The Salesforce Admin career path is newer career path in the tech space and is becoming increasingly more popular.
Salesforce also has projected millions of new jobs across all the facets of the salesforce ecosystem including developers, architects, and of course admins!
Although one of the biggest questions that those thinking about this career ask is, what does a salesforce admin actually do?
Well, lets jump into it.
Youtube Video
One thing to note before we get too far into this blog post.
We have a youtube video on this on the Salesforce Emily youtube channel!
Sometimes it is easier to watch a youtube video! I will drop it below.
What does an admin actually do?
So what does an admin actually do?
This question has multiple facets and could be highly variable depending on what type of salesforce environment that you are working in.
A Salesforce Admin that is working with a large salesforce system could have entirely different job duties than an admin who is working in a small start-up company’s salesforce system.
However, even with these two entirely different systems, there are still things in common that these admins do!
So lets jump into some of the most common things that salesforce admins do on a daily basis!
Top Tasks of a Salesforce Admin
1. Educate Users
The first task is to educate users. This is often overlooked by salesforce admins.
However, it is vital that we show the users of salesforce how to use the system.
Users are the lifeblood of the salesforce org. They enter the data, they work every day in the system, and they become more productive when they know how to use the system.
Admins are in a really unique position to bridge the gap between the ultra-technical side of relational databases and the front end where users live and work every day.
2. Configure the back end of salesforce
The second task is to configure salesforce for the users and for integrations.
In most cases, the admin is not going to be writing any code. Salesforce has the ability to have the backend be set up (to an extent) by doing declarative actions.
These declarative actions include creating new objects (groups of similar data), creating fields (individual boxes of data), and setting up simple integrations between salesforce and another software tool (like DocuSign).
Typically, these declarative actions done to customize the salesforce instance to the individual company’s needs.
For example, a company wants to be able to send contracts out of salesforce and let the customers sign it electronically. This is where integrating Docusign with salesforce would be incredibly lucrative.
3. Create Automations
The third task is to create automations in salesforce.
These automations can become incredibly complex. The two main paths for automation are flows and approval processes.
Flows are a drag-and-drop tool that uses actions as pieces.
For example, you want to automatically update field A when field B is manually updated. You would do this using flows!
The second main automation tool is the approval process.
An example of this one is approving a discount. When a contract is discounted above a certain amount it needs to be approved by a manager.
You can set up a series of actions for this discount to be approved through multiple means including in salesforce as well as email.
Automations are endless and are used to save the company time and money!
4. Listen to Users
The fourth item that is incredibly important is to listen to users and more specifically listen to their potential changes for the salesforce instance.
Users are in salesforce day in and day out when they have a suggestion for upgrading the system or creating a new automation, listen!
This is where some of the best ideas come from to customize the org to their preference and needs.
5. Create Users
The fifth item is to create users.
Whenever someone new comes into the salesforce instance their user will need to be created.
As well as provisioning their security settings! Which is extremely important to data integrity.
6. Advise Stakeholders
Finally, is advise stakeholders.
Specifically on the upcoming system updates and the viability of potential updates to the system.
Honorable Mentions
Now, these are not all the things that salesforce admins do but these are some of the most important I have come across in my career!
These honorable mentions are from the Salesforce Emily community
- Troubleshooting errors
- Cleaning and updating security settings
- Tweaking and editing reports
- Cleaning the data
- Resetting passwords
Did I miss anything on this post? Let me know in the comments!
Conclusion
A big congrats to you for making it through this tutorial! We hope you found it useful!
Check out the salesforce Emily youtube channel here.
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And check out our courses here