💃 The $300,000 Salary Salesforce Professional 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! What does it take to make a $300,000 salary? Why would a Salesforce Professional make this much? How does one get in position to make this level of compensation? Where do they even offer salaries like this for this field? Let us take a crack at answering a few of these burning questions, shall we?

Agenda for today includes

• The $300,000 Salary Salesforce Professional

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

The $300,000 Salary Salesforce Professional

The kickoff meme is a bit of a foreshadow, but we'll get to that. First, let's remove Sales and Business Development roles from this equation. Enterprise Software Sales have commission kickers that can comfortably get them into this range. So if not sales people, who is making this kinda salary?

Who?

There is an array of roles and titles that can achieve this rarified air. To name a few-

• FAANG Salesforce Director (yes, FAANG uses Salesforce!)

• Practice Lead at mid/large professional services firm

• Executive at small/mid professional services firm

• Certified Technical Architect

Why?

Why are these roles so well compensated? It always comes down to company financials. A person making $300k is going to be responsible for high-dollar things - millions of dollars in revenue, and millions in expenses. An effective $300k person will consistently achieve company financial goals - hitting revenue milestones and managing expenses.

Of course, they aren't necessarily doing this all on their own. But much of the buck stops with them. If things go poorly, leadership isn't reaching out to the developers or project managers - they're reaching out to the $300k person, as they should. The decisions that they make are highly impactful both internally and externally for clients/stakeholders. Sometimes the decision is highly unpopular, but is for the long-term benefit, like eliminating perks for cost savings, in order to meet payroll increases.

What? 

What are some of the responsibilities of a $300k person? Let's use a Practice Lead at a professional services firm as an example - this strategic role is responsible for high-value human capital and company revenue. A Practice Lead may be responsible for staffing and leading a team of 50 Salesforce resources, including TAs, SAs, Developers, Consultants, Admins, Project Managers and Business Analysts. If the average salary for each resource is $100k, times 50 heads, that is $5MM annual payroll the Practice Lead is responsible for. Then, on the revenue side, the Practice Lead may be responsible for achieving $15MM in annual revenue.

Leading 50 people and their performance to tens of millions in revenue, produced by hourly services, is hard. The level of knowledge, skill, and experience required to coordinate this delicate dance is high, which leads us to.....

How?

How does one get themselves into position to have a $300k role and be successful in it? Having some exceptional knowledge and skills, plus a relevant background, are good starting points -

Knowledge

• Profit and Loss principles.

• Technology principles, including, but not limited to Salesforce.

• High business acumen.

Skills

• Hard Skills - analytical, ability to identify and manage risk, and ability to understand and apply leverage.

• Soft Skills - leadership principles and application of them, communicate effectively with everyone from fresh undergrads to executives, and lots and lots of patience 🙂.

Experience

As always, this can vary quite a bit, but here are some example backgrounds of $300k Salesforce Professionals -

• Software Development - as a Lead Developer or VP of Applications, for example.

• Management Consulting - MBAs looking for a change.

• Lateral Move - an effective non-Salesforce Practice Lead who is given an opportunity to grow a Salesforce practice at their firm. With the Big 4 getting their hands dirty in the Salesforce space, this move makes a lot of sense.

Work-Life Balance

$300,000 is a lot of money, and the company that will pay you that will ask for a lot in return from you. Going back to our example of a Practice Lead they will likely have utilization requirements (ie they are expected to bill clients a certain count of hours/week) on top of their already lofty responsibilities. But a professional in industry, say Google's Director of Salesforce, not only does not have utilization requirements, but they have the full force of Google's recruiting machine to bring in the very best and brightest Salesforce Professionals to work on their team. The Practice Lead and the Google Director may have very different work-life balance experiences.

Another indicator of work-life balance will be the size and age of the company. A young start-up that is looking to grow is going to have high utilization across the board, and the senior leaders will shoulder a lot of the responsibility in achieving that utilization. A Big 4 firm has two-hundred years of services under their belt (KPMG was founded in 1818), and is more focused on stability than exponential growth.

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes

But First - refer a friend in the link at the bottom of the email and receive a Salesforce Salary Guide that includes salary ranges from 2019-2022 and how they may shake out in 2023!