Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we sit down with Ashley Sisti, Sr. Manager of Business Strategy and Operations at Salesforce.

Join us as we talk about translating your admin skills, career progression, and having honest conversations with your manager about your skillset.

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Ashley Sisti.

An Admin origin story

Like a lot of folks we have on the pod, Ashley started out as a Salesforce admin. What began as customizing leads ended up as an opportunity to learn everything she could, and enabled her to make a career pivot into a position at a company that was migrating to Salesforce. She learned a ton about implementation and building things from scratch.

Later on, Ashley worked with a larger Salesforce team as a business analyst, where she got to put her work in context with a developer, project manager, and be an expert in specific parts of the business. Now at Salesforce, she works in business operations, working on systems, technology, and processes that support our customer-facing teams. Essentially, she works on how Salesforce uses Salesforce.

Why admin skills are transferable

“Learning to be a Salesforce admin is also really transferable to a lot of other parts of working in a business,” Ashley says, “it’s a really good way to learn about business and how businesses operate in a less scary way.” You’re solving problems, but you’re having a lot of conversations that are really about business transformation.

Half your job is asking questions to get to the why behind what they want you to do, and that can help you learn a lot. This translates directly to something like the five whys, a common tool business analysts use to get to the root causes of a problem and figure out how to fix them. (and you can check out a past podcast episode we did about that). 

Having hard conversations with your manager.

One thing that happened as Ashley grew her career is she started to encounter problems that couldn’t be solved just by tweaking something in Salesforce. Sometimes you need more people, or more budget, or a broader scope. “You have to start thinking about how does the company, overall, solve this problem and not just how do I go in and execute on it,” she says, “but when you get comfortable with thinking on things on a larger scale you can really start to grow your career.”

You also need to be able to talk honestly with your manager about your skill limitations. “A good manager will be happy when you come to them because they can help you identify how you can grow those skills,” Ashley says. But how do you know they’ll be supportive? Ashley runs through what to look for, and how to make the tough decisions to grow your career.

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Direct download: From_Admin_to_Business_Operations_with_Ashley_Sisti.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:00am PDT