Elevating the Role of the Salesforce Administrator (Becoming a Change Agent)
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This short document discusses overcoming challenges and driving organizational change. It notes that resisting change by claiming "we've always done it this way" is dangerous. It also states that overcoming pain and gaining supporters ("fans") through listening and learning can accelerate positive change within an organization.
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Elevating the Role of the Salesforce Administrator (Becoming a Change Agent)
- 13. The most dangerous phrase in the language is we’ve always done it this way. - Grace Hopper
- 26. Pain Overcome = Fan People Who Overhear Fan (Manager, Peers, etc.) = Fans 2 Fans 2 + Continued Effort to Listen and Learn = Faster Organizational Change
Editor's Notes
- Elevating the Role of the Salesforce Administrator Good morning! I am really excited to be here with you today to talk about elevating your role as a Salesforce Administrator. As I was putting together the content, I realized that this title is probably not quite as accurate, so I’ve retitled it:
- Becoming a Change Agent!
- Before we get started, let me introduce myself. My name is Brent Downey and I am based in Denver Colorado where I am the co-leader of the Denver User Group.
- I am the Salesforce Platform Manager at ReadyTalk; a web an audio conferencing company where our passion is perfect online meetings and presentations.
- I also run AdminHero.com which is a blog dedicated to helping Salesforce Administrators Become Workplace Heroes by sharing lessons learned, best practices and thought leadership. If you haven’t heard of the site, I would encourage you to take a look at it when you get a chance and subscribe.
- I’ve always been fascinated with marketing. Before deciding to get my degree in Business Administration, I contemplated Marketing but didn’t think that I had what it took. I didn’t feel like I had Don Draper’s level of creativity. I’m one of those nerds who, while fast forwarding my DVR through commercials, will actually stop and rewind just to watch a commercial. It’s amazing how marketers have learned to leveraged psychology and behavioral modification techniques to train us; to persuade us to take a specific action. And yet, even with all of my studying of marketing, I never realized that I could leverage some basic marketing tactics and techniques to elevate my role in the company and become a valued business partner while at the same time driving adoption and building my personal brand.
- So today, I am going to share with you some basic marketing tools which you can leverage to help drive organizational change, build your personal brand and become an Admin Hero. These tactics are: Identify Your Customer
- Understand Your Customer’s Pain
- ...and Every Interaction Matters (a.k.a. You Are Always On Stage)
- First, I want to focus on the word “Customer” because this is an important part of what we are talking about today. When we hear the word customer, we tend to think of customer service. Perhaps you even have a really bad customer service experience pop into your mind - or perhaps even a great experience. While we as Administrators may not be truly customer-facing, we have internal customers. And these customers expect what every customer expects - excellent customer service. They want to be listed to, valued and treated fairly. The word customer is very purposeful because it helps us to get into the right mindset when interacting with our users. So, what does it mean to identify your customers? Don’t you already know who they are? Yes and no. Obviously, we know who these individuals are in our organizations. Sales reps, Marketing, Account Management, Customer Service etc.The question is, have you taken time to truly identify who these users are? For years marketers have used a tool called buyer personas to help shed some light on who the target customers are. These fictional people represent the target market and helps marketing to create collateral focused specifically for that prospect. These materials are then used across the organization to help close deals, build a better user experience and more. This image shows two of the four personas a MailChimp - an email marketing service. While these are styalized images, they still contain the primary characteristics of a good persona: A job title A name A photo Basic characteristics of the person Having this information helps you to know how to communicate with these individuals. How your solutions are going to impact these customers. Personas ensure that everything you do is done with the customer in mind. This does not need to be a difficult process. Get a general understanding of your primary customers and write it down or have it in the back of your head. Your goal is to service the customer and the only way to do that is to understand who they are. http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/create-buyer-persona-makemypersona?utm_campaign=blog-rss-emails&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=16102372
- So, now that we understand the importance the word Customer and why personas are a great tool to help us understand our customers, I want to dive into the next two points. First, I want to set the stage and give you an idea of the environment I was working in where these tactics were applied. Several years ago I was hired by a large organization as the Salesforce Administrator. Part of my job was to assist in the deployment of Salesforce to the global sales team. Unfortunately, I was brought in after the critical decisions had been made, unable to influence the processes or configuration. I began to hear grumblings from the field. After talking with end users, there was a noticeable disconnect in the way that this project was being implemented and communicated from the executive team. The user had not been taken into account and the configuration reflected a system built for the corporate office – not the user.
- This was an issue because most of the users were digitally naive. With an average tenure around 30 years, the majority of the field staff were nearing retirement and didn’t have a desire to learn a new tool or system. I also had opposing forces coming at me. The executive staff wanted Salesforce to do one thing and the reps wanted it to do another. Neither party seemed to care about the other’s needs. To make matters worse, I was hated in the organization because I was the face of this failed implementation. In fact, prior to a sales training, several reps joked about having the guillotine and lynching post ready for me. How has had a similar experience!? (Pause for raising of hands). Yeah! You want to talk about an up-hill battle, this was it! Somehow I had to harmonize these groups and create a happy medium, configuring a system that everyone would be pleased with.
- I spent a lot of time challenging the status quo. I asked questions and tried to find reasons for current processes; looking for ways to improve. The majority of folks I talked to said “well, we have always done it this way” as if that was the reason not to change. The environment was challenging, but I wanted to make an impact. I had to make some executive decisions which were not popular with stakeholders – and sometimes I did it without approval because I knew that it was in the users best interest. What I didn’t realize was that in doing so, I was implementing changes based on a deep understanding of the customer’s needs. I was thinking and acting like a marketer.
