With so many of us facing unprecedented downtime in 2020, some have resorted to using that extra time for education. Salesforce’s interactive online training platform, Trailhead, provides learners with everything you need to get skilled up on Salesforce technical acumen and, ultimately, certified.
You’ve completed all the badges and gotten certified, and now you’ve got to figure out how to translate your knowledge of the theoretical company Universal Containers or Ursa Solar into something convincing enough for someone to hire you in a job interview. It’s probably hard to see how your intricate knowledge of how to configure the fake company Cloud Kicks’ Salesforce instance is going to help you land your first admin job. You’re not alone. It’s not easy.
It takes a precise way of thinking to be able to translate Trailhead lessons into your real-life problem-solving, and it takes time to hone that technique. It’s possible - hell, I started off a creative writer and ended up a Salesforce architect - but it does take some practice.
So in the spirit of the holidays, here are three exercises that I’ve done in the past to tackle that learning curve:
Train your brain to see in terms of Salesforce. If you’ve gotten this far down the Salesforce journey, you probably already have an aptitude for databases, or at least spreadsheets. As you drive around your town, or watch commercials, or scroll through news feeds, start to think about what features different companies would have in their Salesforce org. Imagine you’re the admin for all of the companies you see and it’s your job to come up with the bells and whistles that would set this bakery apart from the one down the corner. Or next time you go to the doctor, imagine what the office CRM would look like if it were on Salesforce. What automation would be necessary? What automation would be awesome?
Use your dev orgs. In order to get through Trailhead, you have to setup various Playgrounds which is where you configure things that Trailhead then checks before you move on. You can use these orgs outside of the Trailhead instructions. As you start to see things in terms of Salesforce, start to build those things out in your dev orgs. These are sandbox environments so there’s no harm in playing around. As you imagine various business models, business scenarios or problems that need solving, once your brain’s eye sees it in terms of Salesforce, build out what you see in a dev org. If you’re wrong, you can delete stuff, rework it and try again. Worst case, just spin up a new one and try something else. For example, one of the people that taught me Salesforce built a dev org around the North Pole. Santa Clause was the top of the role hierarchy, Mrs. Claus was COO, the reindeer were like vice presidents and so on and so forth. So she used what she imagined to be the process of receiving requests from kids (service cloud), checking if they were nice, building the toy (product development & management) and getting it back to them (shipping and warehousing) as processes in Salesforce.
Stay in your lane. As you can see, you don’t have to know much about business in general to become a good admin. The more useful skill is being able to translate what Salesforce is capable of into something that the customer wants. So even if all you know is the North Pole, you can still use that to learn how to configure Salesforce. If you watch soap operas all day, build an org around the main character’s family. If you like books, make an org as if you’re a publisher reading books and rating them. If you like video games, imagine how the database behind Fortnite is setup and build out your own. Regardless what you know and what you’re comfortable with, use that to your advantage when learning Salesforce. Try to always tether back to that and you’ll learn more quickly.
After you’ve gotten Salesforce certified, your next priority should be to shorten the time it takes for you to come up with a solution to a business problem. The only way to do that is to interact with business problems. If you have the luxury of being able to get paid while doing this, that’s great, but most people will have to learn this on their own time, and that’s why these three tips will be helpful in getting that ball rolling. The more lessons you can teach yourself with theoretical business problems, the better.
The famous Thomas Edison quote references how his thousands of failed attempts to create the light bulb weren’t failures, but rather “1000 ways not to make a lightbulb”. The more “failures” you have, the higher your likelihood of getting it right the next time, so trust your training and your problem-solving skills and earn your stripes risk-free in a dev org.
If you’d like some guidance on how to mold your knowledge into a Salesforce database, just hit me up!