Christine Stevens on User Management

Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Christine Stevens, Senior Salesforce Consultant at Turnberry Solutions.

Join us as we chat about the keys to user management and why documentation is so important.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Christine Stevens.

Start with documentation

Christine is another guest we’re bringing on from Gillian’s Skills for Success video series, where she shares her tips for user management. We couldn’t pass up the chance to bring her on the pod to hear more and ask some questions.

User management starts with a solid onboarding process and, for Christine, that comes down to good documentation. New users have a lot to learn and having clear process flows can help them make sure they’re doing the right thing.

Christine recommends showing the same process multiple ways, like a flow chart for more visual people and a step-by-step list for folks who just want the instructions. The same goes for In-App Guidance—some users love it but other users would rather have a printed reference next to them for help as they go.

Good documentation tells a story

When it comes to documentation, it’s important to remember that different industries have different terminologies that might overlap with Salesforce terms. Christine points out that an “account” might mean one thing to an accountant, a different thing to a lawyer, and yet another thing to a Salesforce Admin.

“Write the training like you’re telling a story,” Christine says. Whenever possible, put documentation in terms that make sense for the industry your users are working in. This makes it easier to follow and easier to update. What your users need to do probably won’t change that much, even if how they do it in Salesforce does.

Empathy and patience

Whenever possible, Christine recommends taking a close look at your company’s existing technical documentation. You can save yourself a lot of time by adapting it to fit with Salesforce, and it’s likely that there has already been a lot of thought put into how to document key business processes in a way that makes sense for your users.

Finally, Christine reminds us that the keys to user adoption are empathy and patience. Change is hard for anyone, so it’s especially important to take the time to listen to people and hear their concerns. If you can get to the root of the problem there’s often a simple fix.

Be sure to listen to the full episode to learn more about managing permissions, some new things coming in Winter ‘24, and how Christine reverse-engineered an abandoned Salesforce instance.

Podcast swag

• Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store

Resources

• Skills for Success—A New Video Series to Help Salesforce Admins Succeed

• Salesforce Admin Skills Kit

• Admin Preview: Winter ’24 Release Readiness Live

• Admin Trailblazer Group

Social

• Christine: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cdeannastevens/

• Salesforce Admins: @SalesforceAdmns

• Gillian: @GillianKBruce

• Mike: @MikeGerholdt

Full Transcript

Mike: User management is one of the four core habits of a Salesforce Admin and big responsibility that we all take on every day. So it really only makes sense that I talk with Christine Stevens about user management, documentation and user adoption. Now, Christine is featured in our Skills for Success YouTube series that Gillian launched just right before Dreamforce. And if you've been following along with us on the podcast this month, I've called it Skills for Success September. And so we're going to round out September by talking about user adoption and user management. But before we get into the episode, be sure you're following the Salesforce Admins Podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. That way you get a new episode every Thursday right on your phone. It's like magic and I promise they all don't sound like this one because Dreamforce kind of wrecked my voice. So with that, let's get Christine on the podcast. So Christine, welcome to the podcast.

Christine Stevens: Thank you so much for having me, Mike.

Mike: Well, I'm glad we are able to connect and round out September our Skills for Success September and talk about user management, which I mean that to me is the basis of success for admins within an org, for users, for really everybody. I mean, if users are using the system, then everybody's going to be successful. So let's dive into that. But first let's find out a little bit about you, Christine. How did you get started in the Salesforce ecosystem?

Christine Stevens: Yeah. Sure. So I got my start in Salesforce back in 2014. I actually joined a small ISV partner called Accounting Seed. So they originally hired me as their bookkeeper. And I want to say about three months into the job, I had no idea what Salesforce was, one of my managers approached me and they're like, "You're going to be working on our support team. You're going to be helping our users get onboarded with Accounting Seed and Salesforce." And I'm just like, "Oh gosh, I know what Accounting Seed is because I've been doing the bookkeeping, but I have no idea how to use Salesforce." So they're like, "We'll send you to Salesforce training and all the shebang." So I went to Salesforce training over the summer of 2014. I really liked the class, I really liked the material. So I spent maybe about a month after that class studying for the Salesforce Admin Certification, and then I eventually took the test and actually passed the first time. And since 2018, I've actually been working as a consultant for various consulting firms.

