Salesforce is one of the hottest industries in the world right now. According to SalesforceBen, from 2019 to 2024, IDC predicts that 4.2 million new jobs will be created in the Salesforce ecosystem. There are definitely a lot of opportunities out there for people looking to start a brand new career or transition into Salesforce. Since there are so many career directions you can take as a Salesforce expert, we decided to explore some of the most popular career options so you can make a better decision in terms of which one is right for you.
What Salesforce Careers Are There?
As of April 2021, there are over 20 different professional certifications from Salesforce. Each career stage corresponds to a certain certificate. You can start off as an administrator or developer, eventually, delve into marketing (and pass an exam as a Pardot Specialist) or consulting. Interested in commerce? Get certified as a CPQ expert. For the most determined and ambitious, there is the honorary role of system architect. Salesforce also makes it easy to acquire the knowledge you need for each role with a wealth of educational materials.
The training offered by Salesforce has been designed for the various job opportunities that it creates in the marketplace. These categories of education depend on the role played by the individual in both private, public, and nonprofit organizations:
- Salesforce Administrator
- Salesforce Developer
- Salesforce Solution Architect
- Salesforce Consultant
- Pardot Specialist
Let’s start expiring these roles in greater detail so you better understand which one is right for you.
Salesforce Administrator
Salesforce Administrators often need to resolve user issues in real-time. The report might not be loading for some reason, or a process might break in mid-stream. You can expect to perform some routine tasks such as:
- Unlocking user accounts or resetting passwords due to user forgetfulness
- Dealing with SSO, two-factor authentication, and certification problems
- Adding a new white-listed IP-address
- Helping users develop or fine-tune reports so they yield meaningful metrics
- Troubleshooting email campaigns, workflows, approval cycles, or auto-responders that generate excessive bounced emails.
Then there will be tasks that will need to be done on a rolling basis. These are things that we’re working on just fine a week ago, but then things went awry when you came into work Monday morning. These tasks include:
- Run data deduplication tools. If you are using a rule-based deduplication app you will need to monitor and adjust those every week. This is why it’s better to use machine-learning-based deduplication tools, like DataGroomr, since it eliminates such time-consuming work.
- Run adoption dashboards
- Run data quality dashboards
- Examine time-based workflow and scheduled APEX queues to make sure there are no unexpected entries.
As you are going about performing all of your tasks, you have to be smart in the execution and delivery. Keep in mind that even though you have some important work to do, the users are more important than you are. You need to be as responsive and unobtrusive as possible, so users see only the benefits you provide. Very often this will involve doing critical work off-hours. The downside is that you may be working off-hours. The upside is that the Salesforce community is just that – a community that will support and guide you along your career path. If you are thinking about this career path make sure to get familiar with most common Salesforce admin job interview questions.
Salesforce Developer
Salesforce can be adapted to business needs in two ways – through configuration and customization. Developers are primarily engaged in customization of Salesforce, but they can also partially perform configuration.
With configuration, CRM functionality is configured through the Salesforce admin user interface without the use of code. You can create tables, objects, fields, form relationships between them, set rules for automating workflows and many other things. A large business usually hires a separate specialist for the CRM configuration, usually a Salesforce administrator.
Customization is needed if the configuration options are not enough to automate complex business logic. Some possible Salesforce customization examples include:
- Development of new functionality for standard CRM modules.
- Automation of complex business processes for the needs of a particular company.
- Development of custom templates for emails.
- Implementation of Einstein AI capabilities in CRM.
- Creation of custom reports and dashboards.
- Integration of Salesforce with other systems (ERP, company website, social media, etc.).
- Development of custom applications for Salesforce (product IT companies can place such applications in a special market – AppExchange).
The Lightning platform provides developers with all the tools they need to customize Salesforce: from a native language for the back end (Apex) to UI frameworks. At the same time, three times a year (winter, spring, and summer), Salesforce releases updates for Lightning. Each release contains approximately 150 updates. All information about innovations and changes can be found on the Salesforce website.
