers. And all of that was in the certification before we ever got to anything technical.
And I think that's the part that makes you a little bit more whole is the certifications aren't just, do you know the clicks? Do you know the config behind it? But it's, do you know how to get there? And do you know how to get there in a way that the organization is going to really be useful from? Are you going to create an app that is exactly what they ask or are you going to create an app that peels a couple layers deeper and actually uncovers the problem that you're going to find out three months later? And I think that's what the certification did.
The other thing, and this is kind of attuned to what you said, a lot of people look at it as, well, I have the experience. I could just top off my life with the certification. It's not the end. When you graduate from college, you aren't like, cool, all done learning work life stuff. That's the beginning. Because now you're going to shop around that college degree and get jobs and then build your career. And to me, that's the same thing as the certification. Once you have that certification, cool. Now the really fun part begins because now it's you have something really firm to stand on and build the rest of your career upon.
As opposed to it being the capstone of your career. It's not. It's where you go to build the rest of your career and you use it as a foundation because you can just say, well, I'm certified in these three things as opposed to, well, what does it mean when you say you have 10 years of Salesforce experience?
Stacy Jacobs:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it doesn't tell me if you have a certification, it definitely does not tell me how you handle those real world, real org situations. How do you handle the unclear requirements? And I love those consultant exams because they absolutely do what you said. They get you to think more about the holistic approach to how this product or this scenario fits into a use case. And so that's something certifications don't give you. They don't give you a clear road into how you handle gathering requirements, technical debt, all of these things. But that's where all the experience and you being human with judgments come in.
And so when I meet somebody and we're talking about their career paths and we're talking about what's next, because to your point, we get degrees, we earn our accomplishments, but it never stops. Learning never stops. I really treat certification as a strong starting signal. It is something that you dedicated yourself to. You learned, you earned and you've kept it. And then I want to hear how you've applied it. So I'm always looking for those wonderful scenarios and I learn a lot by making mistakes. So I also want to learn how you've made mistakes on how you've applied that certification thus far. And yeah, that's a very, very good point. Those consultant exams are great at handling some of those logical thinking points.
Mike Gerholdt:
Right. Yeah. There's no exam that sets you up for everything you can possibly run into. I equate it to driver's ed. They can't possibly teach you how to handle every situation on the road. And passing driver's ed and getting your driver's license doesn't mean you'll be a good driver. But what it does mean is they've at least equipped you with enough of the critical skills and ways to think through solutions and challenges that when something does come up, rather than it being completely foreign to you, you're like, "Okay, I have a methodology to work through."
There's a place in Denver that has, I want to say it's like a six-way stop or a five-way stop. I think it's five, five points. It's the neighborhood. I went to a jazz festival there. There's no driver's ed manual that tells you what to do at a five-way stop.
Stacy Jacobs:
No, there's not.
Mike Gerholdt:
Who goes? I don't get who goes. You on the left? But at least you have a methodology when you get there to say, "Okay, I should always yield to the people on the right or yield to the left." You have at least something to start with to work through that problem as opposed to nothing.
Stacy Jacobs:
You have a general idea.
Mike Gerholdt:
Well, you got to pull up your phone and ask Claude, "Hey Claude, I'm sitting at a five-way stop sign. What should I do?"
Stacy Jacobs:
Yeah. You have a general idea of how the pizza's made.
Mike Gerholdt:
Right. Whether or not it's coming with pepperoni.
Stacy Jacobs:
Or cheese or white sauce or red sauce.
Mike Gerholdt:
I was shocked. You went to cheese first. I was like, "I never really thought of it being an option to get a pizza without cheese, just a slab of dough and sauce."
Stacy Jacobs:
I know, right?
Mike Gerholdt:
Man.
Stacy Jacobs:
And then we layer AI on all of it. I mean, before we know it, robots are going to be delivering all our meals.
Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, yeah. I feel like that's probably a whole thing, those little food delivery things getting stuck everywhere. Well, Stacy, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and beating me to the food analogy. You win.
Stacy Jacobs:
Oh, thanks so much.
Mike Gerholdt:
Not that it's a contest, but I can't believe you beat me there.
Stacy Jacobs:
Well, it is now.
Mike Gerholdt:
I suppose I'll take that. That and I need to know how many people like pineapple on their pizza. I'm not opposed to it. Of all the fixings, it seems to be the most controversial.
Stacy Jacobs:
It is, yeah. I also want to know how many people know about this five-way stop sign.
Mike Gerholdt:
I think it's five points. It is the coolest area outside of Denver. I was on a vacation in Denver and I stumbled on a jazz festival and I had to look it up when I got back to the hotel room. But yeah, I want to say it's five points and there's five streets that converge right there. They had a whole festival. There was two stages and food trucks.
Stacy Jacobs:
Fun.
Mike Gerholdt:
It was awesome.
Stacy Jacobs:
That is great.
Mike Gerholdt:
Well, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Stacy Jacobs:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
Mike Gerholdt:
Big thanks to Stacy Jacobs for joining me today. One thing that really stuck with me from this conversation is that getting certified isn't the finish line. It's really the starting line. I mentioned how getting my first certification back in 2008 changed the way I thought about myself. I didn't suddenly know everything about Salesforce, actually far from it, but I had the confidence that I knew what I was building and more importantly, I had a foundation of knowledge to build on. And I think that's more important even today. Yes, AI can give you the answer, but you still need the knowledge and experience to know whether it's the right answer. So whether you're thinking about your first certification or wondering what comes next, I hope this conversation gives you something to think about. And if you know somebody who's been putting off a certification, well share this episode with them.
Until next time, I'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Lee, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce.
Join us as we chat about all the cool new features coming in the Winter '27 Release, including Builder Central, Setup with Agentforce, and what's new with Flow.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jennifer Lee.
Admins are agent-powered with Builder Central and Setup with Agentforce
First of all, this is the first week with our new format, there will be a video version as well. Coming soon to the Salesforce Admins YouTube channel to see demos, clips, and visual explainers for each episode. Today, we're looking ahead to the Winter '27 Release with Jennifer Lee to find out which new features admins need to know about.
One thing that generated a lot of excitement at Dreamforce is Builder Central. It's an intelligent, agent-powered workspace where you can build, test, and deploy solutions using natural language. You really need to see it in action to understand how powerful it is, so check out the video for this episode, where we have a demo for you.
Setup with Agentforce is also now generally available (GA). This tool simplifies so much about managing users, configuring your org, and troubleshooting user access issues. Jen's found it to be especially helpful for reorganizing role hierarchy and, in general, taking control of permissions in your org.
Three Flow enhancements to make your life easier
Jen highlights three Flow enhancements that she thinks will have a big impact for admins:
Edit History allows you to review, restore, and reuse past versions of a flow. If you've ever found yourself staring at a broken flow and asking yourself why you can't just go back to a version that worked, this enhancement is for you.
Also new in Winter '27, you can now process multiple records with Screen Flows from List Views and Related Lists. This makes it easier than ever for your users to do bulk updates with a quick mass action, without having to leave the screen flow they're already working in.
Finally, Test Mode (Beta) allows you to debug and test in Flow Builder in one place. You can save manual tests so you're not entering the same criteria over and over again, and use them to build an automated testing suite.
Jen's steps for release readiness
The wonderful thing about Salesforce is that a new release is always around the corner. For Jen, release readiness comes down to four steps:
Plan and learn

Get hands-on

Test

Communicate with your team and users

The good news is that by reading this post, you're already doing step 1. So my advice is to pick one new feature for this week's episode and spend some time exploring it. As admins, we learn so much more when we get our hands dirty and start building.
Make sure to listen to my full conversation with Jen for more highlights from the Winter '27 Release. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch a new episode every Thursday.
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Learn more
Salesforce Admins YouTube Channel: @SalesforceAdmins

Salesforce Admins YouTube video: A 4-Step Release Readiness Guide for Admins

Salesforce Admins Blog Post: Jen's Top Winter '27 Release Features For Admins

Salesforce Admins Blog Post: Introducing Setup with Agentforce: Your New Admin Superpower

Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: September Monthly Retro

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Full Transcript


Mike Gerholdt:
Welcome to the Salesforce Admins podcast, this week I'm joined by Jennifer Lee to walk through Winter '27 Release readiness, including Builder Central setup with Agentforce Flow and some of the features that admins should be paying attention to after Dreamforce.
Now, hey, quick heads up, if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast, there's a video version of this episode over on our Salesforce Admins YouTube channel and this time it matters because we're actually dropping demos and clips into the conversation. Now, don't get me wrong, you'll still get the full discussion right here but you're going to miss out on some really fun stuff by not seeing the video one. So, go check out that video version on YouTube, let me know what you think, in the meantime, let's get Jennifer on the podcast.
So, Jennifer, welcome to the podcast.
Jennifer Lee:
Thanks for having me.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Well, it's October, it's post Dreamforce time which means we got to start paying two releases and you put out an amazing release readiness blog. We've also gone through Dreamforce, there's been iterations of stuff being updated so I figured why not have Jennifer back on the podcast to talk about everything that we saw at Dreamforce, everything that was in the release and maybe, I think, some stuff that missed your blog or needs to be updated. Does that sound current?
Jennifer Lee:
Yes, that makes sense.
Mike Gerholdt:
Okay, perfect. Well-
Jennifer Lee:
And I had to get all dolled up for this episode.
Mike Gerholdt:
I know. It's a video podcast so, for those of you listening on iTunes, there's a video version of this over on YouTube where hint, hint, there will actually be GIFs and video demos to watch so stay tuned. Hopefully it turns out, it's early, here we go.
First thing I want to talk about is one of the cool ... There's a lot of cool stuff that we launched at Dreamforce but Builder Central. It was right after the keynote with our Salesforce live content, it was featured in the admin keynote. I hadn't had a chance to really play around with it until after Dreamforce which is now. You've had a chance to see it and interact with it but tell people about Builder Central if they skip past it.
Jennifer Lee:
All right. So, what Builder Central is, basically, it's a tool where you go in and describe what you want. You can describe the app or the agent in plain language and then the build agent goes and does all these things and it creates this plan for you, describes all the requirements and then it goes and builds all the things and you can go in and preview the items and make tweaks to it. And then, when you're ready, you can go, say, deploy from your sandbox to production.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yup. Yeah, it builds it. So, I talked to the PM just this morning, it builds it in a virtual environment because I had no ... I was like, "How is it doing this thing? Is it changing stuff already?" He's like, "No, it's a virtual environment and it doesn't change anything until you deploy." Even in a sandbox, you deploy it. So, I used it, it was so cool. I think it was so cool because it's just top of mind, you're like, "Hey, could you give me this?" And, spoiler alert, I had it create a screen flow. Not that I can't create screen flows, I can, it just takes me a little bit and Builder Central just cranked it out, no problem then it was like, "Hey, do you want to add this to a page?" and I said, "Yes."
And then I could go back ... The cool thing is then I could go back in and I could actually see the flow components that were built, to me that was like, "Ugh." This is so much easier not because it's building it for me, it is, but because now I can learn and go back and see what are the components I should have built as opposed to getting frustrated that I don't know what the right thing is to build next.
Jennifer Lee:
Yeah. The great thing is, in that preview mode, you can go in and drill into the data model and you can actually see the things versus it just coming back and saying like, "Oh, I did these things for you and here's just a list."
Mike Gerholdt:
Right, yeah.
Jennifer Lee:
The fact that you can actually drill into it and look at it is really cool.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yup. And it doesn't just duplicate stuff. It looks at your org and says, oh, well we have this, let's integrate this. It really feels like, man, if I would've had that as a new admin, it would help me jumpstart all of the things that I need to build. And could you go over your skis building a little bit? You could but I think the onus is then on you to go back and learn all the things that it built and why it built it.
Jennifer Lee:
And I love that it puts that human in the loop piece, it just doesn't just do it for you. You're going in and you're like, "Okay, this wasn't quite right so I'm going to tweak this a little bit," but, yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
Right. It's currently in beta, right?
Jennifer Lee:
Correct, correct. So, this is the time where folks can go in and just kick the tires and check it out.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I can't, I can't wait. Actually, one thing we're going to do so, if you're listening to the audio version of this, jump over to YouTube because right now I'm going to put in a demo of Builder Central.
Okay. So, that was the demo that the PM team put together of Builder Central, I think it's really cool, it's also the demo they showed in the connected content. It only begins to scratch the surface, I think this is the strongest V1 product I've seen us come out with in terms of just admins having a superpower. It needs a cape, Builder Central should get its own cape.
Jennifer Lee:
Let's totally make one.
Mike Gerholdt:
I know. So, there's a lot of other tools. Set up with Agentforce is one of them, let's talk about that.
Jennifer Lee:
Yeah. So, folks, if you're in my release notes blog, notice that I don't nearly have as many of the setup with Agentforce features that are currently in the release notes so don't come at me for that but let me just highlight a few that weren't in my blog. So, Data 360 is no longer required so that's great but do note that there are some specialized tasks such as, if you're using related list enrichments and custom report types, that will still need Data 360 so just keep that in mind. They also streamline the enablement page so it's easier to enable set up with Agentforce in your org and, previously, you needed to separately assign two permission sets to each user and now they bundle that in a perm set group. So, you just need to assign the perm set group and you're all set to go with your users.
Mike, back in the day, I would've loved to have this and have an agent do this but now you could manage your users in bulk, you could freeze a bunch of users, unfreeze a bunch of users or specify here's these users that need their password resets instead of doing it one by one by one because who has time for that.
Mike Gerholdt:
Period. Just that alone would make me happy.
Jennifer Lee:
Mm-hmm. So, for your profiles, you can go into the setup agent and you can say does this user profile have added access opportunities or which profiles have the customized application permission and it'll come back and surface that for you like just asking an agent. You don't even have to go through and click every single profile page, that's time-consuming. So, with summarizing permission sets, permission set groups and having it surface up the information you need without having to, again, do those manual clicks. Another thing is, if you have a major reorg in your role hierarchy, you can just subscribe it to the agent and then it'll just reorganize your role hierarchy for you. Can you imagine back in the day you have to manually row by row, yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
I'm just thinking of, of all the parts of my Salesforce org that got the most stale, role hierarchy was it. You almost set it up and then you get elbows deep in building apps and onboarding users and role hierarchy is the first thing that gets out of date.