Mike: Wow. Passed the first time. You're in a minority there. That's really cool. Because I know a lot of people don't pass the first time. Ironically enough, your story mirrors a lot of admins. "Hey, I'm working for this company now and I'm in charge of Salesforce." "Oh, cool. I know what that other thing is. I don't know what Salesforce is, but let me figure that out." I know in the Skills for Success series with Gillian on the YouTube channel, which we'll link to in the show notes, you talk about user management. So let's dive into some of the user management stuff because I know there's a lot around with profiles and permission sets and being a consultant, I'm sure you run into all kinds of nightmarish scenarios where there's lots of things set up. But at the core, as admins get orgs set up or dive into orgs, where should they get started?

Christine Stevens: I would say the most underrated skills that I find that is not done on a lot of projects is documentation and training. I feel like those two things are when you're cutting the project budget, those are the first two things to go. But also I find those things important because when you're training, you want to give your end users documentation. They're going into a new system, they don't know how to use the system. And the first thing I've always noticed a lot of users ask is like, "Okay, you're showing me this cool system, I see this and that, but I feel really overwhelmed and I can't really absorb this knowledge right now. Where can I go after this training session to review what we just had? Or can I have a documentation on hand? So as I'm learning and navigating the system, I have a reference guide to refer to." So what I like to do on a lot of projects that I work on is I do documentation. So I usually like to do process flows because we have some users who are very visual and if they see the process flow of how to do everything, they're able to follow that. And then I have users who just like to read a book of documentation. I also write documentation guides along with little screenshots. And I think that is really important so that they can see where they go and they just have that hands-on guide next to them as they're clicking around in the system and it gets them more comfortable and confident in using the system.

Mike: Yeah. Having done some implementation projects, I always know documentation is, it's like when you're building a house, they go, "Oh, we can paint the walls for you." "Nope, that's fine. I'll do it myself. It's totally going to save me money." And then you're a couple of hours into painting the first wall and you're like, "Should've paid for this, should've had somebody else do it." What's interesting, I thought you went a different route with documentation, so I'm going to go down your road with you and then come back. Do you find when you're building documentation for users that they enjoy having something that is outside the system? And I ask this because we have in-app prompts and we spend a lot of time on that versus having stuff help guide them through the system.

Christine Stevens: So I've seen it go both ways in my experience. So I have some end users who like to have that outside documentation. They just like to have a printed copy of that document sitting next to them as they're on their computer, they have the document sitting next to them and they're clicking around in Salesforce using that guide. But then also I have users who like to use the in-app prompts such as the screen flows, the help text, the little pop-up icon when you're clicking on a field and you have the pop-up icon to see the additional information. And then one thing I liked really doing in the past for UAT is when we built our test scripts, I worked for a company at one point where we designed a training app and we would load it into each of our client's sandboxes and we would load our test scripts, which contained the steps to test each process. So that information was in Salesforce. And what I've noticed what quite a few customers have done over time with that app is they would take our instructions if they were well written and turn that into their training documentation. So they would show users where to go in Salesforce and then they would just go into Salesforce, maybe have it up on another screen and just be able to navigate those test scripts as they're entering their real life information into Salesforce.

Mike: Yeah, that makes sense. How do you advise as an admin sitting here thinking, oh man, documentation. It always works out nice to start fresh when you have a new project. But for admins that are like, "Okay, I've got to go back and document some stuff." How would you recommend somebody tackle that?

Christine Stevens: Yeah. So I've been involved in quite a few projects where I was thrown into the middle of the project as an admin. So there was a project I worked on last year and they had a Salesforce org that was about 12 to 15 years old and nobody on staff knew how to use the org. So what I did to figure out how things worked is I just dove into the backend of the system. I started looking at the Schema Builder to really understand the object data model, and then I just dove into the objects to see what kind of fields there were. I dived into the flows. I started really looking into the flows and writing on a scratch sheet of paper what the flow did, what objects it was touching and then I ended up taking that. And the good thing about the company I worked for when I was doing this is they had templates of technical documentations that you could write. So I just took all that information that I documented onto that scratch sheet of paper and put it into that document, and I actually presented it to my clients and they were like, "Wow, in the 15 years we have this org, this is the first time we've had completed documentation." And they asked me, "Who showed you how to use the system?" And I was like, "Nobody. I actually took it upon myself to really dive into the backend myself to really understand how things worked."

