How To Be an Exceptional Salesforce Admin

The Salesforce ecosystem is a behemoth, employing millions of people and generating trillions of dollars of revenue. For an aspiring admin, it can feel daunting to break into and impossible to stand out among the ocean of competitors. 

Unfortunately, many, many companies who have purchased Salesforce find themselves frustrated due to either 1) a lack of necessary expertise to configure the CRM appropriately, or 2) implementation partners who aren’t meeting their expectations. This provides an enormous opportunity for an exceptional Salesforce admin to stand out from the crowd and to delight customers. But in order to do this, as an administrator, you have to be at the top of your game.

After completing thousands of tasks, hundreds of implementations, and dealing with an uncountable number of bugs along the way, we at Kicksaw have learned a thing or two about what sets an exceptional Salesforce admin apart from the crowd. We’ve distilled what we’ve learned down to a list of core skills that our most successful admins possess, and we’re here to share that list with you. Spoiler alert: It’s not about how many certifications you have!

Set expectations

The biggest friction point in life is misaligned expectations. Throwing a big surprise birthday party for a friend who was hoping for a casual night out with a few close friends is a surefire way to disappoint. There are thousands of ways to disappoint a customer, but we find that these are the three most common:

• Failing to keep stakeholders in the loop and engaged with the project
• Not communicating clearly enough in terms they can understand
• Neglecting to set crystal clear expectations every step of the way

As a project unfolds, you’ll most likely be working with a customer’s technical project manager on a daily basis and executive stakeholders only on occasion. Exceptional admins are able to find a groove with project leads to the point where informal communication is all that’s required. However, executive stakeholders are generally very removed from the day-to-day of a given project. A simple solution is to provide weekly summaries of project status, blockers, and options not considered to execs who are out of the loop. This helps you avoid any surprises on deployment day and makes sure you’re not building something that leadership won’t appreciate.

The fact of the matter is that your clients likely have little experience running Salesforce projects. You should assume that clients will not be familiar with the tradeoffs of recommendations you make, which can make it difficult for them to make informed decisions. To help them get out of their own way, try to simplify the language you use and avoid jargon wherever possible.

Knowing what an end state will look like gives customers confidence that a long and arduous project is worth the time and money. Poor admins tend to jump into the build phase of a project without first aligning expectations with clients as to what is being built, what is not, and what can flex. That time spent aligning expectations with clients goes a long way toward ensuring a project will succeed. 

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.” - Abraham Lincoln 

Focus on delivering value

One of Kicksaw co-founder Kyle Morris’s favorite phrases is, “Clients don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole in the wall.” As a technical person, it can feel intuitive to lean into the details of a project when working with clients. Geeking out on whether to use a flow or Apex is as old as Salesforce itself. But for clients who mostly just want their problems solved rather than a lesson on the finer points of architecting a CRM, getting into the details can be a grind.

Focus the majority of your efforts on getting that quarter-inch hole drilled for your clients. Don’t nerd out on the tech — think about what problems your stakeholder is facing and talk about the result that the solution brings. (And then brag about the tech to your fellow exceptional Salesforce admins — we love to hear about it.) 

For example, if the client is suffering from an expensive Salesforce instance that their team is not using, the project leader could be receiving pressure from executives to get things turned around, or their job may be on the line. If you get mired in the complexities of identity and access management, APIs, or whether a task really does need a flow or Apex, you’re likely to lose their attention. Focus on delivering value, and your clients will love you.

Tell people “no”

As an admin, it’s easy to feel like an order-taker. Clients come to you with requests, and you deliver. And while your clients may be the experts on their business, when it comes to building solid technical solutions based on best practices, they are often very inexperienced and couldn’t architect a good solution if their life depended on it. This is why proficient admins such as you are so important.

Every admin has heard a stakeholder ask, “Could we create a really easy checkbox that…[does something they’ll forget about in a week].” At Kicksaw, we receive requests that go against best practices on a daily basis. Clients wanting to add hundreds of fields instead of building an object, having single points of failure, relying on homegrown solutions to products that quality vendors offer out of the box…the list goes on. Your job as an admin is to be a centering device, reigning clients back when they get too excited, or pushing them when they think too tactically. Coach your clients to focus on a solution that scales — help them understand how and why those quick and dirty short-term solutions might actually cost them more in the long run.    

That said, often the most valuable decisions you can make about a Salesforce instance are what not to build. You have to have the ability to push back on requests that paint clients into a corner, and exceptional admins do this regularly. Find comfort in telling the client, “No.” As the expert, trust your gut, and don’t let the tail wag the dog. 

Look to simplify/streamline

When they inevitably come to you with a request that you aren’t sure is in their best interest, ask client stakeholders to define what they are looking for in the form of a problem statement. This pushes the client to get to the heart of the issues they face. So, if you’ve got a client who requests you to, “build a new flow that will update a field on the account when an opportunity moves to closed won,” challenge the client to define the problem they are facing. In this example, that might look like, “I can’t see at the account level if a company is a customer or not.”

