Salesforce Admin Training Plan

Salesforce Admin Training Plan

Want to dive into Salesforce to switch your career or start it? You’ve heard about Salesforce somewhere but don’t know where to start. I will help you here with my article. This plan will take at least a month to complete, depending on your pace.

Before starting this path, just go and create a developer account to practice and explore Salesforce (It’s Free).
Link: https://developer.salesforce.com/signup

Why start with Admin: Salesforce has so many use cases, extensions, and products. For example, it provides you with the ability to create sites for your business. It gives you CPQ to automate the quoting process for your salespeople. It gives you FSL to maintain field technicians. Name a business requirement, and Salesforce has a solution for it. All these functionalities are built on the basic structure of Salesforce, which an admin must know.

I will be providing the learning path and Trailhead links, along with new exercises to practice on.

1. Start by learning the basic concepts of the Salesforce sales lifecycle. It will give you a basic insight into how businesses work using Salesforce. Follow these steps:

• Log in to your developer account.
• Create some leads.
• Convert them into opportunities, accounts, and contacts.
• Add some products and close some opportunities. Alternatively, you can check this video to understand the things which I mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWNiYTvDoHo

Now, once you are comfortable with creating some records and navigating in Salesforce, let’s start looking into the backend.

The first thing an admin needs to learn is about:

• Fields and objects: Creating your custom object fields
• Objects are just like tables in any other database. They are handled here, record-wise.
• Learn about standard and custom objects and the relationships you can build between them. Also, learn how to convert a relationship if needed. Learn about these alongside: Tabs and apps in Salesforce. Use the following links:
• https://intellipaat.com/blog/tutorial/salesforce-tutorial/creating-objects-tabs/#:~:text=Salesforce%20Objects%20are%20database%20tables,%2C%20reports%2C%20dashboards%2C%20etc.
• https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/modules/data_modeling/objects_intro.

Once finished with objects, move to fields. Take notice of formula fields, especially how they work. These are the most useful for automating lots of processes.

Learn about these specifically: formula fields, dependent picklists, roll-up summary fields, and record types on objects.

Useful link: https://shreysharma.com/fields-in-salesforce/

Now that you know how to create objects and fields, let’s move on to making them visible to users.
When a company uses Salesforce, it’s for their employees on various levels and roles. Hence, we cannot show everyone the whole data. Therefore, what a user can see should be controlled. Learn about creating profiles and permission sets in the system for now. These help control access to objects and fields.

Useful link: https://techilaservices.com/blog/what-is-profile-in-salesforce/

Then we have page layouts, compact layouts, lightning pages, dynamic forms, and their assignment based on profiles, apps, and org-wide settings.

Useful Link: https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-page-layouts/

Now we are at a stage where we can create standard and custom objects and create fields to collect and manage data. But how will this data be shared between users? To control sharing between users, Salesforce provides lots of features and a flexible model. You need to check OWD (Sharing settings), sharing rules, role hierarchy, manual sharing, and teams as an admin.

These features provide lots of options for an admin to handle sharing between users. There are tons of other features available, but you can start with these. Even these are going to take a lot of time to understand and practically implement.

Learn about these specifically: queues and groups. Now move on to creating some real automation: Flows, “The most powerful and an admin’s best friend.“
Flows give you the functionality to design processes and enable automation. There are various types of flows that you can use. Here is a complete module provided by Salesforce for this: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/trails/build-flows-with-flow-builder?gclid=CjwKCAjwxaanBhBQEiwA84TVXI5J9pz2dhL9RjGIBIFarPSnCsN_mqnTcS5VihZEs6etNiz37uSlJBoCR_QQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

Useful Link: https://www.salesforceben.com/whats-the-best-way-to-learn-salesforce-flow/

Note: Salesforce earlier also provided workflow rules and a process builder. These tools are retired by now, but one must have knowledge about them as they are still in use. The next big responsibility for an administrator is to create reports and dashboards.

Reports are the strongest game-changing feature of Salesforce. To learn about reports, check out this article about how to create Salesforce reports: https://www.salesforceben.com/how-to-create-a-report-in-salesforce/

Learn about these specifically: report types, dashboard filters, bucket fields, joint reports, folders, and report access. Other than that, I am mentioning a few standard Salesforce features an admin must know about:

• Approval Process: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/content/learn/projects/automate-business-processes-recruiting-app/create-approval-process-rec-app
• Assignment Rules: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.customize_leadrules.htm&language=en_US&type=5
• Duplicate Rules: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.duplicate_rules_map_of_reference.htm&language=en_US&type=5#:~:text=A%20duplicate%20rule%20defines%20what,can%20also%20create%20duplicate%20rules.
• Escalation Rules
• Licenses in Salesforce
• Creation of a user/freezing and inactivating a user.
• Setting up login hours, login IP ranges for users After implementing all these features and functionalities, one must know how to make them available for users to use. So, you need to learn how to really implement these for the business
• You cannot directly implement these; hence, you need to learn about the Salesforce development life cycle: Useful Link: https://360degreecloud.com/salesforce-development-lifecycle-explained/
  Learn about these specifically: different kinds of sandboxes provided by Salesforce and different deployment tools, or at least change sets. Deployment using a change set: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.code_tools_changesets.htm&language=en_US&type=5

Being a Salesforce admin requires building solutions for business requirements; hence, while learning every single automation, think of the business requirements around them and the best approach to tackle them.