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Why Pattern Recognition Matters for Salesforce Admins
About this Episode
Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Adam Stark, CRM Systems Administrator at Belmont University.
Join us as we chat about how his experience as a musician with learning and pattern recognition has set him up for success as a Salesforce Admin.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Adam Stark.
From the stage to the Salesforce Admin chair
I met Adam Stark at TDX, and he had such an interesting path to becoming a Salesforce Admin that I had to bring him on the show. Based out of Nashville, he's been a professional touring musician for twenty years. But when everything shut down during COVID, he spent his days on Zoom making an album, and his nights on Trailhead working towards his admin certification.
Adam's experience in the studio made it surprisingly easy to jump into automations on Salesforce—they made sense to him. "As a music producer, one of the things I got really good at doing was accomplishing signal flow, like trying to get a sound source to a final, presentable stage," he says, "and that sort of signal flow process is the same with flows." Whether it's building tracks in a DAW or building solutions in Salesforce, Adam discovered that it's still the same underlying logic.
How pattern recognition makes learning Salesforce easier
Starting out in Salesforce can feel overwhelming because the platform is robust. But, as Adam explains, the same could be said for learning guitar, and he realized that he could draw on his experience as a music teacher and performer.
A part of learning any instrument is pattern recognition. You practice scales or licks in isolation so that it's easy to find them and play them when you're performing. "The more you do it, the more familiar you get, the more you begin to recognize patterns," Adam says, "and once you see the patterns, things start to feel smaller."
Over time, something that seems very big, like learning a piece of music or trying to use campaigns in Salesforce, becomes more manageable.
Acing your job interview with honesty
I also wanted to hear how Adam got through the interview process and landed his first job as a Salesforce Admin. His experience as a musician helped here, too, because he was already used to doing interviews with radio stations while on tour. But nerves aside, Adam feels the key to his success was honesty. "I don't know everything," he says, "but if I don't know it, I'll figure it out, and we'll find a solution."
For the folks out there who are still breaking into the ecosystem, Adam encourages you to get out there and meet working Salesforce professionals as soon as you can. Go to a community group, or even TDX, and pick someone's brain. It can help you piece together what you're learning in Trailhead by understanding what Salesforce looks like in action.
There's so much more great stuff from Adam about how he learned Salesforce and landed his first admin role, so make sure to listen to the full episode. And as always, make sure you're subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast, and we'll see you next time.
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Full show transcript
Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins podcast, Adam Stark didn't start in Salesforce. He started on a stage, building songs and touring as a professional musician. In this episode, he's going to share how that same mindset of thinking and systems, sequencing steps, and designing outcomes translated into building solutions with data, automation, and now AI. In this episode, we're going to dig into how admins aren't just learning tools anymore. They're designing how work actually gets done across people and technology. Adam's going to walk us through his journey from Trailhead to his very first admin role and what it really takes to connect those dots when you're building something bigger than just features. So if you've ever wondered how your past experience shapes the way you architect solutions today, this episode's for you. So with that, let's get Adam on the podcast. So Adam, welcome to the podcast.
Adam Stark:
Happy to be here, man. This is awesome.
Mike:
I'm glad we got connected through our architect friends. You are at TDX this year. So let's just give people an overview of who Adam Stark is and how you got started at Salesforce.
Adam Stark:
Yeah, absolutely. So I work down in Nashville, Tennessee. I work at Belmont University. And my journey into Salesforce is quite a unique journey. I actually was a professional musician for a long time. I was a touring artist, a professional songwriter, producer, and did that for many, many years. And then a thing called COVID hit in 2020 and really put a damper on the touring side of things, as you can imagine. So during COVID, I went through my own personal little existential crisis moment of, are we ever going to play shows ever again? This was a huge part of my income stream to provide for my family. And so I'm going through this crisis moment of what's next, what should I be doing? And a really good friend of mine who is a Salesforce developer, he told me, he's like, "Man, you should look into Salesforce. Just go on Trailhead and just poke around."
