12 Steps to Start a Career in Salesforce

If you work for a company that sells something (or even one that doesn’t), you’ve probably heard of Salesforce. You may have also seen someone in your network posting about certifications and Salesforce-specific jobs, and you’ve decided you want to learn what that’s all about.

Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, and companies of all types and sizes use it to transform their business. Market research firms expect the Salesforce economy to create 3.3 million new jobs and close to a trillion in new business revenue by 2022. Because of this demand, recent salary surveys for 2020 put the earning potential for Salesforce Admins between $100–125k (with developers earning as much as $170k)! Generally, skills in these income tiers can be difficult or expensive to learn, but not so here! Salesforce is an easy, fun, and free skill to learn if you have the right path.

So, if you’ve decided you’d like to transform your career and start setting yourself up for a career in Salesforce, you’re making a great choice! But there are so many resources out there and so many job titles to navigate it can be hard to get an initial read on what the heck is going on in the Salesforce economy. So here are 12 steps that can help get anyone to a full-time career in Salesforce.

Salesforce is a giant ecosystem with a lot of career tracks to meet you where you’re at today. The most basic and popular of these career tracks is the Administrator track; there is even a saying amongst practitioners that the “Admin is king”. You can think of admins as generalists; they have wide enough subject knowledge to cover most Salesforce use cases (depending on the product). For this reason, nearly every Salesforce organization will have admins running the show.

Then there are more specialized tracks, notable of which are the Developer Track and the Consultant Track. These specialized tracks will typically overlap quite significantly with the admin track, but go deeper on selected subject areas like industry products or APEX programming. Typically, these tracks have their own certifications and are tailored for individuals with experience on the platform in an admin role. If you’re interested in learning more, you can look at all the tracks here.

Unless you’re looking to hop to a Salesforce role with another company, you’re probably going to have to make a case how this could be an impactful change for the business. It’s a great thing if you have a boss that is open to new ideas and invested in your personal development; but if you really want to make the case, you need to come to the table with ideas. And the best people to get ideas from are all around you: the users.

If you’re in a role that uses Salesforce, you probably know the ups and downs of how your team uses it. You probably know every annoying thing, who experiences it, and why it should be fixed. Now picture every team that uses Salesforce at your company, each with their own problems and ideas. This knowledge is gold to a Salesforce owner; so talk to the users. Get to know their pain. If you come to your manager with problems identified and a plan to deliver business impact by fixing them…it’s hard to say no.

If your company already has full-time Salesforce people, talk to them. Chances are they’ll be glad you did. There is so much to do in Salesforce, and so much impact to be delivered, teams are typically under-resourced and more than happy to get reinforcements. If they don’t outright offer to teach you themselves, they’ll probably give you guidance on how to train yourself. Keep them updated on your progress, ask them what else you can be doing and for honest feedback on your development.

When you’re ready (not for another couple steps!), you’ll be able to come back to them and show them what you’ve accomplished. Ask them if they can give you some easy and low-risk tasks to do, something to help them ease their own plate. They’ll probably be able to give you something real you can sink your teeth into. Repeat this with more and more advanced tasks and you’ll be getting real experience in a real organization that will be invaluable to your future.

It’s easy to think of Salesforce as a single platform, and that’s because it is. But behind the curtain, Salesforce is a suite of products with very different functions and use cases. Your company may use one or several of these products in its instance, and before you start any course of study you should figure out what those products are. Because wouldn’t it be awkward if you learn everything about a Salesforce product your company doesn’t even use?

If your company doesn’t currently use Salesforce, you’re in luck because you have your choice of the lot! You’ll probably want to pick a product that could be useful to your company or a company you want to work for. The big ones are Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud. Most Salesforce organizations license one or multiple of these three products. Sales Cloud is what put Salesforce on the map, with 83% of Salesforce practitioners reporting proficiency in the technology. This is probably the best place to start, particularly if you’ve selected an admin track.

You do not need access to a production Salesforce organization to learn Salesforce, you can deploy your own personalized instance for free! Salesforce offers free developer edition accounts that can be deployed in minutes that operate as kind of sandbox to give you risk-free creative freedom. No matter how badly you screw up, nobody will ever know! I highly recommend the first thing you do is go register for one of these sandboxes so you can test your learnings in a real environment.

The Salesforce ecosystem is massive. Even the most experienced Salesforce professional can learn something new and apply it to a problem their business might be facing. This means there are endless opportunities for growth and professional development on the Salesforce platform.