Jennifer Lee:
Yeah. And then one last feature I'll mention for setup with Agentforce which I do mention in my blog is the org health and usage metrics dashboard. Now, we provide all sorts of metrics to you but now you can go in and say these are the ones that are important to me so I could favorite those and you can say these are the ones that I don't care about and then they're hidden so that you basically customize it to what's important to you which is really cool.
Mike Gerholdt:
I like that. Was that in the admin keynote? I feel like a version of that was.
Jennifer Lee:
A version of that ... So, I think you're thinking of security center essentials.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, essentials, yup. Look at that, we have more than one tool for a thing.
Jennifer Lee:
Imagine that. So, should I continue on with a couple of other features for-
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, please.
Jennifer Lee:
Okay.
Mike Gerholdt:
Because I think there's other stuff that you wanted to talk about.
Jennifer Lee:
Yes, absolutely. So, in a record, when an owner leaves the company, you naturally will assign a new owner to that record. Now, if that record had any manual shares with it, those manual shares just evaporate into the ether when you assign it to a new user so then you're going to have John Smith knocking at your door as an admin saying, "Hey, I had access to this record, now I don't." But in this release, you can go into sharing settings and then enable keep manual shares when transferring records and enable that checkbox. And then org-wide, once that happens, it will take that manual share and move it along to that new owner so you don't lose any of that record access so that's great.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, my God. Yeah, nobody keeps track of that.
Jennifer Lee:
Exactly.
Mike Gerholdt:
When a user asks another user, "Hey, can you share this?" and they click share, there's no log for that.
Jennifer Lee:
Nope.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, man. And what's crazy is you wouldn't know it until somebody has to go to that record which could be eight months after a person left.
Jennifer Lee:
Right, right. And then you're like, "Well, how did you get that access?"
Mike Gerholdt:
Right. What have you been snooping around on?
Jennifer Lee:
And then digging through the setup audit trail to figure it out, yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh.
Jennifer Lee:
Yeah, no.
Mike Gerholdt:
Just don't set up audit trail into an AI and be like, "Help."
Jennifer Lee:
Mm-hmm. Or you set up with Agentforce.
Mike Gerholdt:
Right.
Jennifer Lee:
So, another feature for reports is that now you can preview a record within the report and it doesn't jump out of the report, you can preview it within the context of the report. Now, to use that, you need to enable it so you need to go to the reports and dashboard settings page and then there's a feature called show record previews on lightning reports beta. So then, once you do that, when you're in the report mode, you have to click on this little icon that looks like an eye and then you click on any of the record links and then they'll open up in the side panel.
Mike Gerholdt:
That's cool, wow. It's been a while since I've built reports, that was probably the one thing I always tried to shy away from as much as possible.
Jennifer Lee:
Same.
Mike Gerholdt:
Thankfully, now we can just have Coworker build things for us, I don't know. We would be remiss to ... I'm surprised we've made it this far and haven't talked about Flow. Everybody's sitting here like, "You awesome, you have Jennifer Lee on the podcast and for 12 minutes you don't talk about Flow."
Jennifer Lee:
Well, I saved the best features for last.
Mike Gerholdt:
I know. I was going to say, right, you got to ... Ironically, it's why they put the milk at the back of the grocery store because everybody needs milk and they just want you to walk past the aisles of canned chili to get milk.
Jennifer Lee:
So, as always, kudos to the Flow team because, with each release, they're rolling them out, there's just a lot of them.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah.
Jennifer Lee:
I'm not going to possibly go through all of them, I'm just going to pick three that I'm going to highlight.
Mike Gerholdt:
Okay.
Jennifer Lee:
So, the first one is being able to review, restore and reuse past Flow versions. It's 4:00 p.m. on a Friday, you're looking at a Flow that's broken and then you're trying to figure out where it went wrong and who changed it and what happened, well, now you can go into the edit history when you're in Flow Builder and you can see every single change that was made. You can see which elements were changed, you're able to then restore to a previous version or copy the logic into a new Flow. So, that just really makes the troubleshooting and whatever changes you need to make so much easier instead of back in the day where I had different versions of flow and trying to figure out is this different, is this not?
Mike Gerholdt:
All of us did.
Jennifer Lee:
Crazy.
Mike Gerholdt:
I know. And the number of times that I would have to ping Jennifer Lee and be like, "Why doesn't this Flow do this thing?" And she'd be like, "Because you didn't check a box," ugh. Just go back to the version that worked before I broke things. What else can we do in Flow?
Jennifer Lee:
Well, on Screen Flows now. So, from a list view or related list, you can check the records so check the records and then specify the Flow action and then that will take those selected records and process them in bulk. So, instead of having, for example, you're on one record and you're clicking a Screen Flow or autolaunched flow and having it processed for that one record, you're on a list view and you're like, "Okay, well, I want it to happen to these multiple records so I'm just going to select them," and, boom, it just happens for all of them instead of having, again, to go one by one by one. So, this is something I'm really excited about because I wish I had this when I was back as an admin way back when.
Mike Gerholdt:
I could imagine.
Jennifer Lee:
Because I told my users, sorry, you have to do it one by one, can't put it on a list view.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, nope. We have some stuff in beta for Flow as well, right?
Jennifer Lee:
Yeah. So, the last thing I'm going to talk about is Test Mode which is in beta. So, in Winter '27, when you're building your Flows, you're going to have a little build tab and then a test tab and all your testing and debugging is now going to be in one place which is great. And so, there are a bunch of features that come with Test Mode. So, when you're working through a Flow and you're having to iterate through and test and test and test, know that now you could save that manual test so you're not entering the same criteria for your records over and over again, you save it and then you just reuse that. So, there's a lot of reuse so that's great for as you're building a Flow.
And then, when you're ready to activate it, you don't want to lose any of that test so then you could promote it to become an automated test where you have assertions. So, assertions are a developer term but essentially what it means is you test for something that is positive. So, if your Flow creates a task, you want to test that as part of your process, a task was created. So, the great thing about automated tests is, once you built them, it's there forever so then, when you go and test your Flows, when you make a change to it, you want to then go and test to make sure nothing breaks, you don't have to manually test them, you can now go and say, "Oh, I want to run this entire suite of tests for this one given flow or I just want to run these couple," and it does it for you. You don't need to manually go in and manipulate records, it just remembers it.
Now, another thing is if you have Flows that call another Flow or maybe you have an HTP call out, when you do your testing, you want to isolate those other pieces because those would've been tested elsewhere, you don't want to test an integration every single time and a subflow would've been tested in and of itself so you want to isolate those out and really focus on the main flow. So, now you can do that with specifying mock outputs for your actions and subflow elements. And then, lastly, when you're testing records, there are records that aren't easily searchable. So, examples would be case or campaign but you know the record ID so you have the option now, instead of searching for a record, if you have that record ID, you can pace either that 15 or 18 character ID and then use that to test your Flows.
Mike Gerholdt:
Ooh, that's easy, I like that.
Jennifer Lee:
Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
You could keep some record IDs around to test against all the time.
Jennifer Lee:
Mm-hmm.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, those are cool. It's funny, Flow testing to me is still creating it in a sandbox and going to a record and trying to make it work as opposed to properly running the test, I don't know. It's like, "Come on, please, screen, I like this." That's really cool. I feel like a lot of the release this time was solving things that we were willing to work around but it's made it so much easier, all of the testing, all of the bulk updates. Bulk updates, I don't want to sound old but I remember having 12 workflows in an org and thinking, boy, that's a lot and now how many flows per object aren't people trying to manage and test and iterate on and fix and update, the same with users so I think that's really cool.
One thing that's different about when you become a Salesforce admin is really getting used to, hey, releases are coming and the cool thing is you don't have to do anything, you can just chill out. I remember I had a user once ask me something, they were like, "What are you doing this weekend?" I was like, "Oh, this and that, I'm going to write a blog post and Salesforce has a release coming so our instance won't be available from 2:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. or something." And they're like, "Oh, do you have to be up during that time?" I was like, "Nope, sure don't have to worry about it." But you have to prep and I think that's something new for me when I got started as an admin.
So, tell me a little bit more, help people understand, do we have some stuff that they can help get ready or what should they do? Because I'll link to it in the show notes and include it with this blog post.
Jennifer Lee:
Yeah. So, we have best practices for getting ready for a release. So, with this release, I went through and took a look at the blog post that I wrote in 2022, it seems like a long time ago.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, wow.
Jennifer Lee:
So, a lot of the same concepts still apply but I added a few new things or things that you should be aware of. So, I freshened that blog post up and then I also recorded a new video. So, depending on what method you're better at learning, whether it's reading through a blog or watching a video, you're still going to get the same type of content. So, essentially it comes down to four foundational steps, I have plan and learn, get hands-on, tests, and there are different levels of testing, and communication, communication within the team that's building Salesforce as well as your users.
So, within that plan and test section, I do really ... That's the biggest of the four steps and I talk about sandbox strategy and how that's important and why you need both a preview sandbox and non-preview sandbox and here are the reasons why you would use each one and things to consider and also talk about the different levels of testing as well. So, whether you're a new admin, just getting started, that releases happen throughout the year and they're going to happen whether you're ready or not. So, I recommend either reading the blog, watching the video and just knowing what you need to think about to get your org and your users, your team ready for a release.
And then, if you're a seasoned admin, sometimes you just need a refresher. You've been doing it for a while, you might pick something up that you're like, "Oh, yeah, I forgot about X, Y and Z." So, yeah, take a look, we'll have it in the show notes, either the blog and the video.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. No, I think it's a really good point is sometimes you take things for granted. I think for me it was always the sandbox refresh schedule. What do I need to refresh now for current, to stay current and to make sure that I'm doing both? And so, yeah, if you're not used to it, it's a new thing and, if you are, this is really good because it helps you, oh, maybe you forgot about this and got to pick it up so this is great.
Jen, your mega blog, everybody loves it, we love that you publish it, I'm glad that you pour through the release notes for everybody. And thanks for coming on the podcast and updating us on some stuff but also walking us through what was really cool with all of the AI that we launched at Dreamforce and, of course, Flow because Flow, right?
Jennifer Lee:
And speaking of AI, so this time around I had AI help me through the process.
Mike Gerholdt:
Oh, oh.
Jennifer Lee:
So, I trained it, yeah. So, instead of me combing through all 600 plus pages, I told Claude, I fed the release notes into Claude and I said here are the sections that I care about, focus around admin but also, if it's in that category and you don't think it's applicable for admin, still list it so I see it. So, I didn't have to review everything, I saw what Claude returned and then I looked through the list of the things that it didn't think applied to admins and there were some that I'm like, "Oh, well, not necessarily directly but they should be aware of it," so I did that human in the loop piece where I'm like, "Okay, I'll pull these things back in because I think it's relevant." So, it did speed up the process so I highly recommend it to use it to customize your release notes.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Dealing with large amounts of data, that's what AI does really well and I don't know if ever I've read all the release notes.
Jennifer Lee:
No.
Mike Gerholdt:
But to have a tool, any tool just at least give one pass of a filter and you can accept or reject its ideas but at least it's got you ... Feed it the release notes, go grab a sandwich, 20 minutes later, hey, it's got a pass on 600 pages for you, now you know what to pay attention to. I think that's a great tip. So, thanks for coming on the podcast and helping admins out for this release.
Jennifer Lee:
I always love being on here.
Mike Gerholdt:
Well, that was a lot to cover and I think my biggest takeaway from this conversation is just how much easier some of these new features are going to make our lives as admins, whether it's Builder Central helping you build faster, set up with Agentforce cutting down on repetitive tasks or some of those improvements in Flow, there's plenty to explore. And a big thanks to Jennifer Lee for joining me and walking us through everything, be sure to check out her Winter '27 mega release readiness blog along with the other resources that we have linked in the show notes.
And you know what? Here's my challenge to you. Pick one feature we talked about today and spend some time exploring it because reading about new features is one thing but figuring out how it could make a difference in your org is where the fun really begins. I'm Mike Gerholdt. We'll see you next week in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Alastair Dinning, Senior Solution Architect at Salesforce.
Join us as we chat about the process of adding new features to your org, from what to look for when you're reading through release notes to rolling something new out and driving adoption.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Alastair Dinning.
Which new features should I pay attention to in the release notes?
The exciting thing about working in the Salesforce ecosystem is that it's continually evolving. A new release is always around the corner, chock-full of new features that could improve your org. But how do you sift through everything to figure out what will add value and what's just a shiny new toy?
My guest this week is Alastair Dinning, a Senior Solution Architect with Salesforce Professional Services. He has 14 years of experience as a consultant for businesses of all sizes, helping admins change their orgs for the better.
For Alastair, the most important thing when you're looking through release notes is to have a clear understanding of your business processes and problems. Do any of these new features address a pain point? Whether you practice SABWA, run a steering committee of power users, or use a case management system for feedback, you need to have your finger on the pulse of your users.
Three pathways for adding a new feature to your org
Once you've identified a problem you'd like to address, Alastair lays out three options: you can build a declarative solution yourself, you can buy a solution off of the AppExchange, or you can work with a developer to code something custom.
Building your own declarative solution means that you end up with something that's tailored exactly to your specific business requirements, but it also costs you resources in terms of time.
Buying something off the AppExchange, on the other hand, costs you money up front, but you're saving a lot of time and can deploy the change quite quickly. Even if the solution isn't 100% right for your specific problem, Alastair encourages you to reach out to the AppExchange partner because they're often willing to make improvements.
Finally, coding a custom solution is probably the most expensive in terms of internal resources, but gets you exactly what you want. The drawback here is flexibility. You don't want to end up with a solution that you can't update if your business context changes in the future.
Know when to keep Salesforce steady for your users
If you've spent time with your users and really understand their pain points, adoption should come easily. But at the end of the day, the job of the admin isn't to constantly roll out new features—it's to make life easier for your users.
Sometimes, the best thing you can do is to keep your Salesforce environment consistent and stable. That means not only identifying which new features could possibly be helpful for your org, but having proactive conversations with leadership about the bigger picture. 
Make sure to listen to my full conversation with Alastair for more about how to roll out new features to your org and how admins can best work with consultants. And remember to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.
