Salesforce Admins Podcast

By: Mike Gerholdt
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  • Summary

  • The Salesforce Admins podcast features real-life Salesforce Admins, product managers, and community leaders who transform businesses, careers, and community with clicks, not code. This 20min (sometimes a bit more) weekly podcast hosted by Mike Gerholdt feature episodes to empower Salesforce Admins who are implementing Enterprise CRM solutions. There may be some (digital) confetti. For more than our most recent episodes, go to https://admin.salesforce.com/salesforce-admin-podcast.
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Career Success Economics
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Episodes
  • Boost Your AI Strategy with Salesforce Labs AI Library

    Boost Your AI Strategy with Salesforce Labs AI Library
    Feb 13 2025
    Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Marianna Torres, Associate Salesforce Labs Evangelist at Salesforce. Join us as we chat about the Salesforce Labs AI Library and how it can get you started with implementing AI agents in your org. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Marianna Torres. What is Salesforce Labs? Growing up, Marianna was always interested in more creative pursuits and had never considered a career in tech. That all changed during the COVID-19 lockdown when she enrolled in a workforce development program called Year Up United and landed an internship with Salesforce. Today, Marianna works on the Salesforce Labs team, curating the Salesforce employee-built apps, components, and flows that are available for free on AppExchange. Now with the release of Agentforce, the team has put together the Salesforce Labs AI Library as a resource to help you get started with AI. How the Salesforce Labs AI Library helps you get started with Agentforce If you’ve been keeping up with the pod, you know that prompt engineering can be tricky business. But what if you could copy all the best, most useful prompts from Salesforce product experts? That’s what the Salesforce Labs AI Library is all about. It gives you everything you need to get AI agents up and running. When she’s going through submissions, Marianna asks three simple questions: Will this help the customer? Does this simplify something that historically takes a lot of time? Is it easy to use? If the answer is yes, it gets included in the library, ready to help you implement Agentforce AI in your org. More resources for Salesforce Labs If you don’t know where to start, Marianna recommends going through the Salesforce Labs Basics on Trailhead. You can also listen to the full episode, where she walks Josh through the process of looking something up in the Salesforce Labs AI Library. That’s it for this episode, so be sure to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast and we’ll catch you next week. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more The Salesforce Labs AI Library Trailhead: Salesforce Labs Basics AppExchange: Salesforce Labs Year Up United Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Marianna on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Josh Birk: Hey, gang, Josh Birk, your guest host here for today. Today we're going to talk to Marianna Torres about a project that I am very, very excited about. It's live now, it's called the Salesforce Labs AI Library. I'm really not sure if I'm getting that name right, but I will ask Mariana here in a second. All right. Today on the show, we welcome Marianna Torres to talk about the Salesforce AI Labs library. Do I have that title right or is there are more official one? Marianna Torres: The Salesforce Labs AI Library is the official title. But yeah, you did a good job. Yeah. Josh Birk: Okay. Welcome to the show. First, I want to talk a little bit about your early years. Was computers and software engineering, software in general something you always wanted to get into? Marianna Torres: Honestly, no. I'm actually surprised about how I ended up here at Salesforce. But yeah, so growing up and stuff, I was always more of a creative person, so I was drawing, singing, doing all that. Basically anything that's creative, I was doing. So as I got older, it kind of got to the point where it's like you kind of realize that, okay, it's like I can go to school, I could pursue this, I could potentially do something. But at the same time, I had graduated and it was shortly before COVID. Josh Birk: Oh. Marianna Torres: Yeah, so instead of going the traditional route, I had just joined a workforce development program. The program was called Year Up. Yeah, so through that I did the six-month corporate training. They had transitioned it to virtual and everything. So yeah, I actually started my internship here at Salesforce in 2020, so peak COVID. And from there one thing led to another, I was a contractor for a couple years, and then I got full time. Josh Birk: Nice, nice. What was the connection to get into the AI labs job itself? Other than the fact that we get paid a nickel every time we say the word AI. Marianna Torres: Yeah. So yeah, the team that I'm with now, it's the exact same team that I had joined five years ago as an intern, and that is the Salesforce Labs team. So primarily, our job is to provide our customers with some free employee-built apps, components, and flows on AppExchange. Then this past whole year, AI became huge, and then we had to pivot and we're like, "Okay, the customers want AI, what can we give them?" Seeing as how AI wasn't packageable yet, so- Josh Birk: Right. Marianna Torres: Yeah, we actually just launched Actions, I believe. So Agent Actions are now...
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    19 mins
  • Spring '25 Salesforce Features: AI, Flows, and User Management Updates

