5 Tips to Make Every Salesforce Admin an #AwesomeAdmin

Whether you’re a Salesforce admin yourself or a business leader reading up on useful best practices for your business admin, you’ve landed upon the right page. As more & more companies shift towards using cloud CRM software, like Salesforce to organize data, track opportunities, manage campaigns, & much more, the role of a Salesforce admin becomes all the more crucial within the company.

A Salesforce administrator wears many hats: answering user questions, customizing the applications for users’ ease, setting up reporting & dashboards to keep managers happy, working with key stakeholders to determine requirements, keeping an eye on availability & system performance, activating the features from each new release, and so much more. It won’t be wrong to say that the success of not only the CRM, but the company as a whole rests on the admin’s shoulders.

When the nature of work is so complex, every Salesforce admin can benefit from all the help he/she can receive in streamlining the processes. Here’s a list of some useful tips we think will help all the admins in increasing adoption & the overall ROI from Salesforce:

Using Salesforce Flow for Building Automations

As Salesforce officially retired Workflow Rules & Process Builder during Dreamforce 2021, Salesforce Flow is a new way forward. Instead of being hesitant about this change, Salesforce admins must welcome Flow with open arms as it empowers them to build complex business automations with just clicks (as opposed to code), giving them the same power as a developer. With the use cases for Flow being endless, every admin must make it his/her best friend as it will allow them to handle a vast majority of complex business requirements without the help of a Salesforce developer.

Learn to Use Sandboxes First 

Being a Salesforce admin, the sandbox will not be a new term for you. But you still need to keep in mind that sometimes even the smallest of changes can have significant negative consequences. Therefore, using the sandbox to build & develop things before moving them into the production environment is greatly recommended. Using Sandbox to test every change will allow you to create new things without compromising the data & applications in the production level.

Also Read: Storing Data outside of the Salesforce System – Top Considerations with an Efficient Roadmap

Maintain Data Quality

As most CRM projects fail because of bad data, maintaining the data quality is another important task for a Salesforce admin. To ensure consistently high data quality, you’ll need to train your users, create & implement a top-notch data quality process, and use available technologies to automate the process whenever possible. Though the admin is the primary person responsible for data management & maintaining data quality, asking for help from other teams doesn’t hurt. For example, you can ask your sales representatives to thoroughly search for records before creating new ones to reduce data duplication.

Give Proper Attention to Data Protection

Nothing hurts the business productivity more than accidentally deleting some important data or making a change that breaks processes. In order to avoid these pitfalls, focusing on data protection in Salesforce will be our next tip. And the best way to do this is to back up, back up, & back up your data. We recommend creating reliable data backups of your data that can be restored in case the original data is ever lost. Whether using Dataloader, Weekly Export Service, or a full-service data backup solution, always make sure the data in Salesforce is backed up securely.

Implement Data Archival Techniques

As a final tip, we’ll recommend archiving your data in Salesforce for long-term storage & safekeeping. You need to assess which data is used frequently, by whom, & for what purpose. Based on this information, you can define your data archiving strategy in Salesforce which can help you in efficient data management, data storage optimization, seamless compliance, & much more. If you need some help in this, look into our data archiving platform which allows you to archive your data either at a native level in Big Objects or into external databases (MySQL, Postgres, MSSQL, etc) by leveraging external platforms (AWS, Azure, Heroku, GCP, On-premise).

As your organization’s Salesforce admin, you play an extremely critical role in making the Salesforce CRM a success. Your position requires you to be your company’s data steward, thereby protecting the org, ensuring its quality, & helping users use the SaaS platform as efficiently as possible. Though the task can be daunting, we hope these tips & tricks will help you in becoming an #AwesomeAdmin in no time.