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Full show transcript
Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm talking with Alastair Dinning, a senior solution architect with Salesforce Professional Services about how admins can decide if a feature is right for their org. We're going to dig into how to spot the business problem behind a feature, when to click, buy, or code your solution, how to prototype before making a big investment, and why timing and support ability matter just as much as functionality. So next time you find yourself reading the release notes and thinking, "Oh, that looks cool," you'll have a framework for deciding when to implement it. With that, let's get Alastair on the podcast. So Alistair, welcome to the podcast.
Alistair Dinning:
Thank you, Mike. It's good to be here.
Mike:
We connected ironically over Slack. Not ironic. Is it ironic? I always get hung up because I'm afraid I say ironic because I learned irony from Alanis Morissette, but we connected over Slack because you're a fan of the podcast and you work at Salesforce. And I was like, "Hey, I have this topic that I think you're perfect for." So let's start off by you letting everybody know what you do at Salesforce and how you got there.
Alistair Dinning:
So I am a senior solution architect with Salesforce Professional Services. I've been at Salesforce for give or take five years. I've been working in the ecosystem for 13 and my entire career has been as a declarative consultant and into being in the architect world. And I came to Salesforce through the acquisition attraction on demand and having spent my whole career, my Salesforce career in Salesforce consulting. So I've worked with a good number of organizations, whether they be small business, medium business, large business, government. I'm working currently with the Canadian federal government. I've worked with education, with nonprofit. And I mean, as a consultant, that's my approach to this job. And it's like, how do we as admins do things declaratively and do things well? And what can we bring to the table?
Mike:
Yeah. Wow. Worked with government. You must have a lot of scissors to cut all the red tape.
Alistair Dinning:
Yeah, government does bring a lot of red tape with it, but you make sense when you're talking about taxpayers' money.
Mike:
Yeah, no. I mean, it's all intentional for a reason. So let's talk... One of the biggest questions I always get, and it's a question I had as a Salesforce admin, which is how do I decide if this feature is right for my org? And feature could be anywhere from the biggest feature do we flip on? At one time we had customers had a choice of turning on lightning all the way down to the smallest little checkbox that maybe we added. And I was reading through some of the stuff that you do at Salesforce and I thought it'd be great to have that conversation with you about helping admins figure out if a feature is right and maybe give them some of your thought process into that. So I think that's where we'll start.
Alistair Dinning:
Absolutely. So one of the fun things about Salesforce that I've always appreciated is the three releases a year and the fact that we get new functionality every four months or so, and there's always something that's in those release notes that's exciting. And again, the advantage of having been a consultant is I've seen all of these different organizations and I see these new tools coming from the release notes and I'm like, "Oh, that's cool. That's really fun, and I think that's going to add value."
But to your question, is it just this shiny new toy or is it actually going to add some real value into the solution? I think I always start with, "Okay, so that looks cool, but how is the business going to utilize it?" From two points, either is there a business value that we can add with this new feature or is there a pain point that I as an admin have seen, I've heard from my users time and time and time again where they're all like, "I don't like this. I don't like this. This is a slow process. This is in my way," boom, boom, boom. And does this new feature address that pain point?
So if I was to take Dynamic orms in the Lightning Page Builder, they're super cool because we could do all sorts of fun things with it. But it's only useful if, for example, the business say to me, "Hey, my page layout is completely cluttered with all this stuff that I don't use at the beginning of a opportunity process. So why do I have deep fields on or a whole ton of fields on opportunity development when really we're just trying to identify what the opportunity value might be, value prop might be for this customer?"
Mike:
I think that's a great start. And I know I thought of that. I'll say this, I would really love it if the business was as explicit as you say they are like, "Oh, there's really this problem with too many fields." I think oftentimes you have to peel back a layer and listen to users say, "I'm just struggling to find the right information on this page." Or I remember when I was an admin, we brought on a different business unit and I remember the business unit asking why there was this entire section of the account page and it was kind of in the middle and it was above all of the information that they needed. And I said, "Well, if you don't like it, you can just collapse that section." And they said, "Yeah, but shouldn't it know whether or not it should show that to me?" And this was before Dynamic Pages.
And so I bring that up to say, I hear you. I wish it was that explicit, but sometimes you almost have to listen and put two and two together for them.
Alistair Dinning:
That's right. It can be hard for the business to know how to articulate what they want from the solution. But as an admin, there are a couple of tools you've got. One is you could spend some time desk side with your key users or have a steering committee of users who are giving you feedback on a regular basis on what they're using, what they like, what they don't like. The other option is that if you have an ITSM light solution where you've got case management, so your users are providing functionality cases or technical cases on Salesforce, on their usage of Salesforce, then you can actually scroll through the data and see what people are saying, "This works for me. This doesn't work for me." And I mean, if all the cases are coming around a particular topic, then you know that there's a problem there and that's got to go in your admin backlog of things to address in due accord.
Mike:
Yeah. And I think you mentioned the three releases a year. Obviously we're always working to solve issues that enough customers have brought up, maybe not specifically in your case, but somebody has that issue. That feature didn't just get born out of a wishlist. It got born out of somebody really had that pain. I also think you bring up an interesting point of, so when you're looking at, should I just implement this feature? Is it actually solving a real problem or do I have to invent the problem or is there a better way to solve that problem?
Alistair Dinning:
So when we come to, is there a better way to solve that problem, there's a three step process that I've always applied to implementing functionality in Salesforce. And there's two steps to this process. One is those, are we going to click it? Are we going to buy it? Are we going to code it? In terms of solving the problem for the business requirements? We've identified a business requirement. We've said, "We need to fix it." Can I declaratively solve this problem? Can I just build it out of the box with the tools that come? And I mean, I'm a declarative consultant. I don't write code. So could I do it? Can I build a piece of functionality that's going to allow me to do that? Do I want to buy it or do I want to install it? So do I want to go to the AppExchange and pull something from the AppExchange that's going to solve the problem because this is a problem, to your point, this is a problem that multiple people have had.
And so somebody else already went and built the solution and put it on the AppExchange. So we already know that those requirements exist. We already know that the solution exists and somebody's taken the onus of really digging through that solution and thinking through the problems and debugging the solution, whether they've built a very comprehensive declarative solution or they've coded a solution and they've put it on the AppExchange and just made everybody else's life easier. And sure, do you have to pay for that product? Most of the time, yes. But does that take away from you having to invest in development time? Also, yes. So paying somebody for a solution off the shelf can be a lot easier than coding it, but then coding it is our third option.
So you've looked at the declarative solution, you've gone, "This isn't quite going to solve the problem the business has brought to me." You've looked at the AppExchange and there's nothing quite there that's going to fit the bill. Again, this isn't solving the problem the business bought to me. So then yes, then you're into the point where you want to code a solution and work with your developers, work maybe with your UX team, work with your testing team on actually coding out a comprehensive solution to solve the problem, solve that business requirement that was there in the first place. But that's a heavy investment.
So the flip side to that is that if you were to declaratively build it, can you get 80% of the way to the business requirement, whereas a coded solution would get you 100% of the way there? If you declaratively build it and you get 80% of the way there, what you also get is a lot of feedback from the business before you make a big investment in coding a solution. And that accelerates your development path, gives you a lot of feedback into what your coded solution might look like, but it does help you mitigate the cost and stop you going down the wrong path because your view as an admin as to what the business is after versus their feedback when they start road testing something in production is going to be two different things.
So either declarative and be done with it or declarative and use that as the prototype to inform your development path, again, assuming there was nothing on the AppExchange that met that requirement.
Mike:
Right. Or a hybrid of the two. I know there's some AppExchange apps that you can even add on to.
Alistair Dinning:
Oh, yeah.
Mike:
And that would help out. I think that you bring up a good point and it's one I never brought up when I was an admin, but not everything on the AppExchange is free. There's a cost to it, but the cost would be ongoing as opposed to massive upfront that they would spend on you and it's a small monthly fee. And you also benefit from, then they get time to upgrade it. Whereas if you've built something, who knows if you're going to have time to upgrade it.
Alistair Dinning:
All of the above is true. The other thing with the AppExchange, which has blown my socks off in such a good way in some occasions, is that I found a product on the AppExchange that met 85%, 90% of my business requirements, presented it to the business, the business, "It would be nice if... I really needed to do X plus." And I've actually been able to go back to the AppExchange partner, have a conversation with them because some of these... These are not giant software houses that are difficult to talk to. Some of these are very small independent consulting shops or software development shops and they will take your feedback and they'll go, "Oh, that's a good idea. That's not on my product roadmap," or, "That is on my product roadmap. Let me accelerate it." Or, "Let me bring that into my roadmap and we will bring it to you as part of the product." And they will actually take that feedback if you ask.
And I think the important thing to consider there is don't assume that what's in the app exchange is locked and finite and immutable, but it could be a discussion. And they will take that feedback because they want their product out there as much as anybody else does.
Mike:
Yeah. And if it's a feature you're requesting, who's to say it's not a feature that a lot more of their customers aren't requesting? I like that. One thing I wonder in your day-to-day, because you have a really cool title of senior solution architect, how much, when you sit down with an organization or you sit down with an admin and the people that use Salesforce, how much do you talk to them about the amount of change that's going on outside of just implementing Salesforce?
Alistair Dinning:
It can be some very extensive discussions because when I get pulled in to work with a customer, we're typically doing a technology overhaul or a migration from a legacy platform into Salesforce. So there's a lot of business process change that has to happen to make sure that Salesforce meets those requirements, but also make sure that the business users understand that Salesforce is going to support them and how Salesforce is going to support them. And these requirements will... The method of working can change quite drastically, even if the end goal is the same. The process of spending time and training people and understanding what motivating them before you actually even get into making any development change is really important.
So I try and step out of the weeds of, I need a form that asks X, Y, Z and fields, but what are we trying to achieve with this form? What are we trying to achieve with this business process? Or maybe even what is the metric that the business users are being evaluated on or being comped on? Because if you understand how people are being evaluated or how people are being compensated, that will drive and you can build a platform that will support those behaviors that will drive adoption and that will bring people into your world or into your process.
Mike:
The second you talk money, that's when it becomes real for people, especially compensation. For every time I've rolled out a sales process, the salespeople want to know if X, when, Y, what's my pay? Because A, that's why we work, but also I want to make sure that I'm doing things right. And the reason I ask that is for the longest time as an admin, if I was pushing out new features, I felt I was doing my job. If I was constantly giving, and not constantly, not every day, but on a regular basis, if I was giving my users new features, I felt like I was doing my job. And it didn't really dawn on me until one of the organizations I was working at went through a massive leadership change. And here I am pushing out new features on opportunities for salespeople and stuff across the board, and everyone else is kind of grappling with also massive organization changes.
And I remember I sat back for at least two months and just didn't push anything new because if I could control that environment and give my users a sense of normalcy when the rest of the organization is changing, then I wasn't contributing to their stress.
Alistair Dinning:
That's a very reasonable way of moving things forward and allowing the team to stay on an even keel.
Mike:
Well, I mean, part of, I think, understanding and thinking through is this feature right, is, is this feature right right now? Or would it be more right later given where everything's at? The last thing, the cliche of that is you don't want to push something new the last two weeks of a quarter because you're radically changing a possible sales process or something that could affect books and numbers. So obviously that seems to make sense, but the same also holds true for other parts of the year when other parts of the organization are maybe going through a different change.
Alistair Dinning:
And this taps onto another point, which has just occurred to me. So yes, absolutely. When we are making changes in the Salesforce platform, we've got to be organizationally aware to, for example, to your point, where salespeople are in their sales cycle. Are we at the end of the month? Are we at the end of the quarter? Is this the end of the fiscal? I mean, everything should be end of fiscal. Big sales organizations that I've worked with or worked at, you don't make any changes in the last month of the fiscal because the sales people are always focused on a single task and that is getting to their number. And we're talking about salespeople, but it could be any other organizational goal and team where you need stability because there is a bigger goal to move to.
The second thought, when we look at how do we implement major change or how do we bring new product forward, it's being organizationally aware in terms of understanding where the business is going and having conversations with leadership about, "Hey, we've got these brand new features, but are they going to be relevant in six months? If we look at a new quoting system to bring in new products, are we still going to be selling this line of product or do we need this level of complexity? Is this still going to be a thing? Is this worth the investment in the time and the change and the development if this doesn't line up with the strategic objectives of the business?"
So being organizationally aware to what your changes are doing, how your business users are in their, not their life cycle, but their business cycle and where the business is going. These are all important points when we look at how do we bring new functionality forward.
Mike:
Yep. You talked in the future and roadmap and boy, every release, every time we have a major event, there's always roadmap sessions, people want to look ahead. I know for a few times there's been times where I've looked at a feature and thought, "Oh, I really want to implement it now, but if I just wait three months, they're going to have this functionality and it's going to be a lot easier for me." And I think knowing that and being able to have your organization on pause to say, "No, let's let the future mature," then we'll be ready for it as well, as opposed to implementing it too early.
One of the things I think we're thinking about is taking that inventory of your own skill and thinking, "Once I implement this, is this something I can support?" And as somebody that helps architect solutions, at what point do you think through how much features can be deployed versus if a customer organization just doesn't have the people power to support it?
Alistair Dinning:
So having been a consultant for 13 years, 14 years, whatever it is now-
Mike:
Your consulting is a teenager right now.
Alistair Dinning:
Basically, yes. Having been a consultant for quite a while, I've worked with a lot of small organizations and one of the things I've learned in that process is you can build, as an architect, I can design and build a really fancy whizbang solution that'll really knock the socks off the business users, but for that thing to have legs, for that thing to have durability down the road, I need to trust that the admin team in the organization that I'm working with can keep it going. I've always kept an open door to any admin I've worked with, but at the end of the day, as a consultant, I'm in there for a period of time and then I do my job, I deliver my functionality and I leave. And it's always the bit about my job that I like and I don't like. I get to work with lots of great companies, but I also don't see where things go six, 12, 18 months down the road.
So it is a concern that we make sure that the admin team, the development team have enough handover and enough technical capability to maintain any solution we deliver because we don't want them looking at this in six months time or 12 months time thinking, "Oh my God, this was great at the time, but they didn't know..." I mean, nobody's got a crystal ball when you build functionality. You don't know where companies are going, you don't know what's going to happen in the market, you don't know how product's going to get adopted and unpacked by your business users. So things have to be built scalably and things have to be built with the intent that somebody can maintain and continue to use it going forward. Because if it's too complex, the admins that, as a consultant, that I've left behind are going to be cursing my name down the road.