Salesforce has invested millions in resources for training and certifying learners at all levels. The most popular platform for learning Salesforce skills is Trailhead , where learners (or “Trailblazers” as they are referred to in the ecosystem) can browse a massive library of easily explained walkthroughs on just about any Salesforce use case imaginable. Trailhead has also gamified professional development, offering badges and credentials for concepts mastered that you can add to your resume or Trailhead profile. Other e-learning platforms like Udemy and Focus on Force have courses you can take that are more specifically tailored to achieving a specific certification or Salesforce career.

I really cannot emphasize this enough: do your Trailheads! If you follow none of these other steps, follow this one! Bookmark the website, set reminders on your phone, do whatever you gotta do; but for the sake of all that is useful, do your Trailheads!

I’m going to leave it there for now, but rest assured I’ll come back to stress this again later.

You may have heard a popular saying among Salesforce practitioners, “Clicks not code”. This is a mantra that simplifies the mission of Salesforce’s powerful and extensive suite of low-code tools to enable organizations to deliver digital transformation without having to hire programmers. Salesforce’s updated user experience, Salesforce Lightning, even extends their drag-and-drop functionality to deploying and scaling custom applications, which was something previously reserved to coders.

If you’re looking to start a career in Salesforce but don’t know how to code, have no fear because you do not need to have one iota of coding ability. Part of what makes the Salesforce ecosystem so empowering is anyone can learn it, regardless of skill set. In fact, most sophisticated Salesforce organizations don’t need to write code at all.

All that said, developers aren’t going anywhere; and learning how to code can significantly extend your capabilities in Salesforce to hyper-specific enterprise problems your business may be facing. If you’re interested in learning SOQL or APEX for Salesforce, you can find plenty of lessons on Trailhead.

A few years back, Salesforce released a new user experience that extends the capabilities of their drag-and-drop features to application development and component-based page layouts. This makes learning how to code in Apex even less urgent now than it was previously. But the fact is many organizations still haven’t made their transition over from Salesforce Classic to Salesforce Lightning, but most of those same organizations are looking for people to help them do it. Learning Lightning will not only help grow your capabilities within the platform, but also improve your value to the Salesforce job market. I recommend the Admin Essentials in Lightning Trail to get started with your Lightning education!

Okay, this one is by no means essential, but joining a user group can be a great opportunity for professional networking (and fun too!). Cities across the world have user groups where Salesforce practitioners of specific or any skillsets can gather to learn from each other, network, or just enjoy each other’s company! There are user groups for specific products, roles, or even concepts. These user groups are oftentimes financed by Salesforce, and sometimes the issues and solutions identified in their sessions even make their way onto Salesforce’s product roadmap. You can see what’s in your city here !

Once you’ve mastered what you wanted to learn in Trailhead, it may be time to start considering getting certified! Certifications are proctored exams taken to verify to the outside world that you know what you’re talking about. Some Salesforce jobs require certifications, some don’t; but in any case, it gives you an edge up on the competition when the hiring manager can be assured you’ve studied what they need.

You can register for certification exams on Trailhead. There is a cost to register so you’ll want to select which one is right for you and study hard. Some of the exams have brutal pass rates, but if you happen to not pass your first time around, you can retake for a discount within a few weeks. If you’d like extra exam preparation akin to your SAT prep courses back in high school, there are in-person or online courses you can take that will train you for a specific certification exam.

Cool, you’ve got your certification and you’re ready to drop it on LinkedIn! Now what? Well, oftentimes the next step will be up to you, but it can’t hurt to develop some soft skills. Salesforce is a relatively new career category, and so most organizations don’t have traditional project manager/technical resource structures built out. Oftentimes you’ll need to be both the technical resource and your own project manager.

This can be jarring for someone coming from a big company or out of school who may be used to having defined and achievable tasks laid out for them by somebody else, or having another check their work to see if it’s correct. For those thinking of a Salesforce role, a critical skill to learn will be setting yourself up for success, and building close relationships with coworkers to sanity check ideas. But once you’ve mastered this, you’ll come to enjoy the agility and creative freedom unburdened by extensive feedback apparatuses.

Alright, you did it! You’re ready for a career in Salesforce. You have your certifications, you have the right attitude, and you have a plan to deliver impact for your organization. The next step can be the most difficult for some, but the next time somebody needs something done in Salesforce, raise your hand. Let others know this is something you have the desire and know-how to do. Nobody is going to intuitively know what you want from your career, so you need to self-advocate. Maybe your company has been looking for a person to own Salesforce but haven’t gotten around to hiring someone, or maybe there’s a position for you at another company in your network. There are hundreds of thousands of Salesforce positions out there, go shoot your shot!