As a Salesforce admin who has been working in salesforce for a while or just started your career recently, every new year brings the hope of doing something new, setting goals for ourselves, and thinking of ways to elevate our career in our organization. After the tired happy new year messages and what is your goal for this year for you being bombarded on our social media channels, we are thinking of ways on can we really do this year with our admin career. Obviously, the doom and boom news from Salesforce laying off 10% of its employees, and bad economic metrics starts hitting our fears and our chameleon brains!! We all have questions and hope there is a gym where we can do and build our muscles quickly and drink that healthy matcha green tea to make us healthy!!

What kind of goals should a salesforce admin have for this year?
Are there tasks or habits I can do consistently which can lead me to getting my goals?
What kind of tools can I use to track myself on how am I progressing or not progressing at all in my career?

What kind of goals should a salesforce admin have for your Salesforce Org for this year?

When we talk of goals for a salesforce admin, there is always this sidetrack of certifications, new products, and skills we should learn or develop which comes to our mind. But let us address the elephant in the room!! As an admin, what is your primary responsibility and how are you judged in your organization? It is the salesforce org that we live and dies every day for our users building those shiny objects to meet the requirements. So here are some tips on goal metrics for your Salesforce org.

Increase adoption by 10% across Users or specific departments.
Increase data quality by 10 or 15% in your Salesforce org
Reduce Risks in your salesforce org by increasing your Salesforce health security score.

Are there tasks or habits I can do consistently which can lead me to achieve my Salesforce Org goals?

As you can see from the above goals, adoption will be the most emphasized this year. Do you know why? With budget cuts and the economy in a bad shape, guess what is the question your boss is going to ask you? How can we save money with our salesforce org and do we really need these licenses for our users? Are our users really using every license? So the question is how do we get started on the adoption metric? Here is a guideline that you can use.

Talk to the business and agree on 1 or 2 metrics that you can track like the Number of logins, Data created on the last time frame on key objects like leads, accounts, cases or opportunities, etc. This will be a moving target but the bottom line is sticking to a metric.

Data Quality Goals

At the end of the day, Salesforce is just a tool that captures data for our business processes. As we build more objects and automation, we are also responsible for building reports and dashboards for our leadership. But before we jump into shiny tools like Tableau and Einstein, we are always pounded with questions on why the metrics are wrong, why is there a mismatch in the numbers, etc. So as an admin, we all know it all boils down to one question which is data quality. Now how do we measure data quality? Here are some tips for you on this.

How complete is your data? E.g How many leads and contacts have blank emails and phone numbers? How many leads or contacts have test phone numbers or junk contact information? So completeness really means in simple terms can you contact a salesforce lead or salesforce contact with the data in Salesforce Org? Look at the below data quality report which you can create or run based on the org. This will help to create a data quality complete metric that you can increase by 10% in 2023!!

2. How consistent is your data in your salesforce org? E.g State fields with abbreviations vs 2-digit state codes, phone numbers in different formats, and countries abbreviated vs non-abbreviated. We all know how much havoc the state fields can create for us with our summary and segmentation of reports. You can look at the below report as an example to get some idea on generating an inconsistent data score for your org.

How bad is your data in the org? These are the duplicates in your org that get accumulated every year with so many apps integrated with your instance. We all know that duplicates kill our org with performance, adoption, and bad metrics. But still, we do not take action why? Because it is not part of your salesforce goals for a year? You might wonder the moment I talk about duplicates, my business teams shut it down as technical debt or wait till the year’s end!! But the year-end never comes!! So it is our job to highlight it and put it on our performance goals and get the leadership’s attention on it?? It is like an oil change for your car and if you don’t do it, you are going to break down!!!

I am sure you have your own data quality tool to run the duplicates. Here is an example of a data quality dashboard you can create in your org easily as an example!!

How secure is your Salesforce Org?

With the world going remote, and Salesforce pushing for MFA, security is a critical factor that you should use in your yearly goals for your org. The question is where do I start on this?

Salesforce has a free tool in your org called Healthcheck you should run every year. Once you run the health check, you should update the baseline health check score and promise your boss that you will increase it by 10%!! You can see the below screenshot as an example

As part of your goals for this year as a Salesforce admin, here are 3 areas in which you can start with a metric and report to your leadership on a 10% improvement for this year.

Adoption – Agree on 2 metrics which can be logins and also data created and updated on 3 critical objects by users.
Data quality – Measure data quality in your org based on completeness, inconsistency, or duplication. If you are looking for a free tool to measure your baseline, use this free app by salesforce labs for it.
Security – Measure your salesforce org security using a salesforce health check.

So here is the starting point for you to set goals for your Salesforce org. Next, we will talk about habits that can lead to activities that you can leverage for your goals. As always feel free to post your comments below or email Buyan Thyagarajan at buyan@eigenx.com