I fear for Salesforce Trailhead.
Trailhead was my doorway into a new career. After 15 years of software testing the end was nigh. The writing was on the wall as soon as I worked on an ‘agile’ project, Software testing as a way to make a living was dead. Progress. Only a few short years earlier jobs were everywhere then 7 years later the whole map had changed. This is whats happening to learning Salesforce. For all I know its whats going to happen to CRMs, but for now I will stay with Trailhead.
Salesforce Trailhead is a gamified (remember when that was a thing!) way of learning Salesforce and is myriad areas of functionality. Sign up, create yourself a free developer account and go wild on hundreds of step by step tutorials, all of them with points to earn and badges to be won. I learn’t a LOT from Trailhead. Amazing. Free.
The only issue with Trailhead I always found was that theres just so much content. Where do you start? All these years on I needed to learn Marketing Cloud and this issue still arose, but I duly stepped forth, how else to learn this? It went okay but day-to-day work took over and a week or so in I realised I’d need to come back to this later.
Six months later and I thought I’d see if ChatGPT could help. No points or badges but as a single Salesforce resource time was sometimes limited.
The result? Three weeks later..
- Salesforce connected to Marketing Cloud via the correct user
- Email templates created for Marketing
- Demo email
- Synchronised data sets (SDE)
- Filtered data sets based off the SDE automated to refresh each day,
- Synchronised unsubscribe marketing cloud page
- Sales Cloud Campaign integration
- All the required marketing user access
- Sent emails mapped to Salesforce Contacts
- Metrics on sends and open rates
Okay I’ll admit no real Journey Builder work, although the unsubscribe automation uses some, but the business doesn’t really need it. They have enough to learn already.
Three weeks for something that would have taken what twice, three possibly four times as long via Trailhead. Marketing Cloud is a finicky thing too so those weeks would have been super painful.
I loved Trailhead. But I’m not sure I’ll ever use it again.