Before I joined Vantage Point Consulting, I spent the bulk of my career as an internal Salesforce Administrator and Developer working in commercial real estate lending. At its peak, the company I worked for had 150 employees. We only used Sales Cloud for CRM and loan origination. In the last 6 months since I transitioned, I have found that while much of the knowledge I gained in my previous role has transferred well to my new position, there are many differences. Below I will highlight the 6 primary differences and adjustments I have experienced since making the switch from Salesforce Admin to Salesforce Consultant.

Remote Work

Every job I have held up to this point has been office-based. Becoming a Salesforce consultant has meant that my work environment is 100% remote. For me, the transition to remote work has been one of the biggest changes. Technology has been fundamental in this transition. Time spent talking with coworkers about projects has been replaced by chatting with them in various channels in the company’s Slack. Project meetings with internal stakeholders have been replaced by client meetings in Zoom and Google virtual meetings. The change to remote work has been positive for me overall, but it is something to consider when moving into consulting.

Clients

While working as a Salesforce Admin for a company, your clients are your co-workers. A large project will usually consist of a business leader and a small number of key stakeholders from their department. In my previous role, I generally worked with the EVP of Sales and one or two of our top producing originators. Consulting has been similar, but with two key differences. First, as a consultant, I have found that access to end-users is more limited. I am typically working with managers, sometimes from multiple departments. This means you will rely on the client stakeholders to understand all the use cases across their organization to deliver a successful project. Second, client relationships are temporary. Working for a company, your co-workers are a much more permanent fixture. In consulting, your relationship with your clients ends when the project is completed. These two differences create an interesting client dynamic. You need to quickly build a relationship and understand the ins and outs of a client’s business, but that relationship can quickly end.

Project Work

This is a change I was expecting, but I still feel it warrants discussion. As the primary admin for a company, my workload consisted of everything from major projects to minor configuration changes, bug fixes, and password resets. As a consultant, you work on multiple projects with different clients simultaneously. The variety means that every day is different, which I enjoy. That said, the change does not come without challenges. You are dependent on not only your own work but also the work of the entire project team to ensure the project is completed on time and as expected. Scope creep happens. Project delays happen. This may mean that you have major project deadlines pushed up against each other. In a consulting role, maintain open communication with your project teams and your supervisor to ensure that you don’t get overwhelmed or miss project deadlines or client expectations.

Billable Hours

Working as an internal admin I never had to track my time. I was not used to looking at my time as a revenue-generating resource.  There are several reasons you need to track your time as a consultant. You can’t bill a client without an accurate accounting of the hours spent on their project. As an employee of a consulting firm, you bring value to the company when you work hours billable to the client. If you transition into a consulting role, you will need to keep meticulous track of your time. In my opinion, managing your day down to the 15-minute increment provides consistent structure day-to-day, ensures you have time slots reserved to finish all critical project work, and will make it easy to log time throughout the day.

Co-Workers

As a Salesforce Admin working for a smaller company, I was generally working on my own. Working as a solo admin, I rarely had the opportunity to collaborate on a problem or communicate about a project in technical language. When challenges arise, you can either search the web and hope someone has had a similar problem and documented it or go to a forum and post your question in hopes that someone will respond. In a consulting position, you are surrounded by experts with a wide range of skills. We work in a highly collaborative environment and bounce problems and ideas off each other. Importantly, we can communicate in technical jargon and understand one another. This change has been positive for me. It has given me the opportunity to expand my skills and learn from people that have different experiences and Salesforce platform knowledge.

Certifications

Working as a full-time administrator for a single company, I was never required to acquire or maintain certifications. I took the Admin Certification exam and maintained that credential throughout my career, but that was never a job requirement. While I continued to gain skills and understand the platform, I was never too concerned with taking the exams and getting certified. The world of consulting is very different in two ways.

1.       You must maintain a high level of credibility and trust as a consultant. Your customers are looking to you to be the expert in all things Salesforce. Certifications build that credibility and confidence with clients from the start.

2.       Salesforce partners are placed into tiers based on a few categories. One of those is expertise, measured by certifications.

In a consulting role, certifications hold significantly more weight than they do working as an administrator for a company. Luckily, there are resources available to anyone looking to add certifications. Salesforce Trailhead and Focus on Force are both great study tools. Trailhead is an on-demand learning platform from Salesforce. It provides theory and hands-on courses on the Salesforce Platform. Focus on Force provides exam-specific study guides and practice exams. Utilize these tools to build your knowledge of the platform, help in building credibility with your clients, and support the consulting firm you work with.

I hope this has given anyone considering a transition from in-house admin to consultant some insight into what that change may bring. I have been in my new role for 6 months. While the change has not been without challenges, the experience has been incredibly rewarding. I look forward to continuing to expand my knowledge of the Salesforce platform, working with a great team and incredible clients.