Today Salesforce is so much more than a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Technology that was originally built as a CRM platform has expanded to encompass near-infinite use cases.
The Salesforce platform now offers a robust suite of cloud-based tools and functionalities that can be configured to streamline business processes across any role in an organization, for companies across all industries.
For such companies, the heart of their operations is the Salesforce Administrator, a key player responsible for ensuring smooth operations, project management, data management, and process automation for all the users who rely on Salesforce each day.
Less Time Training, More Time Innovating
Administrators (or Trailblazers, as Salesforce refers to them) are effectively business analysts and problem solvers. They collaborate closely with stakeholders, identifying pain points in the organization's processes and finding innovative ways to address them using Salesforce functionalities.
With a vast array of Salesforce products—from Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Salesforce CPQ, Manufacturing Cloud, and more—admins have a fair share of responsibility when it comes to mastering all of the platform's capabilities, including dashboards, workflows, and data management.
While many systems administrators are used to a daily workload of teaching and training users on various features of a platform, Salesforce’s famously user-friendly interface and its huge library of webinars and tutorials called “Trailheads,” reduce this aspect of the role considerably.
If users are able to teach themselves the tool—or at least pick it up with relatively little guidance—the Salesforce admin job can use their time to innovate processes and harness the full potential of Salesforce's capabilities and its latest features.
Creating Complex Configurations—Easily
Salesforce offers a high degree of customization, empowering administrators to leverage its composability to configure the system according to their organization's unique needs.
Moreover, most Salesforce configurations can be accomplished without writing a line of code. Using the Lightning Web Component (LWC) interface, users are able to drag and drop different modules to create new workflows. Tools like Process Builder can optimize operations, saving time and reducing human errors.
Plus, with the magic of modern APIs, companies that require specific integrations with third-party vendors can maintain these connections seamlessly.
Benefits like these lower the barrier for the Salesforce administrator job in bridging the gap between technical functionalities and the business's needs, ensuring that the Salesforce platform aligns with the company's goals.
Anyone Can Be a Salesforce Admin
Given that entry-level workers and beginners without any Salesforce experience are able to pick it up quickly, this also means that anyone can become a Salesforce administrator.
Particularly, anyone who’s interested in implementing digital transformation for their company can study up, take the Salesforce administrator certification exam, and steward their company into evolution—no matter what their current role is.
For instance, although Diana Sehawneh is the full-time Quality Coordinator for MaryRuth Organics, she is also leading the charge for Salesforce enablement and digital transformation at her company.
“I honestly learned Salesforce [and Propel Software] on the go. It was definitely self-taught throughout the whole process. I would go to the Trailheads in the moment, for whatever I was looking for. A lot of YouTube videos help a lot too. It's been fun.”
LISTEN TO OUR CONVERSATION WITH DIANA SEHAWNEH ON THE PLATFORM RULES PODCAST.
From her role on the Quality Management team—not IT or systems administrator—Sehawneh’s journey proves that anyone in an organization can pick up Salesforce and transform their own processes as well as their team’s—and eventually even the company’s.
CONCLUSION
You don’t have to be a Salesforce professional or even have a career path as a solutions administrator to be able to easily adapt, learn, and innovate within the ever-evolving Salesforce ecosystem.
When it comes to those responsible for administrating solutions for its end-users, those working with Salesforce are more advanced administrators; they’re much less in the business of training than in the business of problem-solving and innovating.
See for yourself how simple it can be to transform your product management workflows with Propel Software, built entirely on the Salesforce platform. Request a demo.
