Tuesday 28 February 2012

Why get SFDC certified

As I sat down to take my Sales Cloud Certified Consultant exam, I adjusted my web cam for the 14th time and tried to relax and remember every single aspect of the Salesforce.com Sales Cloud and Sales Automation proposition.

I tried to recall Wealth Management, Person Accounts, Lead Management, Roles, Profiles, Territories, Account Hierarchies, Sales Teams, Account Teams, Queues, Sharing groups, queues, Sales Processes, Pipelines, Forecasting, Custom Forcasting, Products, Assets, Opportunity Products, Product Schedules, Validation Rules, Formula Fields, Workflows... The list just seemed to spiral out of control and after a short panic followed by a deep breath, I hit the start button and commenced.

A short while after I had finished I decided to think why, oh why had I just put myself through the tortuous Salesforce.com certification process again! I takes up immeasurable amounts of your own time to revise the subject matter, clogs up my Kindle as I download the entrire help PDF onto it for some 'light' bedroom reading and causes me to say apparently strange things to my wife who, until recently, had no idea you couldn't enable Territory Management unless you had also enabled customised Forecasting.

Then, in a moment of clarity I knew why we do it!

Salesforce is quite frankly one of the most powerful and dynamic applications in the world today It has so many strings to it's bow that it is quite frankly difficult to keep on top of them, even if you are a specialist in the technology. Bearing this in mind, it's important to remember that customers will generally tend to buy Salesforce.com as a CRM application, let's face it, with a simple enough sales process you can have SFDC up and running for Sales Automation in a matter of hours and fully configured with reports, security and all the bells and whistles in about 10 days. Where it gets tricky however, is when the customer wants to leverage the potential of the SaleForce.com platform.

I have often thought one of the major strengths of SaleForce.com is often used by people to turn it into a weakness of the plaform. I'm sure you have heard Salesforce.com employees, partners and consultants religeously chanting the following mantras:

'80 / 20 rule

'CLICKS NOT CODE'

and as cliche as it may sound this is more than a mantra, it's actually best practice and combined it gives you the split of how the majority of successful implementations should be done '80% clicks to 20% code'. This however sometimes isn't followed! People starting out on Salesforce are oftern ex-Java or .Net developers and are very comfortable in an IDE such as Eclipse or Visual Studio. They don't like the standard Salesforce layouts, find configuration boring and unchallenging and are keep to jump into writing triggers, classes, components and VisualForce pages. They ignore the rich functionality of Workflows, Formula Fields and Roll-up summary fields. They have no inclination to learn about Divisions, Territories, Wealth Management, Person Accounts (I won't go through the list again :) ). They write hundreds and thousands of lines of code, massively increase the complexity of the implementation and more critically, irreperably impair the flexibilty and dynanism of the platform.

At this point I will now return to the original question posed at the beginning of this blog, I must assure you I haven't actually digressed as far as you would think.

In order for a Salesforce Consultant to be able to deliver the best possible solution for the customer, they must first know platform to an obsessive level. They need to know the latest features in the new release. They need to know what can be done with Workflows, what can be done with formula fields. New skills have to be used to get the best from the framework and this is where the certification comes into it's own.

Customers don't want to know all of this, they have day jobs, they are worried about the day-to-day running of the business and don't want to become Salesforce consultants. They need to know that they are getting real platform experts, people who actually have recognised and standardised qualifications in the subject matter. Now, to put a slight mocker on this, having a certification does not necessarily make you a good consultant and on the converse side not having certifications doesn't make you a bad one either but, having those certifications proves to the customer (and a prospective employer) that you at least know enough about the platform to pass those exams. You have proven that you know how what features are available, what can be done with configuration alone, how you can combine features to build solutions, when you have reached the limits of the platform and need to start thinking about development. At the end of the day it's an insurance policy for Salesforce.com owners and stakeholders that you are getting someone who actually knows the platform to a good enough degree to deliver a maintainable, scalable and flexible solution that meets your requirements without costing the Earth.