- A year later, the company went through a major reorganization and my entire department was laid off. With most of the stakeholders no longer with the company, I leveraged this event to overhaul the system. I was now in a position to make the decisions and this meant that I could cater to the end-user, not the corporate office. In my conversations with users, they expressed that no one had ever asked them what they wanted in their system. So, I generated an end-user survey and solicited feedback. But I was very careful not to ask questions about Salesforce exclusively. I truly wanted to know what their day looked like holistically; understanding the bottlenecks and time wasters in their day-to-day activities.
- The survey was a success as rep after rep anonymously sounded off and vented their frustrations and pain-points.
- These pain-points then turned into prioritized action items. These action items turned into tangible changes in the system and users were grateful to have had a voice in these changes. They saw that I truly cared about their needs and slowly, I began to turn skeptics into advocates.
- As I continued to execute against this list, an interesting thing happened. Those customers who were skeptics began to turn into advocates. It is a really powerful thing to have someone who was so opposed to you and “your system” to now be finding value in the system enough to tell his peers about how he is using it to save time in his day. This is something that marketers only dream of! However, I want to tell you that this was not an easy or quick process. It took the better part of my three years at this company to get the major changes completed and build substantial advocacy.
- This story leads us into our first point. Understand your customer’s pain. Marketers are all too familiar with this concept. The job of a marketer is to find the pain, and propose a solution. The key to this point as an administrator is to do whatever you can to collect feedback. Don’t take it personally when someone hates something you have done. Be bold enough to step out of your pride and truly listen, even empathize with them to find a solution that fits.
- See the customer’s pain from their perspective. To do this successfully, you need to take off you Salesforce glasses and put on the glasses of the customer. Perspective is everything. When you can see your customer’s pain through their eyes, you can empathize with them on a different level and find solutions that not only meets their current needs, but anticipates their future needs.
- I really like this particular point because it is one of the most impactful thing you can do. Every interaction we have with people tells a story. We have the power to effect change with every interaction. If we can leverage every interaction to create advocates, we have the ability to drive the change we are looking to create by building an army of fans.
- Who knows this hashtag? Who has used this hashtag recently? First, I want you to think of the last time one of your users really got under your skin. Got it? What did you feel? What did your body do? You are probably feeling frustrations or even thoughts of “I’ve told you that 800 times already!” Okay, I am going to tell you a personal #whysfdcadmins drink story that will either remind you of why the hashtag exists or help you start drinking! This story is an example of how you can turn any one of these (and many other moments) into a return on investment all because you remembered that every interaction matters.
- For the purposes of this story, I am going to tell you what I really said while showing you what I was really thinking, courtesy of the hashtag #whysfdcadminsdrink. Alright. I typically cleared my calendar on Friday’s so that I could be available for 1:1 training with users. They could book 30 minutes with me to talk about any topic they wanted to. On this particular day, I was working with a user who was having a hard time understanding how to add products to an opportunity - even though I’ve trained him on this multiple times. 20 minutes into the call, I am still trying to help this user get logged into Salesforce. After I ask question after question trying to troubleshoot, I finally asked - “Are you connected to the Internet?”
- So this customer has pain on top of pain. I keep pressing on. A little while later (felt like years to me), still trying to connect this guy to the interwebs, I try to explain to my customer that connecting to the Starbucks wifi is super easy but it’s apparently easier said than done. “No, the Starbucks wifi doesn’t require a password. If you have to enter a password, it’s the wrong wifi network.”
- So this 1:1 training lasts over an hour and after the user connects to the internet, orders a fancy coffee and gets trained on this process for the 5th time, I am done. “Oh gosh no. The pleasure was all mine! Tell your manager and anyone on your team to contact me with any questions. I am more than happy to help.”
- Wow! That was almost as bad as the 7 minutes I spent on the phone helping someone find the home button on their iPhone! This interaction, while I didn’t realize it at the time had an associated ROI which helps to create the wave of change across the organization. Lets look at some basic math that proves this out.
- First, the customer’s immediate pain was relieved and this guy became a fan. HE TOLD EVERYONE. His boss, his boss’s boss, his co-workers - EVERYONE. I would assume that even the folks at Starbucks got something out of it. My friend Felicia , who sat across from me and overheard the conversation ended up telling my manager and her manager about this interaction (which I found out about later on). These fans count. It is still the case that unhappy customers travel fast! The Customer Rage study has continued since 1976 and looks at the effect of customer satisfaction. According to the CCMC (Customer Care Measurement & Consulting group) which runs the study, in 2013, word of mouth resulting from dissatisfied complaints is nearly three times higher than the word of mouth communicated by satisfied customers. That means that if you DON’T SOLVE THEIR PAIN, they are more likely to tell people about their negative experience. 3 times as much! Getting your fans to talk about you is KEY to your success. You can create faster organizational change by getting and keeping fans and always seek to listen and learn from your customers. Why is this important?
- Because remember - It’s not easy. Change means disruption and disruption means fear which means death. Your CONFIDENCE in these interactions will carry you farther than you realize. In every moment, eyes and ears are upon you. You are creating change, disrupting what was through Salesforce. In every moment, you are either winning fans or inciting a riot. How you speak, what you write, how you show tension, what non-verbal language you use is HEARD. What is it saying?
- Equally important is how you get off stage. How do you vent, regroup and re-gather steam? For me, my off stage was with a friend at a Starbucks. It was a place where after a discouraging phone call, or a slew of frustrating meetings, I would walk, get some fresh air, have a hot cup of coffee and vent. This became coffee therapy. We used this time to encourage each other so that we could go back into the office and continue to create change with a clear head. What I want to encourage you with is this one fact. You may feel like no one cares. Like no one is paying attention. You may feel like you are “just” as Salesforce Administrator.
- But I am here to tell you today that you are not just a Salesforce Administrator. You are the Chief Change Agent. How are you going to change your organizations?