And this is me not knowing anything about it. I didn't even know what a CRM was, but went on Trailhead and shout out to the Trailhead team because what an incredible resource, like unbelievable resource for people to learn the platform. Just really, really impressive. But yeah, I would spend my days working on music with my... I was a duo, if you will. I was in a band with another guy and he and I produced our records and we wrote all of our songs. And we're doing that virtually during the day during COVID where we're songwriting over Zoom, which is a complete interesting exercise to try to be creative over Zoom. And then we're recording audio files and sending them back and forth and compiling them into a record, which was wild.
Doing that during the day. And then at night, I would just get on Trailhead and just start learning. And the more that I learned, the more interesting it got to me. And yeah, I got hooked and was really fascinated with what Salesforce as a platform was capable of doing and honestly how beneficial it is to businesses and organizations.
Mike:
Wow.
Adam Stark:
So yeah, I started learning. I was really determined to get an admin certification just to have in my back pocket. And then the world opened back up. And we did what artists called revenge touring because so many people were starved for entertainment at that point in time. It'd been a year, year and a half of no real public entertainment. So we got busy, went back out on the road, and I put Salesforce on the back burner for a little bit and then had more kids and talked to my wife and we just decided we're at a spot in life where being home is really, really nice. And I was pretty invested into the Salesforce journey at that point. So I went ahead and finished up, got my admin certification and I saw that Belmont was looking to implement Salesforce and went ahead and filled out an application and landed the job.
Mike:
So I've shown Salesforce to people. I've taken good friends of mine to user groups and I've had friends of mine even get up to Ranger status, which is a hundred badges and still be like, "Meh, it doesn't make sense to me or nothing's clicking." Something clicked for you that was like you got it and it's hard to describe, but I know what you're feeling, but what was it for you?
Adam Stark:
As a music producer, one of the things that I got really good at doing was accomplishing signal flow, like trying to get a sound source from one stage to a final stage, final presentable stage, if you will. And what I found was when I really started to get into some of the automation tools in Salesforce, especially flows, I realized this actually feels like a very familiar muscle to me. How do I get from A to B and what are the steps I need to take and in what order? What's the logic to get there? If I was producing music, it would be, I've got this... Say it's a vocal, do I want to EQ the vocal first or do I want to compress the vocal first? And then do I want to bus it to a different channel and affect it there with other things or do I want it to be isolated?
And really that signal flow process is the same with flows. And then I just watched what it could do with data and I was like, "This is actually really fun because you're building solutions." As a songwriter, you're building songs. As a producer, you're building tracks and you're building records and I'm still building. It's just a different medium now.
Mike:
Yeah, that's fascinating because the next question I was going to ask you was... So I will confess, when COVID hit, I was one of those people that's like, "I'm going to learn a skill." Except I didn't do like you, I wasn't as devoted. I bought a guitar, a really nice acoustic guitar. And let me tell you why. Two reasons. One, I was like, if I'm going to learn, I'm not going to learn on some Walmart guitar level, I'm going to learn on something good.
Adam Stark:
Good for you.
Mike:
And two, if I buy something nice, then I feel like the investment will... I'll feel bad if I don't use the investment, right?
Adam Stark:
Mike, I'm the same way. When I told my wife, I'm going to get into cycling. It's like I need to buy a nice bike to make myself get on the bike.
Mike:
Right. I'm not going to buy the Lance Armstrong. I didn't go out and buy a Les Paul and spend a used car's money, but I got a nice acoustic guitar and people come over to my house, they see it on the stand. They're like, "Wow, do you play?" So here's the moral of the story. I took guitar lessons online for like a month solid and I realized, I don't know what it is, but music and math are two things that my brain's like, "Hey, that looks like I should go on the couch and sit and eat some Cheetos and somebody else will figure this out." That is exactly what my brain does.