They'll be like, "What did he build me? This worked to begin with, but now I need to make some change. I don't understand how I expand on this." And so I'm really conscious of making sure two things. One is that the solutions I build are scalable, but two is that I have empowered the team that I'm working with, the client team, the admin team, that they have the tools to carry that product forward and they have the documentation to carry that product forward and they don't inherit a bunch of tech debt and that they're in a good place where they can understand it and debug it and enhance it and move it forward as their business dictates.
Mike:
So let me ask you this, because I think it's very poignant. As having been a consultant and done that for a while-
Alistair Dinning:
A while.
Mike:
... what are questions that you really wish the Salesforce admin had asked you across the table?
Alistair Dinning:
I think it's about understanding what the Salesforce admin skillset is and what their background is and what their appetite to learning Salesforce is. Actually, sometimes the other thing to know, and it's not directly answering your question, but what I look for in that relationship with the admin is to understand their skills, their capabilities, their bandwidth for Salesforce, because in some smaller organizations, the Salesforce admin is not just the Salesforce admin, they're doing other things too. They may be an operational support person, they may be a financial support person, they may be a sales admin type individual on top of having to learn Salesforce.
So again, it's making sure that they've got the tool sets and that we've had a conversation about, "Hey, are you understanding that this is how this is built? Do you have access to resources? Do you have access to a local user group, a local admin user group to help you get support? What are the other resources and tools that you've got that we can make sure that you are good to go with this product once it's gone? Do you understand how it's built? Do you have the documentation? Do you understand the designs? Do you have this in a sandbox? Have you unpacked it in a sandbox or maybe a POC environment where you can really play with this thing without breaking what's in prod?
Mike:
That's really good. I mean, I think back to the consultants I've worked with and the really good ones, part of their pitch for that solution was, "And here's how you configure it as an admin." One of them was just a matter of changing some static resources and then you didn't have to touch code.
Alistair Dinning:
Yeah. So static resources, custom metadata, custom labels, these are really important tools because you make all of the scalability of that buried, not buried, available to the admin in simple tool sets, which to your point, you don't have to touch code, you don't have to go and unpack a flow and rewrite business logic in a flow. You don't want to be doing that.
Mike:
Talk to me about, have you ever had an inside group of a handful of users that was your internal champions that maybe when you were looking to roll a feature out, you would beta test it on them?
Alistair Dinning:
Absolutely. So the best example I can think of this is a university in Ontario where I was working with the business school. And that school we had Salesforce was being used by the professional services team, the student services team, the marketing team, the alumni group. I'm going to say there were two other groups there as well. I'm trying to think of all the different departments.
Mike:
Wow.
Alistair Dinning:
This business school had a COE, a Center of Excellence for Salesforce that was represented by business users from all of those individual departments and the IT group were there. They were there to answer the question that we were answering today, which was, "Hey, there's this brand new feature in Salesforce. Do you want it? This is what it could look like. This is what we've heard from your users, but does this make sense to you?" And this school had a, they met on a regular basis. I would say every two weeks the COE would meet. And again, it was driven by business users who demonstrated an interest in both learning Salesforce and expanding Salesforce and contributing to the overall picture that we had one record of a student that we could follow their life cycle through.
So we had good transparency on what the motivation behind Salesforce was in this organization. And they had a forum where the business users could come with problems, the business users could come with ideas, and the IT group and myself as the consultant were there to say, "Yeah, Salesforce can support that and this is how we could look at it." Or, "Salesforce can support that. Give us a couple of weeks. Let's have some detailed conversations, then we'll come back and see how this fits into the big picture."
So having in any organization that we had, I think 120 Salesforce users in this group, this school, having a team of business users that would come together in a well-structured discussion forum where people were learning the product and able to contribute was really, really valuable for the development part of that because it wasn't one executive who just determined that this is the way we're going. It was the business who said, "This is the way we're going." Because the business asked for it, the business adopted it, because the business adopted it, they got really deep into owning the solution and they had true ownership of what that environment was and where that product was going.
Mike:
Wow. I've ran into something similar where the contract group of an organization really, really had a defined vision on what they wanted. And I created the demo and pushed it to them. And once it went live, they were the biggest champions because they were so invested in that feature. And it made the old system they were moving from just light years worth of antiquated. And it was kind of cool because then they could be at the forefront to help push change for other parts of the organization that maybe were a little less innovative.
Alistair Dinning:
Well, it's not just less innovative. It's maybe scared in some respects or unsure. I mean, I think when you have multiple groups working in Salesforce and you've got somebody who can really demonstrate the value and say, "Right, we can move an application from potential students signing in to application submission and review process. And we can drop the timeline that was that process that was four months. We can drop it to two and a half months because we were able to take time out here and take time out here because we can make the process more rigorous and more efficient and more locked down."
If one team can show the rest of the business that, that's far more valuable than myself as a consultant saying, "I can save you money. I can save you time." It's far more valuable than the admin even saying, "I can save you money and I can save you time." Because if the business will step up and say, "Hey, we did cut costs," or, "We did improve our opportunity close," or, "We did cut our service response time," then those are the wins that really matter that other business users hear and then get incentive to go, "Right, well tell me more. Tell me how did you achieve that efficiency? What did you do? Who did you partner with? What did they bring to the table?"
Mike:
Yep. I hear you. Thinking about timing of this podcast as it comes out, we're right on the heels of the newest winter release. For an admin listening to this that's reading the title very literally, How Do I Decide If a New Feature Belongs In My Org? Is there a thinking structure or I don't know, a plan at which you go through release notes that you could give them as a way to think about how they look at features they see in the newest releases?
Alistair Dinning:
So I think the first thing to do is to marry up, "Hey, that looks fabulous in the release notes," to where does that align to the business requirements that we're hearing or the business problems that I'm hearing from my users? So if we have something that looks cool and we know it's going to resonate, that's the place where we start. If we've got 10... and there are hundreds of features in every release. But if you've got 10 things that catch your eye, which of those 10 things resonate against what the business has been asking for or complaining about? Because we can deliver what they're asking for, you can fix a problem, that's a great place to be.
Then we're going to look to see how do we pilot that? We're going to look at how do I get this in front of the business in a way that I can, for low investment, how can I build a proof of concept that the business can see and see whether it actually resonates and does this solve the problem? So whether this is building it out in the sandbox and turning on all its features, is this going to developer.salesforce.com/freetrials and grabbing a free trial that's pre-built with this feature enabled because the developer of free trials, you have two choices. You can get an empty org or you can get an org that's pre-populated with data. If you get an org that's pre-populated with data, you don't have to seed it, you don't have to make it look fancy. It's already done for you.
So either do a sandbox or a free trial and prototype it. And then you can put that in front of the business and get the feedback from the business. And then if it looks right and the feedback is positive, does this fall into the life cycle of where the business is at? Is this a good time to launch new functionality? And then if all of those things align, look at the technical complexity of doing it. In my case as a consultant, I'm going to be like, "Right, how much do I need to then knowledge transfer to the admin team so that they can maintain it after I'm done? If I am the admin building it, does this make sense?" And from that point you can move forward with, "Hey, yeah, let's run with this new feature, or not."
Mike:
I think that makes sense. Alastair, thanks for coming on the podcast and helping us walk through what can be a myriad of constant decisions in not only just the number of features that Salesforce comes out with, but the number of ways that we can build and deploy those features.
Alistair Dinning:
Mike, it's been my pleasure.
Mike:
And I want to thank Alistair for taking time out of his day to join me on the podcast and really give me a practical way to think through what it can feel like with an endless stream of feature decisions. And here's something you can try for the next release. I want you to take the features that catch your attention and match each one against an actual business problem or a request that you've heard from your users. You can prototype the strongest candidate, put it in front of a few people and pay attention to what happens. Then ask whether the timing is right and whether your team can realistically own what you're about to introduce. A feature that earns its way into your org by solving something that matters and leaving you with a solution you can keep after you support for launch.
Well, that's it for this week. Thanks for listening and until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Joshua Birk, Senior Director of Admin Evangelism, and Kate Lessard, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce.
Join us as we chat about what caught our attention at Dreamforce, what surprised us, and what's worth spending time on.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Joshua Birk and Kate Lessard.
Build fast and accurately with Builder Central
Probably the most exciting announcement from the keynote is Builder Central. It's a low and no-code workspace to enable admins to build fast and accurately, without compromising on security.
From React sites to flows to agents, you can get an idea off the ground with plain language prompts. But just because you move fast doesn't mean you need to break things, thanks to automated testing, safety checks, and built-in controls.
"We can take what we as admins already know about data models and our org structure and really, truly define what we're building," Kate says. You can upload requirements documents and information about your organization's business processes to make sure everything that you build works from the get-go.
Create consistently amazing Salesforce experiences
The other thing that was touched on in the keynote was Headless 360 and the Headless Experience Layer. You can bring Salesforce to Slack, Claude, and anywhere else your users need to interact with your data.
If you're feeling overwhelmed by how many different ways there are for users to interact with your Salesforce data, know that you're not alone. But at the end of the day, these are experiences that you're designing for your users to make their lives easier where they're already working.
Admins need to focus on governance and security
Finally, the biggest takeaway from Dreamforce this year is that governance and trust are more important than ever. Hackers use AI too, and the threat landscape is constantly evolving.
Now more than ever, the role of the Salesforce Admin has shifted into governance. That means data cleanup and strict permissions controls to make sure that your agents are working as intended. And that also means getting a better handle on how your data is moving across platforms and who might have access to it. 
Trust is a core principle at Salesforce, and so we're rolling out new tools like Security Center Essentials and the Transaction Security Policy Accelerator to help you take control of what's going on in your org.
There's so much more great stuff in our September Monthly Retro recap of Dreamforce, so make sure to listen to the full episode. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us in your feed every Thursday.
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Salesforce 360 Blog Post: Deploy Best-Practice Security Policies Instantly with Transaction Security Policy Accelerator

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Mike on X

Full show transcript
Mike Gerholdt:
Before we jump into today's conversation, I want to give you a quick heads up about what's coming on the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Starting in October, we're moving to two episodes a month with a little bonus episode to kick things off. So October 1st, we're talking about how do I decide if a new Salesforce feature belongs in my org? Because Salesforce just released it and we should turn it on, are two very different things. Then on October 15th, Jennifer Lee joins me for a special video and audio episode, Winter '27, What Admins Should Check Before Their Org Updates. We'll help you figure out what deserves your attention, what you should test, and what you need to be ready for before the release hits your org. And then on October 29th, we're asking the question, what does an admin certification prove in the Agentforce era? We'll look at what certification tells employers and admins today and where hands-on experience and judgment fit into that picture.
So after October, you can expect two episodes a month focused on helping you understand what matters, why it matters to your work, and what you can actually do with it when you get back to your organization. And that brings us to today's episode. So I'm joined by Kate Lessard and Josh Birk for a post Dreamforce conversation about what caught our attention, what surprised us, and more importantly, what's actually worth an admin spending time on. We're going to talk about Builder Central and what it could change about how admins build, new ways Salesforce can show up in tools like Slack and Claude, and why that data permissions and security in your org are even more important.
We'll also get into Security Center Essentials, transaction security policy accelerators, Agentforce vibes, and some of the new tools that can help admins understand and work with their org faster. But there's a bigger thread running through all of it. AI can help you build, investigate, and move faster, but it doesn't replace knowing your business or knowing when something is actually right for your org. Josh calls it trust but verify. And I think that's a pretty good way to head into this conversation. So let's get Kate and Josh on the podcast. So Josh and Kate, welcome to the podcast.
Joshua Birk:
Thanks for having us, Mike.
Kate Lessard:
Thanks.
Mike Gerholdt:
We all have a little post Dreamforce voice in our step because it's been a long few days, but I wanted to get something together with all of us really fresh right after we landed. Some of us landed sooner rather than later leaving San Francisco and talk about what we saw, what really stuck out to us, maybe some of the demos we got to work on and things that surprised us. So Kate, you are in the keynote and keynotes always get top billing, so we're going to start with you.
Kate Lessard:
Woo, I love it.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. Talk to me about some of the stuff that you guys showed in the keynote for people that missed it and what you're excited for.
Kate Lessard:
Yeah, the keynote this year was really fun to work on the demos because there's just some really exciting new technology out there for admins to leverage. I think that there are just a lot of exciting new features that are specifically for admins that are really designed to improve our building experience. And if you are able to catch any of the sneak peaks or any roadmap sessions, you know that there are even more coming. But if you did join us for the keynote or if you plan to go watch it later, a really great example is Builder Central. And this is an amazing AI builder that is specifically designed for low-code and no-code builders. So not only can we use it to build fast and accurately, but we can also use it to edit directly in the Explorer, which is I think my favorite feature.
And we can really visualize everything that we build and that spans from things like react sites to flows to agents, and then even all the way over to data model and permissions, which is super cool as an admin. And I want to say that I think that the most important thing to note though as an admin is that using tools like this, my expertise and my strong foundational skills that I've developed are still really necessary. With Builder Central, we have the ability to add things like requirements, documents, or information about the different business processes from our organization so that we can take what we as admins already know about data model and our org structure and really truly define what we're building. And so I think to me, the message and the excitement here is that as admins, we still need to understand the business and the technology to be successful and that doesn't go away, but using a fantastic product like Builder Central, we're more important than ever and we get to create these exceptional experiences and that really has lit me up this Dreamforce.
Mike Gerholdt:
I'm going to pause you there because I know you've got more to talk about.
Kate Lessard:
Oh, yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
I'm so glad you brought up Builder Central first. I was floored. So I had seen, obviously we work on stuff prior to seeing it at Dreamforce and I'd seen demos and I think maybe it just kind of skipped off the surface for me as, "Oh, it's another AI thing and it can do this." And it kind of looked like a little bit of setup with Agentforce or Agentforce for setup. And I gave it some credibility, but I didn't really understand what I was looking at. And then I got on the show floor and this was Thursday and Daivat, who works for Tiaan, who was in the keynote, pulled me aside and said, "Mike, you got to come to our demo booth." And I'm like, "Okay."
