The majority of Salesforce training you’ll find in the world is conducted in English. But things are changing as the platform grows in other parts of the world. We’ve seen a few self-guided Salesforce courses and Trailhead content in other languages, including Spanish. But the options are limited when it comes to getting hands-on and instructor-led Salesforce training in Spanish or other languages.
In this post, we’ll cover the lessons learned while delivering a Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) bootcamp in Spanish so more organizations can offer training in languages beyond English.
How did the Spanish Account Engagement bootcamp come to fruition?
My name is Marcos Duran and I am a Marketing Manager at Sercante. In my role, I support our team with the development and delivering of Salesforce training to our customers. I have been a Salesforce user for almost a decade and Salesforce consultant for the past 7 years.
Part of being a #MomentMarketer is that you need to not only stay ahead of the latest trends and hot topics but also bring your tribe with you. My old Spanish professor used to use the term “Compartir la riqueza” or “share the wealth” in English.
This year I decided that I wanted to challenge myself with creating and delivering an Account Engagement (Pardot) bootcamp 100% in Spanish. My goal is to support Spanish speakers in earning their Pardot Specialist certification.
For a little bit of background, this platform gave me my “real” start in the ecosystem years ago. Although I am a native Spanish speaker, this is still a challenging feat since all the content has to be dubbed into Spanish and has to be tweaked to make sense technically and also culturally.
Here’s a hot take: Google Translate can get you 70% there, but that last 30% is what differentiates a speaker versus just dropping it into a translator. Before you say anyone can do that, I’ll ask why do you think more people haven’t?
This course lasted five weeks for a total of 8 one-hour classes. During three of those five weeks, we met twice.
Six big takeaways from developing a Salesforce training course in Spanish
Here’s a few lessons I learned along the way of doing this bootcamp. I hope they will help you plan better if you are interested in offering virtual webinars/programs as a user group leader or in your own organization.
1. Lean heavily on pre-promotion
A rule of thumb for webinars is that at least 50% of your signups won’t show.
In my case, this was close to my final numbers. I ended up with a 30% signup rate between announcing the bootcamp on LinkedIn and getting people to actually sign up.
Lesson Learned: My mistake here was that I didn’t have the form ready when I was gauging interest. As a result, I lost on that initial wave of hype. If you do this internally, get people to register once you gauge interest.
LinkedIn post I shared to see if people in my network have interest in Salesforce training in Spanish
And the poll I posted…
2. Reach out to your community
From promotion to content creation, I reached out to people in my network who had been through this experience, looking for advice.
I received a lot of positive advice — special shout out to Lara Black, Daniela Galmes, Victor Alberto Pantoja, and Ben LaMothe for all their support.
Thanks to their encouragement, I was able to support 30 students from 13 countries around the world in their native language with Account Engagement content.
Lesson Learned: Message the people you know who can offer advice, introduce you to people in their network, or help you to promote your efforts.
3. Optimize your course content
This particular bootcamp was focused on getting ready for the Pardot Specialist certification.
We used the study guide material from Trailhead to guide the format of our bootcamp and essentially focus on the goal of passing the exam. In addition, I provided our students live demos of the essential parts of Account Engagement (for the visuals), presentation decks, and links to documentation from the Salesforce Help Center for additional guidance.
Lesson Learned: Build your training course using resources from Salesforce. That’s who designed the exam you’re attempting to pass and the tools you’re using. So, that’s definitely the best place to start.
4. Encourage student engagement
This was my favorite part. To get our course going, I engaged our students with questions about their own experiences. For many, this meant comparing features with Marketing Cloud Engagement to help create the bridge between their experience with that platform and this new platform material.
We had several long conversations throughout the course that really showed the real-life business challenges they were facing. Thank you to everyone who shared with us!
Lesson Learned: Have a sense of humor when things go wrong. Having to say automations in Spanish 30 times in one hour is not fun — it is definitely a tongue twister. Thanks to everyone for putting up with me as I searched for the correct words to illustrate my point.
5. Send plenty of reminders
This is a tip from Google Calendars: send reminders close to the webinar start time. I would send out a message a few hours before class to remind students, “Hey – class is today, make sure you show up.”
This was the hardest for me because through this course I would see our attendance numbers fluctuate. At the end of the day, I understand we all have lives outside of work. So it’s best to be patient and as helpful as we can with others.
Lesson Learned: Keep on sending those course reminders. Your students appreciate them!
6. On-Demand
Finally, at the end of each week, I would send everyone the slides and recordings. I would suggest you do this once at the end of the course.
Lesson Learned: Offering the course recordings on demand is essential. Life happens, students may miss a session or two. This content is also a lot to take in, so giving the option to revisit is going to help your students to be more successful.
Changes I would make to future Salesforce training in Spanish
Now that you read a little about how this course went for me, you may be wondering what’s next?
Well, here’s a few things I would do differently:
- I would love to be able to do this in person to really give the students the most support I can.
- I would continue to team up with other Account Engagement rock stars and divide the work to ensure we bring in different experiences to the classroom.
- I would probably promote this a little longer than I did (initially we had just north of 100 people interested in Spanish Pardot training).
Other than that, I feel it always pays to help others power up. I look forward to continuing to support Spanish and English speakers on the Salesforce platform and continue to make the most out of their investment.
If you are interested in watching the Spanish Bootcamp series please click here.
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You can join our regularly scheduled courses or ask us about private training options — like this one that was offered to Spanish speakers in the Salesforce community.
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