Do you consider yourself a Salesforce nerd?
Somebody corrected me whenever I said I was a nerd one day, and they were like, nope, you're just a geek. And I was like...
Hey y'all, my name is Rachel Hubel. I am a senior solutions architect at Publicis Sapient. We're here to talk and nerd out. Nope, we're gonna geek. I'm gonna throw the geek in there. We're here today to geek out on Salesforce and answer some questions on Twitter and Reddit and Quora. Let's get started. A user from Reddit off of the Salesforce sub-channel asked, what are some cliche Salesforce words? Salesforce.com, ecosystem, Ohana, clicks not code, customer 360. It's often what is Salesforce's shiniest object and whatever they determine to be their shiniest object for that year is the cliche word of the year. So kind of like Pantone defines a color of the year, I feel like we should be defining Salesforce's cliche word of the year.
A user from Reddit asked, what were your holy **** moments when it comes to Salesforce functionality? Every time I go on to a consulting project, I learn about a random industry I had no context about and walk away knowing way more than I ever expected about that industry. I always thought Salesforce was just accounts and contacts and being able to store people. But my first interaction with Salesforce was building out a database to store cats and dogs. I had to work with my nonprofit team to figure out what type of information we need to store for cats and dogs and knowing what types of shots dogs needed and what types of medicine cats needed. That was like really interesting and very different than what I had ever worked with before.
Where do all the Salesforce nerds hang out? When we're not at Dreamforce and we're actually sitting behind our computers, we're hanging out on Discord. There is a literal global subset of knowledge there. Doesn't matter where you're at in the world, there are people that are on Discord and willing to support you. The ask back is that you support other people whenever they ask questions too.
Jmon8 on the Salesforce community asked, is it realistic to grow your Salesforce career and niche knowledge as you get more experience purely through Trailheads? Trailheads are Salesforce's self-guided learning journey. I would say no. People may be certified in a variety of specialty certifications, but that doesn't mean that they're an expert in that. And so what I would recommend is trying to get real hands-on experience and whether that's creating your own scenario in a dev sandbox in Salesforce or take the route that I did and join consulting. I think getting that hands-on experience really expedites your knowledge and your career.
Pat from Quora asked, why do you think there is a trend toward more Salesforce specialization? Salesforce has grown substantially based on their acquisition of other products. So their acquisition of Tableau, their acquisition of MuleSoft, that is how they are expanding their offering. But in doing so, it requires more specialization for each one of those products. There's no way that people can know all of the nuances of the verticals or partner apps. And so it really becomes the natural trend to be able to specialize in one or two or three different things as compared to specializing in 15 different things that Salesforce has.
Kacelyn from Quora asked, why is there a need for Salesforce integrations? We always encourage people to house as much data as you possibly can in Salesforce, but also recognize that Salesforce can build a lot of things, but it won't build all the things. Sometimes the sweet spot is to have a different program integrate into Salesforce to pass that data back and forth.
The biggest misconception that I see in the Salesforce space is that certifications equal talent or equal subject matter expertise. Salesforce is constantly changing. So while you may have acquired a variety of certifications, there is always more knowledge to learn. And in my opinion, you're never a true subject matter expert because the finish line is always moving.