How To Collaborate With Your Salesforce Admin for Sales Success

Every family has one: The organiser. This is the person who handles all the day-to-day tasks, ensuring there’s always food in the fridge, clean clothes in the drawers, a continuous supply of toothpaste, and that everything runs smoothly day after day. The person without whom everything grinds to a halt … is it you?

That’s essentially the role of the Salesforce Admin. They’re certified power users who know where things are so their colleagues can use the Salesforce platform effectively. Like it is at home, at work, the secret to a sweeter life is collaboration. Life improves when you listen to the challenges of the people around you, think about how you can help, and find out how they can help you.

So, let’s look at the relationship between Sales Professionals and Salesforce Admins and the mutual advantages of collaboration. As our customers continue to show, optimal use of the platform can bring you outstanding results.  

Table of Contents:

• What does a Salesforce Admin do?
• How can they help you?
• How to work better together
• Collaboration compounded
• Helping each other embrace AI
• Helping each other become the best

What does a Salesforce Admin do?

Salesforce’s The State of the Connected Customer 2023 shows that 63% of business buyers globally say most customer experiences fall short of what they know is possible. The Salesforce Administrator role (or ‘Admin’) exists to solve this. They’re a certified user that makes sure each customer organisation gets the most from its Salesforce investment and enjoys efficient sales operations.

With system administration duties, Admins are responsible for setting up Salesforce and making sure it runs smoothly. They’ve special permissions, such as adding and removing user accounts or specifying what people can see and do, and special powers, including the ability to create custom Salesforce objects, workflows, validation rules, reports, and more.

Admins are planners, problem-solvers, and heroes (meet Marzena, for example!). All Salesforce organisations have at least one administrator, which could be a sales professional who uses Salesforce the way other users do or a dedicated Admin whose full-time role is configuration. While Salesforce offers you many self-service features, working with your trusty Admin will help you get the best out of your sales tools.

The things a Salesforce Admin can do include: 

• Setting up a feature you heard about during training
• Creating custom workflows ‌help you track case closures, implement personalised approval processes, and generate custom reports
• Giving you user permission that’s not granted as part of your user profile
• Addressing any error messages
• Managing CRM data and information  
• Helping you manage the continued growth of company data, as illustrated in The State of Data and Analytics 2023.

How can they help you?

The Salesforce platform is highly customisable and as we’ve seen, the Admin can help you configure it to your needs. So, what’s the advantage for you?

• Your Admin can build tailored dashboards or reports just for you, to visualise the specific key data you need, which might be different from that of your co-workers. This allows you to get information faster.
• Your Admin can guide you on the platform’s capabilities, ensuring that you derive value from your investment. Additionally, they encourage you to think creatively about sales strategies.
• They keep you up to date on the latest Salesforce tools, capabilities, and updates, so you can maintain an edge every quarter.
• They maintain the platform so your experience is smooth, fast, and secure. This includes bug fixing and always staying on top of training, for themselves and others.
• Admins will help with the move to automation and AI for more streamlined sales processes.
• And Admins integrate third-party apps using Data Cloud so that you can have all the functionality and connectivity you need.

How to work better together

Your Admin, drawing on vast knowledge and training, provides so many opportunities for advantage. How will you leverage these for peak sales performance? The key lies in collaboration. To make collaboration effective, there are essential guidelines to follow.

• Communication: For best results, you need to understand each other. This means lots of communication, both listening and talking. You need to know what’s possible and be able to articulate your challenges. It’s a two-way relationship as you’re helping each other do a better job. In time, with continuous communication, your Admin will be able to anticipate your needs, and you’ll have a better understanding of what’s achievable, and what to ask for with Salesforce customisation.
• Action: Use the updates your Admin has designed to find out if they work or not. All platform optimisation is just theory until it’s tested in a real sales environment.
• Results: Finally, try to provide feedback on what’s been done. It’s tempting to always look forward to what you can do next, but that misses a vital part. It’s important to assess the effectiveness of your past actions at different intervals, such as three months, six months, and one year, to gauge your success. For example, how are the prompts you’re using on Einstein AI working out? Can they be improved? For a truly strong relationship, you need to accept surprising results and mistakes and be open to change.

Collaboration compounded

Salesforce Admins are part of a bigger community, and collaboration is an important part of that culture. Admins play a fundamental role in the development of the platform because they share their insights with each other and with our developer community. And they get these insights from working closely with you.

So the more you can collaborate with your Sales Admin, the better the platform gets. And the better the platform gets, the better your results. A virtuous circle of sharing and improvement.

Helping each other embrace AI

As we move into an age of AI assistants, it’s to everyone’s advantage to lean into AI and understand how it can help. Our research shows that 91% of business leaders globally say generative AI would benefit their organisation, so it’s likely coming your way if you don’t already use it. 

We’ve previously discussed the actions Sales Admins can take to get AI-ready. But of course, a collaborative effort between you and your Salesforce Admin can facilitate a smooth transition for both of you. Your Admin can assist you in setting up and effectively utilising the Salesforce AI platform Einstein. In return, you can support your Admin by explaining which tasks would benefit from sales automation or AI integration.

Helping each other become the best

Through collaboration, both parties can perform at a higher level than would be achievable alone. By working closely with your Sales Admin you’ll be able to use your CRM platform in ways that give you an edge, to close more deals more quickly. And, this relationship will help your Admin create a Salesforce system the best it can be for your organisation.

To support you and all our Admins, Salesforce maintains an active hub, which you can explore here. If you’d like to know more, please get in touch.