I am currently looking after the Melbourne Nonprofit Salesforce User Group and one of the attendees asked me for some advice on how to get ahead in their Salesforce career. Yes, I do have to understand that I’m a that point in my career where I need to guide and help new people coming into the industry – it’s part of my job.
So here’s my advice…
My advice to you is to become indispensable in your organisation. Make Salesforce the centre of your organisation’s existence – if it’s not in Salesforce or the Accounting System, or on the Website it doesn’t exist.
Pick a project, and do it – seek forgiveness not permission. Even if you have to do it in your own time, and in a sandbox to prove the concept. Get an executive level champion who will encourage you.
Spend a lunchtime with staff members you don’t normally deal with – ask them what spreadsheets they are using, what things are difficult for them, and how you can make things easier for them – this is where you will find your projects.
Document everything. Write down your learnings. Write case studies as to how what you implemented helped the staff in your organisation. Present the case study to the management – they love feel good stories like that.
Run a brown-bag lunch session where you invite any staff member to come and learn something new about Salesforce (eg using Chatter) and even if two people come, it’s worthwhile because you and they would have learnt something new. Document, and share the success with your management.
Blog, get on twitter and pester #askforce for questions you have, and follow all the other NFP people on there. eg @bethbrains, @snugsfbay, @mpusto, @tracykronzak @andrew_sf and see who they tweet and start following them.
Make yourself known on The Hub. Take a question that someone asks that you don’t know the answer to and make time for yourself to go and research and document the answer and then get back to them. Get on the main Salesforce Success Community also and delve into areas you don’t know about.
Continue doing Trailhead. Do trails that you don’t think you would never do in your day to day job.
Install apps from the Appexchange in your Dev org and try and work out how they work. Document your findings – publicly.
Read blogs, listen to podcasts. Pick a few people that inspire you and read everything they do – for me it’s someone like Jennifer Lee @jenwlee – the enthusiasm and energy she has for learning and teaching Salesforce is amazing – she lives and breathes Salesforce. Read the blogs of the people that they retweet.
At some point you need to get to Dreamforce. Or at least a Salesforce Community event in London or Paris or the US somewhere. If you are thinking of travelling, try and do it when there are events like this on. Meet the people in the community. Talk to them. Connect with them.
Set up a group of like-minded people on The Hub, talk to other people. Come to the regular Melbourne Salesforce User Group and even the Developer Group. Get yourself to a point that you don’t understand what they are saying then ask questions, and keep asking until they can explain it in a way you understand – it will help them and help you.
It’s not all about Salesforce though – you need to think outside of Salesforce – think about the Website and the Accounting System, and all the other systems that you use – how can they be streamlined, eliminated or made much more enjoyable for the staff to do. Most staff get bogged down into this is the way things have to be done, and it’s just all too difficult to even think about changing. Have a look at my blog post So You Want To Learn Salesforce, for more info.
Understand the legislative framework in which your organisation exists. Learn about things like the Privacy Act, the Spam Act etc. How do they impact your organisation. Your organisation doesn’t exist in a bubble. Are there things that you can do to streamline your legislative reporting for example.
Question everything, question everyone. Be a pain in the butt, in a good way. (Eg I saw a donation form today that has a Date of Birth field on it and Gender is required – why, why are you keeping Personal Identifying Information that you now have to go to great lengths to maintain security on? What benefit does it help your organisation to have that information – well if it’s because you want to know the age of your constituents then ask for Age Range, not Date of Birth).
Become certified – yes, it’s a pain, and it’s expensive, and it’s hard to learn the breadth of what you need to know to pass when you work in a small NFP organisation, but there are good groups on Success to help guide you along the way.
When you get a bit further on see if there is an area you want to specialise in – do you want to be a consultant, a developer? If you want to be a developer, you first have to be a good Admin (and that’s a whole other topic, but there are great resources when you want to go that route).
Contact someone when you get stuck. Write up the problem first though. I get stuck ALL the time. Thankfully I have a great bunch of other MVPs I can ask. But for me, writing the problem out sometimes helps me understand what I need to do next to test it or work it out.
Some other blog posts that are a similar topic:
- Not a post but a great tweet.
- Admin Hero – Admin Career Path
- Admin Hero – So You Want My Job
- Admin Hero – Your First 90 Days
- Salesforce’s take on this topic.
- This one may not be entirely relevant but it is one of the best career advice articles I have ever read.
- This post is from a developers perspective and starting to talk about the Admin / Dev work split that is changing – again a topic for another post.
- It’s interesting that this post says to go and volunteer at a NFP org, so I hope my post has countered that with what you can do if you are already inside a NFP organisation.