The Absolute Beginner's Guide To Salesforce Administration

Welcome to Salesforce.

In this course, we're going to learn what Salesforce is, why it's useful and how to customise it.

The videos will take you through all the basics of Salesforce Administration and show you, with concrete examples, how to think about, build, and enable various features on the platform, such as:

• creating objects,

• fields,

• record types,

• actions,

• automations,

• validations,

• managing your data,

• and more.

So how are we going to achieve all this? Well, we’re going to imagine we are both the CEO and initial Salesforce Administrator at Donut Revolution, a fictional business we just launched. We're going to create a Salesforce org for our company, and as new Salesforce users, we’ll start customising the platform and build various features and automations so that we can run a successful company.

This course is split into 14 sections (which are important for the Salesforce Admin exam), but the topics are structured in a way that is more realistic to an actual company’s journey with Salesforce adoption. We'll tackle a different business challenge in each section and we’ll customise the Salesforce platform accordingly, showing you step-by-step how to enable a certain feature or how to think about a particular problem.

Each section has a homework assignment for extra practice, which links to other relevant Trailhead trails / modules / projects. Many topics also have an additional (practical) assignment that allows students to attempt building a certain feature on their own before checking the solution-videos.

What is Salesforce and what does a Salesforce Admin do?

If you’re completely new to the Salesforce world you’re maybe wondering "what exactly is Salesforce, who is it for? Who uses it and what can they do on it?" and for good reason; it can be tricky to explain all the complexities of the platform at first.

#1 Customer Relationship Management platform

Well, let’s imagine that you are the CEO and first employee at Donut Revolution, a company that has big dreams of revolutionising the world of donuts. Your products are simply the best and you want the whole world to know it.

You just spent a lot of time and money investing in this business, so you should start finding companies interested in purchasing these donuts, and taking note of who you talk to, the company they represent, what their interest level in your offer was, and so on. At first it may seem like writing this down anywhere would be fine, since you’re probably calling a few different companies and only talking to about a handful of people.

But as word spreads about your tasty donuts, you probably want to track your activities in a better way otherwise your daily life is going to become an administrative nightmare of finding the right piece of paper or the right Google Sheet, and if you don’t find it, 3,000 donuts might get sent to the wrong address.

Learn how to administer your company in Salesforce

If you'll take this course, you'll know all the fundamental Salesforce Administration concepts.

We’ll start from the very basics - what are Leads? What are Opportunities? What’s a Custom Object? but by the end of this course you'll become a confident solo-Administrator, and you'll be able to tackle any Salesforce administration challenge.

Here is a partial list of what we'll talk about in this course:

• Creating custom fields

• Creating Record Types, Sales/Support Processes

• Object Relationships

• Salesforce Validation & Automation

• Data Security & Sharing

• Data Management tools

• Lead Automation tools

• Advanced Sales productivity features

• Analytics (creating Reports & Dashboards)

• Customer Service Management features

• Organisational setup features

• Using the Salesforce Mobile App

• Navigating the AppExchange

And lots more.

I believe the best way to learn something new is by doing so we’re going to create this fictional company in Salesforce and then enable and build different features mentioned above as our company grows.

How is this course different to other (free) materials available online?

• Assumes no previous knowledge of CRM tools / IT & Business concepts

• Lots of practical examples

• Contextualised learning (“learn how to do X because your company needs to track/achieve Y”)

• Students are given a clear order in which to tackle various topics, so as not to get overwhelmed

• Extra-assignments for more practice in each section

Who is this course for?

Any person who is interested in pursuing a Salesforce career or who wants to better understand how a company’s Salesforce org is run:

That includes:

• Students

• People looking for a career change

• Tech enthusiasts

• Anyone interested in Salesforce administration (for fun or profit)

If you're not sure if this course is for you - drop me a message.

What are the prerequisites for this course?

None. All you need is a computer and an Internet connection.

About Me

I've been in the Salesforce industry for 6 years, ever since I became an Accidental Admin in 2015.

After a few years of working in Marketing and the odd student-job, I made the switch to Salesforce and never looked back.

One of the things that helped me most in understanding how Salesforce works was building various personal projects on it from tracking daily food recipes and ingredients as custom objects to building budget reports and dashboards to keep track of my spending.

I found that concepts like Opportunities, Accounts or Custom Objects had a clearer meaning if they were backed by concrete examples and actual puzzles/problems that needed solving.

I've been a fan of learning-by-example ever since, and have designed this first Salesforce Administration course with the same principles in mind.