Salesforce is trusted by some of the largest companies across a variety of industries, including brands such as Spotify, NBC Universal, Toyota, Macy’s, as well as industry leaders and thousands of smaller companies and nonprofit organizations. Ranked #1 for CRM Applications based on IDC 2021 Revenue Market Share Worldwide, Salesforce serves 150,000 customers from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. What all of these organizations have in common is their need to hire Salesforce administrators to manage their Salesforce environment and make sure their contact data is organized and accurate. In fact, demand for Salesforce administrators is expected to grow 11% through 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Let’s start by getting an overview of what a Salesforce administrator is and then we’ll look at how you can become one.
What Is a Salesforce Administrator?
A Salesforce Administrator is a system admin who specializes in Salesforce’s suite of CRM products. They are the main experts for answering questions, developing processes, creating reports, and training other users on how to use Salesforce effectively. Not only will they know Salesforce inside and out, but administrators will also have working knowledge of additional products and services that Salesforce ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) create for the platform.
One of the biggest reasons why Salesforce administrators continue to be in demand is that more and more companies are relying on data and analytics for all kinds of business processes, such as sales and marketing, planning, and customer management.
What Does a Salesforce Administrator Do?
The role of the Salesforce admin will depend on how the company is using Salesforce. For example, there are multiple products from Salesforce, including the Sales Cloud, which is Salesforce’s most popular product, but there’s also the Service Cloud, which is used by a company’s customer support team. Following are examples of some of the roles a typical Salesforce admin might take on in their day-to-day jobs:
- Overseeing user profiles and access levels – Salesforce admins are responsible for the company’s data, such as information about products and services, customer demographics, purchases, and other activities. They will create accounts for all the users and assign them the proper access levels based on their roles and responsibilities in the company. In addition to this, Salesforce admins will often onboard new hires who need access to Salesforce as well as remove access for employees who no longer have access to Salesforce.
- Import new leads and contacts – As your sales team and other stakeholders add leads and contacts to Salesforce, admins will be busy developing standards for these processes to ensure data consistency across the organization.
- Streamline reporting – Since Salesforce admins are expert CRM data managers, their companies rely on them to keep data clean and have it readily available to help support training efforts and justify business decisions.
- Setup and run deduplication tools – Over time, contact data and user behavior can be duplicated by users, webform submissions, and imported lists, so it falls to the Salesforce admin to run deduplication tools to scrub the data and remove duplicates. The frequency of this process will vary depending on the organization and the tools they use. Some operate automatically in real-time, while others are initiated at a regular interval (usually at least once a week) to keep Salesforce running at full speed.
- Testing system updates in the sandbox – Salesforce is designed to automatically update on a regular basis, but the best admins proactively test and install these updates in a sandbox in order to understand changes and explore new capabilities before updates go live. This helps ensure the organization’s data stays as secure as possible and Salesforce runs at full capacity.
From the list above, we see that a Salesforce admin can be responsible for many different functions and processes that are integral to data management. , which raises the question: how can somebody become a Salesforce admin? We explore this question in the next section.
How Does a Salesforce Adminstrator Get Salesforce Certified?
To become a Salesforce admin, you don’t need to have a technical background or pre-existing knowledge of Salesforce technology. As long as you have a computer and an internet connection, you can access Trailhead, which is Salesforce’s free online learning platform where you can learn all of the skills you need to become a Salesforce admin. Everything is done online and on your schedule.
Before you go out into the market and look for jobs as an admin, you will need to prepare for and pass the Salesforce Certified Administrator exam. If you are a newcomer to Salesforce, you will start off by learning about the basics of the Salesforce platform and what it does via a series of engaging modules. According to Salesforce, it takes around 115–125 hours of study and preparation to pass. Best of all, the average base pay for a Salesforce Administrator is about $92k, according to Indeed. And don’t forget to review the Salesforce Admin interview questions to be better prepared.
Salesforce Administrator Credentials and Certifications
Becoming a Salesforce Admin can be a valuable long-term career path or a way to improve the career path you’re already on. The Salesforce Administrator role has five credentials, including:
- Administrator – designed for those who have experience with Salesforce and continuously look for ways to help companies get additional features and capabilities.
- Advanced Administrator – for seasoned Salesforce Administrators who have mastered advanced Salesforce features and functionality to solve a variety of business problems.
- CPQ Specialist – for individuals with experience designing, building, and implementing quoting flows with Salesforce Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ), the technology used to organize sales teams
- Marketing Cloud Administrator – for administrators who configure and troubleshoot configuration and user requests in Marketing Cloud, including subscriber data management and Setup navigation.
- Platform App Builder – for those skilled in designing, building, and implementing custom applications.
Examples of the concepts you’ll learn during study for the certification exam include:
- Managing users, data, and security
- Maintaining and customizing Sales Cloud and Service Cloud apps
- Building reports, dashboards, and workflows
You can also pick up a few Superbadges along the way to indicate extra learning concentrations in topics such as Business Administration Specialist and Security Specialist.
Applying the Right Tools as a Salesforce Administrator
One of the main responsibilities of a Salesforce admin is tracking the health of the data inside Salesforce and making sure there are no issues, such as duplicates, invalid data, and other problems that can lower the quality of an organization’s data, impact operations, and negatively affect the bottom line.
DataGroomr is a deduplication tool that every Salesforce Administrator should be aware of. Not only does it identify and eliminate duplicates through the power of machine learning, but it doesn’t require any setup or maintenance. Salesforce admins simply connect to their Salesforce instance and start deduping right away. As part of your job, you will be labeling records as duplications. With DataGroomr, the system automatically learns and improves the algorithm so that future duplicate detection is more accurate. Couldn’t be easier.
As a new Salesforce Administrator, you should try DataGroomr for yourself. Get started with with a free 14-day trial.
