💃 The Most Underrated Salesforce Certification🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! When it comes to Salesforce Certifications, there are 3 prevailing questions from Salesforce professionals-

1. Is it worth it to get a cert?

2. How hard is the PD1 cert for a functional Admin/Consultant?

3. Which cert should I get next?

The answers are, obviously 🙄 😉 -

1. Yes

2. Pretty difficult, like 7/10 hard

3. Read on to find out!

Agenda for today includes

• The Most Underrated Salesforce Cert

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

The Most Underrated Salesforce Cert

But first -

Here are 3 runner ups, and why these certs have value -

1. Sales Cloud Consultant - The focus is on effectively working with stakeholders. Important for all Salesforce professionals, not just consultants.

2. Sharing & Visibility - Visibility and Accessibility are core functions of software applications. A CRM may have especially complex requirements with a large set of sales users.

3. Business Analyst - Foundational knowledge and skills for technology workers. With SF’s low barrier to entry (not a bad thing), BA skills are often under-developed by SF professionals.

And the most underrated Salesforce certification is 🥁🥁🥁….

User Experience Designer!

Trailhead here

What Is It?

This cert gives you the knowledge and tools to setup your users for success in achieving a quality user experience.

A good user experience leads to higher user-adoption rates. Higher adoption rates lead to raises 💵 for the Salesforce professional! Or they should…..

From the user’s perspective, it is a much needed reminder for us Salesforce professionals that salespeople are mouse-clicking thousands of times in their hundreds of records, all day, every day.

From their laptop 💻. From their phone 📱.

From the Salesforce professional’s perspective, we need to be aware of our user’s experience.

Functionality, integrity, scaleability. These are really big responsibilities we have.

But we can’t let UX slip through the cracks! 🫡 

Why Should I Care?

This may, or may not, come as a surprise, but if you are a Salesforce Admin or Consultant, UX is a very big part of your job responsibilities.

There is no Page Layout specialist on staff. YOU are the specialist!

(quick anecdote - the scrappy, non-cert’d Admins seem to put a higher emphasis on UX than their cert’d counterparts 🤔. Anybody know why this is?)

How much time do these users spend scrolling page layouts to get to commonly used fields?

Or are there commonly used fields in one object, but are on 2 different tabs?

Or do we want to align activities with a last record update date, but the activities are on a different tab that we have to click to?

Is the light gray outline visible against the white page? How visible is it after 8hrs of being on a computer?

These are all considerations the Salesforce professional is responsible for.

The stakeholder may be responsible for the design decision, but you are responsible for providing the design options and then building the solution.

More importantly, you are responsible for advising and guiding the stakeholder to decisions that drive and increase user adoption.

The UX cert provides knowledge to do this.

What’s Included?

A lot of stuff! Some of the most important items are-

UX/UI principles - User experience and user interface principles.

Wireframing - And no need to tediously build out Salesforce Page Layouts when you can wireframe them. Some popular wireframing apps include Lucidcharts and Figma.

Salesforce Lightning platform alignment - aforementioned principles are good. Then aligning and applying them to the Lightning platform. Thanks, Salesforce!

How Do I Get It?

Take the Trailhead! Study! Pass the exam!

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes