Get a Piece of the Salesforce Cake: Designing a Solution
How many people does it take to make a Salesforce Cake?
At last year’s Dreamforce conference we learned that Salesforce and its ecosystem of customers and partners will drive 4.2 Million New Jobs, $1.2 Trillion of New Business Revenues from 2019 to 2024. That’s a lot of different jobs, and a lot of cake to go around.
A Salesforce Solution is a lot like an expertly designed and impeccably crafted cake. A variety of people work on the final product, from bakery owners and designers to decorators and bakers. And every element, including flavors, structure, decorations, scheduling, and client’s demands must be carefully planned and looked after by different specialists.
Let’s take a closer look at what it takes to build a Salesforce Solution.
Salesforce Administrator: Decorate a Salesforce Cake
A decorator (Salesforce Administrator) relies on the cake designer (Solution Architect) to plan the overall structure and design to solve complex requirements (so you want a 10” cake to feed 75 people, look like an English garden, and taste like the air after the first rain of spring). Once the plan is created, the decorator can focus on the details like making the sugar flowers and placing them on the cake - i.e. creating and changing allowable field values, creating and configuring page layouts, creating email templates to send to customers, among so many other configurable ways to manage and maintain your Salesforce Solution.
The best Salesforce Administrators are those that understand the business well and possess an understanding of how Salesforce works and how to configure it.
If you are interested in obtaining a Salesforce Certified Administrator Certification, begin your studies by completing the Salesforce Admin Beginner Trailhead, and gain at least six months of hands-on experience supporting or working on Salesforce projects.
Salesforce Solution Architect: Design a Salesforce Cake
A top-notch cake designer listens to their client’s needs, balances what the client wants, considers the ingredients and tools to use, and creates a design based on these elements. The end result is a sublime combination of flavors, aesthetics, and craftsmanship. This is what a Salesforce Solution Architect does, except their batter of choice is not vanilla or chocolate, but rather Salesforce. While you can’t eat Salesforce, and the cloud won’t tantalize your taste buds or satiate a rumbling tummy, it does last a lot longer and is 100% sugar-free. Still, the principles are similar: you take in all the information from the business then use your extensive knowledge of your product (Salesforce) to create a structurally sound, client-pleasing, and delicious (or functional) end result.
A Salesforce Solution Architect considers the business requirements and processes and understands Salesforce configuration and development options. This knowledge enables Solution Architects to effectively design a data model and determine how Salesforce capabilities can best be fit together to create a solution that meets business needs.
The best Salesforce Solution Architects are those that have strong analytical ability, relational database modeling skills, and an understanding of the Salesforce development framework. This doesn’t mean you have to know how to write lines of code necessarily, but just having the ability to problem-solve.
The only problem is - now I want cake.
Conclusion
If you are interested in becoming a Salesforce Solution Architect, after you complete the Certified Salesforce Administrator exam, then complete either your Certified Platform App Builder or Certified Salesforce Platform Developer 1. Then you can explore a number of other certification paths - but don’t forget to get plenty of hands-on experience along the way.
For more info on Salesforce credentials based on roles, check out Salesforce’s certification site.
If you are a beginner or experienced Salesforce professional and interested in working at Pacific Point Corp. or interested in utilizing our consulting services please learn more about our company at http://pacificpointcorp.com/.
