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.