Our recent rebrand was accompanied by several changes to our internal operations.
One of these transitions involved an upgrade from our old CRM to Salesforce. When I heard about plans to implement Salesforce, I knew I would need additional training – at least from a user standpoint.
I decided to go with a Salesforce training course from Blue Wolf and I found the experience to be extremely helpful in streamlining our new process. While I am glad that I had the opportunity to attend this training, there are several things that I wish I had known beforehand.
Here are 5 of the most significant:
If you are considering a career in Salesforce Administration or Development you should be aware that it would require training on a continuous basis. This is not a career path for people who like to do the same thing over and over again or who prefer to become “masters” of their domain. This program requires you to re-certify every three months to learn and test new additions to the software.
Before I headed to training, I didn’t take the instructor seriously enough when they informed me that I would need a second computer monitor on the first and second day of class. This is a mistake that I would NOT repeat! It is critical to have at LEAST to monitors, and maybe even three for a virtual training in a program like Salesforce.
You definitely need to have two monitors – one to watch and one to follow along in the exercises creating the custom fields and workflows.
The most challenging part of the course was keeping up with the pace. As someone that was totally new to Salesforce, with barely a month of experience before training, I was in the minority in my class.
Most of the people I was in class with were users who had been managing a Salesforce instance for several years, and just needed tips for the exam. So the majority of the time, we would go over concepts, get hints on what would probably be on the exam, and then run through an example quickly, clicking through screens together.
The training program I decided to go with focused more on exam questions than I anticipated. I expected to work more with business use cases since the Salesforce exam is scenario based. Instead, our instructor really stuck to the core concepts and on tips for the exam itself.
The course was much more intense and difficult than I expected it to be. I would advise new users to take some online training before attending a course like this. This will help you understand the basic Salesforce navigation and key terms.
I made the mistake of trying to follow along as the instructor was providing valuable test information. If I were to repeat the course I would write down those tips instead. Our recordings of the course were intermittent, so there are things I wanted to go back and watch that I couldn’t. Virtual training is difficult. Be early, stay late, or stay through lunch to get a little extra help and guidance from the teacher or to go over anything you don’t understand.
The most valuable thing I learned in training is the way that Salesforce is structured, and the language used to discuss parts of Salesforce, such as calling Leads, Accounts and Opportunities “Objects,” and then learning the rules around how things flow. It was also valuable for me to spend time in the course, because I acquired skills and ability to customize our Salesforce instance. I have been working with the program since the day I finished the course!
My job has changed drastically since attending the Salesforce training. I have been working in the system since the moment I came out of class, and I have been tasked with some very challenging assignments for leads within our instance.
Since we also use Marketo, I have to work closely with my Marketo guru for all of our Marketing Automation needs. Luckily, I am surrounded with a smart team, and we have been able to figure out most of the things we want to do up to this point.
We still have a lot of work to go, but it has been fun learning both of these programs and helping with lead generation/marketing automation for our SDR team. I have grown in my responsibilities at work and I definitely attribute this to my training in Salesforce.
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