How to Become a Salesforce Admin: The Definitive Guide

Salesforce Administrators have responsibility for the organization’s data, including critical information about sales and marketing, products and services, and customer demographics, purchases, and other activities. They create user accounts, assign access levels based on roles and responsibilities within the organization. This often includes onboarding new hires who need to have access to Salesforce. And they handle off-boarding and removing access for former employees and others who no longer use Salesforce.

As users add leads and other data to Salesforce, administrators develop standards for these processes to help ensure data consistency across the organization.

Salesforce Admins are experts in CRM data management. Organizations depend on them to keep data clean and organized, and to pull data as needed to help support training efforts and justify business decisions.

Over time, contact data and user behavior can be duplicated by users, webform submissions, and imported lists, so it falls to the Salesforce Admin to run deduplication tools to scrub the data and remove duplicates. The frequency different organizations run this process will vary depending on the tools they use. Some operate automatically in real time while others are initiated at a regular interval (usually at least once a week) to keep Salesforce running at full speed.

Salesforce is designed to automatically update on a regular basis, but the best admins proactively test and install these updates in a sandbox in order to understand changes and explore new capabilities before updates go live. This helps ensure the organization’s data stays as secure as possible and Salesforce runs at full capacity.

Salesforce administrators run all kinds of tests and reports to make sure the database stays in good condition. These tests and reports may include field utilization reports, APEX tests, role and profile reports, and other industry specific reports. The administrator’s system knowledge and access to data makes them the go-to resource for this kind of activity and they often automate processes for the tests and reports.

Best practices dictate that admins keep records at least 12 months and often much longer. This requires documenting all error reports and any changes made to field history tables.

When issues arise with Salesforce, the admin is the person responsible for figuring out what’s going on and finding a fix for any problems. They also survey users and management for new ideas, then plan, build, test and execute those solutions. Admins train other employees on updates, changes, and processes.

Salesforce is a powerful sales and marketing tool. To make sure the organization is using all of the capabilities of the application, Admins will set up contact sequences, A/B tests, processes for data entry automation, and reports to measure the effectiveness of sales and marketing initiatives. Then they’ll optimize those processes to make them even more efficient.

Organizations in different industries use Salesforce in a variety of ways. For instance, admins in the medical field will need to understand HIPAA data protection requirements in addition to their Salesforce expertise. Other industries have specialized needs as well, so a good admin understands both Salesforce and industry specific requirements.

Hiring managers and other human resource experts maintain up-to-date lists of the capabilities and expertise Salesforce admins need to possess. But it’s not always easy to separate the job candidates who have deep knowledge and practical experience from those whose experience is more topical or in some cases, non-existent.

To help address this challenge, Salesforce has created several certifications that measure an Administrator’s knowledge and experience with the platform. These aren’t easy-to-complete surveys that just about anyone can pass. Each certification requires a great deal of study and work to master the relevant skills.

For individuals who have experience working with Salesforce CPQ (configure, price, and quote software), this certification helps demonstrate an administrator’s skills and knowledge designing, building and implementing estimation and proposal workflows for product price configuration. Administrators with this credential help their companies earn the trust of their clients with solid estimation and pricing processes.

Some organizations need customized applications within the Salesforce platform. The Platform App Builder certification helps administrators demonstrate their skills and ability to design and build custom applications with the declarative customization capabilities of Salesforce.

In addition to these four administrator certifications, there are other certifications designed for architects, designers, consultants, developers, and marketers. This guide outlines all of the available options.

Admins can earn one or more of these certifications as well, but whether it’s worth the time, effort and expense depend entirely on your role and responsibilities in your organization. Earning additional certifications demonstrates that you have a more diverse range of skills and expertise, but in many cases, these extra certifications deal with responsibilities outside the typical administrators’ job responsibilities.

Aside from signaling to employers and management that you actually have the expertise needed to be a Salesforce Administrator, holding one or more of these certificates comes with a few other benefits—including new career options.

The obvious roles for a person with one of these certifications include Salesforce Administrator, Advanced Administrator, and Business Analyst. But there are others. For example, Certified Administrators may also be qualified to be Sales Engineers.

The Sales Engineer is an organization’s technical resource for Account Executive and the sales team. They help build and maintain the systems in Salesforce that qualify leads, support the sales team’s customer-facing activities, and identify the data to help them improve. The Sales Engineer is an expert when it comes to Salesforce, and they operate as the bridge between the sales and development teams.

A second, non-traditional option is Project Manager. An effective project manager may have responsibilities outside the Salesforce platform, but their knowledge of Salesforce and their ability to pull data to support product development make them a great resource for project teams.

Other career options that a Certified Administrator may qualify for include Data Analyst, CRM manager, Automation Consultant, Salesforce Developer, Implementation Specialist, and System Architect.