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I was excited to attend the first ever Salesforce Admin Keynote. A large number of the people who use Salesforce every day are Admins and it was good to see a spotlight on them.

The reality is, Admins juggle many things and they have to work smart.

Presenter Kris Lande, Director of Admin Marketing, Salesforce, shared with delegates how previously, as an admin, the old mantra of “set it and forget it” is exactly what she needed to live by to get things done. This means if you don’t have the tools to fire off automated processes and workflows, you are probably feeling the pressure. And, it’s why we listen carefully to our admins to understand what they need.

In doing that, we’ve repeatedly heard the request for new, interactive training spaces – training tools that are comprehensive, but easy to follow. But, most of all, fun! So, it was great to see Trailhead as a central feature of the admin keynote, as well as a part of a whole developer zone in the Dreamforce Expo (a firm favourite with our co-founder & EVP Technology, Parker Harris).

What is Trailhead?

Trailhead is a fun and easy way for you to learn Salesforce – your personal Salesforce, for whichever journey you are taking your business on. There are trails  - and badges - for everyone, taking you on a journey from learning platform basics, data management and data modeling, through migrating to Lightning Experience and on developing your own rock star business apps.

During this session I learned that our Admins have already earned more than 50,000 Lightning badges to help them on their journey from Lightning Classic to Lightning Experience.

This tells me our Admin community is blazing a trail to success for businesses all over the globe – it’s impressive!

How you can take advantage of Trailhead to guide your business?

1. Experiment

2. Engage

3. Design

The first step to supporting your business more effectively with Salesforce is to EXPERIMENT in the Admin Playground.

The Admin Playground is a safe environment to develop your app building skills. It’s not connected to your organization instance of Salesforce so it’s a safe place to play around with data. And, it’s also not a Sandbox, which is where you go with a solid concept to build and test – it’s more experimental than that. It’s where you test the boundaries of what you know, and learn without limits. It’s gaming, where the big prize is awesome business tools and greater success!

When the playground connects to Trailhead, you can complete badges and be an expert in anything you need, to shape your business systems your way. The great thing about Trailhead combined with the Admin Playground, is the Lightning design system gives you code you can copy and paste right into your apps.

The Salesforce AppExchange also has more than 50 partners contributing usable apps and components you can just drop right into your build to complete it. You don’t have to build everything yourself (we won't tell anyone).

The next step is ENGAGE with your stakeholders to get feedback on your Salesforce journey. We heard from session presenters the importance of taking advantage of Salesforce’s mobile app for Admins – Salesforce A – to get out there among the people using Salesforce every day. Salesforce A lets you sits down with system users, explore features with them, record their feedback, activate access permissions during the conversation, and a whole lot more. This level of engagement is priceless in terms of getting you where you want to go fast. The message was; “Don’t be that guy behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz”.

Finally, DESIGN. It’s what Trailhead was created to empower you to do. Salesforce is your system, you get to make it work for you in a way your competitors can’t. And, we hope that with Trailhead we have given you the tools to empower that journey. 

Get started with Trailhed HERE.