How to Convince Your Boss to Send You to Salesforce Training

I’ve been in your shoes before. You’ve been granted the responsibility to manage portions of a new or hand-me-down Salesforce instance (without proper Salesforce Training). Congratulations! As exciting as this is, you have quickly realized there’s more to it than building reports and resetting user passwords. You now hold responsibility for protecting your company’s most valuable data and processes used to make business decisions. No pressure.

You have three Salesforce Training options:

1. Use Google, YouTube and the Salesforce Help Center to diagnose and solve problems. While this is free, it’s risky and will take time and potentially a few rounds of trial and error to get things right.

2. Read the World’s Best Salesforce Blog. 😉 😉 😉

3. Attend a Salesforce Administrator training course.

While our managers are supportive of our personal development and growth, sometimes budgets are strapped, or just not allocated for systems training. Therefore, I wanted to share my approach for successfully gaining manager approval to attend Salesforce Administrator training. If this works for just one person, then I’ll consider this blog post a success.

When I prepared for battle (actually it was just a meeting), I used the following points to justify the investment of sending me to training:

1. Hands-on training > YouTube

Salesforce training is packed with hands-on exercises, comes with step-by-step, how to guides and will give me the chance to practice in safe place before building in our instance.

2. You Can Hold Me Accountable

With appropriate training and studying, I’ll be able to take the Salesforce Administrator Certification Course. In order to maintain this certification though, I’ll have to take 3 tests a year after each release. This allows you to hold me accountable for the continuous updates in Salesforce that could help or hinder our instance.

3. Minimize Future Fire Drills

If you invest in training an administrator now, you will save time in the future. If we were to hit a roadblock with customizations, security, formulas or workflows, it will take more cumulative time for me to work with public message boards, blogs and Google to diagnose and extinguish the issue. A proper training will give me the foundational knowledge needed to understand the root of future problems.

4. We Must Protect Ourselves

With a tool as powerful, customizable and scalable as Salesforce, there are unlimited security risks. As a properly trained administrator, I’ll have the skills to manage user access, protect our data and train users properly to maintain a functioning and reliable database.

5. We don’t know what we don’t know.

I can do research and teach myself how to use and develop the platform. However, there are so many customizable features available that I won’t truly understand the full power of them without an expert’s lesson. Formal training will open my eyes to possibilities we haven’t thought of that could potentially improve our business and marketing processes even more.

The Last Step

After making your point, make sure to have your training class picked out so you can sign up right away. OpFocus offers a 5-day Platform Configuration and Administration Essentials Course that is updated after each major release. It’s designed for people like you and me who have been granted the honor of Systems Administrator. Good Luck!

P.S. If this worked for you or if you have other tips, please share below!