Last Sunday, I met an old friend over coffee who started a start-up business and was using Salesforce CRM for managing her clients, sales, leads, etc. Well, she knows how to operate Salesforce CRM on the vanilla level and but she was looking for someone who can help her in carrying out complex features in the CRM. She was looking for an expert who knows in-and-out about the Salesforce, who can suggest her which Salesforce’s feature can help her business to move in the right direction. As a layman, one can only know the basic things about the working but a specialist knows in-andout about the Salesforce CRM. So, I suggested her to meet a Salesforce Consultant who can assist her with day to day Salesforce needs. Before proceeding in detail about the Salesforce Consultant, let us understand what is Salesforce. Salesforce is a cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) which offers a wide range of solutions (client management, leads to sales, sales management, services management, etc.,) to all sized organizations. So in this article, I will reveal few secrets on how to be a successful Salesforce Consultant. Let me tell you, a Salesforce Consultant is a person who is pro in the fields of Administration, Architecture, and Coding. You have to fulfil the Salesforce requirement which your company need or you have to suggest an alternate way to fulfil the needs if their suggested method is not feasible. To be a successful Salesforce Consultant, the below steps will definitely help you in achieving your goals: First Step: Begin your Salesforce Consultant journey with Trailhead to learn about the modules offered by Salesforce to its users- admin, business users & developer to have a strong grip on CRM. Start taking quizzes and complete challenges to make your grip strong in Salesforce. Second Step: A Salesforce Consultant also needs to do coding to meet the requirement of the client so it is utmost important that you have knowledge about the development tools used in Salesforce like Developer Console, Code editor, Force.com IDE, Ant Migration Tool, etc. Third Step: A Salesforce Consultant also need to have detail insight about products like Einstein Analytics, Pardot, Heroku, Salesforce IoT, Quip, Social Network (Chatter), and Helpdesk (Desk.com) so that they can use them when their organization needs its functionality. Fourth Step: With the new releases of Salesforce happening each year, a Salesforce Consultant must be aware of what’s new in every release of Salesforce and how will the existing system react to the new features of Salesforce. Fifth Step: Should be able to implement the app(s) listed on AppExchange depending upon the requirement of your organization. Sixth Step: Give Salesforce Certification exam and get certified which will help demonstrate your skills and help in making forever and a day career in the Salesforce field. Seventh Step: When you have good experience in the field of administration, implementation, documentation, coding, testing, etc., then you can be rightly called a Salesforce Consultant.
With the help of your experience and knowledge, you can analyze the requirements and suggest what is best for the organization. You are the one who is ready to tackle the complex Salesforce custom requirement. That’s all folks for today. I hope, my piece of knowledge will help you in a long run to make a successful career in the Salesforce field and serve the community for better.