The idea of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems was born at the confluence of sales, data analytics, and software development. Experts from all these fields crafted an idea of a digital system that can help track, record, and analyze the relationship between a business and its customers.
Salesforce is currently the most popular CRM system, owning nearly 20% of the whole CRM market share — a number that has been steadily growing over the years. Salesforce’s CRM solution is trusted and used by the world’s biggest brands, including Coca-Cola, General Motors, and HP.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the whole process of successfully investing in Salesforce — from understanding the specific business gains the system can give you to hiring Salesforce developers who can help you get the most out of your sales and marketing.
Why does my business need Salesforce?
To understand why investment in Salesforce development can be beneficial to your company, it’s first important to fully grasp the advantages of a CRM system.
So why should customer relationship management systems be of interest to you?
- It helps you track all your customer interactions.
- It makes it easy for your sales team to analyze their sales methods based on actual data.
- It helps you automate routine tasks, including customer renewals.
- It simplifies the process of creating reports.
- It allows you to easily share data between employees and teams.
The next question you might be asking yourself is: why should I choose Salesforce instead of other CRM solutions? The experts answer.
- It’s a stable technology built by a company with over 2 decades of experience in building CRM systems.
- It has a truly enormous ecosystem of apps that can be installed to make your Salesforce experience even better.
- Even if you don’t find an app that does what you want it to do, you can always implement your own features with the help of Salesforce developers.
- It has a mobile version, allowing you to track your results from anywhere with just a few taps.
- It’s easy to install and use, meaning you can start reviewing your customer relationship fast.
- And last but not least — as it’s the top CRM solution on the market, there is a huge number of Salesforce experts, including Salesforce developers, who can help you utilize Salesforce even better.
But why and how you can actually hire Salesforce developers? The rest of our guide will be fully dedicated to this matter.
Why hire Salesforce developers?
While Salesforce includes an amazing package of out-of-the-box, easy-to-use solutions, to truly harness the power of this amazing sales and marketing tool, you need to hire Salesforce developers.
Salesforce developers can…
- Easily set up Salesforce’s CRM according to your needs. This includes setting up workflows and assigning permissions.
- Maintain your Salesforce database so it’s always working top-notch and is secure from intrusion.
- Fix any issues that you might have with the platform, e.g. workflow error in an order caused by another employee’s mistake.
- Translate your business needs into the Salesforce infrastructure. Recommend solutions that can help you get the best out of the platform.
- Provide training and workshops on Salesforce to other employees.
- Install and set up any additional apps your business needs.
- And, finally, build your own unique apps that are perfectly tailored to your company’s requirements — they can even be sold later to other businesses, providing you with additional revenue source.
What technical skills to look for in your Salesforce developer?
While simply using Salesforce doesn’t require any unusual technical knowledge and can be done by virtually everyone after a quick training, maintaining and upgrading the platform is another thing. To make sure you hire a Salesforce programmer who can truly handle your business’ needs, you should look for experts with the following hard skills...
- Up to date with Salesforce and its API
Make sure your Salesforce developer candidate has experience with the most recent version of the platform. The CRM is upgraded by its creators regularly, bringing new features, meaning only by keeping up to date with the technology one can truly harness it.
Be aware that there are currently two main versions of the Salesforce platform: Classic and Lightning Experience. You should hire a Salesforce developer with experience in both but as Lightning is the future of Salesforce, it’s the one you should focus on.
- Knowledge of Apex
Apex is an object-oriented programming language, heavily based on Java. It helps with setting up the Salesforce infrastructure according to the company's needs.
- Knowledge of Visualforce
Visualforce is a markup language, based on HTML, allowing to better adjust the visual interface of Salesforce according to the business requirements. Both Apex and Visualforce are solutions unique to Salesforce.
- Experience with the Lightning Framework
Salesforce made it a bit tricky so let’s clarify one thing — although connected, the Lightning Experience and the Lightning Framework are two different things. The first one is the name of the overall system that aims to replace Salesforce Classic and the latter is an environment for developers to build new apps and features faster.
- Additional technical knowledge
There are a lot of additional skills that a Salesforce developer can use to optimize the Salesforce experience for your business. These include, but are not limited to, SQL, Java, HTML+CSS, the Bootstrap library, JavaScript, and JavaScript frameworks (e.g. React, Angular).
Hire Salesforce developers with the right soft skills
While the specific technical knowledge is crucial for Salesforce developers, you should not overlook soft skills either. They directly impact how fast your new hire gets accustomed to the team and how well they will communicate with everyone across the company.
What soft skills should be of crucial interest to you when you want to hire Salesforce developers?
- Being able to leave aside the technical jargon
A huge part of a Salesforce developer’s job is related to working directly with non-technical teams to improve their CRM experience. Whether we are talking about running workshops or simply fixing issues reported by other employees, being able to communicate with them in a jargon-free language they can understand is crucial to a fruitful cooperation.
- Coaching skills
This skill is another one that directly impacts how well your Salesforce developer will be able to handle running trainings and workshops for your employees.
- Excellent time management
Salesforce developers often have to involve themselves both in Salesforce support as well as in the development of new apps. Because of this, they need to be able to tailor their schedule to accommodate all of these tasks.
Top Salesforce developer job interview questions
Only by running a proper technical job interview, you can reliably assess the skills of your potential Salesforce developer hire. Such an interview, however, should be run by a person with experience in the area of Salesforce development. If you don’t meet this requirement, you should consider asking an expert to join you during the interview — this could be another Salesforce developer, an IT project manager, or a software consultant.
Below you’ll find some of the questions that might be asked during a Salesforce developer job interview.
- What is the difference between a role and a profile in Salesforce?
- What types of object relationships are present in Salesforce?
- What are Governor Limits? Give some examples of them.
- What is the best way to expose an Apex class as a REST web service?
- In what case would you use code instead of declarative tools?
- Trigger vs Process Builder — what are the differences?
- What are maps in Apex?
- What does the @future annotation do?
- What is Trigger.new used for?
- What are getter methods? What are setter methods?
Find the perfect Salesforce developer fit
A Salesforce developer has to be able to understand the unique CRM needs of your business to tailor the Salesforce platform accordingly. To speed up the initial process of getting accustomed to the new work environment and make your new hire deliver results faster, we recommend looking closely into the two main areas of company fit.
- Industry fit
Hire Salesforce programmers who have already worked with companies within your business vertical. Such fit means that your new candidate most likely understands your target customer and can recommend workflows and other solutions based on their previous experience.
- Company culture fit
Improve collaboration within your team by finding a Salesforce developer that shares the same values as your business. Consider things like attitude toward diverse teams, approach to remote work, and management style.
Who else will you need?
Leverage the power of Salesforce even more by investing in other IT experts who can improve your sales and marketing. Whether you need an AI expert, a data scientist, or a business strategist, we can help you hire all these people fast.
At Ideamotive, we run a vast network of top global IT talents looking for new career opportunities. We can connect you with leading Salesforce developers and other experts, choosing them based on your business’ unique needs.
Get in touch with us now for a tailored selection of top IT professionals.