And he showed me a customer that came up and was really into Star Trek and this is why I'm like, "Okay," took a screenshot of a Star Trek set, kind of like those glittery panels that 70s, 60s tech ad. And he said, I think I want to make a dashboard for my executives because they're really into Star Trek. And they gave Builder Central that screenshot and the data it should pull and it created a dashboard, I kid you not, that looked just like Gene Roddenberry had created it for the 1960s Star Trek episodes.
Kate Lessard:
Oh, very cool. I love to hear stuff like that.
Mike Gerholdt:
I was like, "Seriously?"
Joshua Birk:
Right.
Mike Gerholdt:
Now I have no idea. This is where my limited information comes in because Josh, it's a React site or it's a React page or I don't know what to do with it after that, but I was just like, "Oh, I could make my whole instance look awesome."
Joshua Birk:
Yeah. And well, we're moving towards this realm of you can use Lightning, you can use React, and you have a lot of flexibility in the technology that's driving this. And that's, I think lending to that your dashboards don't have to look like what you think your classic dashboards are like. And it goes back to not that there's anything wrong with the Salesforce UI, but it's like, as was said during the main keynote, was the UI really ever our main driver? Was that what made us distinct? And I don't think that's the answer. I think the answer is the platform, it's the APIs, it's the features. And if you can update your UI to be like Star Trek, which is freaking awesome, all the better for everybody.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I think that's a demo video somebody should do.
Kate Lessard:
Yeah. It really takes that concept of storytelling with data to a whole new level and making it really impactful for the people that are digesting that information.
Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, if that's what your company wants, then that's what people... If you want people to look at dashboards or whatever, then put it into something they're at. So, Kate, I share with you the same concern. Am I right to worry that it's almost like when we first get the calculator in algebra class and everybody just uses the calculator and assumes it's right for admins in terms of Builder Central? Because my worry is I see that and I'm like, "Okay, but wait a minute, how do I know if that number's right?" And I know how to pull that dashboard. Should we do something else besides build that Sparkle dashboard in Builder Central?
Kate Lessard:
Yeah. And I think the really important thing to know as you start working with Builder Central is you have to have a strong admin foundation. Everything that you know is important because you are sharing that information about your data model and what you need in that either prompt area, that box where you're entering in your prompt, or through your requirements' information where you add in a file. And so I think that it's actually incredibly important to have your strong admin foundation to be able to create these exceptional experiences.
Joshua Birk:
Yeah. And say it with me everybody, always do it in your sandbox first, press but verify. And these are the same skills and the same habits that we've been forming all along is even if you were working with a developer team, you wouldn't necessarily assume everything that was coming out was 100% accurate. And the same's going to be true with Builder Central and these other tools.
Mike Gerholdt:
Continuing on, Kate, after that Builder Central, I think that was the first chapter in the keynote, right?
Kate Lessard:
Yeah, that was our chapter one, building trusted AI.
Mike Gerholdt:
What did we talk about for chapter two?
Kate Lessard:
Chapter two was all about delivering trusted AI everywhere. So I think that admins go to Dreamforce. I know that when I was an admin, I would go to Dreamforce and I would feel a little bit of overwhelm because there's just so much to take in. And I think that maybe that was something that I was hearing from admins this year that they're feeling a little bit overwhelmed because everything that they do is actually now expanding to all of these different interfaces as well. So we saw examples of Salesforce and Slack, we saw examples of Salesforce and Claude, and this is going to continue across other interfaces. So I think that the big takeaway here and what I'm continuing to watch is how admins can deliver to new and more interfaces without changing that true foundational work that we've done in Salesforce. And that's super exciting.
And that was really what our second chapter in the keynote was about. I think the example we used was a really good one. In the keynote, we showed exposing and running a flow directly in Claude. And that example was super simple. It was just a really easy auto launch flow to escalate a case. But that business implication is huge because as admins, I feel like one of our superpowers that moving forward is really meeting users where they are working and providing that same exceptional experience, whether they're in lightning or in a different interface. So I think that that is really cool and something I'm really excited to see how it progresses because we're only going to more interfaces.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I agree. Was that the chapter where, maybe I'm confusing my keynotes, where you could preview what the Salesforce, I'll call it a card, would look like in Claude or Slack or ChatGPT?
Kate Lessard:
Yeah, we did show HXL, the headless experience layer. We did show an HXL component in Slack as well. And HXL is really a way to be able to take that component, that experience, and exactly display it in Slack, display it in Claude. So that's really cool. And admins can get hands on with the HXL playground if they want to try that out. It's been one of my favorite places to spend time lately.
Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, to me, and I said in the architect and developer keynotes too, it only served to almost refocus me more as an admin to think of, I have the Salesforce core as my foundation and everybody's going to be coming to use it. I have to make sure that my data and my security are the utmost because once somebody uses that headless layer or AI force to ask Salesforce a question in Claude, if my data's not right, then their answers aren't right. And I was thinking of that as that's the home base for me. And it almost just reaffirmed it that we weren't interface engineers because now the interface is everywhere. We're really data and security.
Joshua Birk:
Yeah. And I mean, this is the promise of headless, is that it's the client that you need, not necessarily the client that we are going to enforce on you. And I think there's a lot of interesting variations of using Claude and using Slackbot and using Coworker and things like that, but you're not wrong. It's like the core responsibilities are still going to be the same and that's what's going to drive, and context is king and you can't have good contacts without good data and you can't have good data without good security. So a lot of the foundations, they're just still there and they're going to help you through whatever agentic route that you're going to be going through. But as Kate was saying, the importance of those core responsibilities is never going to go away.
Mike Gerholdt:
You brought up Coworker. Josh, did you make it to any coworker sessions?
Joshua Birk:
I did not, but I have been poking around with Coworker and I think Coworker's a really interesting feature. What's interesting to me is that we are now seeing these tools that are very similar but different. We have Coworker, we have employee agents, we have Slackbot, and they all kind of overlap each other in various ways. Coworker, I think the big strength at Coworker is that it's basically you turn it on, you connect it to your sources and then you let it go. Whereas an employee agent is something that you are involved in highly customizing.
And then Slackbot is kind of its own tool and obviously it's something that's very important if you're actually using Slack. And I think the nice thing is we don't have to put all our eggs in one basket. You can utilize the client, the agent, the AI that is best for you, whether that's Coworker or Claude or Claudeforce, it's whatever's going to be best suited and they all have their little distinctions for using it. I'm a big Coworker fan because it puts a lot of feature and functionality and information right at your fingertips, but it doesn't have the customization that say an employee agent does.
Mike Gerholdt:
Right.
Kate Lessard:
Yeah. And I want to hop in and specify, we're talking Agentforce Coworker here. And I think the really cool thing for admins to know here is... that you can turn this on in under five minutes and have it set up and ready to go and supporting your users and providing them with the information they need, which is, I mean, talk about just a really quick win for us to be able to deliver these awesome AI experiences to our users.
Mike Gerholdt:
So would you do that first, Kate, instead of building out an employee specific agent?
Kate Lessard:
I think it depends on the situation and what you need the agent to do. I think that Agentforce Coworker is going to allow users to help themselves quite a bit, and it's going to be a really straightforward, quick win that you can get them moving in the right direction. If you need your employee agent to do kind of other things and have a lot of different connected data sources, I think that maybe you would go in that direction, but I think it always comes down to that what is the use case?
Joshua Birk:
Yeah. And to throw a little bit in favor of an Agentforce employee agent is you can enforce a certain level of determinism using flow, right? So you have a lot of control over what that employee agent can do, whereas Coworker is just sort of out of the box.
Kate Lessard:
Absolutely.
Mike Gerholdt:
I will say this. So the architect keynote finally, because there are things that Mike can read five and six times and it still doesn't make sense to him, the architect keynote finally described to me the difference between probabilistic and deterministic. I think I'm saying both those right.
Kate Lessard:
That's a mouthful. Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
It is. I know. It feels like when you go... But that word-
Kate Lessard:
Oh, look what we did to you. Oh, no.
Joshua Birk:
Yeah, you tricked your brain into you didn't know how to pronounce it.
Mike Gerholdt:
There's only so many times you can say that word before the fuse breaks and I already said it. I already broke the fuse. But that is the AI saying, "Oh, well to win the deal, you need 18%." And then deterministic is the AI using its reasoning, but also being grounded in saying, "Well, 18% would win the deal, but our max is 15%." And I was like, "Oh."
Joshua Birk:
That's a good way of putting it.
Mike Gerholdt:
Maybe it was a developer keynote. Again, they kind of all smeared together for me. But I remember seeing that slide and I thought, "Now it makes sense to me." I had a light bulb moment.
Joshua Birk:
Nice.
Mike Gerholdt:
Just didn't appear as normal. And then of course I've already blown the fuse on terministic and probabilistic times I can say that. It's like exclamation points. Do you ever have an English teacher that told you only had five exclamation points you could use the rest of your life?
Joshua Birk:
No, but that's not bad advice.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. So hey, we got that going for us. Kate, I think chapter three of the admin keynote was around security.
Kate Lessard:
Yeah, exactly. It was all about governing trusted AI. And I think that security had a really big presence at Dreamforce in general. With the rise of agentic AI, we're seeing new security threats. Everyone listening has heard us say it a million times before, but I really do think that we mean it when we say that at Salesforce, trust is our number one value. And we really do firmly believe in a shared responsibility model that helps protect customer orgs and data. So with all of these new security threats that we're seeing, Salesforce is really proactively rolling out new and enhanced features for admins to monitor as well as to improve their security posture. So I think that that's one of the things I would actually really be coming out of this Dreamforce, feeling really proactive about security and what I can do as an admin to protect my organization.
And in the keynote, we showed a couple different examples of both security as well as data privacy. We showed compliance agents. We gave a sneak peek of the enhanced DSAR policies that are going to be rolling out in the future. We shared transaction security policy accelerators, which are just a fantastic new addition for anyone that's leveraging Shields, event monitoring, using transaction security policies. And then we also showed Security Center Essentials, which is I think something really cool to call out because it is something that is free and available to all admins regardless of your org, your industry, what type of data you have going on, that's something that you can leverage to really be more proactive about your security. And I'll also add that it was really nice to see an increased amount of sessions focused on security this year. I was looking at everything in the Admin Meadow and we had tons of security sessions. It was fantastic.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. What was the thing that you demoed in the keynote? Because I felt like you had a hot minute of talking, you were scrolling through something. What was that?
Kate Lessard:
Absolutely. So those were the Transaction Security Policy Accelerator, which is a Salesforce Labs app that's available right now in the Agent Exchange. And I think this is really important because if you have used transaction security policies in the past, you were writing these security policies from scratch and you were doing that either with complex Apex code or you were creating these kind of multistep configuration steps and set up. And it was really challenging. And with Transaction Security Policy Accelerator, we actually took a list of all of the most requested security policies and made them into pre-built templates that you can just really easily deploy in your org. So that is just a huge game changer for any of our Shield customers that are leveraging event monitoring.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I was going to say that when I saw that, I though I'd known stuff about security. And to be fair, back when it was a little different, the amount that we could do for enforcement, but to see you scroll through that and the amount of policies that were there, the documentation that was behind it, not just the part that everybody saw, and I think you deployed actually one of them, which was, it was pretty, I'd call it mild configuration. The part that got me floored was the documentation because I was horrible at documenting stuff. I knew where things were because I was the only admin. And when it came to working with IT and making sure security stuff synced up, documentation was always something I was constantly working on. The configuration would be right. It's the documentation that I needed to constantly report in on. And I saw that in that and I thought, "Man, that would've put me miles ahead. I wouldn't have had to buy my IT department so many donuts."
Kate Lessard:
Yeah. And I do think that when you deploy these, and if you go back and watch the keynote, you can see a little bit of it. There is the documentation and there's also the information that's like the description of what's happening, the why it's important, which I love to see, as well as the triggering event. So it's definitely above and beyond. And then you can kind of review those prefilled settings and fine tune them for your org.
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, absolutely. And we had Kylie on to talk about Security Center Essentials on the podcast, so I'll link to that episode too.
Kate Lessard:
Awesome. Yeah. I think it's just such a great thing for everyone to have access to.
Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, that was easily my number two of Dreamforce walking away. So Josh, I think you did a session on, it sounds like I didn't do any research for this, but I have a whole list of things, but you did a session that was similar to one that we'd given at TDX that you partnered up with somebody new. Was that on AI Force? No.
Joshua Birk:
On Agentforce Vibes. They partnered with-
Mike Gerholdt:
Agentforce Vibes. Oh, that little thing.
Joshua Birk:
That little thing.
Mike Gerholdt:
Remember that thing that we launched back in March?
Joshua Birk:
Yeah. Yeah. I partnered with the great Lay Durafé, who I think inherited the presentation from another TN, and I'm blanking on his last name, but it was a presentation that they had presented at TDX, but it was more of a walkthrough of five coding tools. And we focused heavily on Agentforce Vibes itself when it comes to admins using it. Kate really hit a lot of the good highlights when it comes to where I think we're heading, but I think we're heading into this age of, for lack of a better term, and until I come up with a better term, it's the best one I've got, but vibe admining, which is basically the ability to use these AI tools. And this was a very interesting session to me because for one thing, I have slow walk talking about Agentforce Vibes to admins because it's basically Visual Studio Code in the cloud and that's a developer environment.
And so there's some things that if you're using it as a developer environment, would not be particularly admin friendly. But what we've evolved to is this scenario where the Agentforce Vibes panel is actually very user-friendly in general, and you can do a lot of work within the panel itself. And then the rest of VS Code really just kind of turns into a preview state. So you don't have to try to code Apex within VS Code or anything like that. And so that was one thing that I think the tool is friendlier. The other thing is that the models have just gotten so much better. And so Kate was talking about the example of being able to do an auto launch flow two years earlier, maybe even a year earlier, there's no way I would recommend admins trying to create an auto launch Flow within any of these tools because they simply weren't very good at it.
And there's technical reasons for that. Flow is kind of our own creation, whereas things like Apex and WC have a lot more information out there for the models to consume. But the models have become much friendlier and much more powerful. And what I would invite people to do is if you can find it in the Salesforce events, Lay created this prompt builder library, or I'm sorry, prompt library. And it shows just the breadth and the width of the things that these tools can do. And we used Vibes as our example in part because it's built right there in the org, it's a Salesforce product, et cetera, et cetera. But as I was saying before, many of these other clients, many of these other agentic things can still do very similar things.