And so I would get to the point where I could learn the chords and figure out the finger and then they started to get to the point where they're like, "We're going to teach you music." And those notes on those bars, it might as well have been a foreign language. It was to me. It just didn't make sense. And I'm sitting here, during the day, I do Salesforce and we're dealing with complex flows and data validation and all this other stuff. And I'm like, "Why can't music make sense to me?" And it's funny because the reverse almost sometimes doesn't hold true. What works for you in understanding music did not work for me in taking understanding Salesforce to music. It's crazy. So anyway, so the moral of the story is I have a really nice acoustic guitar-
Adam Stark:
We're going to do some guitar lessons out there.
Mike:
... that has sat on its stand. But I did play it for a month.
Adam Stark:
Well, you bring up an interesting point, and this might cross over to just some meta principles in general is the longer you're doing something, when you first get into anything, whether it's music or Salesforce for that matter, Salesforce is so daunting to get started because it's just so robust. There's so many things. It's overwhelming. It feels like this massive mountain you have to scale, but the more you do it, the longer you go about doing it, the more familiar you get, you begin to recognize patterns, right? And then once you see the patterns, things just start to feel smaller, if that makes sense.
And I think the best way I could describe it is, that has been my journey with Salesforce. To get started, it felt like this massive undertaking. And the concept of campaigns, it's like, what are those for? I still don't really know why someone... There seems like there's several different angles to use campaigns, and it's just trying to get your head around it without ever being a user in Salesforce. But then you start seeing one example of campaigns, and then you see another, and then you're like, "Oh, well, now I've got some creative ideas because I recognize some patterns and I know what the functionality of this thing is." So yeah, I just think the longer you work at something, you recognize those patterns and then it's like, "All right, this actually is starting to make a little bit more sense to me."
Mike:
So you got your certification, you did Trailhead on and off when you weren't revenge touring, which is a fun term. I also remember that when the world opened back up and we were like, "Oh, let's do a thing." And maybe ironically, the first thing I did was I went to a Hyatt Regency and I got French fries.
Adam Stark:
Yes, sir.
Mike:
Totally boring, but man, the quality of French fries in those restaurant style fryers, nothing at home makes the same.
Adam Stark:
You are right.
Mike:
Everybody right now that's listening to this podcast wants me to ask this question, so I'm going to ask this question.
Adam Stark:
Okay.
Mike:
What was your first interview like? Because you obviously did a remarkable job of interviewing because you got a job. And I asked that question because I probably every day get a dozen or so DMs across various social networks of, I'm starting in Salesforce and I want to be an admin and how do I get my first job?
Adam Stark:
It is the million-dollar question, right?
Mike:
Right.
Adam Stark:
Again, going back to familiar muscles, one of the things that I was familiar with was the concept of interviewing because I did interviews with radio stations all over the country for years. So the idea of someone sitting in front of me and asking me questions, I wasn't expecting it. I was pretty nervous about it at first when I was venturing into this new career path because I was like, "I haven't had a job interview in how many years? It's been a long time." I was pretty nervous about it. And then once I sat down and started having the conversation, again, it was like a familiar muscle of like, "Oh, this is an interview just like a radio interview is an interview." So I felt pretty comfortable in the interview environment. And then it was me being honest.
I really wasn't trying to put on that I knew more than I actually did. I wasn't trying to talk technical where I didn't understand it. I was honest with the idea of who I was as a person, what I'd learned. I'd achieved my certification. I have a pretty good base of knowledge for what Salesforce is and what it can do, but I don't know everything, but I'm determined to find out. If I don't know something, I'm the person that will figure it out. That's what I've always done. In my music career, where there were technical needs, we didn't always have resources to have somebody else meet those needs for. So I would be the one that would go and dive into it.
I would figure out how to code lighting rigs and write DMX and program a light show for us because we needed a light show. So that's just my makeup is I'm a hard worker, I'm a learner, and I was honest about that in my interview. If I don't know it, I'll figure it out. We'll find a solution. And it worked to a point. Obviously, the organization took a chance on me because of an experience gap, but they saw something in me, I guess in my integrity and honesty, but also my drive to find solutions and not be afraid to go learn was attractive to them.