Two free development environments are integrated into the Lightning Platform, the Developer Console and the Force.com IDE. The first option is suitable only for learning since the console does not have many important features necessary for professional development, for example, integration with a version control system, code syntax highlighting. And it’s better not to choose the Force.com IDE, because Salesforce stopped supporting it in October 2019. One of the most popular environments that Salesforce developers prefer to use is Microsoft Visual Studio (there are extensions for working with Salesforce).
Salesforce Solution Architect
A Salesforce architect is the highest step of technological growth for a Salesforce developer. Based on the needs of the client’s business, the architect designs the entire CRM system. This position requires rich experience in development for Salesforce, knowledge of all cloud products and tools of this platform. According to Salesforce, a person in this position serves as a trusted advisor and leader who partners with business stakeholders and executives to design a vision and architecture for a solution to a business problem. Often in the position of the technical team leader, they help educate the team with technical best practices.
But what exactly falls under the responsibilities of a Salesforce Solution Architect? Here are some of the most common duties you can expect to perform:
- Conduct business process review meetings
- Lead the evaluation of functional and technical requirements
- Perform gap analysis between Salesforce functionality and the client’s requirements
- Write comprehensive design specifications, including functional specification, use cases, and user stories
- Create technical documentation like solution design documents and technical design documents
Good Salesforce Architects wade through the noise of this world to decode and resolve confusion around business and technical needs alike. To do this well requires both creativity and problem-solving skills for comprehensive Salesforce solutions, including object and data model structures, integration points and data flows, formulas, and workflow automation, along with other custom functionality.
Salesforce Consultant
Salesforce consultants serve as an intermediary between the customer and the technical team (architect and developers). They analyze the customer’s business, study the problems, obvious and possible in the future, and select the best solutions based on Salesforce. The consultant needs to be able to balance the needs of the business with the technical capabilities of Salesforce. At the same time, it is important to understand when Salesforce customization is really needed, and when you can limit yourself to the configuration.
Some of the main responsibilities of a Salesforce consultant include:
- Presales involvement where a consultant needs to gather/validate a potential client’s requirements with multiple Salesforce products and complex integrations.
- Gather requirements for cross-organizational transformation, with changes impacting multiple teams.
- Carry out Business Analysis to understand the ‘current state’ in depth.
- “Big picture” solution design, with multiple integrated systems. Understand the considerations involved with solution design (and therefore, concepts in the Salesforce architect domain).
Pardot Specialist
First of all, Pardot is a marketing automation solution that helps companies create meaningful connections, generate more pipelines, and empower sales teams to close more deals. If you have around 6-12 months of experience building and executing marketing workflows with the Pardot platform, you may want to consider becoming a Salesforce Certified Pardot Specialist and obtaining the necessary certification. This certification proves your skills and knowledge in building strategic marketing processes while incorporating tools such as lead scoring, email marketing, lead generation, and reporting.
As a Pardot Specialist you will be responsible for:
- Application designing, enhancements, building, validations, and deployments.
- Creating Pardot complex journeys through various Engagement Programs.
- Working on an Email module with email template creation, content configuration, personalization, sender profile setup, and test send validations.
- Configuring landing Pages with personalization and dynamic content to be used for various marketing purposes.
- Form building activities to configure and set up enriched forms to capture lead data used during B2B communications.
Be a Part of an Actively Growing Salesforce Marketplace
Since the Salesforce ecosystem is always growing there’s always going to be a need for qualified professionals to create Salesforce apps, integrate SaaS, customize Salesforce for the specific needs of a company and perform many other business functions. Salesforce offers a lot of information, training, and certifications to help you get your career off to a good start.
Whatever role you choose to pursue, remember that data cleansing will be a big part of it. Reach out to DataGroomr for the tools you need to manage deduplication, verification, and clean data. Start a free trial today!
