So, you’ve decided that the career of a Salesforce Architect is for you – you love the idea of working directly with customers who want to innovate, helping them to modernise and streamline their firms’ processes, with the view to improve user experience.
The job of a Salesforce Architect is varied, but ultimately you help customers launch strong and sustainable processes. The role involves coaching of business executives; teaching them how to get the most out of the data they receive from the platform, ensuring teams across the business know how to design work processes, and demonstrating various configuration methods.
These are the key traits you need in order to achieve your goal of becoming an in-demand Salesforce Architect.
Natural leader
Not to confuse leadership and management – as a successful Salesforce Architect, you will take the lead on your own projects from start to finish. You’re responsible for controlling the outcome of your projects and having the confidence to do so is key.
As a starting point, place focus on small projects and work towards building up a portfolio of the projects you have led on. While a portfolio of work demonstrates the projects that you have been involved with and led on, it is vital to ask for recommendations in order to back up the validity of your skills. You can ask for recommendations from colleagues and clients you have worked with. They can leave recommendations on LinkedIn or send them via email, just make sure you have confirmation to use their words before sending anywhere.
Communication skills
Communication skills are without a doubt one of the key traits of a successful Salesforce Architect. Getting buy-in from stakeholders, team members and even clients can be essential to the success of a project, so your persuasion skills and the ability to communicate your ideas is key.
The ability to interpret and translate your client’s ideas is also important, as you will need to relay ideas and conversations to your team in order to ensure they understand the project and what is required of them.
As a successful Salesforce Architect, you will also be required to resolve customer support issues and potential conflicts over decisions and best practices when working on projects. Your great communication skills will ensure that clients are more than satisfied from start to finish, regardless of any road bumps you may come across.
Passion
Salesforce is constantly expanding and as the ecosystem continues to evolve, it’s essential to ensure that you remain ahead of the curve. To ensure your success as a Salesforce Architect, it is important not to become too comfortable with the knowledge that you have. You achieved your Salesforce certification, that’s great, but the learning doesn’t stop there, not with a platform that is ever-evolving.
Successful Salesforce Architects are passionate about the ecosystem they work within and the technology that they use. It is a good idea to plan how you’d like to develop your knowledge and skills both inside and outside of the Salesforce world. Keeping on top of changes and getting on board with learning new skills demonstrates a growth mindset. This will make you stand out among the crowd when searching for new roles and advancing your career.
Organised with a problem-solving mindset
Planning and organisation should be at the forefront of every project you work on, no matter how big or small. Take the time before starting a project, to evaluate and plan (as much as possible) each step, ensuring you communicate this plan effectively across your team and key stakeholders of the business. How you keep yourself organised and strategise your plan is entirely down how you and your team work best, but it’s important that it’s clear to everyone what the objectives are.
As well as being organised, the most successful Salesforce Architects need to be able to solve problems and design strategies to deliver more complicated projects for clients. There will be points when you are working on a project that issues might arise, when you are faced with these moments, it is important that you are able to problem solve. Being able to progress the project with clever problem-solving skills will ensure that you don’t lose too much time when issues arise.
Adaptable
As your career progresses, the ability to manage and lead on multiple projects will become essential, so being able to adapt to various clients and their needs is vital. Whilst the majority of projects will have a dedicated project manager whose job it is to ensure a smooth process, you will need to check that various objectives and milestones are being met. A successful Salesforce Architect wears many hats, and it’s important that you don’t find this part of the job daunting.
We hope this helps you discover if becoming a Salesforce Architect is for you. Should you need further help on what makes a top one, or to help you find your next dream role, get in touch with us today!
