How to be a great internal Salesforce admin!

How to be a great internal Salesforce Admin!

Being an Internal Salesforce Admin can be a challenge, you have to wear many hats, with a skill set that often includes business analysis, change management, project management and salesforce expertise.

Alongside all this, it’s not normally your main job! We work with many fundraising managers, volunteer managers or programme managers, who become the internal Salesforce administrators.

At our Company, we mentor many internal Salesforce Admins to help them flourish in their new role – helping them to manage design, customisation and user adoption effectively within their non-profit.

An internal Salesforce Admin needs to think strategically, upward manage, and educate people in Salesforce and customisation.

In your role as an Internal Salesforce Admin :

• Take time to understand the design process and technology to be adopted so you can understand and explain the functionality that is available, and gain buy-in from key stakeholders.
• Gather, document and prioritise user requirements. Perhaps use the Case Object within your own Salesforce instance to manage user requests.
• Manage communications with stakeholders and build good working relationships with internal staff and external consultants.
• Have the independent authority to manage people, budget and time and sign-off requirements.

A Salesforce Admin should also apply these [highlight dark=”no”]three key elements, to give the CRM implementation the best chance of success:

1. Business Analysis
2. Change Management
3. Project Management

At our Company, we champion all three elements within our projects, and equip our Salesforce Admins to adopt these practices by providing mentoring support and training.

Each of these elements is a skilled discipline in its own right,

Our top three tips for successful Salesforce Admins are: 

Business Analysis

1. Gather the detail on performance metrics and reporting requirements from your users. To help users explain their needs get them to draw the graphs they want OR show some example Dashboards to them. There are quite a few resources out there on google.
2. Involve users in reviewing and refining business processes through group workshops that are departmental as well as cross-departmental. Help users to understand the potential of Salesforce so they can start to create a wish list of requirements, share these openly and discuss priorities as a group. Start to identify the positive benefits it will bring to personnel and the organisation to calculate return on investment.
3. Future-proof the choice and design of system by hosting a workshop with the senior management team to showcase the capability of Salesforce and facilitate a discussion about how a wider application of Salesforce could help the organisation to achieve the wider business strategy and management objectives. To assist you, invite a Salesforce consultant or Salesforce Account Exec to provide further insight and case studies of similar clients.

Change Management 

1. Find an Executive Sponsor who is fully behind the purpose and application of the CRM, who provides an investment of time and money, and leads on communications about the ‘What, Why and When’, to give weight to your work. They should also initiate the need for the senior management workshop.
2. Working with the internal communications team create a strategy for communication, user involvement and support during the adoption process that accommodates for different team members personalities and learning types.
3. Working with the Executive Sponsor create a ‘Carrot and Stick’ adoption strategy to ensure the new system is adopted and used by all relevant team members.

Project Management 

1. Set up a Champion Group consisting of internal staff from key business departments who use or want to use Salesforce and external experts who have complementary skills and personalities, and are committed to the success of the project. Assign specific roles to each member.
2. Become the internal Project Manager to lead the Champions Group to organise, manage, sign-off requirements. Organise users to prepare necessary information, give them timeframes, allocate budget and track time spent for each department and requirement delivered so your time and money is accounted for.
3. Work in an agile way, and identify and deliver an initial ‘quick-win’ implementation with one particular team or department, to generate confidence in the process and solution.

Take Action

• Join our monthly training workshop for internal salesforce admins who want to equip themselves with the basic knowledge of Business Analysis, Project Management and Change Management. To find out more click here.

• Require some internal input and mentoring then join up to our Salesforce Mentoring Support Package – find out more here

• You can also check out Salesforce.com’s own resource for Salesforce Admins at https://admin.salesforce.com/