A great book does two things for you in my opinion: it gives you a framework for thinking about a topic, while also helping you learn the skills to apply that theoretical knowledge. It's rare to find one book that dramatically impacts your thinking, so imagine my surprise and delight when I found two in the last couple of weeks.
Both these books succeed in both those categories, and that's why I feel like they're going to be timeless additions to my CRM library (and hopefully yours too!).
The two books I want to highlight are
For simplicity's sake, I'll be referring to the former as BCB and the latter as LSOPS for the rest of the post. This post ended up being a bit longer than I expected, so the I'll start with the TL;DR: if you're a CRM Admin looking to expand your skills and your thinking about the Salesforce platform, read both these books. This post is honestly a little verbose despite multiple rounds of edits, but my primary goal is to get you to read these books and not my thoughts about them, so I'd like mostly highlight that I think these books are excellent you should be reading them.
I've already read both books a couple of times, and can see myself referring back to them on a regular basis. More advanced Admins might find some of the topics considered in BCB a bit basic. However, I feel they're both worth at least a one-time read for Admins of all levels, and invaluable for a beginner Admin.
The book walks you through the life of a CRM Admin. I love it because it starts out extremely simple (One sub-section of a chapter is called "What is a Business Process"), and continues to build on simple knowledge to walk you through a TON of really important information. It begins by giving you an overview of what a CRM Admin is, delves deepr into business and IT processes, walks you through Business Analysis skills, talks about implementation and finishes with an extremely imortant but underemphasized skill set, self- promotion. BA area is where BCB excels in my opinion. As I'll highlight below, BCB gives you a great overview of what it means to be an Admin, while starting to teach you the skills that really matter.
A good CRM Admin is most successful when they see themselves as a Business Analyst first and foremost. Your goal as an Admin is to solve business problems using Salesforce. One half of that is your platform knowledge: learn all the tools the platform offers so you know when to best use them. The other half is knowing your organization's goals and challenges, and developing and implementing solutions to those challenges- that's when your platform knowledge really comes to use.
The book doesn't delve super deep into one topic or skill. However, I have yet to find a book that does this good a job of covering the lay of the land for CRM Admins. I find that there is consensus that BA skills are extremely impotant for a CRM Admin, but I find very few people actually talk about how to develop and refine those skills in a CRM contextThis book offers a starting point, but I think it's an extremely important starting point, especially because of the amount of info covered about the CRM implementation process.
There's plenty of "further reading" material in the resources to help you expand on the skills covered in the book. Plus, Deepa gives you tons of her own templates and (e.g. a Configuration Workbook) that alone are worth more than the price of admission.
There's an X-factor in this book that will greatly benefit new or budding CRM Admins: it instils an optimism in your book that goes way beyond business knowledge or skill. Deepa's writing/teaching style is one that makes you feel like you're capable of learning the skills thoroughly, and becoming a great profesional. (If you've ever read or watched anything by Salesforce dev extraordinare David Liu, you know exactly what I'm talking about). Besides her general writing style, Deepa actually takes some time to shares her journey in the Salesforce world (which was a challenging but rewarding one for her), and her vulnerability is pretty damn inspiring.
Although there are a lot of great Sales Ops resources around, none has captured my imagination quite like this books. There's a lot of discussion about general sales strategy and sales enablement, but not nearly enough about how to to take those principles and actually apply them in your CRM. That's where this book really stands out to me. It pulls you in from the first page by talking about sales process, and shows you how to take all these great ideas about process and put them to work in Salesforce (specifically, Lightning!).
As you can tell from the title, this book is targeted at customizing Salesforce specifically for Sales Development reps (professionals doing the work of qualifying prospects and leads). Matt notes that BDRs are a subset of Salesforce users who spend A LOT of time on the platform, but don't receive nearly enough support on the whole in making the platform easier for them to use.
The book is basically structured into five parts, walking you through the process of creating a Salesforce system that reflects your marketing/sale process and makes life for your sales rep easy. It starts with thinking about how you feed data into Salesforce, talks about how to best present data to your reps, moves onto how to help reps qualify and contact leads, and then delves DEEPLY into reporting (five whole chapters!).
What I liked about the book was that it both offered a holistic process that can be implemented, but also breaks down the process so well that you have your choice of specific solutions to specific problems. These problems are ones that are sources of frustration for every Admin, sales manager and sales alike. There are tons of strategic and tactical considerations covered throughout the book that every sales leader, SOP and Admin have thought about endlessly.
For example, the book discusses the ideal way to use Leads (or whether you should even be using them!). Salesforce's default functionality is extremely powerful, but not always applicable or useful to every case. Leads is one of those issues. For a lot organizations that engage in high-touch sales with limited prospecting, Leads can sometimes confuse things more than help them (more need for data cleansing, additional data type to maintain, etc.) Matt discusses the standard vs No Leads approaches, and walks you through when they make sense. To get this kind of comprehensive coverage of the issue normally requires a ton of Googling that still leaves you scratching your head.
Another big topic the book covers right off the bat is the assignment of new Leads for existing Prospects or Customers. This a big issue in every organization, because it's simultaneously a process and technology problem. What's your internal SLA for new Leads from an existing Customer? And more importantly, how is this SLA mapped to Salesforce? Matt not only walks you through potential solutions to the process problem, but also gives you a specific Flow you can build
Besides a heavy emphasis on usability throughout the book, there's also a specific chapter dedicated to making outreach as simple as possible ("Make Working in Salesforce Workable"). Matt shows you how good planning, use of automation tools and a little creativity can make Salesforce a tool your reps work with ease (instead of frustration).
I especially like this book because it acknowledges the challenges of building on the Salesforce platform, which is something a lot of resources tend to avoid- when it comes to CRM, there tends to be either a broad discussion of process or a talk about how to do very specific things in Salesforce. There isn't enough briding of these two things, or acknowledgement of their sometimes opposite natures (e.g. sales leaders want lots of data, sales people want to be selling, and that can mean their idea of a perfect CRM can be very different).
Matt features a David Ogilvy quote at the start of Part 2: "If you're trying to persuade people to do something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think." It is precisely these factors that make this book such a great read. There's a wealth of information and expertise in the book, but it's presented in such a way that you don't realize how much you've gained from it until you stop to reflect on what you've read.