💃 Salesforce Professionals - Generalist or Specialist? 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Are you a Marketing Cloud or CPQ professional who is feeling pigeon-holed, but well paid and getting enticing offers from recruiters 🤑?

Or maybe you’re a Sales Cloud consultant who also has led Service and Experience Cloud implementations? You have gone an inch deep on the mile-wide horizontals that Salesforce products cover.

Choosing a generalist or specialist career path can be a confusing decision 😵‍💫. So what are the things to look at to provide some clarity?

That is the focus of today’s discussion! Let’s get to it!

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Agenda for today includes

• Salesforce Professionals - Generalist or Specialist?

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

Salesforce Professionals - Generalist or Specialist?

Today we will cover -

1. Definitions

2. Salary

3. Career - Path, Trajectory, and Stability

But first, the Takeaway - 

No right or wrong answer on which path you choose - generalist or specialist.

Regardless of which you choose, maintain the things that got you into a successful Salesforce role in the first place - stay curious, always be learning, and always be ready for change.

As well, Salesforce solutions are becoming more complex, and integrated into an array of other technologies. Even specialists will need to expand their knowledge to consider the growing count of external factors.

(Simple) Definitions

Generalist - Jack of All Trades. Master of None.

Generalist Example:

A Salesforce Admin for a company that has Experience Cloud, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Pardot.

The Salesforce Admin is responsible for supporting and maintaining each application, as well as the business analysis for business requirements, user stories and process flows.

They are also responsible for the Project Management for larger deliverables.

When there is a requested change to an API or a new marketing strategy for Pardot, then the Salesforce Admin has access to a consulting partner to support these specialized requests.

Specialist - Master of one, or a few.

Specialist Example:

A Marketing Cloud Admin who is responsible for Studio configurations, Data Extensions, and AMPscript.

The Marketing team is responsible for marketing strategy and content, but the MC Admin is responsible for implementing the Marketing Team’s strategy and content into Marketing Cloud.

The Marketing Cloud Admin is on a team with a project manager, business analyst, and Salesforce Admin whose roles and responsibilities compliment each other.

Salary

This is continuously evolving right before our eyes. At this time, specialists are enjoying a premium 💵.

2 years ago, in 2021, MC admins and CPQ specialists, as examples, were within existing salary bands. Now, they are often in their own bands that are higher than their generalist counterparts.

$120-$140k salaries are common, now, with as little as 2-3yrs dedicated experience in MC or CPQ.

But, who knows, this may change again in a few years 🤷.

Either specialists regress, due to saturation, AI, or any number of things. Or generalists catch up, due to the aforementioned increasing complexity of Salesforce solutions, and the spectrum of skills required to be successful, which a generalist brings to the table.

Career

Path

Most specialists do not make the conscious career choice to be a specialist. Rather, it’s a miniature version of “Accidental Admin.”

For example, a Salesforce admin, on a team of 2 admins, is chosen by the boss to be the one to help the consultants implement CPQ. And the rest was history (someone has to support it after the consultants leave).

So a generalist interested in becoming a specialist may not have an obvious option.

Learn MC In your spare time? In what test org? Same with CPQ, how can you get quality exposure to this if your existing role doesn’t offer it?

Trajectory

A specialist is likely to have a higher trajectory, but a lower ceiling. So, from a salary perspective, you would earn more, faster. But have a lower max salary.

A lower ceiling may be totally acceptable for a professional who has no interest in managing people or leadership roles.

A generalist may earn less in the early-mid career years.

However, a generalist will be better equipped to take on, and succeed in, a leadership role.

A leadership role will have minimal hands-on in the org, and more leading and managing of people, at a higher pay than the Salesforce professionals they oversee.

Stability

Over a long enough timescale, generalists will have more career stability. It’s natural that a wider breadth of knowledge, skills, and experience would provide you, and an employer, more flexibility and options.

But who thinks Marketing Cloud or CPQ are going away anytime soon? A CPQ specialist in their 40s has low risk of becoming obsolete before their retirement.

So, Generalist or Specialist - which do you prefer and why? Let us know by replying to this email or leaving comments in the poll at the bottom!

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