Mike:
Yeah. Well, from your perspective, what were you the most concerned about going into that interview?
Adam Stark:
I would say I was most anxious about the technical interview side of things, mainly because I have never been a front end user and I'd never been an admin before. So I was a little anxious about, am I going to look like a fool if they're asking me technical questions that I should know answers to? And there was a little bit of that. We found some limitations in that interview process, but again, I always said, "I'm happy to go learn. I'm happy to run that down and figure it out."
Mike:
Yeah. That's always, I feel like, the first question is, how do I get through the interview? How do I get through... I've never had a Salesforce admin job before. Aren't they going to look for experience? And to me, my first job, I didn't have a Salesforce admin certification or anything, and I just got handed that as a responsibility. I think it depends on the vision and commitment that people see. They saw something in you and said, "Hey, he can grow with us in the same way that we're probably looking to grow this platform." And also, you were a good fit culture. I think people are always like, "Well, what if I'm not smart enough?" Well, the other part of it too is, do they see themselves working with you?
Adam Stark:
Absolutely. That's a really good point. And I should mention, I don't think I mentioned this, I graduated from Belmont, so I went here for undergrad.
Mike:
A little bit of alumni.
Adam Stark:
I had the alumni angle coming in. So that really helped because I did understand the culture. I was here for four years. I'd know what the school represents. I knew how, at least on a basic level, how the school functioned and what some of the departments and teams were. So that was a starting point, right? But you're absolutely right. What you know is, I don't want to say half the battle, maybe more than half the battle, but there's a large percent of the battle is like, are you going to be someone we enjoy working with day in and out? And are you someone that thousands of other faculty, staff and students are going to be interacting with? Are you the person for that job? So you're right, the culture fit is a huge part of it and not to be underestimated.
Mike:
Yeah. What part, now that you're in it, of the job has probably been the most rewarding that you didn't anticipate?
Adam Stark:
Oh, it's for sure this idea of going through a journey with people. As admins, you find your users and you go through the discovery process with them and you learn about what are your pain points and you just learn about the language they speak and their staff, their workflows, all that stuff. And when you can deliver something that helps relieve those pain points for them, and at the end of it, they see that beautiful chart that they've been longing to see for two years, or they see the one-click automation that just executes perfectly and performs the need they need. When you can look at each other and high five at the end, and just it's so rewarding. I just love those wins with people.
Mike:
Yeah. The best part for me was always go live day. When somebody finally gets that solution and they're like, "Oh, I don't have to look at that green DOS screen anymore." God knows whatever else they were dealing with.
Adam Stark:
Absolutely. And then you see the spreadsheets and things that they've been managing.
Mike:
Oh, [inaudible 00:18:03].
Adam Stark:
"Oh, Lord, this is your world."
Mike:
It is. But what's funny is some people, I'd say, almost get to the level of coding with the amount of cross tables and pivot tables and references that they build in these spreadsheets. You almost have a robot there.
Adam Stark:
You are right. You are correct.
Mike:
So you spent some time at TDX this year. Was that your first Salesforce event as an admin?
Adam Stark:
It was my second. I was able to go to Education Summit last year first, but I got to say TDX was awesome. I loved it.
Mike:
A lot of people that listen to the podcast don't get to go. Some people do the over under. I wish all my listeners could go to TDX, but for you, what were you going there thinking, "Here's what I need to leave with?"
Adam Stark:
It's a really good question. For me personally, I am not content staying where I'm at. I always have this need to grow. So as an admin, I feel like I'm getting comfortable with some of my admin tasks and I'm always looking to grow into the next stage. If that's going to be growing as a developer or a consultant or whatever that would be, I'm always looking for the next thing and eager to just up my skills. So going into TDX for me was this exciting opportunity to interact with people who are way smarter than me and way more talented at the platform and just pick their brains. The cool thing about TDX was it's so, I would say, question-friendly. You can walk up to ask the expert tables and just sit down and have conversations and really glean a ton from some of these technical architects.
