How to get started as a Salesforce administrator
CRM, quoting, lead generation, social selling, email cadences… a Salesforce administrator needs to master sales tools. As I write, the only CRM I’ve used is Salesforce.com, and I can tell it isn’t easy to learn. In this post, I’ll share few resources I’ve used to develop Salesforce skills.
Table of Contents
Get certified
There are 22 Salesforce certifications, and I suggest Salesforce administrator passing the administrator and app builder certifications. Moreover, the Sales Cloud Consultant certification is also relevant as it is designed for professionals who implemented scalable and maintainable solutions. To get certifications, create a Webassessor account with your email address.
Most certifications cost 200$, last 90 min and have 60 multiple-choice questions. You can verify Salesforce Certifications here: http://certification.salesforce.com/verification.
Salesforce Help
The Salesforce Help can be useful as well. There are three types of Salesforce Support: Standard, Premier, and Signature. Standard support doesn’t offer much, but with Premier and Signature support, there are many resources you can use for training: certification prep courses, certification practice exams and role-based online and video learning.
Trailhead
Salesforce Trailhead is the best way to learn Salesforce by doing. Thus, I recommend Sales Operations professionals to pass Business User & Admin modules. Also, I suggest the “Report and Dashboard Specialist” superbadge. Trailhead also has modules about releases, which is great to stay up to date as Salesforce makes three releases per year. This is what a Trailhead profile looks like.
Join the community
Lastly, Salesforce has a great community, and community members can help you out whenever you need. There are two places where you can ask questions: Salesforce Success Community and Salesforce Developer. Sales Operations will mostly use the Success Community forum, but SOQL queries related questions can be asked on the Developer forum. Your Community Profile summaries your Trailhead Profile and your Salesforce Certifications.