Mike: Wow, that's cool. I love that tip of look for existing technical documentation because you know most companies have that.

Christine Stevens: Yes.

Mike: You're not starting from scratch. Okay, so I love where you went with the documentation question, you threw me a curveball because I wasn't even thinking about users and wanting to look at the process to understand what they're inputting in terms of the technology in front of them. I was thinking documenting user profiles and user management, and I thought that's where you're going to go. So I'm going to throw that at you, so here's your curveball. Which is, as a Salesforce Admin, I think it's always very important that we make sure that for security reasons, our profiles and permission sets and permission set groups are always up-to-date. How best do you recommend for admins or some of your clients to document that?

Christine Stevens: Yeah, so there is an app that I've used in the past, and the name of it does not come to the top of mind. Because I know the issue with documenting profiles and permissions, it's not really easy to abstract that information out of Salesforce. At least that's how it's been in my experience. You do have to do some clicking around. So there was an app that I've used in the past that allowed for you to export your profile and permission information just so that you had up on, I think it put it into an Excel spreadsheet so that you had an Excel Doc and it had the different profiles listed along with the different permission sets. I think the profiles were rows and then the different permissions for columns. Maybe I have that flipped. And you could see right on screen, okay, what does this user have access to? And when I showed that app to some of my clients, they were actually surprised at what they saw. They saw there were times that they had users who had too much access to the system because a lot of clients, their default is to give everybody admin access just so they don't have to go through that strategy of thinking of limiting access. But as a consultant, I advise against that. And then another thing I advise against is always updating your profiles is you have these permissions, and I know you have, I think they're called permission groups now, where you can group the different permission sets together. So when I'm working with a brand new client with a net new Salesforce org, I encourage them to go down that route and use that app, and then we just go through it, clean up the permission sets. And I think with that app, you are able to directly load back into Salesforce those updated changes so that they could take effect immediately. Because I know with the user interface of Salesforce right now, you have to go through one by one on the objects and update the permissions, and I know that's a nightmare for a lot of people.

Mike: Yeah. Well, the good news, and I'll link to this in the show notes, I saw at Dreamforce, because we're coming off Dreamforce from not that long ago, in Winter '24 at the release readiness live that we did, Cheryl Feldman demoed that you can, A, now select all on permission sets. So that's in that video. And B, you can also see all of those permissions-

Christine Stevens: Oh, wow.

Mike: ... on a page. So there's some improvements coming. Everybody cheered, so I know I am underselling it by 1,000% right now. But everything you mentioned was stuff that's coming now in Winter '24 because, yes, I mean it can be a little bit of a who sees what, who saw what, and just set them up as an admin, I just need them... And it's like, "Right, but we need to do this with the right security in mind so that people aren't seeing things." To your point on documentation when doing training, what is your best advice for tackling and making sure that your documentation doesn't get out of date?

Christine Stevens: I would say the biggest thing I've been focusing on in most recent years, especially as I do training and write documentation, is I find that my customers can consume the training better is if you write the training like you're telling a story or you're telling a day in a life story. So right now I work with a lot of clients that are law firms, so they like to hear the law firm terminology as you're going through stuff. So I try to relate it to the industry that they're in and the role that they're in. And as long as I write it as a story, it makes the updates easier. I noticed with a lot of training documentation that I read sometimes, it's very technical versus user-friendly. And I find when you write it in more of a technical nature, you have to update it more versus if you write it in a story mode, sometimes I find that I'm going through and maybe updating the screenshots and maybe the text here and there.

Mike: Yeah. Right. But the story sometimes doesn't change a whole lot because it's the same.

Christine Stevens: Yes.