And it's like the most popular use case that I think I'm seeing is like, "Hey, go tell me this thing that I'm very concerned about in my org," or, "Hey, I'm a day one admin and I need to know what's going on in my org. So can you generate a markdown file that gives me a report of all the flows that are in my org, which ones might be redundant, which ones might be old, that kind of thing. And these tools can just really generate that kind of thing in a fraction of a time that it would take a human to go through and go file by file by file and actually try to consume the information that's in your org and then try to compile it into something that you could hand off to another human being.
Kate Lessard:
Yeah, that's one of my favorite use cases for Vibes actually, is to just ask questions that I need to know about my org and my metadata. It's been incredibly helpful and powerful for that.
Mike Gerholdt:
I happen to, because I've owned Track long enough, look back 10 years ago in 2015 in the wayback machine. The top performing sessions were by Salesforce MVPs talking about I just inherited an org, now what do I do? And documenting an org. And it's interesting because now we're still talking about that, but we're talking about it through the lens of how can AI help me do this and move on to the stuff I really need to get done.
Joshua Birk:
Yep, exactly.
Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, it's the same problems. It's just we're using more advanced tools to solve it faster.
Joshua Birk:
Yeah. The other thing that I thought, I did not know we were going to announce at Dreamforce because there's-
Mike Gerholdt:
Because there's things that even we don't know.
Joshua Birk:
Even we don't know. And the big one for me was COA. So COA is a model that Salesforce has created in partnership with NVIDIA. And COA is what's called a post-train model, which means basically you take an empty bucket and you fill it with your own information. And the information we have filled it with is years of what's called synthetic data. So we're not using customer data, we're using artificial data we've created that looks like customer data. And the few interesting things about COA is, first of all, it's running on our own iron.
So it should be cheaper and faster for us to run, but also it should be more efficient because it doesn't have to know what the sourdough bread recipe is that your grandma... it's only trying to answer solutions from about CRM, right? It's very, very specific and very fine-tuned. And it should be available, I want to say now, I'd have to probably check the press release, but when you go to your dropdown of the models that you can select for Prompt Builder and Agentforce 5s, et cetera, it should be available under those. And I highly recommend, people. I'm dying to try it myself just to see what kind of distinctions I can see.
Mike Gerholdt:
I mean, that's interesting that COA is also was the name of Mark's dog when Salesforce was founded.
Joshua Birk:
Yes.
Mike Gerholdt:
We tend to do that. Tend to keep things interesting. Well, we're getting about to the point where most of my listeners are either getting ready to hop off a train or complete their dog walk. I know because I survey them. I'd love to think of, we're headed back to work on Monday after Dreamforce. What is the one thing that you would do or what is the one thing that you would dive into or two things, but stack rank them. And I started with Kate, so I'll start with Josh this time.
Joshua Birk:
Well, not to repeat myself, but like I said, I want to tinker with COA. I want to see if it has the tangible results that I do from a technical point of view, really believe it will. And then also just Lay gave me this whole library of prompts. And I mean, it was an interesting session to prepare for because these things have been moving so quickly that I really honestly wasn't sure what Vibes would be capable and what wasn't. And so one of the things I want to do is just take a turn and just start putting Vibes really through its faces, really push it to its limits and see exactly where it is. So keep an eye out. We've got a blog coming out about skills in general, and skills are the things that allow tools like Vibes to be quick and efficient because they're little micro instructions of how to do things like create a soccer query, create a custom object, update a custom object, create a dashboard. But then I think we're going to have some blog posts coming up that's going to take that one step further.
Mike Gerholdt:
Kate, how about you? You flew in.
Kate Lessard:
Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
Back to reality. There's nine or 10 users that need password resets, that's a given.
Kate Lessard:
Oh my gosh. Absolutely. Yeah, I've got them all set up with MFA. My baggage finally got here. Yeah, a couple things. And I think it goes back to when we were talking about the keynote, you'll hear some reiterated themes from me as well. I would start with security and I would start with that security essential front, security... Wow.
Mike Gerholdt:
Your fuse broke too.
Kate Lessard:
There's my fuse. Yeah, the Security Center Essentials and really those free things that I could present to my stakeholders, my leadership team as ways that we can really get more proactive about our security and then maybe evaluate some of the other enhanceable features that were discussed depending on what I have available in my org.
So I think I'd start with security, which I'm sure is not a surprise from anyone listening that knows me at all. And then the second thing, I would get hands on with Builder Central. So it's available as beta now and you can start building and even better, it's free. It's free with reasonable usage limits in every org. So I think that that would be my big exciting hands-on moment and really go experience for myself what I can build for my org and how AI can impact me and help me be both faster and then just continue to build these awesome trusted AI experiences for my users.
Mike Gerholdt:
I couldn't agree more. I'm of the generation that we used to say if it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't count because we got to drive people to log into Salesforce. And I remember I created a dashboard for an executive of logins and records changed to try and figure out, to show them that we're using the tool. And to them, I always told them, I said, "There's no dashboard for email at this company." And he said, "Well, no, because you can't get business done without email." And I said, "Well, there's your answer right there." I think this Dreamforce for me kind of reiterated the fact that it's still, if it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't matter, but now I need to get ready because the interface that somebody's going to be using might not be Salesforce.
And I need to think about do I have the foundation right? Have I been putting off all those business process changes, those field cleanups? I just did a blog post on metadata cleanup and I used Vibes for that. And I was scared to death using Vibes because there's still a whole lot of tabs that I had to ping Josh and be like, "What does this do?" And he's like, "Stay away from that tab. Fine. Just talk to it and it's okay. It's like hell." But that to me really, I need to make sure home base is set up so that when I sit down and have that next conversation, because I'm with you, Kate, on Builder Central to talk about, so where are we going?
Is there an AI tool that we're predisposed to rolling out company-wide? And then making that available to grab Salesforce data, but also making sure that when it does it, it doesn't just return gobbledygook because I have 1300 accounts with phone notes in the phone field because we never cleaned up our data. And so it's like one part of it is make the foundation so that whatever we decide to build, it's there. But the other thing is I now have all these tools that can compress time for me and really put... This was an idea I was floating past somebody because we've heard the term human in the loop, which was AI returning something, but then giving it to you. And we see that in all the builders too. You need to approve this, you need to do that. Even Slackbot will put together a message, but I was thinking more of admin at the helm.
Joshua Birk:
I like that.
Mike Gerholdt:
Which is you're in Builder Central and here's what I need done. I'm going to check what you're going to do, but you're going to build this stuff, but I'm going to check it and then we're still going to fix it and put eyes on it before it goes out the door. And I'm not just going to turn it loose. Even for Coworker, I would really want the five people that I feel are knowledgeable about AI and knowledgeable about our data to ask it questions so that I'm getting it thoroughly tested before I roll it out to Bob in Atlanta, who's going to ask it to make a list view every Thursday afternoon for his Friday call downs.
Kate Lessard:
Well, and that's it. The human at the helm, the admin at the helm. Admins are more important than ever, and we really need that strong knowledge that we already have. Everything that we've learned has set us up for this moment.
Joshua Birk:
Yeah. I'm trying to think of the phrase that Lay ended with, with his section of the presentation, but it was something along the lines of, do not replace your expertise with AI.
Mike Gerholdt:
That's good.
Joshua Birk:
Your expertise is still the driving force of making sure this stuff is going to work correctly.
Mike Gerholdt:
That's good. And it's still the differentiator for all that AI can create for you. It's the expertise of you saying, is this right for my org or is this right, right now?
Joshua Birk:
Yeah.
Mike Gerholdt:
Well, this is a fun conversation? Thank you all for joining me after Dreamforce and giving us a little bit to think about. I think the second half of the year is usually heading down and going into the holidays, but we have stuff to build and I'm kind of curious what dashboards are going to look like just given we can give it screenshots. So I think that's interesting. But Kate and Josh, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Joshua Birk:
Thanks for having us.
Kate Lessard:
Yeah, great to be here.
Mike Gerholdt:
So a big thanks to Kate and Josh for jumping in and recording this while our minds were still fresh off of Dreamforce. As always, I hope there's something from the conversation you can take back to your organization, your users, or the way that you think about your work as a Salesforce admin. Be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins podcast so you don't miss an episode because we have some really good ones coming up. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli, Founder and Principal Consultant for Throughline HR LLC, and William Walsh, Salesforce and AI Recruitment Lead at Harvey Nash.
Join us as we chat about what Salesforce employers are looking for in new hires and how to get your career started.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli and William Walsh.
How the Salesforce Admin job market has changed
Over the past few years, the role of the admin has changed a lot. It's no longer about how many certifications you have or how many users you can manage. While those skills are still important, being a great Salesforce Admin is much more about how you put that knowledge into action to support core business processes and generate value for your organization.
So how do you stand out from the crowd? That's what I wanted to talk about with Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli and William Walsh. As recruiters, they see the Salesforce Admin job market from both sides: what it's like when you're looking for a role and what employers are asking for when they hire.
Increasingly, it's not just about what you can do in Salesforce, but how you can connect it to the business and make an impact.
Talk about business impact
The number one thing that Maria looks for in a Salesforce Admin is requirements literacy. "It's not just being able to take a set of orders and execute it, but really be able to fine-tune that," she says. "Push back, make recommendations, be in front of what's happening and have that longer future vision, knowing that so many of these runways are going to be short with AI."
Showing you have that skill is tricky, but it starts with how you talk about your experience. Are you describing features, or are you talking about the benefits? Don't just list outcomes; talk about impact. You need to show that you can think bigger than what you're building and understand how it fits with larger organizational goals.
The power of showing up
William urges job seekers to spend real, face-to-face time in the Salesforce community. At this point, everybody has shiny, AI-polished LinkedIn profiles and resumes. But meeting someone and making a connection with them can be so much more powerful than sitting in front of your computer mass-applying to every job opening you come across.
"This ecosystem is super welcoming, and everybody wants to see everybody succeed," William says. "So go to some user groups, some local events, and you'll see how quickly people around you start to root for you and start to put your resume in front of the people they know."
Maria and William have a ton of great tips for interviews and navigating the Salesforce Admin job market, so make sure to listen to the full episode. And while you're at it, subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.
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Full show transcript
Mike:
The Salesforce admin job market looks a lot different than it did a few years ago. So, what are employers actually looking for right now? And how do you make sure your resume, experience, and interview skills line up with that? Well, today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm talking with Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli, founder of Throughline HR, and William Walsh, who leads Salesforce and AI recruitment at Harvey Nash. We get into why certifications alone aren't enough, how industry experience can help you stand out, and why curiosity and communication matter so much once you get into the interview. So, whether you're looking for your first admin job or your next admin, we're also going to tell you about where it's worth spending your time. With that, let's get Maria and William on the podcast. So, Maria and William, welcome to the podcast.
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Thank you so much for having.
William Walsh:
Thank you. Thank you for having us.
Mike:
This is going to be exciting. I have not had two people on in the job space ever, so I go from zero to two, which is smart. But Maria, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about what you do in the job recruiting, job placement space.
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Absolutely. Well, thanks so much for having us. My name is Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli. I am the founder and CEO and principal consultant for Throughline HR LLC. And very much in the vein of what we're talking about, this is my new solopreneurship venture launched in the last two months in response to everything that's happening in the job market. I've done every side of the recruiting, staffing, hired and being hired from doing Salesforce recruiting at Robert Half, supporting them, Protiviti, staff augmentation to going in-house with Vicasso, formerly Internet Creations, helping build both professional services and their ISV side. I worked at Salesforce directly in workforce development in Salesforce Talent Alliance under alliances and channels and helped get employer commitments to continuing to grow the ecosystem, investing in that top of the funnel Salesforce talent, building programs to help bring people in, admins, BAs, developers.
And now I am working all different roles, but still very much in touch with the Salesforce ecosystem, still working with so many of the amazing partners that I've built relationships with over the years, supporting outsource hiring, staffing, job coaching, and career guidance.
Mike:
Wow. So, a few things.
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Just a couple things.
Mike:
William, how about yourself? 
William Walsh:
Yeah, I don't know if I'm as impressive as Maria, but I'll try to keep up as we go along here. But I lead our Salesforce and AI recruitment practice at Harvey Nash. So, here, what I basically do is work with companies across not only the Salesforce ecosystem, but multiple CRMs as we continue to grow. And that ranges to help them build out their teams of admins, business analysts, all the way up to architects, AI specialists, data focused people and leadership roles as well. The neat thing about what I do is I work really closely with both sides of the market. So, I'm talking to not only hiring managers for what they need for their teams, but also speaking with Salesforce professionals every day on what they're seeing in the market and where they want to take their careers next. So, I think I get a pretty unique view of the market from both the employer and candidate side. 
And a big part of my job is understanding obviously where those two things line up. So, hope we can give everybody some good information today as to what employers are really looking for and how to stand out in this ever-changing job market.
Mike:
Yeah, I think that's why I was so excited. Shout out to Umer who was on the podcast a long time before he even joined Salesforce that connected all of us. But I love that both of you had the same but different lenses into the job market. And William, you set me up perfectly. So, I mean that's the first question on my list, which is when you look at the Salesforce job market right now, specifically for the admin role, what are you seeing?
William Walsh:
Yeah, I think it's definitely a more competitive market than it was a few years ago. I think there's a lot of really good admins out there. So, just being that Salesforce admin and having a few certifications on your resume isn't really necessarily enough anymore. What I'm seeing clients respond to is admins who really understand businesses behind the platform, whether it's sales, service, operations, data, which I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit more, but really admins who can show they've solved business problems in Salesforce are the ones that are standing out currently. People that can, again, not just be that general admin, but can differentiate themselves with whether it's an AI tool or a specific industry, that's kind of been the biggest thing that I've seen change. It's become a much broader role. Again, a company would just look for someone who was able to manage users, build reports, handle workflows, keep the org up and running.
Now they really want someone who can be a real business partner for them, understand the data and automation integrations. So, I don't think the admin role has necessarily become much of a different role, but it's definitely, you want to add some more skill sets to just your generalist admin at this point.
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Absolutely agree. I think we're seeing a really important evolution and one that really follows a lot of what we've seen before in ERP and MCSC before where you're getting a role that used to be about just configuration, build this, set this up. You had a lot of single seat admins that assist admin, a lot of people didn't even call themselves Salesforce admins when I first started recruiting in this space, which is what made it so difficult. And now there's this concentrated branding and it's evolving into this governance and you really need to be able to stand out in ways that say, to William's point, this is an outcome I can provide, not here's the number of seats I can manage, but this is what I'm able to do in terms of business impact. I understand how this is going to affect what the top line is for the company, how this evolves into the mission. People need to understand the actual companies, not just the platform itself.
