6 Skills Salesforce Administrators Need to Succeed

Many Salesforce Administrators are making huge strides in their careers, skyrocketing to success and becoming strong leaders both within their company and the Salesforce community. We’re here to help Salesforce Admins continue to grow their careers and provide insight into the particular skills Salesforce Admins should strive to develop in order to reach their full potential and deliver amazing results.

The six skills below are also the skills that recruiters will look for on your resume when hiring a Salesforce Admin. Be sure to take note of any skills you want to develop, so you can continue to build your amazing career in technology as a successful #AwesomeAdmin!

1. Salesforce Skills

It’s no surprise that being a Salesforce Admin requires Salesforce skills! In order to excel in this role, there are four core responsibilities that Salesforce Admins need to learn and master:

1. User Management — User management is about more than just creating user profiles and permissions; it’s about being a champion for your users and taking the time to understand how they do their job and what makes them successful. This helps you not only design an awesome user experience but also create an effective strategy for both user training and adoption.
2. Data Management — Data is at the heart of everything you do in your business. It is also the engine that drives your Salesforce instance. Ensuring data in Salesforce is managed correctly will make everyone’s lives easier! Best practices to assess and improve the quality of your data involve putting in place validation rules, proactively preventing data duplication, and ensuring data is actionable to help users and executives make important business decisions. Field customization is also another large part of data management because it allows you to tailor your Salesforce instance to your own unique business requirements.
3. Security — Once you’ve set up processes to manage your data, you need to ensure measures are put in place to protect your customer and business data. Regularly performing a Salesforce Health Check will help improve your org’s overall security and is essentially a dashboard to see how safe your security settings are. Also, aligning with your IT department and correctly implementing field level security will further ensure your data and applications are protected.
4. Actionable Reporting — The ability to provide reporting on your business is super important in helping your users and executives gain insights and make decisions from their Salesforce data. Creating reports and dashboards that are focused on providing goal-oriented stats will help answer questions such as which products are top sellers, who the highest value prospects are, and which marketing campaigns have been most successful.

We’ve summarized these four core responsibilities in the image below. Print this out and pin it to your desk to keep these top of mind!

In addition to these core responsibilities, Salesforce Admins can also benefit from learning about the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform in order to develop Salesforce product-specific skills, such as Sales, Service, Commerce, and Integration. As admins, you are the driving force behind the success of Salesforce at your company. So it’s important that you have a well rounded understanding of how the Salesforce Platform can be used to meet business needs and goals — and drive amazing results at your companies.

2. Business Analysis Skills

The ability to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of business operations is key to your success as a Salesforce Admin. A large part of this centers around process analysis and documentation, which will help create transparency into your company’s unique and customized business processes. In doing this, you’ll identify the processes, people, information, and documentation involved in business activities and then use this information to build and improve upon solutions to meet business needs.

Being a strong problem solver and troubleshooter will also help you immensely in your role as a Salesforce Admin, because it will help you identify any business process gaps that exist and allow you to take the necessary steps to select, execute, and evaluate a suitable solution.

3. Leadership Skills

In much the same way that a good idea can come from anywhere, leadership can come from anyone within an organization. Being a Salesforce Admin puts you in a really unique position within a company. Having both business and technical skills provides you with the credibility to be an innovation leader at your company. To really excel in this way, you’ll want to continually invest time in developing strong communication skills — both written and verbal. For example:

• Writing business cases
• Creating training materials
• Building and delivering workshop materials
• Demoing new features for users and executives

Stakeholder engagement is another important leadership skill, as you often need to partner with other teams to deliver a project, including IT, executives, sales, and marketing users. You’ll also want to build strong relationships and network with parties external to your company, including other Salesforce Admins and partners in the Salesforce ecosystem.

4. Technical Skills

Technical skills are important for Salesforce Admins as they will help you work more efficiently within your organization, especially when navigating a complex task or project. As a Salesforce Admin, you’ll want to develop expertise in areas such as database management, security, and compliance. You’ll also want a basic understanding of APIs. By having well rounded technical knowledge, you’ll be able to speak to users and executives more confidently using your specialist expertise. This technical knowledge, when combined with business analysis skills, leadership skills, and project management skills, puts Salesforce Admins in a unique position to deliver amazing value to their companies.

5. Project Management Skills

An effective Salesforce Admin will proactively apply their knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to activities aimed to meet business goals and needs. There are many varied and different skills associated with project management. However, here are the six most important ones for a Salesforce Admin:

1. Leadership
2. Task management
3. Scheduling
4. Quality management
5. Planning
6. Execution

In addition to these, it’s also super important that you continuously seek feedback. To do this requires actively listening to your stakeholders, analyzing feedback, and then thinking of the best possible solution to move forward.

6. Industry Skills

Having a firm understanding of the business and industry in which your company operates is important for Salesforce Administrators because the specific types of activities and business processes that you implement will no doubt be influenced by these. For example, think about how differently a university operates compared to a bank. Both operate under very different rules and regulations, have very different business goals, and serve very different customers. These types of industry factors heavily influence the way a business operates and also the way Salesforce is used and administered.

#AwesomeAdmins are building successful careers in technology. And they’re doing this by building a skill set that is in high demand — a skill set consisting of both business and technical skills. With this diverse set of skills, it’s no surprise that Salesforce Admins all around the world are skyrocketing to success and transforming their careers, companies, and communities.