TruSummit Solutions’ 10 Steps to New Salesforce Admin Success

We’ve heard a version of the same story time and again: You’re a fairly technical resource who has expressed some enthusiasm for Salesforce, and – boom! — your organization has deemed you the de facto Salesforce administrator. Your organization has hundreds of users, several third-party integrations, and you’ve inherited a backlog of work. And while you’re excited by the prospect of advancing your Salesforce career, you’re also a little – no, a LOT – intimidated by the challenges ahead of you. How do you ensure you rise to the challenge and swim, not sink?  

In our experience, there are a few steps you can take to help get your hands around your current Salesforce instance, chart its roadmap, and set yourself up for success. And some of these are low-hanging fruit, which means you’ll get some quick wins – and some much-needed internal capital – under your belt!  Your 10 steps to Salesforce success start now:  

1. Understand the Current Salesforce Setup: Even though you may have been working in Salesforce for some time, it’s worth it to go back to square one. Start by understanding the existing Salesforce setup. Familiarize yourself with the custom objects, fields, user roles, profiles, and permission sets. Review the existing documentation, if available. Understanding the architecture will give you insights into how the system was intended to be used.  
    

2. Audit User Access and Security: Review the current users, their roles, and access levels. Ensure that security settings are appropriate and that only the necessary personnel have access to sensitive data. This step is crucial for maintaining data integrity and security. There are, however, different levels of audits that you can conduct: a health check can provide an overview look at your org (this post is a great guide to a Salesforce health check), while more intensive audits can reveal security gaps, inefficient processes, and even help you identify sources of technical debt (we like this intro to audits beyond a health check). During your discovery phase, the more information, the better – be thorough with your audits.  
    

3. Examine Integrations: As a follow-on from your audit work, you have likely begun to identify all third-party tools integrated with Salesforce. Now you need to understand their purpose, how they interact with Salesforce, and any issues that may exist. Ensure you have this information documented before taking on steps 4 and 5 – it will prove helpful to you as you begin to meet with key stakeholders and prioritize your backlog. 
    

4. Prioritize the Backlog: You likely inherited a backlog of Salesforce work; it may be captured in a project management tool (best case!) or you have a bunch of emailed requests from various Salesforce users to sift through (not the best case!). To begin assessing your backlog, capture it all in one place; our customers have had success with project management tools such as Jira or Asana. Assess the backlog of work and prioritize tasks. It’s important to distinguish between urgent issues that affect daily operations and long-term improvement projects. Assign the priority to the tasks and then focus on the backlog items that represent the highest value to the end users.   
    

5. Engage with Stakeholders: You absolutely must talk to key users and stakeholders to understand their needs and challenges. And at this point, you should get their buy-in on your backlog, too. Ensuring that you know what is important to key stakeholders, and that they know what you’ve prioritized for completion and by when, will ensure that you aren’t working in a silo and that your tasks reflect the strategic objectives of the organization at large. You may also hear anecdotes from key stakeholders that help you identify any gaps in the current system and opportunities for improvement. 
    

6. Create a Roadmap: With audits complete and all inputs gathered, it’s time to develop your roadmap for managing and improving the Salesforce environment. This should include immediate fixes, short-term goals, and long-term strategic plans. This roadmap will also inform your resource and third-party vendor needs and will aid your finance teams in forecasting and budgeting.  
    

7. Utilize Salesforce Resources: Salesforce offers a wealth of resources for administrators, including online courses, webinars, documentation, and the Trailblazer community forums. Best of all, many of these resources are FREE! Start at the Trailhead to utilize these to enhance your knowledge and skills. 
    

8. Consider Getting Certified: This one isn’t necessarily a short-term solution, but if you haven’t already, consider obtaining Salesforce certification. The test prep and test itself will greatly improve your understanding of the platform, and obtaining the certification will give you added credibility.
    

9. Stay on Top of Salesforce: To say Salesforce is constantly evolving is a bit of an understatement. Salesforce pushes seasonal releases three times a year, along with periodically pushing critical updates. And the future roadmap for Salesforce is extensive, and is usually unveiled in detail at marquee events like Dreamforce and TrailblazerDX. Make it a habit to read Salesforce blogs, follow Salesforce on LinkedIn, and generally stay on top of the latest news and announcements to ensure you’re in the know on the Salesforce evolution. 
    

10. Turn to the Professionals: If you’re still feeling overwhelmed, consider reaching out to a Salesforce partner for help. Salesforce partners can provide expertise and support in managing complex environments. (Shameless plug time! At TruSummit, our managed services offerings are flexible, scalable solutions to help you do everything from clear backlog to fully augment your Salesforce administration.) 

Managing a Salesforce org is a marathon, not a sprint. Stay patient, keep learning, and engage with the Salesforce community for support and advice. And if you need a little more help, you know where to find TruSummit Solutions.  

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And first let us say … we are here for it. We know firsthand the power of well-roadmapped, well-implemented Salesforce instances to help change an organization’s operational trajectory (just check out our AppExchange reviews to see some examples).  

But we also know that deriving maximum value from Salesforce is a challenge for many teams for whom Salesforce administration and development is just another item on their already-massive to-do list. Now add in the increasing complexity that comes with Salesforce’s new rollouts, features, and enhancements, and … yes, we know you’re getting overwhelmed.  

That’s why we are huge proponents of Managed Services for Salesforce. Sure, part of it is because we offer (the best) Salesforce managed services, but most of it is because we know that you can do so much more with Salesforce when you have the right team on your side.  