Mike:
Those are really good points, I think. And that's one thing to jump off of too is so broader, I heard partnering with the organization, not just managing. Over the last few years then, what kind of roles or skills have changed or grew in terms of what employers are looking for in Salesforce admins? Maria, I'll start with you. 
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Absolutely. One of the things I've seen the most is really that requirements literacy, not just being able to take a set of orders and execute it, but really be able to fine tune that, push back, make recommendations, be in front of what's happening and have that longer future vision knowing that so many of these runways are going to be short with AI. Things are going to continue to change at such an insane pace that's not going to slow down. It's not, well, after this week, after this cycle, after this next set of release notes, things are going to calm down. They're just not. And that resiliency means that when an admin has a set of requirements, they need to be able to show judgment and wisdom, not just knowledge holding.
Mike:
William, you mentioned in yours that there was a certain set of things you kind of look for, things that are changing. Could you expand on that?
William Walsh:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we all know AI has been the big point as of late over the last few years, and I think data is kind of the big one, right? You can have any AI tool in the world. If your data isn't clean, it's not going to work correctly for your business, right? And so, I think data's a big one, automation's a big one. And as we see AI show up more and more, you're seeing a lot more demand for admin to have the experience with your specific industry clouds as well, your specific Salesforce products. And I think that people would honestly rather hire admin to understand, again, how to use Salesforce to improve business process rather than just someone who has that long list of certifications. I think when people first get into Salesforce early on, at least back in the day, it was, "Hey, get as many search as possible." And search are great.
They get you in the door, but the real world experience is kind of what gets you over the finish line. And I think that's super important for people to understand.
Mike:
So, we've danced a little bit on industry and William, you brought it up. I think Maria, your answers have alluded to it. If I'm a Salesforce admin or looking to become a Salesforce admin, and I have a lot of a certain industry perspective, let's say Finserv or banking or automotive, I'm picking the big categories, should I really lean into that or should I just look for an admin role in any industry because I know Salesforce administration?
William Walsh:
Yeah, I would say either or, right? I think it totally depends on if you surely have a true love for that specific industry and working in that industry, you can definitely stick with it, but you just have to, again, not just be a generalist admin. I think within that industry, then you have to start diving a bit deeper into, again, if it's Finserv, say specifically Revenue Cloud and more that you can do within Revenue Cloud and CPQ. And again, learning more AI integration tools that'll help your specific business within that industry. Again, it's like I said, not just being that generalist admin I think is the main part, but I also find that sometimes you can get yourself into a spot where I feel too niche, right? And when I'm looking for a role, I can only go for roles in this specific industry because that's where my experience is. 
And so, I can see where people have those pain points. I think, again, if that's what you would really enjoy to do and that's your passion, stick with it and just broaden yourself within that industry. Otherwise, it's definitely, I always find being at a consultancy or being at a partner is always good because you get to have your hands on a few different platforms at once or get to be in a few different engagements to where you can really work on a Sales Cloud environment here, but then be in a Service Cloud org over here. And so, you get your hands on multiple different things and continue to grow your skill sets, not only in one specific industry, but all throughout all the Salesforce clouds.
Mike:
Maria, I'd love your thoughts. Should I lean into my industry first or should I lean into my admin skills and apply across the board?
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
It's a very tricky question because ideally it's one of those, well, it depends, the lawyer answer. On the surface level, I would say yes, lead into the industry because of how that supports the differentiator of understanding the business outcomes. If you are coming from banking, if you are coming from healthcare, if you are coming from education and re-skilling into Salesforce, you're going to be able to speak more intelligently, especially at some of these, I'm going to use this phrase lightly now, entry level roles because you don't have entry level understanding of what the company is trying to do, what kind of outcomes they're looking to drive. And that's going to really support what I said about that requirements, scrutiny, the wisdom, the choices that you're making, and that's going to be an important differentiator.
However, in today's job market, I would not tell somebody to limit themselves to only applying to jobs inside of their industry because there is a transferability, there is a lot of change happening inside of all of these industries, and people at the end of the day need to pay their bills. And sometimes, there just may not be enough opportunities in a given industry that makes sense for them when they're looking at jobs that are either available for remote, that are in their geographical area, if they're looking at companies that are pushing RTO, et cetera. So, if somebody really had a passion to what William and I believe you alluded to earlier about an industry that maybe they don't have deep experience in or maybe they don't have a lot of career experience at all, finding ways to stand out and deepen that industry knowledge so that you can stand out, I think is just as important as having that deep industry experience and figuring it out.
Mike:
Again, you set me up perfect for what I was thinking because I was kind of hovering around this question, but let's jump into this part of it. For each of you, when a candidate lands on your desk, what is it that makes them stand out versus others?
William Walsh:
Yeah, so I can start. I mean, like I said, I think for me, certifications matter. It shows commitment, it shows employers that they've got some confidence in your technical foundation, that kind of stuff. But what's really important to me is when I sit down, not only look at a resume, but when I speak to someone, can they walk me through three really impactful, at least three really impactful kind of projects that they've delivered? And nine times out of 10, a client is going to want to talk to someone who can walk them through really impactful projects they've been able to deliver rather than someone who's just got a list of certifications on their resume. So, I think that's super important. Another thing is having a bit of technical ability as well. Again, having that crossover, differentiating yourself from just your generalist admin, someone that can. 
Again, when I say technical sales, I do not mean coding Apex, but more so building and configuring and being able to do a lot of work with workflows nowadays. And again, having some AI focused tools that you've worked with in your current role. Most clients now are using AI one way or another, and when they're hiring an admin, again, they want that person. A lot of times they are taking on the headache of trying to integrate that tool correctly, and it's probably not their role. And so, they want to have someone that they can bring in right away and understand what exactly is going to work for their business and how they can best get their platform to where they need it to get to. So, like I said, I do look for certifications, they're great, but at the same time, it's really about real life impactful projects you've been able to deliver on and what your role was in those projects.
If you're able to get a bit more technical and tell me you did some of the configuring yourself, that goes a long way when you put it in front of a client rather than, again, I was just kind of creating dashboards and all the other generalist admin stuff that we would usually look at five, six years ago.
Mike:
Yeah. Maria, I'd love your perspective on what makes a candidate stand out to you.
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Yeah, I think there's a handful of things. One, just being completely candid, that they look like a real candidate. The fake candidate's a real thing now, that they have verifiable information that they are active in whether it's LinkedIn, the Trailblazer community. I'm seeing posts that look like they're written by a real person. I've seen a resume that looks like it's written by a real person, just really to start at the surface level. And that can be really tricky because I have seen profiles, LinkedIn profiles, resumes, emails, communication, LinkedIn posts that because of trying to demonstrate this very, I think, professional demeanor and best practices, sometimes it can come across so boilerplate. My spidey sense tingles for a second and I catch myself going, "Is this person real?" And that is a real risk that people run now in polishing their information off. So, I'm just going to start at that surface level. 
Once we're actually interacting with a candidate and we verify this is a real person, not a bot, what really looks is that what's driving a person's? Where is the learning resiliency? Where is the resiliency within the stories that they are telling, not just the polished, "I was able to increase this by this percent and that percent." That's wonderful. Having those numbers is great. That is now the bare minimum. When somebody can say, "But," adding to the star method, that an extra R, that reflection, "But now with this new technology, I would do it differently. But now knowing how our customer base changed six months later, I would do this. But now knowing that more and more companies are going to be absorbing other companies, I would approach this slightly differently." Right?
That reflection piece of saying, not just giving me the story outcome, but how they would take that into a similar project going forward, or even if they're at that level, right at that cusp of people leadership, how they would train somebody else based on their experience of going through those steps, that to me is a significant differentiator because that tells me that person has the ability to stay the long run, that they are not just looking at just having that list of facts and figures for the resume, the output, the promotions, but that they're actually looking to build both within themselves and around them.
Mike:
So, along those lines, thinking of where candidates spend their time, because I mean, I'm old enough to remember that I used to have to go to a bookstore to look up resume templates and go buy special resume paper. Now everything's electronic. I won't date myself, but I did in high school have to check out the internet for 15 minutes at a time. It's amazing we had anything done with dial-up back then, but we did. But you mentioned polish, and I think it's crazy that there's bots out there, but we're talking about real humans. Where are the real humans putting too much energy into either their resume or their experience or something that's not actually helping them in the hiring process? 
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Well, one of the top ways I think is just in their general job search. So, LinkedIn did a pretty big overhaul of their algorithm in 2025 to an algorithm called 360 Brew, and it really rewards humanity and consistency within the process, their post, their about section, their experience, the resume that's uploaded, their interactions with recruiters on the backend, et cetera. And putting everything into a ChatGPT, a Claude, a AI of choice and spitting it out is actually. I'm finding a lot of very talented people are telling me, "Oh my gosh, three years ago I couldn't open my LinkedIn because every recruiter from here to Singapore was in my DMs and now it's just crickets." And most of that is because everything is so polished and saturated and M-dashed and if not this, then that that it's getting downgraded on the algorithms. And the same things happen, and that means that they're not showing up high in the recruiter back end of LinkedIn as much as high in the results.
So, really being able to have a unique voice and tone and sounds like the person that shows up in the interview, it does matter. And it's a hard line to draw because people want to present the best version of themselves, but that kind of certified human best version of themselves is mattering more and more. 
Mike:
Yeah. I mean, it's very tempting to feed your resume or your LinkedIn URL to AI, pick which one and have it spit stuff out. I mean, it can write how remarkable you are in some pretty punchy language that you're like, "Oh, I don't think I would've written that before." But the other half of that is everyone else is doing it, so now yours sounds less human just like everyone's. William, let's take a different angle for you. Opposite of that, what are candidates sometimes underestimating they should spend time with that hiring managers are really looking for out of candidates? 
William Walsh:
Yeah, I mean, I think it's tough on the resume side of things. What I would tell people is communication is the number one thing. Like you both just hit on, your resume can be great. It can look like you are the number one person that should get this job, but at the end of the day, I think, again, an admin is kind of sitting between that business and the technology team, and they need to understand how to talk to VP of sales one minute. They need to understand how to talk to a developer the next minute, and communication is key. And so, it's hard to say on paper, "Hey, what am I maybe overlooking here?" But it's really the communication aspect, and that comes from working on projects, volunteering. If it's tough to get a role, volunteer somewhere on a real project, get hands-on experience where you'll be able to explain what you really did. 
Again, I think it's tough to say what people are overlooking on their resume. Again, everybody's resume can look great. It's really, once you get in front of someone, the communication aspect, because that's the differentiator at this point. Like we just said, everybody's got their resumes being made by an AI tool somewhere. They're all going to look great. What are you like when we get on the phone? And if you are really able to, again, explain what you can do for a business, the value you can bring for a business, and not just your typical reading off your resume, which a lot of folks do, a lot of folks will just rely strictly on their resume and just go into an interview studying up their resume and the bullet points that they have in there so they can just hit those soon as a question comes up.
You need to be able to be a real person. People want to work with people they enjoy working with. I think that's a big thing that a lot of times people forget. You can be the best candidate for a role, but if you aren't clear with your communication, you don't seem like an enjoyable person to work with on a daily basis, there's a good chance they'll go with someone that may have a lesser skillset just because, hey, we can train this person up to be where you are and we really enjoy working with them. Again, they're clear with their communication. They can translate business needs and requirements to our technology team well. So, that stuff is what really I see matters the most once you get into that intro stage and meeting a client.
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
And just to add to that, William, I think the asking questions, not just having answers. I think your point about having the answers, the mission statements, the details memorized is so spot on because I think the risk of that is there isn't that conversation where people are figuring it out together sometimes and showing up and saying, "I'm not sure, but here's how I think I would approach the problem." Or even just asking back, "Well, what's your internal method? Where would you start?" And then taking that from there. Sometimes even within the not knowing, how people approach that situation of not knowing, I think is really underestimated of how to show up or coming back.
I had a candidate years ago who bombed a question, just stumbled and fumbled and got flustered and frustrated and 24, 48 hours later, sent me an email and said, "I looked it up. I actually didn't know about this. Here's what I learned. Here's how I would approach it right now. I actually though this was really interesting. I found a community group. They have a call here. If anybody else struggles with this question, you can send them this link and they can learn more about it." And actually gave me their references, the work that they did, and that's what comes into that learning resiliency that was... I think people underestimate the ability to come back or not know and demonstrate how that not knowing makes them someone that would be enjoyable to work with, that the team could see themselves being with. In real life, you don't have the answers sometimes when you're figuring the problems out.
William Walsh:
I was just going to jump in there and say, what does a good admin do? They ask questions, right?
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Yeah.
William Walsh:
You don't get told to do something and then just put your head down and do it. Usually you want to know, "Hey, why do we want to do this? What is the value for the business that we're able to do this?" Right?
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
100%. 
William Walsh:
And so, you want to know what that outcome is going to lead to, or where in that business is this going to help support if we're able to create this workflow this way or whatever the case may be. And so, a good admin asks questions and you have to have that same approach when you're going into an interview. You have to, again, not just be there with. You have no idea how many times I get feedback from a client where they say, "Hey, they seem like they're great, but they seem very robotic, right? They were just kind of reading off a sheet. Here's question, answer, question, answer." And a lot of times, clients want candidates to put them on their toes and ask questions that they might not even know the answers to. But for them, that's in their head they're going, "Oh wow, you know what? That's great. I didn't even think about that."   
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
And that can be a small failure of the hiring process as well because the roboticness happens on both sides. You have hiring managers that have their rubrics and going through, and it's very important that we have non-biased criterion that we're hiring towards the competencies and the skill sets. And also, there needs to be room in that interview process to have that conversation and measure someone not just on their. Did they guess the answer correctly? Did they memorize the right answer? Were they able to regurgitate that? But were they thoughtful? Did they have really good questions, inviting and making enough time and room for that instead of filling every single space with call and response? 