Maybe they do need the automation they described in their initial request, but more often than not, you will find that the functionality is already there — it’s just not addressing their needs adequately, or the inexperienced client is unaware that the answer to their problem is right in front of them. 

Over time, systems tend to become more complex, confusing, and ossified. And typically, business stakeholders are comfortable finding new features to add, but they rarely look for opportunities to simplify and streamline. A simple mechanism we like to recommend for clients is that for every new field, report, or feature they request, they need to remove two. This mindset tends to result in a dramatic drop in extraneous requests. (Special shout out here to the Kicksaw core value Keep It Simple!)

As an admin, it’s critical to keep looking for ways to streamline. This can be as simple as cleaning up the fat: reports that haven’t been run in years, users that should have been deactivated, fields no longer used, and old integrations that can be purged are just a few examples. A streamlined CRM is a better CRM — without all that clutter in the way, your clients have easier access to that critical business data they need to make informed decisions, and their systems will function more smoothly overall. Cluttered house, cluttered mind, as they say. Keep a tidy ‘house’ for your clients, and they’ll thank you for it. 

Think like the customer/end user

When presented with the opportunity to coach Salesforce admins, Kyle Morris frequently turns to the following story: 

“In my first Salesforce role, I was an internal admin for a fast-growing startup. At the time, Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, Product, Finance, and Engineering all used Salesforce to some capacity. What I found early on was that the layouts that were intuitive for me (as a former Sales rep) were not intuitive for Customer Success or Finance. To solve for this, I would shadow users to understand how they worked, what buttons they clicked, and what their natural workflow looked like. This helped me understand what legacy fields were never used, and it gave me ideas on where to inject automation to streamline steps for the team.”

Beyond shadowing folks you are building for, an exceptional Salesforce admin should make a concerted effort to spend a lot of 1:1 time with executives and leaders in each function to train them on the systems you are building. This helps ensure the executives can enable their teams, if needed. But more importantly, it helps them understand the why behind what is being built. At the end of the day, the users you support and the leaders who lead them are your customers — keeping them up-to-speed on the systems you build is critical to success, both for them and for you.

Be ruthless about documenting

Another quote beloved by Kyle and the rest of the Kicksaw team is, “Do the common things uncommonly well.” This really gets to the heart of what it takes to be an exceptional admin. In this vein, a commonly overlooked component of running an instance is keeping a system clean and tidy so that the person inheriting it doesn’t have to manage a dumpster fire. 

Exceptional admins do the little things, such as: 

• Create clear yet succinct descriptions for fields, objects and reports
• Create change logs of features added and updated
• Communicate project updates to stakeholders who are waiting on something you’re building

It might not be the sexiest part of the job, but it’s absolutely worth your time and will set you apart from the less-than-exceptional admins out there. Trust us here: document, document, document. 

Be adaptable

One of the most exciting things about being a Salesforce admin is that, with a decently sized book of clients, no two days are really the same. You might get a straightforward call from a client asking for help understanding a feature you’ve just built, or maybe you’ll get a five-alarm fire call from a client because every admin is locked out of the system due to a misconfigured single sign-on (yes, we’ve gotten that call). This variability is exciting, but it can also be draining.

One of the biggest challenges to becoming, and staying, an exceptional admin is staying on top of the constant changes to Salesforce, while also managing project timelines for (hopefully lots of) clients. As if that’s not enough, you have to help your clients think around corners and plan for the future. Customers are counting on you; it’s a lot of responsibility.

As an exceptional admin, it’s important to keep in mind that change is inevitable. Try not to get too attached to things you built. Try not to be disheartened when a feature you rolled out last week needs to be ripped out for something different. It may be frustrating, but it’s just part of the job.

Share what you learn with the world

Finally, exceptional admins share what they learn with their fellow Trailblazers. 

“As a solo admin back in 2011 with no peers and no connections in the industry, I felt very isolated,” shares Kyle. “Along the way, I’ve tried my best to share with everyone I can the lessons learned and pitfalls avoided. I feel an obligation to pay forward all the help I received from friends and colleagues along the way.”

A sense of camaraderie and mutual support that supersedes jealous competition is one of the best features of the greater Salesforce ecosystem, and exceptional Salesforce admins have this in spades. No one gets to the top on their own, and there’s more than enough work to go around — share what you know! Learn from others. We’re better together, truly.

One of the Kicksaw core values is Work Together, and this is no coincidence. Being generous with the knowledge you’ve gained is a telltale sign of an exceptional Salesforce admin, and it’s something we look for when hiring our own admins. 

Following the advice laid out in this blog post won’t guarantee you a long line of clients knocking on your virtual door, but we promise that it will set you apart from the crowd. You will stand out as an admin who truly cares about their clients’ experiences and outcomes, and one who has the potential to deliver real value. Pair that with a healthy dose of elbow grease, and you’ve got a surefire recipe for success. We wish you the best on your Salesforce journey.