Did you ever consider a career in Salesforce? Would it be a journey or is it a destination? Can it also be both? While it will most likely depend on personal expectations and perspectives, a career in Salesforce can prove to be interesting, challenging and rewarding. At the start, Salesforce is a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) but its versatility and application can prove to be avenues you can explore as careers, whether its application development, specializations or simply purely Salesforce focused.
This commentary will explore some of the reasons we think Salesforce might be a good career path for you, and hopefully make you take the leap of faith. As a starting point, Salesforce works well with certain categories and types of people. If you can identify yourself, it might be worth considering a career change.
- Do you want to learn more about IT, its operations with front-office processes, from customer interaction through Sales and Marketing to Customer service? Do you want to challenge yourself and put what you have learned into practice, by, for instance, developing an app to change and enhance a business process?
- Are you an innovator who wants to try something new and figure out how things work? Do you ask yourself What can I do to make things better and set out to achieve it?
- Those who seek an understanding of how IT systems can complement business processes. Going beyond CRM (Customer Relationship Management), a career in Salesforce is a positive step in terms of understanding and developing applications, using mobile or facilitating integration with other/existing systems to access information to enhance existing business processes.
- Those who like putting the pieces of the jigsaw together to create a complete picture of customer interactions.
- Those who want to reinvent their careers and be part of a large group of successful communities of professionals globally making a difference through their work.
As a Salesforce Consultant you will seek to understand existing client processes by asking open questions maybe even draw things out visually on a whiteboard for example below:
- How are they doing things today? If you were dealing with the sales department, for example, how are the current lead generation and qualification process (potential interest)? How do they progress through the sales stages of an opportunity (perhaps these are discovery, solution presentation, negotiation) to closed won/lost revenue? This can vary from company to company depending on the requirements which you gather.
- What is it they want to improve? How can they achieve this in a short time frame?
- What are the company’s long term goals?
- Understanding user story concepts – “this department would like to do.., So they can.. and success will be measured by…” – as a Salesforce Consultant part of your role is to fill in those dots and complete the picture.
- How will you ensure they get the most out of their investment in Salesforce they can realise the value quickly and use it on a day to day basis?
- When you gather these requirements, you need to confirm them with your stakeholders and propose your solution. Once you got this approval, you can then build your solution for them to ensure they get the best experience using Salesforce.
- More importantly, how do you ensure that end-users adopt the system to help them complete their processes, which would have been originally manual and time-consuming? Using Salesforce they can now access all their key information within one system?
Some examples of people you might meet and how you could potentially improve things for them:
- You could meet the Sales Manager of a company and ask them the following questions.
- What would it mean for your salesperson if they did not have to write the same emails time and time again if a template already exists in the system?
- What would it mean for you as a sales manager if your reports can be found in one place of the stages of your sales and view as a dashboard, to drill down for more detail if necessary? This could help in terms of budget headcount, setting targets as well as other business decisions.
- You may meet a Marketing Manager seeking to understand which type of marketing campaigns channels bring the best quality leads? and which sources are best for the leads?
- You may meet a Customer Service Manager and Agents, looking to capture requests on multichannel and looking to track their tickets to a quick resolution? What are the most commonly asked requests? Are we meeting our service level agreements for customer interactions and requests?
No matter who you will come across, there are common themes where you can learn and understand the challenges your stakeholder is facing and how you can potentially assist them. From there as a Salesforce Consultant, you can propose and develop a solution using Salesforce, which could save time or increase productivity making an improvement.
As a Salesforce Consultant, when you have completed your requirements, designed a solution and have successfully implemented a solution what does this mean? The end result means you will have empowered these stakeholders and provided them value for their day to day processes and ensuring they leverage Salesforce investment in a positive way. If you identify yourself in one of the categories and you are eager and willing to embrace the Salesforce, get in touch, and may the force be with you.