And there's great hands-on training... Not training, but almost hands-on demos and hands-on with certain products, which was really cool, too. I don't get to mess around with agents a lot because we don't use agents yet. So being able to go and sit and work on, build some agents and see how that's working with Salesforce was really great. But mainly the thing I wanted to do was just go have conversations and glean from those who are far ahead of me in their Salesforce journey and help determine what path am I most excited about going forward? Do I want to be a developer or do I want to go more of a consultant, like client facing route? What's the next thing for me? So yeah, that was my goal.
Mike:
Yeah, no, and that's what we're there for. Obviously, get you hands on with agents, but also I think to be exposed to what other roles in the ecosystem there are, or you can always just stay in admin.
Adam Stark:
Well, you know what I found so interesting with how Salesforce is growing and developing, I feel like the admin might be the most important and diverse role of all of them at this point because so much is being brought to the admin's table of possibilities. We can do so many things with native Salesforce tools now that, I don't know, man, the admin is such a key role that maybe I'll never move on from being an admin. Maybe I just become a super admin.
Mike:
Yeah, that was always one of the things when I got started with Salesforce that I found empowering was that I could configure the product using the product. And I don't recall at that time or even... Now short of a few website builders, did enterprise architecture live there. It was always, you had to plug in a development app and then you had to work in that app and then you had to shove your changes to the monolithic CRM. And if you didn't know code and you weren't a computer programmer, it was easy to really make a mess of things. And it just never made sense to me.
And then when you would open up Salesforce and be like, "Oh, you can configure this and you just go into set up, here I can just configure this whole page." And it's immediate. It's right there when you press Save. I was like, wow, okay, wait, this is... I still remember, I don't know if you've built this. This makes me feel so old. The very first time I built a dependent picklist, I was like-
Adam Stark:
Magic.
Mike:
I was like, "I can run the Internet."
Adam Stark:
I love that.
Mike:
Because I just made this picklist value dependent on this picklist value. And I remember it was a little thing on our leads and it was basically just our tests were categorized in a certain way. And the previous admin, which there hadn't been one, just used one picklist value. It was a monster and it was a word hyphen, another word. And so you had to type out every variation of that and you would open the picklist and it would literally go from the top of your screen to the bottom.
Adam Stark:
Oh my gosh.
Mike:
And I remember I was like, "Well, this is just really two values." And I looked it up and I just remember my users being like, "Oh, that's amazing and I can't select the wrong one anymore."
Adam Stark:
I had that moment with Lightning Record Pages moving on to page layouts. When I realized the power of conditional visibility with Lightning Record Pages, I was like, "This is incredible. I'm a genius."
Mike:
Yeah. And I remember we rolled out dynamic record pages in a keynote and for how long as an admin, I didn't want that. Just the ability to show the field when they need to fill it in and then take it away. And I'm from the days when our account pages used to have 300 fields on it and every person used a different area of that record page and you would go to their desk and everything else would be collapsed except for that area. And I just remember thinking there has to be a way to make this only visible to them and 10 years later we can.
Adam Stark:
And it's so satisfying. It's just beautiful when it works.
Mike:
Right, absolutely. So looking ahead, agents and AI are the thing for now for a long time. We went through mobile and social and there was a brief internet of things and connected devices, but we really were headed towards this AI stuff. What are some of the things you're paying attention to that you're trying to learn and how is your musical skills or other talents helping you learn those?
Adam Stark:
I feel probably like most people feel because AI is just developing so quickly. I feel so behind the curve on what's happening, but TDX was definitely an eye-opening experience for me that it's here. The power of AI and agents is here. And so it's time to really start learning. Lately, what I've been doing is just trying to get my head around some of the 30,000-foot concepts of how AI even works. How do these large language models work? Like what is a vector database and the MCP connectors and how do all these things work together?