Mike:
Yeah, I can't agree more with both of what you've said. I think in the times that I've been interviewing for different positions, both myself and interviewing to fill positions for other teams, nine times out of 10, I enjoy it if the candidate doesn't know the answer, but tells me their thought process to getting to an answer. I say an answer because they may not know if it's correct or not until they continue to research it, but it's understanding their thought process in that interview that I always wanted to know. At least for me, that's what I've always found valuable.
William Walsh:
Absolutely. And you see a lot of times, there's many different ways to do things within Salesforce, within many orgs. And a lot of times when people are interviewing, the main basis of it is, "I want to see how your mind works. I want to see how you get from point A to point B." Not to say it's wrong or right, but I'm curious. I think, again, like you just said, a lot of it is how does your mind work? And that's a huge part of what we see on a lot of interviews as well. Not necessarily it was the wrong or right answer, because usually there's a lot of right answers, but just how did you get there in your mind? How do you get from point A to B? It's always interesting for people to see.
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Curiosity is such an important word there because there's such a performance to the interview process and whereas the actual job requires so much curiosity. And if you can demonstrate that, I think that's going to be a significant differentiator toward and hit all the points I think we hit, making somebody be able to understand, "I understand what it's going to be like to work with this person. Maybe they didn't come to the right answer, but I feel like we could have the type of conversation that would yield the best answer, the learning resiliency, the ability to continue to develop knowledge."
Mike:
Yeah. It's interesting, Maria, you bring that up because on the admin relations team, we've done surveys and had some research done. More than a few times. And every single time, curiosity or curiousness is usually one or two on the list of traits. I want to jump ahead to that first job, but I want to think about it a little bit differently because for a long time in the ecosystem it was, do I become an admin? Do I become a consultant? I think it's probably changed now where a lot of companies are hiring admins. A lot of, William, you brought it up. Some people are choosing to be consultants, but I also think there's contracting work. And the bulk of the people I know do contracting work. And I kind of almost think of that as you can work for an organization, you can do consulting where you're under somebody else's shingle, or you can do contract work.
And I'd be curious, what is a trait or how would an admin, a person looking to get into that job role say, "Oh, I need to work for an organization and I'll be a good fit or I'm really a good fit to be a contract admin or I really want to do consulting." How would they find that or what is something they should look at themselves to determine what path of those three to go down?
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
I think to start, I can start on that one as I moved into the consultant contractor seat myself. I think looking at what part of the work excites you the most is important. If it's that initial gathering the requirements, figuring it out, solving the problem, meeting new people, working with new teams, if that initial part of it is not what you overcome to get to the solution that then you maintain, then you continue to build upon, I think the contracting consulting often can tend to be a path that people will continue to stay very motivated in because there is a Groundhog's Day to that type of work, right? You have to meet a lot of new people over and over again. You kind of very Sisyphean, you roll that boulder up the hill, you get to the top and boom, it's right back down at the bottom with a new project.
Whereas somebody who enjoys finishing a project, scratching something off the to-do list, looking upon the Simba, everything the light touches is what you have configured landscape and then continuing to improve upon that probably is looking for more of that in-house seat, looking for more of that stability and is not going to enjoy that contract work where they're just constantly inheriting a new mess, a new series of problems and nothing ever feels finished. 
William Walsh:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm a big believer in contract work. I've done a lot of work with a lot of partners with contractors. I think if you're trying to break into the ecosystem, I think it's great. You get exposure to a lot of different environments like I kind of touched on before, different businesses, different problems. And a lot of it comes at a quicker speed. Again, if you were just at that solo in-house role, you're dealing with your org and at the pace that your organization wants to go with that. And from an employer's perspective, I think you're able to actually point to projects, real projects that you've studied that you've worked on rather than just saying, "Hey, I've studied Salesforce. I've gotten my certifications." And so, I think, again, people can help... What I think is always interesting is people sometimes feel like they have to completely start over if they're trying to get their start in Salesforce.
And what I always try to tell people is use your previous career when you come into Salesforce, connect those dots. If you come from a sales background, you understand sales processes, right? If you come from a finance background, you understand financial processes. If you come from customer service, you understand that whole customer journey, right? And so, go into a role within Salesforce to where you can utilize your previous career and again, the business knowledge that can actually make you a better Salesforce admin is ultimately being able to... Again, the business knowledge can actually make you a better Salesforce admin because Salesforce is ultimately a business platform, right? So, if you have that experience, you can utilize that in multiple different ways in Salesforce.
And whether that's with a partner, whether that's in-house, I think, again, contracting is a great way to get your foot in the door. And there's not much commitment on the client side either, so it's a lot easier where a client, it's almost, they can call it a try before they buy type of period. And it's the same on both sides, right? I think it's the same for a candidate as well, right? It's for them to try out the role without much of a large commitment as well.  
Mike:
I like that. I'm realizing we spent a lot of time from the admin perspective, which makes sense. It's an admin podcast, but I do want to focus at least one question on employers, and I'm going to try and go right for the heart of the main thing. In both of your experiences, what is the number one thing employers are getting wrong when they're writing admin job descriptions? 
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
William, do you want to start on that one? I'm happy to jump in.
William Walsh:
Yeah, yeah, I can start on that one. I think, again, the funny part is, and Maria would probably say the same thing, I don't know if anybody writes job descriptions anymore, unfortunately. And so, I think that's a big problem is they go into, again, your ChatGPT or your clone and say, "Hey, create me a Salesforce admin job description." And you look at a lot of them, it's your basic, again, like we talked about your generalist admin kind of bullet points in there and people will apply and then they go to talk to people and then they start to realize these are all great generalist admins, but not what we need. And so, I think a lot of it comes on the employer side where they need to really have a human type up that job description, have someone who's working with Salesforce every day in the business say exactly what our pain points are and what someone can come in and help us bring value right away. 
And I think that's the big issue. Like I said, most of the, I would say nine out of 10 job descriptions I see are written by some type of AI tool. And you can tell right away, you could copy and paste most of them and put them into the same job description for different companies, for different industries. They're all basically the same. So, I think that's on the employer to really be better at doing their due diligence on what we're actually looking for. And when I work with a client, we'll see it time and time again where, "Hey, we're missing the mark here, we're missing the mark here." And that's on us to do our due diligence to say, okay, what is really needed? Not just your Salesforce. I know you need a Salesforce admin, but what does your Salesforce admin look like compared to what this organization's Salesforce admin might look like?
They can be totally different job titles and requirements, right? And so, employers need to do a much better job of actually describing what that role is going to look like and not just your basic, "Hey, we want someone who can, again, create flows and document requirements and all your basic kind of stuff." Right? So, I think that's what I would say is most of the stuff I see is AI written and they don't really take their time and then they find two, three months down the road, why have we still not found this person? Maybe it's because we're not targeting the right audience.
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
100% agree. I'll put a bold prediction that if in three to six months you go and start looking at admin jobs, how many of them are going to have completely retired certs still listed as the relevant or we had talked about it before, must have five years of experience in something that has existed in five months. There is a basic lack of understanding of what they're looking for in the job description. And a lot of time it's a speed thing, right? People want to go for, "Okay, we want to hit same as the candidates. They want to hit the keywords, they want to hit a high search, they want to show up on the right people's feed." So, a lot of times it's kind of a regurgitation, it's thrown into AI. It's dusting off an old job description from the last time they hired, whether that was three years or three months ago and reposting it. 
And what employers really need to be doing, it's something that I work with a lot of employers on is looking forward in the requisition. I need somebody who is going to join us for this thing that we're doing, not just a list of what we've needed up until now, right? Showing where that investment is going to be and having that path in mind, not just, I need someone who checks this boxes and great drinking game in recruiting and hiring is hit the ground running, right? You'll be blasted. I need someone who can hit the ground running and said, "Okay, when we get to the finish line, what do they do then?" Because you have to think forward. Understanding what that rubric is and what the weighting is around things. I can't tell you what, especially in, I would say 2012 through '17, you saw the job descriptions, excellent verbal communication skills and jobs that are not client facing, right?
Being clear about what the job actually requires and making sure that those requirements fit, that they're just not the grab bag of keywords that people are just used to seeing, but say looking at, "Hey, what does the data judgment look like? How good are they at requirements gathering? How are we going to actually measure that in the interview process? Why is that important? Who is it important for? What should that look like? What does success look like in the past?" But also what could success look like in the future and not narrowing it down so tightly. And then the last piece, and I'll say the kind of small kind of controversial thing is I think more companies need to pay for the work product from the interviews. A lot of times they give them real business problems and there is a very exploitative aspect of interviewing where sometimes you get a lot of knowledge from very excellent candidates and these candidates are going on a lot of job interviews.
It's exhaustive. You go on LinkedIn and see, I interviewed a hundred times to get this job. I applied to 200 jobs to get this. If somebody gets to the end of the process and you are going to ask them to do a take home assignment, the best way you can get the most out of them, give them a reasonable contractor rate, give them work that you can use and get the information from them and really narrow it down because you will be really intense about who you get to that final process if you know you have to pay for that work product. And candidates would really respect, I think, being able to give work that matters, especially if they're looking for work. 
Mike:
Wow, I like that. That's very different than anything I've ever heard. And it would make me rethink a lot of the stuff that I've delivered because I know in the interviews I've been asked to deliver some sort of project or here's an org and here's a scenario that we gave 20 other candidates. We want to see what you do. I like that twist to be really something tangible. When I push my presenters in admin track for Dreamforce or TDX, I always say, when you get done with your presentation, think about what the person's going to do when they stand up. What do they do next? And I'm going to do the same and hold myself accountable for when we end the podcast, the listener doesn't just take out their earbuds or probably switch over to Apple Music or something and finish the rest of their dog walk.
But if you were, because in my world, it would be really cool to get the three of us on stage at TDX, which is about six months from now. But if somebody was listening today and looking for an admin job, maybe they're employed, maybe it's their first job, maybe it's their third job, depending on no matter where they're at, where would you tell them to focus their energy? 
William Walsh:
I guess I could jump in on this one, Maria. And I would just say, I think we've hit on it a few times, but be very clear about what you actually want to be hired for, right? I think a lot of people's resumes can be a bit ambiguous in that. Make your resume and LinkedIn reflect that as well, right? Don't make a hiring manager dig through four or five pages to figure out what you can do. I'd spend a lot of time networking. I'd go to Salesforce as an awesome ecosystem. We talked about Mid-Atlantic Dreaming, which myself and Maria were at. We've talked about obviously Dreamforce coming up and TDX. And so, there's a bunch of networking events out there and obviously myself and Maria are also part of user groups. There's a ton of user groups out there that are obviously free to join, right? Be involved, network.   
Again, talk to Salesforce professionals, talk to as many recruiters as you can. I know sometimes, people can think recruiters can be annoying, but I promise you, they're just getting you in front of people that you would've otherwise not been in front of. Our goal is to just introduce you to other people. And so, get as many recruiters as possible, consulting partners. The job market is super competitive, right? You can't rely exclusively on applying to jobs on LinkedIn all day long. You have to know people in the ecosystem. You have to get your name out there, get your face out there, make it known that you're a part of this ecosystem and this ecosystem is super welcoming and everybody wants to see everybody succeed. So, you get to network a bit, get a chance to get to some user groups, some local events, and you'll see how quickly people around you start to root for you and start to put your resume in front of people that they know in the ecosystem as well. 
And so, that's the one thing that I think some people miss out on. They kind of really rely on just, "Hey, I applied to 20 jobs today on LinkedIn." Again, get out there, network with people in the ecosystem. This ecosystem is awesome and super welcoming. I don't know if I've ever met somebody in this ecosystem that wasn't rooting for everybody else around them. Everybody can win. So, I would say network as much as possible. There's a ton of different things out there for people that are trying to make their way into the ecosystem to get into. And again, you get in front of the right people, you get yourself, make some friends in the ecosystem and you'll see how quickly things start to move in the right direction for you. 
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Yeah, I 100% agree. I think the networking aspect has not changed. With everything that has changed in the last 15, 20 years in Salesforce, what has not changed is the power of community, the power of showing up, asking questions and getting connected. And that does not mean you have to be the most active on social media. You can be active in real life, but really showing up and participating in community events, the events that are available, listening to the podcast, et cetera, is so important to engage. The other thing I would say is to really look at your LinkedIn profile, your resume, your email communications, and also your networking prep and kind of filter everything through.
Why are you asking? Why this person? Why this company? Why this outcome? So, what? Why does it matter inside of all of it? And then the how. So, when you're answering interview questions, when you're networking, when you're sharing your elevator pitch, really honing in on those three aspects I think are going to yield more human conversations versus just a bullet list brag show. People are trying to get so much information out. We forget that within that efficiency, it still needs to be a conversation. So, really practicing that human aspect and giving people context and understanding and not trying to be perfect, but just showing up consistently I think is going to be the most important thing that people can do. And try to un-AI your LinkedIn information. I cannot stress that enough. Your headline, your about, and your experience section should match. 
It should be consistent and it should have some sort of human aspect to it because I don't think people realize how many profiles and information get passed over because of either algorithmically, it's too polished or the lead is buried. 
Mike:
Yeah. I mean, I think that's a perfect way to end this podcast. I couldn't think of it any better. I mean, I know the more than handful of people I've interviewed, every single one of them has come back to a user group or some sort of Salesforce event that, hey, I went to and I didn't have a job and I walked around the room and sure enough, a couple weeks later, people were calling me or an employer called me because they saw me and got to talk with me, which essentially elevated you above that stack of resumes that they were already looking at. So, I appreciate it. Maria, William, thank you for spending this time going over what is an ever-changing job market, what is constantly being invaded by AI and uninvaded by AI, I think, and helping admins try to find that niche and try to find those jobs that are really rewarding for them because I know the ones that do end up presenting everywhere and you can always just tell it in them.
So, thanks for spending the time with us and thanks for helping out the admin community.
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Well, thank you so much.
William Walsh:
Awesome. Thank you so much for having us.
Mike:
Well, I really want to thank Maria and William for being on the podcast. It was great that I could be connected with you to talk about everything that admins are looking for in this job market and really help us make sense of what employers are actually looking for in Salesforce admins right now. For me, I think the big takeaway is that job search can't be just about adding another certification or sending out more applications. You've got to be clear about the problems you've solved, show how you think, ask good questions, and most importantly, get involved in the Salesforce community so people know who you are and what you can do. Now I want to thank you for listening and if you know a Salesforce admin who's looking for their next opportunity, share this episode with them. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.