Working with a Salesforce Managed Services partner means you get a ton of benefits:  

Expertise on hand without recruiting, hiring, training, and retaining expensive Salesforce resources 
Salaries for experienced Salesforce resources can often start in the low six-figures. Add in costs for recruiting and hiring, benefits and total compensation packages, and annual spend for continuous education and training, and you are looking at a pretty significant budget line item for managing your already-significant spend on Salesforce. Or look at it another way: Depending on how many Salesforce users your organization has, you could be spending thousands of dollars per user to keep Salesforce running. 

The hivemind from a team of Salesforce experts versus the more singular viewpoint of your individual Salesforce resources 
When you bring Salesforce resources in-house, your ability to roadmap, execute, or maintain is guard railed by that resource’s specific career or Salesforce experience. When you work with a Salesforce managed services provider, you get the benefits of multiple points of view, varied career experiences, and depth of exposure from a team of Salesforce experts.  

Reassurance that your Salesforce instances are being managed, enhanced, and even protected without diverting your team’s attention from other critical business initiatives  
Knowing Salesforce inside and out is – quite literally – our job. It’s likely not yours. So, every time your organization needs to modify Salesforce, learn about a new release, or troubleshoot a Salesforce challenge, you are diverting resources from your organization’s core business. The effects of that can be long-lasting and detrimental to any organization (and to employee morale!) 

Consistent, predictable expense that finance teams can forecast and accrue for 
Finance teams and CFOs love predictable expenses that can be budgeted and accrued for. Being able to assure your organization’s financial leadership that Salesforce management will cost a certain amount every month for the next year or two or three is hugely beneficial to any organization. Plus, engaging with a managed services provider can mean substantial savings on bigger Salesforce consulting and implementation engagements if, and when, those appear on the horizon.  

Scalability when your needs or business objectives change
It is highly likely that your organization’s strategic imperatives today have shifted from where they were 6 months to a year ago. And if those strategic shifts impact your Salesforce needs, a managed services provider can quickly scale your services up or down. Scaling an internal team, especially one with very specific skillsets, is not as flexible. Hiring takes time, and if you scale down, you could face the challenges and costs associated with layoffs. 

Speed to market when Salesforce makes significant feature release announcements (like they just did at Dreamforce!)  
AI everywhere. Einstein 1. Copilot Studio. New clouds. FLOW. There is a lot to learn to keep up with the Salesforce (r)evolution, and a certified Salesforce partner is already ahead of the game on it. You’ll be able to implement and use new features faster and enhance your organization’s speed to market when you have a managed services partner on your side.  

If you haven’t yet considered Salesforce managed services, we encourage you to spend some time exploring the offerings from us and others. If you’re not the final decision-maker within your org, sending this post over to your team is always a good idea. And if you want to understand how Salesforce’s latest announcements could impact your organization, let’s talk!  

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Jordan Joltes is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer at TruSummit Solutions. She founded TruSummit Solutions in 2020 after responding to the need for a more comprehensive approach to technology enablement. In 2021, the company experienced nearly 300 percent growth. 

What’s unique about her success and approach to Salesforce solutions:

Jordan believes that the first step in driving technology transformation is understanding the gap between what businesses actually need and what technology has to offer. With the Salesforce platform as an enabler, TruSummit empowers and educates its clients on the value and capabilities of Enterprise Applications with a significant focus on SaaS.

Calling on more than a decade of experience in the Pittsburgh tech sector and Salesforce ecosystem, Jordan has established her firm as a top-performing Salesforce implementation partner, helping people and companies leverage the software platform as a key component of their digital ecosystem. 

Through strategic consulting and business process modeling, TruSummit designs and builds business-centric technology solutions that align directly with each of its customers’ strategic business needs.

Listen to the podcast and get the full inside story:

Learn more about what driving this excellent growth track at TruSummit Solutions in the podcast, below:

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A focus on digital transformation has been a common theme amongst the most successful companies over the past decade. The adoption of this mindset has further accelerated over the past year. A vital component of this new way of working is having a sophisticated customer relationship management (CRM) function. 

Salesforce has emerged as the go-to solution for many companies; however, those organizations often overlook the intricacies of leveraging such a sophisticated platform, as well as the effort required to implement them.

TruSummit Solutions is a Salesforce implementation partner that differentiates itself through its focus on holistic enablement, setting clients up for long-term success. We collaborate closely with clients to identify and remedy unanticipated technical debt – the difference between an investment in technology and the value realized.

Jordan Joltes founded TruSummit Solutions, a woman-owned small business, responding to the need for a more comprehensive approach to CRM enablement. Calling on more than a decade of experience, Jordan established her firm as a top-performing Salesforce implementation partner. 

“In my experience, companies often realize less value from Salesforce than they had envisioned. This is a robust, expensive tool with inherent complexity, and it isn’t easy to master,” said Ms. Joltes. “I created TruSummit Solutions to help clients harness the full power of Salesforce. This includes embedding the processes and governance needed to maximize the return on their investment. We use quantifiable measures to define the collective success with our clients.”

View Jordan’s LinkedIn Profile

Overwhelmingly positive client feedback has proven the impact of TruSummit’s approach. From here, Ms. Joltes plans to scale her company to bring the same empowerment to additional organizations. She remarked on this growth: 

“Many companies have these sorts of challenges but don’t have the resources or know-how to overcome them. That’s where we come in. By driving awareness of this solution and its long-term value, we can help many more companies reach their potential.”

Learn more about TruSummit Solutions and how we can help your business reach the peak of Salesforce performance. No pressure, no pitches, just perspective.

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