Mike: Yeah, that's a really good tip. Plus, I mean, if you think about it, how has humans throughout the span of history moved knowledge and data before the internet or before, I don't know, chiseling in stone? We told stories. There were storytellers, they would go from village to village and knoll to knoll. I don't know, people lived in knolls I guess. Or maybe under bridges. Let's dive into user adoption and I'm going to ask you a question. Yeah, here we go. First day at Dreamforce, we did these one-on-one consults in the Admin Meadow. I love doing them, they're super fun. They're a little challenging, I won't lie, there's a lot of people that came up that had some very challenging things. A couple individuals sat down and said, "So we've spent five years trying to solve this and we can't fix it yet." And I said, "Good, we're going to do it in 20 minutes." Tongue in cheek. One question though, this is the first person I had as a consult, they sat down, they said, "What's the secret to user adoption?" And that was their question. And I said, "Oh, well, let's talk about that." I'm going to ask you, Christine, what's the secret to user adoption?

Christine Stevens: I would say in my opinion, the secret to user adoption is it's always evolving. There is no one unique way of doing user adoption. At least that's how it's been in my experience. It's really understanding, sitting down with your users and really getting to know them on a personal level and how they work. I find when I do those two things, I do find myself adjusting as I engage in user adoption with a lot of my users. I don't have the same training style for each of my clients, it shifts a tiny bit. And I would say the biggest personality trait to have successful user adoption is to be empathetic because sometimes I work with a lot of clients who are in the accounting industry and accountants, they love their QuickBooks. So when they're moving to Salesforce, they're either moving to an Accounting Seed or a FinancialForce. I think they've changed their name to something else that I forget off the top of my head. But most of the time when those users are moving the Salesforce, they're pretty upset because they don't want to leave QuickBooks because QuickBooks is pretty easy to use and now they have this massive Salesforce system and they're just like, "Oh God, I just don't want to do it." And it's just the key that I get to get users to use the system is just to be empathetic and also be patient. Because sometimes I find with clients, we are going over some stuff over and over again, which helps me to adopt my user training. Sometimes the training might not be efficient or maybe I'm not using the language. One thing I try to do is just really adopt in terms of speak the client's language versus the Salesforce language. Because if I use account, not everybody thinks account is an account. Some people think accounts are like client accounts. I know in the legal industry, accounts are parties. So really adopting that language because I find when I adopt the client's language, they are more likely to adopt this system faster because they know what account translates to in their language.

Mike: Right. Yes. I could not agree more. And in fact, sometimes I've stumbled in training and used a technical term, "Wait, I mean this instead." Everybody comes back and does that. So you mentioned training and I want to touch on that because I think there's a fair group of admins, I'll group myself in there, that actually really enjoys doing training. Training is a form of public speaking, so I'm not very scared of that. But there's also a fair group of admins that, if I can just send somebody a manual, maybe a link to a video, I'm good. What's your advice for admins that have to tackle that? Because there's definitely admins that are very outgoing that maybe only have 10 users and can be around all the time. And then there's definitely admins that aren't very outgoing and they might have 100 or 200 users, but they still need to train them.

Christine Stevens: Yes. I would say on a personal level, myself, I'm actually not a very outgoing person, I'm very introverted. So that's something I've struggled with throughout my career also. What's helped me is I've actually invested time into public speaking. So I've gone to things like Toastmasters and really found things to talk about that I'm passionate about. And once I found things that I'm passionate about speaking about, that translated very well into speaking about stuff related to training and user adoption. So I think of it as a game. So when I'm doing those training sessions, I think of it like, "Okay, this is something that I'm passionate about." And just remind myself, what is the end goal. I try to set goals for myself when I'm doing these kinds of trainings. And I feel like when I have the goal and the passion, it feels like it's so much easier for me to get through those sessions. And then I'll also say, what I try to do prior to those training sessions is I try to meditate or I try to take some quiet time because training, it can be exhausting. And when I take that quiet time and also time to rehearse before the call, I usually have a successful training call. I mean, sometimes there are people I speak to who can be quite difficult and usually when I encounter somebody who's difficult, I try to follow up with additional questions to ask them. Because sometimes when you follow up their question with a question or their frustration with a question, it causes them to pause and think about what are they trying to say or what's the point they're trying to get out there. And either they dial it back or they try to figure out a better way to phrase their question.

