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Salesforce Administrator

After Salesforce is implemented, a Salesforce administrator is required to maintain and extend the system functionality as business needs change, evolve or expand into new areas of the business. The role is a varied one but will typically include some or all of the following:

• Provide User Support and be responsible for user administration
• Investigate and resolve problems
• Investigate and analyze requests for change and new functionality
• Configure the system to meet business requirements
• Document business processes and create training materials
• Be responsible for Data Quality including bulk data loads and de-duplication.
• Create Reports and Dashboards

To be a good Salesforce administrator, good attention to detail, problem solving and strong communication skills are required. It also helps to have an IT background to understand some of the concepts that you will come across, such as objects, fields and data model relationships.

Increasingly certification is becoming a requirement for Salesforce administration roles. Find out more about Salesforce Certification.

Salesforce Developer

A Salesforce developer is someone with advanced technical skills that will implement any requirements that cannot be done with configuration. This means programming custom visualforce pages and writing triggers to be invoked on certain actions withing the application.

As a Salesforce Developer, you would require:
• Experience with Apex triggers and Visualforce pages
• Salesforce integration experience
• Salesforce Web Services API experience
• Preferably have a 501 Advanced Developer certification.

Salesforce Consultant

A Salesforce consultant works for a Salesforce partner consulting company or could also be a freelancer. They would typically have skills that combine functional and technical skills to be able to facilitate workshops to identify, capture and translate key requirements into Salesforce solutions across Sales, Service and Marketing processes. They work on a project basis and would be involved in business process mapping, managing stakeholders and their expectations, developing a solution design, configuring the solution, working with technical developers to implement any customizations that involve code or integration, migrating existing data and then developing and providing training.

Salesforce Business Analyst

A Salesforce business analyst would typically work for a large end user of Salesforce. Large enough to support multiple Salesforce resources working in a team. The focus of the business analyst is to understand and document business requirements.

As a Salesforce Business Analyst, you would typically be involved in the following activities:

• Project scoping
• Requirements gathering
• Business Process experience
• Facilitating customer workshops
• Producing functional analysis
• Working with Project Managers and developers
• Salesforce configuration
• System Training

To qualify for this kind of job, you would need the following skills:
• Business Analysis skills
• Salesforce Functional knowledge (to be able to explain how Salesforce works and match requirements with out of the box functionality or understand how and which part of Salesforce could best be customized to meet the requirements)
• Salesforce.com configuration skills
• Salesforce certifications
• Client facing skills
• Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal

For all roles, it also helps to have an understanding and experience working in an Agile environment. As Salesforce can be customized quickly, it is suited well to working in sprints and frequently demonstrating to the business the progress of the project.

What Certification are you studying for now?

Focus on Force currently provides practice exams and study guides for sixteen certifications

Salesforce Jobs

Salesforce Administrator After Salesforce is implemented, a Salesforce administrator is required to maintain and extend the system functionality as business needs change, evolve or expand into new areas of the business. The role is a varied one but will typically include some or all of the following: • Provide User Support and be responsible for user administration • Investigate and resolve problems • Investigate and analyze requests for change and… Read More

Salesforce Jobs

Salesforce Basic Terminology

If you are new to the Salesforce.com application, you may wonder ‘What exactly is Salesforce.com’ and before long you will come across some terminology that is used to describe different parts of the application, functionality and navigation.Here is a quick guide to some of the basic terminology you need to understand Salesforce.com and navigate the application.Basic SalesforceSalesforce is the name of the company and name of the application. It started… Read More

Salesforce Basic Terminology

Subtract Two Date Fields to Calculate Duration of Time

If you are faced with the challenge of calculating the duration of time between two dates in Salesforce, this post is for you. Lets say what you want is to take two dates and times, for example 20/01/2014 09:00am and 21/01/2014 10:20am and calculate the duration of time between them in hours and minutes, and display the result like this: 24:20 or 24h:20m.If we just create a formula field and… Read More

Subtract Two Date Fields to Calculate Duration of Time

Salesforce Roll-up Summary Using the Value of a Formula Field

Roll-up summary fields are a very useful Salesforce feature, but you may come across a situation where you need to rollup the value of a formula field. Here is an example: You have added a custom field to the Product object to record the cost of a product. You want the total cost of all products added displayed on an opportunity. In the screenshot below you can see Widget A… Read More

