A new Salesforce manager's roadmap to job success

Don’t put out fires immediately

“Oh great! The new manager/director just joined. Let’s escalate to them so they can get us our shiny new things in Salesforce.” NO! You’re not a doormat. You want to be the collaborative business partner who has their best interests at heart, not someone who takes marching orders and has no agency to tune-up their requests.

Some people who join think they need to mark their territory within the first 20 days. Take time to learn how things work first instead. You’ll be more productive that way. Here's a playbook on what to do in your first 90 days.

Your direct reports will be hyper sensitive to your words and actions when you first join. I can guarantee you that they’re silently judging if they like you or not.

Audit your onboarding process

‍ What’s good about it? What sucks? Write it down and improve the onboarding documentation. Don't convey the information in the first week. Wait until you've been there for 90 days before you start rocking the boat.

Build relationships, take the temperature

Everything flows through relationships with people. Who are your stakeholders? Set up time to meet with them and understand what’s important to them. This should go without saying, but meet with your direct reports and have regular 1:1s with them.

• Your direct reports
• Your stakeholders and peers
• Your Salesforce success team
• Your vendors

Understand what leadership prioritizes

What does leadership prioritize for the quarter/half/year? In the age of remote, there’s likely some paper trail of what the C-Suite cares about. How did the team deliver on what the priorities were previously?

Get up to speed

Ask these questions to your team, partners, and leadership:

• What important projects are your team working on?
• Learn the intake and prioritization process that your team uses. You might own this own down the line.
• Is there a healthy backlog? (Tickets are clear & concise)
• Is your team at a healthy working pace? Are they overloaded? Do they have autonomy to deliver
• What’s the release process? Are there any gaps you could improve? (Testing, # of bugs, how do rollbacks happen. etc.)
• Is there a project management function or do your devs/admins own projects?

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