Salesforce is now a compelling and featured platform; however, as we have heard it right “With great power comes greater responsibility.” Any organization’s Salesforce administrator thereby has to take a greater responsibility while administering this powerful tool to ensure the smooth run and desired outcome.
Salesforce has a standard practice of implementation and customization, but it requires the skills of a knowledge administrator to complete these steps. In fact, the primary question administrators of businesses which are adopting Salesforce as their platform has in mind are:
- Whether there is any staff, who are fully knowledgeable of the Salesforce functions?
- Are the administrators able to handle Salesforce questions?
- Is there a proper planned procedure in place for Salesforce management?
If there are no such resources, then the company may be missing a huge opportunity to maximize the benefits of using a CRM. Here, we will take a much closer look into what all a Salesforce administrator needs to know while managing such a CRM program.
Salesforce terminology
At the first point, there is such a customized Salesforce lingo which one should know while dealing with Salesforce. Knowledge of this terminology is helpful to understand it better and also while going through the online and offline Salesforce guidebooks. The primary glossary for Salesforce admins to know are:
- Salesforce Chatter
- Salesforce Lightning
- AppExchange
- Cloud Flow Designer
- Feed Card Visualization
- Salesforce Einstein
- Namespace Prefix
- Managed Package Extension
- Trailhead
- Super badger
- Translation Workbench etc.
If the Salesforce admin of your company is a basic employee of the organization or an inexperienced freelancer from outside, then they may not be thorough with this lingo even if they know how to manage things. Even though this is not their fault actually, it could be a roadblock to your proper implementation of Salesforce.
The features of Salesforce
Administration of the Salesforce suite is not simply a normal routine, but it has many unexpected situations also down the line. The administrators need to know what will happen if you need something which hasn’t ever happened before, like using a specific template, generating a client code, or getting a customized quote, etc. In such cases, Salesforce admin needs to handle a variety of demands by the CRM or to manage it on a case-to-case basis. When such challenging things occur, a good administrator needs to be a real problem solver too to dig into the Salesforce Trailheads and find out the best solutions.
For example, you can take a situation as your organization once decides to put forth a range of low-cost or free trial subscriptions to be added to the sales model. However, your primary Salesforce setup may not be configured to accommodate such billing and fulfillment of an order, which may create chaos. In such situations, the reassuring fact is that Salesforce actually offers many such solutions for admins to access, but there is bad news also as that if the admin is not tech-savvy, then they find it impossible to implement those. They need to know all the pros and cons of the apps available on the AppExchange, and they also have to really quick to implement a solution from the App Cloud.
Acting with urgency
This is another important thing to consider. If any urgent and important issues arise, then the admin should be well prepared to handle it emergently. So, this is one thing the operations head need to ensure. It is a major concern when there are part-time admins, consultants, or freelancer who don’t actually ensure instant availability.
Say for example, if one of your loyal client’s needs the best pricing for their important project and they want it immediately, you are in trouble if your Salesforce admin is out of the office on vacation. In fact, Salesforce Trailhead may come into your assistance to enhance your knowledge base and find some instant customized solutions, but you that also requires time and finesse, which are two things you may not be having while your admin is out of touch.
This one reason why the intelligent Salesforce users tie-up with the partner services like Flosum.com, is because they can provide comprehensive customer support 24/7. With such service support, it is not a problem even if your internal admin is out office as one team and the provider is always there to backup.
Need for ongoing certification
Let’s re-explore the basics again. Do you ever check whether your admin is Salesforce certified or not? This is a key point. In fact, for the administrators, clearing the Salesforce certification exam is a very serious affair. Clearing it requires excellent knowledge and skills. So, you are reassured about the capabilities of the administrators who are certified.
Moreover, passing this exam even don’t confer skills for a lifetime. The one who is certified need to keep on upgrading his or her knowledge base to stay on certification. This means someone who is certified for Salesforce in 2015 may not be under active certification now.
Salesforce introduces many new features from time to time, and a good administrator needs to upgrade their knowledge by learning all these things. In fact, Salesforce keeps on releasing new updates from time to time, at a rate of about three major and several minors released per year. As of late, you need to have your administrator a Salesforce Certified Sales Cloud Consultant for which you can check the official Salesforce verification page to confirm certification validity.In fact, Salesforce is a highly user-friendly CRM for sure for businesses across the spectrum to manage their business easily and cost-effectively, but all these benefits come only when you have a skilled and knowledge administrator out there to handle Salesforce. So, don’t let the company to be buried in Salesforce chaos. Either you need to find an administrator who will be able to take up the administration effectively. For small business users or even bigger corporate, the best alternative is to find a third-party Salesforce support consultant who will be offering 24/7 support to end-to-end administration of the Salesforce suite.