What are the different traits or skills that make a good Salesforce Admin? As I look back on my journey, all of the signs were there that this could be the career for me, but I didn't know enough about it to pursue it until multiple people pointed it out to me.
If you have the following traits or skills, you might have what it takes to make it as an awesome admin.
1. I hate doing anything manually if I can help it.
When I started working in a call center, we were doing a lot of things manually. For example, we would go through the list of cases all day long and count how many cases each rep had and write it on a piece of paper. Then, we would make how many cases we gave each person on that paper and keep doing that from 8 am to 8 pm. Now, when you are getting over a hundred cases a day and you have over ten CSR's this pretty much consumes your entire day.
I worked the night shift and after about a year into my job, I was tasked with passing out work after 4 pm. I loathed this system and hated that I spent so much time counting things on a screen instead of working on my own cases that needed to be done.
After about a year of doing this, we were slow one day and I started poking around our org and found the thing that changed my life: Reports.
I started playing around with reports and with no trailhead or training, after several attempts, I finally figured out how to make a report that told me how many cases each rep had at any given time. This not only saved me time but I also got a lot of props from our management team for saving everyone a lot of time.
As an admin, part of your job is to help make your users more efficient and help them get more work done. If you had manual work, you'll be able to sniff out what can be changed and your users will love you for your ideas.
2. I am a curious person.
No matter where I have worked, I have always had to need to know everything about everything. I would poke around and find every manual or training guide I could find and read them during my breaks or on my off days. When I started working in Salesforce, I started just randomly clicking things and trying to figure them out since we didn't have any training docs and I had no idea trailhead existed.
Being curious is a great trait to have as an admin because there is always something new to learn or do. If you have a hunger for knowledge, then you'll never get bored in this role.
3. I liked making processes simpler.
This kind of goes along with point number one, but it is a little different.
No matter where I have worked, I can't help but ask the question 'Why are things done this way?' This question can sometimes get on people's nerves because even the trainers and managers sometimes do not even know. They just do it because that is what they were taught.
Asking this question did, however, help me figure out how to get from point A to point B faster in a lot of instances. For example, why was our team attaching replacement order numbers on the case and on the order and then attaching the original order number to the replacement? We needed them to be noted but this took time and everyone always forgot.
Before I was an admin, I worked with the team so that all you had to do was click one button and it appeared on everything. It only saved about thirty seconds, but thirty seconds per case can mean several minutes in one day of work.
Now, if the users had to go through more than three steps to automate this, it would make things take longer and it wouldn't have any value. Making sure your processes work with as little interaction as possible will:
A. Making training and documentation super easy to understand. B. Save your company time and labor costs C. Your users will love it and actually use what you created.
4.I was a trainer.
As an admin, it's your job to teach your users how to use all of the cool things that you are building. Being a trainer at Starbucks and in my call center helped me develop these skills.
If you already love teaching or if you love writing out documents, being an admin might be a good fit for you.
Now, if you don't love these things, that is also okay. There are a lot of large orgs that have people who do this full time or maybe they have a BA that takes care of it.
5.I was a Customer Service Representative
This was probably the skill set that surprised me the most. When I was dreaming of being an admin, I often dreamt of not taking phone calls and having fewer emails, and basically working in a dark room with no interaction with other people. I couldn't have been more wrong.
Working in IT is very similar to working in CS. AS an admin, you get tickets from everyone in your company (your customers) and you solve their problems in the most polite and timely manner that you can.
All of my years of taking phone calls and closing cases prepared me perfectly for this aspect of the job.
As an Admin, you are often the first point of contact in the IT department that your users talk to, so it's important to make them feel like they can trust you. You have to gather information, figure out a solution, fix the issue, and then explain the solution in a way that someone who isn't technical would understand. All of this also needs to be documented and done in a timely manner. If you take too long, your users will stop reporting issues and try to figure things out on their own or just let things stay broken (I know this from experience).
I believe that anyone can be a Salesforce Admin if they have the right attitude and the hunger to learn. Sometimes, I wish I would've seen my value earlier, but I wouldn't have known everything that I do now. Taking the time to hone the skills above has helped me so much in my admin journey and it can help you too.
If you are interested in becoming an Admin, please follow me on twitter @courteycoen or subscribe to my blog to see more content like this. If you have any questions, please comment or message me on twitter. I'm more than happy to help!