To truly solve real business problems, we had to understand the struggles of the unsung heroes keeping Salesforce running—Salesforce Admins. Enter Alex Smith, our everyday hero. Alex is more than just a Certified Salesforce Administrator. A multitasking master, a data-wrangler, and often an unofficial therapist for coworkers facing Salesforce issues—simply, a superhero! Collaborating with Sales Ops Managers, Operations Analysts, and Chief Revenue Officers, Alex ensures Salesforce delivers business value.
The Many Hats of Alex
Alex’s role isn’t just about resetting passwords—it’s about being the go-to for almost anything Salesforce. Here’s a glimpse of what Alex juggles daily:
- User Management: Setting up, deactivating, and managing user permissions.
- Customization: Building custom fields, objects, flows, and even AI agents in Salesforce.
- Reporting and Dashboards: Crafting insightful reports to guide decision-making.
- Data Loading & Data Export: Inserting, updating, deleting, and extracting data from Salesforce.
Yes, a massive part of Alex’s day is spent battling messy spreadsheets and CSV files during data loading.
Data Loading: The Time Sucker!
Imagine this: Marketing just had a killer webinar, and now they need those new leads loaded—yesterday! The lead data rarely comes in a clean, Salesforce-ready format. What should be a “simple” task quickly becomes a data nightmare:
- Bad file structure: Every CSV file is unique. This one arrives without headers and has crucial address information crammed into a single column.
- Mixed formatting: Salesforce fields expect precise data types, but spreadsheets don’t care! Alex sees $10M, 1000, 1MM, and 60M thrown together for Annual Revenue—a field meant to hold numbers only.
- Invalid picklist values: The Salesforce field “Lead Status” expects predefined options, but mismatched values like “Open” and “Interested” instead of “Prospect” need to be manually corrected.
- Missing Record IDs: For leads to be updated, no Record IDs means complex VLOOKUPs are required, manually hunting for the right IDs to avoid creating duplicates
Some days, it feels like these spreadsheets are actively plotting against Alex!
Joke Break: What’s a Salesforce Admin’s favorite workout? “Data lifting! Heavy CSVs, light patience.”
Stay tuned for our next blog post, where we show how Data I Am turns Alex into an even bigger superhero—no more screaming at spreadsheets!
About the Author
Zeb Mahmood has spent his career unlocking business value by moving, fixing, and loading data—first as an engineer, then as a product leader, and now as a cofounder.
With 2 decades in product management, 9 years at Salesforce, and hands-on experience in early-stage startups, he’s learned a simple truth: data is the lifeblood of every business. But when it’s messy or trapped in spreadsheets, it can’t drive impact.
That’s why Zeb cofounded Data I Am — a Fix & Load AI built for Salesforce Admins and data handlers who just want their data to work. No frustration. No failed imports. Just clean, reliable data that loads seamlessly into Salesforce and delivers results.
Zeb believes great products don’t win on tech alone — they win through empathy. Empathy for users, buyers, partners, and the people building the product every day.