Mike: Yeah, the number of times you have to grit your teeth sometimes at that difficult person in training and you think, "Why are you doing this? This is making it harder." And then you sit back and it's that layer of empathy that I've always had to be like, "Oh, they just need this information in order to move on. They're not trying to make things harder on you. This is a gap that they need filled as well." I think this would be something that a lot of admins are very curious about. User management always falls under the house cleaning stuff, that we always have to maintain, got to make sure everybody's got, what I call, the right key to the right door, permission sets and profile groups and stuff like that. When you talk to admins, what do you advise them on in terms of reporting around user management that shows their ROI?

Christine Stevens: So I usually ask them what are their key performance indicators? What are we trying to measure here? Are we trying to measure the amount of times user login? Are we measuring based on the amount of records that are being created in Salesforce? And I always find that as a consultant, this always varies. So the client I worked with last year, they measured success just based on the number of intake records. So they were a financial services company and their key performance indicator was just the number of clients they onboarded each month. So when I first joined the project, they noticed their client onboarding was on a decline and we started the investigation of the reason why. So I did a couple of interviews with some of the admins on the team and I also talked to some of the end users and the end users had a lot of complaints about the system. So I was working as a business analyst on this project. So I just went through, documented all their concerns and then I went to the admin team and I'm like, "Okay, here's what I'm finding why they're not adopting the system." So one reason was they had to create accounts and at that point their account creation process was manual. And they also had a lot of fields on the account page layoff that they weren't using. So I worked with their admin team, so we ended up building a screen flow to do the intake and just having the specific fields that their agents cared about filling out when they were onboarding a client. So when we presented that to them in a demo session, there was a lot of cheering and clapping, they were like, "This process is so much more automated." And the first month we implemented that, their client onboarding was significantly higher than the beginning of the year. And that was just really cool to see. And we wouldn't have known that if I had not sat down and had the conversations with the end users.

Mike: Yeah. Man, I am right with you. I remember for the longest time, I had the hardest time getting salespeople to create contacts. And there was just a whole bunch of superfluous fields there that other teams needed. This was the days before Dynamic Forms, by the way. And the biggest thing that always stuck with me, and a trainer like yourself told me this, was nobody wants to show up to their job and feel stupid. And leaving a field blank on a page when they're creating a record, unintentionally made my users feel stupid because they're like, "Should I know this? Why don't I know this? Maybe I shouldn't be creating this contact." And it was that little bit that was just enough to stop them from hitting that new button. Which was a measure of their success as well, but we didn't uncover it until we got into some later project phases and I had a boss that asked for that and somebody finally stood up and says, "Half these fields, I don't even know when I create the contact." And I was like, "Oh, well..." Workflows and record types at the time was how I solved it. But yeah, screen flows. I love that answer. That's great. Christine, thanks so much for coming on and sharing some user management. I love the documentation aspect of it. I feel like there's just never enough that we can do to really drive people through and help them understand and drive that user adoption. So I appreciate you taking the time out and being on the Skills for Success video series and then sharing some extra insight with us here on the podcast.

Christine Stevens: Yes, thank you so much for having me on, Mike. It's been fun.

Mike: So that was a great discussion with Christine. I really enjoy the tip that she had about look for existing technical documentation within your organization and then copy off of that. I think sometimes when we're thinking we've got to write user manuals or we've got to write process documentation, we're starting from scratch and we don't know what's out there. Hey, I bet your organization has something out there. This is also a good opportunity for you to make friends over in your IT org, maybe they can help you with that documentation as well. Now, if you enjoyed this episode, can you do me a favor? I just need you to share it with at least one person. And here's how you do it. If you're listening on iTunes, you just tap the dots and choose share episode. Then you can post it social, you can even text it to a friend, maybe a friend that's looking to build some user management adoption documentation. And of course, if you're looking for more great resources, your one-stop for everything admin is Admin.salesforce.com, including the transcript of this show and links to that YouTube series. Be sure to join the conversation over in the Admin Trailblazer Group in the Trailblazer Community. Again, links are in the show notes. And with that, until next week, we'll see you in the cloud.