Salesforce Roll-up Summary Using the Value of a Formula Field

Saving Emails to Salesforce

If you use Gmail or another web based email service, Salesforce has a feature that will allow you to save your emails related to leads, contacts and open opportunities. It is the ‘Email to Salesforce’ features and when enabled, allows users to bcc a unique bcc email address to automatically create activity records against records in Salesforce. To use this feature, firstly the Salesforce Administrator has to enabled it, and… Read More

Saving Emails to Salesforce

Comparing Salesforce Editions

There are a number of editions of Salesforce offering varying features and capabilities. If you are new to Salesforce and deciding which edition is right for you, then this guide will be helpful. If you already have Salesforce it will be useful to know what features you can take advantage of and any limitations you will have. It is of course possible to upgrade to a higher edition. If you… Read More

Comparing Salesforce Editions

Salesforce Search Layouts

Salesforce gives up the ability to customize many areas of how it displays data. One area that is important to understand but easy to overlook is search layouts. Search layouts allow us to customize the fields both standard and custom that are displayed in various results lists. It is worth the time to customize, as it can improve productivity by ensuring that the most useful fields are displayed in the… Read More

Salesforce Search Layouts

Salesforce Instances vs Orgs vs Environments

Once you start getting involved with Salesforce, you will hear a number of terms such as Instance, Org, Environment and even POD. Its easy to get these confused or even not to even be aware of what they really mean. One person may refer to the development instance and another the development environment. Some organisations may refer to the fact that they have multiple instances of Salesforce, and another multiple… Read More

Salesforce Instances vs Orgs vs Environments

What is the Salesforce Account Hierarchy (And How To Use it)

The Salesforce account hierarchy allow accounts to be related in a hierarchy by using a ‘parent account’ field to link them together. Once linked, the complete hierarchy structure can be viewed and links are provided to navigate directly to the accounts.The first step is to create or identify the ultimate ‘Parent’ account. This is the account at the top of the hierarchy. In our example, the top level account is… Read More

What is the Salesforce Account Hierarchy (And How To Use it)

Data Loader Tips – Inserting or Updating Blank Values in a Field

You may have come across the situation where you need to use Dataloader to clear or delete the value of a field. Normally, if you provide a blank value in the input file, DataLoader will ignore it and leave the field value as is. Lets look at an example. Here we have loaded data into the Product Description field instead of the Product Code field. Lets imagine, instead of 3… Read More

Data Loader Tips – Inserting or Updating Blank Values in a Field

Salesforce Multicurrency – What You Need to Know

      What is Salesforce multicurrency?Before we look at how multicurrency works and what you need to look out for, lets look at what it offers:Adds the ability to record amounts in different currencies. If you don’t have multicurrency enabled, then amounts are just displayed as an amount.Allows amounts to be converted, displayed and reported according to exchange ratesAllows the use of dated exchange rates so the value at… Read More

Salesforce Multicurrency – What You Need to Know

Preventing Duplicate Records with Salesforce Config

The Salesforce mantra is ‘clicks not code’ so we always look for a config solution to a problem before resorting to code. While we can set the unique indicator on a custom field to prevent duplicate values for one field across records, how do we prevent records inserted with duplicate values across all or some of the fields? Do we need to write a trigger to handle this? Or is… Read More

Preventing Duplicate Records with Salesforce Config

Salesforce Case Management

In most every company which prides itself on taking care of its customer base to the fullest, the Salesforce native functionality of Case Management goes hand in hand with customer success. The departments in an organization that deal with customer service, product support, issue resolution and service requests can all benefit from utilizing the case management functionalities; and related automation options; within Salesforce. As described in Salesforce Service Cloud Overview … Read More

Salesforce Case Management

Using DataLoader with Lookup Fields

External Ids provide a convenient way to integrate data from an external system, by allowing the use of a unique record identifer for records instead of the Salesforce Id. For example, you may define an Account Code external id on the Account object, which is the unique key for an account record in an ERP system that is integrated with Salesforce. When using DataLoader or another integration tool to update… Read More

Using DataLoader with Lookup Fields