Because I'm that person where I don't have confidence in what I'm doing unless I have a conceptual understanding of how the whole thing is working. So I don't like just blindly building something saying, "I think this ought to do what we want it to do. " It's like, I need to understand on a deeper level how it ticks, if that makes sense. And for better or for worse, that's just how I'm wired. And I will say AI is a behemoth. It is to get your head around it and to understand what it can do and then try to keep up with all the changes. Wow, it is daunting, but very impressive.
I have been really excited since the conference and since I've been learning more about the possibilities with AI. It's starting to spark some creative ideas for me and some creative ideas for how it could be implemented in my organization. So that's side note there. But overall, I feel a sense of excitement of where we're going with all this stuff. And I encourage everybody else, if you feel overwhelmed with the idea of AI or having to implement AI tools, rather than just fighting it and putting your heels into the ground and saying, "I'm not doing it," just start learning and start seeing what it can do, what the possibilities are, and then see where your creativity takes you. You might surprise yourself. But yeah, I'm still in my infancy of learning and getting my hands on the tools, but I will say I'm excited about where we're going.
Mike:
Yeah. I've often heard it described as we're in the steam powered era of AI, which means, wow, it's going to be something. I guess last question, which hearkens back to your beginning, for somebody who is listening, and first of all, I don't know how they would find this podcast, but let's say somebody that's not in Salesforce finds the podcast and they're listening, is there anything you would do different when you were getting started learning Salesforce, knowing what you know now?
Adam Stark:
I think I would... If I was getting started now, knowing what I know, I would have made an effort to connect with Salesforce professionals sooner than I did. I stayed in my room and stayed on Trailhead and just kept completing modules. And the best way I can describe the feeling was I felt like I started putting all these dots on a plot, right? I had all these scattered dots that I was learning as I had complete each module, but I was having a hard time connecting them all. And Trailhead is so big now that if you can easily just wander off on a path of learning that you don't really know if you need it or not.
And then you wonder like, "How have I found myself configuring SSO and I don't even know how opportunities work?" So I think I would have really tried to have gotten involved with community, either the Trailhead community or user group meetups locally, but just start getting plugged in with working professionals and start having conversations because again... And even TDX is a perfect example, sitting down on tables and just asking questions with technical architects. And 15, 20 minutes of that is just so helpful to connect all those dots and have that little bit of a light bulb moment of like, "Oh, all right, that makes sense now." So yeah, get involved, get in a community. I think that's going to be the most beneficial if you're just getting started.
Mike:
Yeah, no, that absolutely makes sense. I'm glad you pointed that out. Adam, thanks so much for coming on the podcast and sharing with us your story and your insights. I think it's always super valuable because the community continues to grow. I was at TDX this year and it used to be a thing where I would walk around and know everybody. And now I felt like I walked around. I didn't know anybody. And it was because everybody was so new. I hadn't met them yet. So case in point yourself.
Adam Stark:
Yes, sir. Hey, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. And I have enjoyed your podcast. Side note, I'm just going to give you a little shout-out here, Mike. Your podcast was super beneficial for me getting started because it was allowing me to have an insight to what an admin does because I had never been in the ecosystem. So just the value that your podcast brought me getting started was huge. So thank you for what you do and thank you for having me today.
Mike:
Well, I appreciate that. You probably also learned too much about food because there's food in every podcast. Somehow-
Adam Stark:
You can never learn too much about food.
Mike:
... everybody is always like, "I never know how you're going to work it in." But every now and then food shows up and I'm like, "We all need food. It makes it very relatable.
Adam Stark:
Absolutely.
Mike:
Adam's story is a reminder that being an admin today isn't about where you start. It's about how you think. From designing signal flow in music to orchestrating automation and exploring AI, this role is evolving into something much bigger, building systems that actually move the business forward. If this episode helped you see your work a little differently, share it with somebody in your network and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening. And as always, until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.
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