Get to Know the Consultant Role

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Describe what a Salesforce consultant does.
Identify the skills of a successful Salesforce consultant.
Explain the key activities consultants perform.

What’s a Consultant?

Curious problem solvers, consultants confidently bridge the gap between a customer’s challenges and their goals. A consultant:

Listens to their customer’s business aspirations.
Figures out what tools (in our case, Salesforce solutions) the customer needs to succeed.
Shares their recommendations in easy-to-understand terms.
Works with their customer to create a plan that maps to results.

Let’s take a closer look at the skill sets of a consultant.

Required Skills

Well-rounded consultants need a mix of technical and non-technical skills.

Consultants should be good listeners, so they can get a clear picture of a customer’s challenges and goals. They should also have project management skills to bring a customer’s dreams to life.

Here’s a collection of non-technical skills we recommend.

Non-technical skills:

To implement tools for customer success, Salesforce consultants need a range of technical skills.

Here’s a collection of technical skills we recommend.

Technical skills:

Consultants combine their pursuit for customer success with their ability to connect the dots through technology. This mix produces creative solutions that transform businesses.

Common Consultant Activities

What does a consultant do day-to-day? Here are the main activities they work on through their customer’s journey:

Customer-centric discovery: A business consultant does customer-centric discovery to uncover the customer’s current experience, future needs, and biggest challenges. Then, they co-create successful strategies to develop solutions, with a focus on building ongoing relationships based on trust.
Business case creation: To create a business case, a consultant breaks down the customer’s challenges and goals, as well as the expenses and tasks associated with the project. Once the customer has a clear picture of the overall project, they can approve and fund it.
Project management: During project management, a consultant identifies the milestones, tasks, work items, and deliverables for the customer.
Implementation: During implementation, a consultant successfully delivers the tools the customer needs to reach their goals. A consultant also provides training and adoption services for the new tool sets.
Evaluation: After the implementation, a consultant tracks and reports on the customer’s progress toward their goals.

Find the Best Consultant Role for You

The Salesforce ecosystem is vast and diverse, so consultant roles at Salesforce come in many forms. Here are the four most common Salesforce consultant types.

Salesforce Consultant Type	What They Do
Business analyst	Communicates between information technology (IT) and business stakeholders Figures out the requirements of a customer’s business challenge Produces data-driven solutions
Functional consultant	Often acts as the project lead in a consultation Works with the customer to find transformational solutions using their knowledge of how businesses in various industries operate Measures and reports on a business’s overall health
Technical consultant	Develops a deep understanding of the full capabilities of one or more cloud solutions Implements specialized, back-end changes to a customer’s Salesforce setups

As you can see, each role has a different skill set and a different part to play within the Salesforce ecosystem.

No matter where you’re headed on your Salesforce consultant career journey, Salesforce can help you get there with confidence. Visit the Salesforce Consultant Career Path webpage to learn new skills, connect with fellow Trailblazers, and discover the perfect next steps in building your Salesforce consulting career. As you can see, each role has a different skill set and a different part to play within the Salesforce ecosystem.