    Spring '25 Salesforce Features: AI, Flows, and User Management Updates
    Feb 6 2025
    Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Jennifer Lee, Lead Admin Evangelist at Salesforce and the host of How I Solved It and Automate This! Join us as we chat about everything coming with the Spring ‘25 release and what’s new for Agentforce and AI on Salesforce. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Jennifer Lee. Jen’s highlights from the Spring ‘25 release Every year, Jen’s release readiness blog post is our most popular piece of content. So I thought I’d bring her on the pod to talk about Spring ‘25 so we can hear it straight from the source. She shares [number] areas where there will be big changes: 1. Agentforce for all with Salesforce Foundations With Spring ‘25, more orgs than ever before will get access to Agentforce for free with Salesforce Foundations. This is a game changer for smaller orgs and solo admins, allowing you to use AI to harness the power of the Sales, Service, and Marketing Clouds to transform your business. One thing Jen wants to highlight is the ability to add agent quick actions right on a record page. Prompting is an art, but sometimes your users just need the AI to do the thing. Now you can give them a magic button to give the agent the correct prompt. If you have Einstein Bots, you can easily convert them into templates for agents to save some steps getting started with Agentforce. 2. Einstein AI for flows For the flownatics out there, there are a ton of new ways that AI enhancements in Spring ‘25 can help you build flows. You can describe what you want a formula or flow to do, and Einstein will build it for you. While you’ll need to go in and iron out the details, it can get you 80% of the way there. No more googling to look up how to write a specific formula. If you’re like most admins, your Salesforce org is probably full of flows that you didn’t build yourself. With Spring ‘25, you’ll be able to get Einstein to summarize what they do, which makes documentation and debugging much easier. 3. User management made easy Meanwhile, there are several user management changes coming in Spring ‘25 aimed at minimizing clicks and making permissions easier to manage. The group summary page lets you view all the sharing rules and list views in one place, so it’s much simpler to figure out why someone can see something but someone else can’t. 4. Better screen flows in Spring ‘25 Action buttons let you automatically trigger a flow when your user clicks a button, but what if you could pull up the output without any other user interaction? That’s where screen flows come in. For example, when your user selects a contact you can automatically pull up the associated cases or opportunities. How to get ready for a Salesforce release Jen’s advice for going through release notes is to start with your org. What features do you rely on? Search through the release notes for those things, specifically, and make sure you know what’s new and what’s changing. Two things that will affect every org are security updates and release updates. These security and performance enhancements will improve your org across the board, so be sure you know when they’ll be enforced and how to test them. Remember, a sandbox org is your best friend. There’s a lot more great stuff from Jen to get ready for Spring ‘25, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Blog: Jen’s Top Spring ’25 Release Features | Be Release Ready Salesforce Admins Podcast Episode: How Can Small Teams Benefit from Salesforce Foundations and Generative AI? Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Jen on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full show transcript Mike: This week on the Salesforce Admin's podcast, we're thrilled to welcome back Jennifer Lee to talk about the Spring '25 release and all of its exciting features. Now, as you know, Jennifer is lead admin evangelist here on the admin relations team at Salesforce and host of the How I Solved It and Automate This video series on YouTube. She's also known for this blog post, which comes out with every release. I know you find it incredibly helpful. I do. Now, before we jump into the conversation with Jennifer, I want to make sure that you are following the Salesforce Admin's podcast on your favorite platform so that you never miss an episode, which could include really cool features like this one. So with that, let's get Jennifer on the podcast. So Jen, welcome back to the podcast. Jennifer Lee: Thanks for having me, Mike. Glad to be back. Mike: Well, it's almost spring. It doesn't feel like it where we're at- Jennifer Lee: No. Mike: ... but isn't that how it always is with all of our releases? ...
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    26 mins
  • How Erick Mahle is Using AI to Transform Mortgage Lending

