With less than a month left in the decade, 2020 isn’t the distant future anymore, it’s basically tomorrow. As always, this time of year is marked by reflection and resolution. Acknowledgement and assessment of where we’ve been and an optimistic pivot toward the year (and years) to come. It’s the perfect time to lay out your objectives, personal and professional, and make a plan to welcome next December with full sails and a boatload of new accomplishments. With that in mind we’ve put together a list of goals for companies, admins, and users to kick off 2020 right and ensure that the next decade in your Salesforce org starts off strong.
Let’s dive in!
Tidy Up
There’s no better feeling than starting the year with a clean org. Tossing out unused fields, decluttering your users’ home screens, and streamlining the most-common tasks drives adoption and helps you be the hero who makes it easy for your office to get back into the swing of things after the long holiday brain-break.
If you’re not sure where to start, Salesforce Optimizer makes it super easy to evaluate and recommend opportunities for improvement, clean up, simplification, and to help drive adoption. It’s a terrific first step, like clearing all the clutter before you set down for a deep clean.
And, once you’re ready to really get scrubbin’ in your org, we’ve written up a handy guide for the whole process. It covers everything from planning, gathering effective user feedback, all the way through implementation and execution!
Give Back / Do Good
Once you’ve tidied up your org and improved things for your colleagues, it’s time to do the same for your community! Volunteer days are an amazing way to use your time to give back to local nonprofits and services (and they’re great for company culture and morale too). Donating your products or services gives you an opportunity to share the fruits of your labor with the underserved in your area. And donating money to causes you and your colleagues care about it is a terrific way to support your company’s values and celebrate your team’s caring spirit. If that time, products, money combo for giving back sounds familiar, that’s probably because it’s the core of the Pledge 1% movement! After all, the best way to establish company values is to live those values every day and making the Pledge 1% commitment is a terrific way to practice what you preach.
Consider the best way for your organization to contribute to your local community and then suggest taking the pledge yourselves. It’s been three years since MK Partners took the plunge (with 1% of our time, services, and profit) and our contributions continue to drive positive office culture and our volunteer days are some of our most widely-attended (and celebrated) events.
Join a User Group
Salesforce’s three releases every year unleash an avalanche of improvements, new features and, of course, pages and pages of release notes. Staying up to speed on everything can feel overwhelming sometimes, especially when your other duties cut into your reading and webinar time. That’s where Trailblazer (Salesforce user) Community Groups come in!
While you’ve been busy focusing on the updates and improvements that are most relevant to your org, other admins and users have had their eyes on the changes that affect them the most. User groups bring all that disparate knowledge together and offer a chance to pick up tips, tricks, and tested-best-practices, so you can improve your Salesforce expertise without always making yourself the guinea pig.
Finding a local Trailblazer Community Group is as simple as clicking the link (and showing up) and, if the closest one is still too much of a hike, you can always start your own! Salesforce is one of the most widely-used platforms in the world and you’d be surprised just how many of your neighbors are probably also eager to expand their understanding.
And, besides the tips, tricks, and knowledge-sharing — community groups are a great way to network and make connections for Dreamforce.
Speaking of which…
Go to Dreamforce
Seriously, it’s worth it.
From the amazing speakers, to the unrivaled learning opportunities, the entire city’s seeming Salesforce-ification creates a week of unmatched expertise and education. The trick is to start planning now. Get your travel booked and your ticket-budget earmarked so that you can spend the lead-up to Dreamforce planning your agenda, coordinating your network, and not having to stress the logistics.
Every year Dreamforce helps thousands of orgs reach their potential and, whatever your vision, industry, or use-case, there are subject-matter-experts to help you dial up the ROI on your tech investment over the months and years to come.
So start making your resolutions and get a jump start on 2020! As always, if you need a hand transforming your goals from vision to reality, drop us a line — we’re always happy to help.
And for the rest of December, keep working hard, smart, and happy. We’ll see you in the cloud.