    How Erick Mahle is Using AI to Transform Mortgage Lending
    Jan 30 2025
    Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Erick Mahle, VP of Revenue Operations & Digital Transformation at Lendz Financial. Join us as we chat about how he’s using AI to drive digital transformation and how he started FlowFest, the largest global Salesforce flow competition. You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Erick Mahle. Solving business problems with Salesforce Erick was always interested in technology as a kid, helping his dad build computers. However, he originally started his career in marketing. Everything changed when his manager asked him to take over Salesforce for his organization and he saw what he could do with declarative solutions. “I thought it was the grownup version of Legos,” he says. In his role at Lendz Financial, he’s combining those problem-solving skills with the power of AI to spearhead digital transformation. The mortgage lending industry is full of complicated business processes that need to be checked and re-checked, so it’s the perfect place to put new AI capabilities to the test. How AI can streamline mortgage lending If you’ve ever bought a house, you’ll know that getting a mortgage is incredibly complex. With so many steps and regulatory requirements, Erick and his team are using AI to streamline these business processes and limit costly errors. They call it Project Lexi. Obviously, with mortgages involved, they’re not ready to turn everything over to AI just yet. However, they’ve already found several wins by eliminating handoffs with automation and training the AI to flag potential problems. For Erick, the key to any successful digital transformation initiative is to focus on the humans you’re supposed to be helping. FlowFest, the largest global Salesforce flow competition Erick also runs FlowFest, a competition where Flownatics can strut their stuff. It started with the idea that although Trailhead is great at teaching you how to build things, a big part of your job as a Salesforce Admin is to fix broken flows. Contests are put through several rounds of debug challenges, culminating in a livestreamed event where the finalists race to be the first to find a working solution for the final flow. It’s basically an esport, complete with live commentary and dramatic photo finishes. They just did their first in-person FlowFest at Mile High Dreamin’, and it may be coming soon to an event near you. Erick had a lot more to share about how he’s thinking about AI and some of his favorite FlowFest stories, so be sure to listen to the full episode. And don’t forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast. Podcast swag Salesforce Admins on the Trailhead Store Learn more Video: FlowFest V6 Mile High Dreamin’ on YouTube Admin Trailblazers Group Admin Trailblazers Community Group Social Erick on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on LinkedIn Salesforce Admins on X Mike on Bluesky social Mike on Threads Mike on X Full Transcript Josh Birk: Hello, admins, your guest host Josh Birk here. Today, we welcome Erick Mahle to talk a little bit about AI, digital transformation, and a lot about one of his projects, FlowFest, and how people can learn Flow in a really fun and interactive way. So, without any further ado, let's go welcome Erick. All right. Today on the show, we welcome Erick Mahle to talk about, of course, probably a little bit of AI since that's what we have to do these days and Mile High Dreamin' and FlowFast. Erick, welcome to the show. Erick Mahle: Well, thanks for having me, Josh. Josh Birk: So, let's start with your early years. Did you always want to get into software? Erick Mahle: No, I had no idea I was going to get into software. Although, when I was a very young kid, my father used to build computers and I know I used to do a little bit of the same as well like getting all the video cards, the motherboards, getting all the components, joining them together. But that wasn't something that stuck with me throughout all these years. So, I went to school for marketing, but somehow ended up as the accidental admin and here we are 15 years later. Josh Birk: Got it. Well, that kind of segues to the next question. How did you first get introduced to Salesforce? Erick Mahle: Well, since accidental admin is the default answer for most folks... Josh Birk: Right. Erick Mahle: I will basically say, I joined a company as a marketing analyst. It was a small company. And like most small companies, you get to wear many hats and they basically said, "Hey, we have Salesforce, why don't you manage Salesforce?" And really had a great experience there. We had brought in my boss at that time who was a Silicon Valley-type global sales director, and he really challenged me a lot. He used to say, "Hey, at SuccessFactor, Salesforce used to do this, or at Zuora, Salesforce used to do that. And really, challenged me to kind of reverse engineer Salesforce and I found a lot of joy in that....
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    35 mins

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