‘Customer is king’ is one of the golden rules of sales & marketing. If you keep your customers happy, profit will keep increasing. One of the best strategies to improve customer service and increase retention is through customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. Salesforce, in particular, has impacted business-to-consumer (B2C) strategies by creating a cloud platform that improves your customer’s experience. It all sounds magical and wonderful until you realize that using Salesforce in your business requires extra hands. Luckily, you can hire a Salesforce developer to take care of all the complicated technical aspects. Here’s how!
What is Salesforce?
Salesforce was founded in 1999, and it was one of the first cloud computing companies. The cloud concept was completely innovative, as it allowed the company to deliver its product through an internet browser.
In simpler terms, Salesforce provides businesses a customer relationship management (CRM) service and complementary enterprise applications that focus on customer service, marketing, and application development – all this through the cloud.
CRM sounds fancier than it really is. It consists of having a record of your customers, who they are, the interactions they’ve had with your product or service, and what products they have purchased. Think of the small grocery store you have down the block; they also have a CRM system. Maybe they write those transactions in a notebook or type them down in an Excel spreadsheet. Now that times have changed and technology keeps improving, businesses have realized that data is gold. Knowing more about their customers helps them develop strategies to retain them and attract potential customers.
Salesforce is the #1 CRM platform worldwide. It has dominated almost 20% of the market share, and over the years, it has continued to develop new products to support companies in understanding more about their customers.
These are some of the companies using Salesforce:
- Toyota
- Amazon Web Services
- U.S. Bank
- Aldo
- American Express
- Macy’s
Why Use Salesforce for Your Business?
There’s a handful of reasons why you should consider using Salesforce for your business. Most importantly, think about it this way. Your customers are what makes or breaks your business. We live in a digital world, where customer service is almost as important as the product itself.
If a customer, or a potential customer, browses your web and wants to learn more about your product, enabling them to ask and receive answers right away is what sets the bait. If they don’t have any answers, they easily replace your product with a similar one.
The same thing with an unhappy customer; they can set your place on fire if they don’t have the right assistance. All this drama can be avoided with the right tool: Salesforce.
Salesforce’s ability to successfully track customer data, analyze customer behavior, and many other key elements are what, at the end of the day, will allow you to retain customers and attract more and more every day. Here are the main benefits of using Salesforce:
1. Valuable Customer Information
This, without a doubt, is the main benefit of using Salesforce. The platform gives you all the information you need to know about customers or people interested in your product/service. You can look at every individual account, all their activity, record, task, etc. You can also look at potential opportunities, which will let your sales team know what potential customer is worth approaching and who is not. All this information is organized in a way that’s easy to track.
2. Increases Productivity
Sales teams no longer have to go crazy while tracking leads, gathering information on potential clients, and overall building a pipeline. With Salesforce, they will have all this information ready to be used and focus more on developing the right sales strategies. According to the Salesforce Customers Report, sales teams have increased by 39% in sales productivity thanks to the software.
3. Easy to Use
The Salesforce platform is easy to manage. Since the company targets different types of businesses, not only tech-related, they developed the software in a way that allows people without any technical background to be able to use it. It has an easy-to-understand format designed to use the platform without any difficulty. However, it’s worth pointing out that when it comes to developing apps or using other features in your website with Salesforce, it’s important to either have a technical background or to hire a Salesforce developer to help you.
4. Flexibility and Customization
As Salesforce targets different types of businesses, the platform is also highly customizable towards each company’s needs. Users are not tied to specific layouts, processes, or workflows. Additionally, Salesforce allows companies to measure and monitor their campaigns’ success and customize these efforts in the way that works best for them. Consequently, it helps businesses develop a fully optimized system.
5. The AppExchange
The Salesforce ecosystem also has all types of applications that suit your business needs in the AppExchange. Here you can find more than 4,600 prebuilt and customizable apps available to support you in different types of processes, from recruitment to marketing, sales, and finances, among others.
AppExchange is used by 86% of Salesforce customers. It helps businesses solve challenges quickly as they don’t have to build the applications or solutions by themselves.
Roles and Responsibilities of a Salesforce Developer
Salesforce, despite being relatively easy to use, has its technical challenges. To those with no technical background, it can become a nightmare. Salesforce developers have the necessary programming expertise to help business clients build and maintain their CRM platform.
The Salesforce ecosystem continues evolving. Every year, it has new features and new products that not everyone can easily grasp and learn. But when you hire a Salesforce developer, they’ll help you understand what choices you have to enhance your business’s CMR experience.
A Salesforce developer usually focuses on developing and maintaining software/application solutions on the Salesforce platform. These solutions can vary, depending on your business needs, but they could be storage architecture, or better distribution strategies across your network, for example.
Main Responsibilities of a Salesforce Developer:
- Develop, configure, and deploy a business application using Salesforce.
- Maintain, create, and execute Visualforce, APEX code, Salesforce incorporation, and AppExchange pages.
- Create timelines and development goals.
- Test stability and functionality of the application.
- Maintain user roles and security.
- Create customer workflows.
- Develop complex CRM solutions.
Must-have Skills of a Salesforce Developer
If you’re looking to hire a Salesforce developer, make sure they have the necessary certifications and skills to perform the role successfully. These are the main skills to look out for:
- Expertise in Apex and Visualforce.
- JavaScript knowledge.
- Application Lifestyle Management.
- System integration.
- Web Services.
- Experience in designing custom objects, fields, picklists, page layouts, validation rules, reports, dashboards, among other elements.
- Experience in administration setup.
- Lightning experience standards.
- Salesforce certification.
Salesforce Developer Interview Questions in 2021
Hiring a Salesforce developer is a must for those businesses wanting to implement a smooth CRM platform that helps them obtain valuable customer data. According to the IDC, there will be 3.3 million jobs in the Salesforce ecosystem by 2022. The competition is getting tougher, so knowing how to interview and evaluate skills is essential. Here are the best Salesforce developer interview questions to ask in 2021:
1. What is an Apex transaction?
An Apex transaction is a set of operations that are executed as a single unit. Such operations include DML operations responsible for querying records. All the DML operations in a transaction either get completed successfully or get rolled back completely if an error occurs even in saving a single record.
2. Which fields are indexed automatically in Salesforce?
There are four fields indexed automatically in Salesforce:
- Custom fields marked as an external ID or a unique field
- Primary keys (ID, Name, and Owner fields)
- Audit dates
- Foreign keys (Lookup or Master–Detail relationship fields)
3. Could you explain how companies track sales through Salesforce?
It depends on the company, as they could implement unique procedures for tracking their sales. Companies track the performance of sales by data analysis. Salesforce’s tracking system allows companies to collect the necessary details to understand how well or bad their sales are performing. Details such as the customers who are served daily, the number of daily sales, day-to-day sales reports, as well as sales figures on weekly, monthly or even quarterly basis (depending on each organization).
4. What does ‘’Data Skew’’ mean?
‘’Data skew’’ is a condition that happens when working for a big client that has over 10,000 records. When one single user owns that number of records that condition is called ‘ownership data skew’. when users run updates, performance issues are likely to happen because of ‘data skew’.
5. How can you call a controller method from JavaScript?
To call a controller method (Apex function) from JavaScript, you need to use actionfunction. For example:
<script>
function JSmethodCallFromAnyAction()
{
callfromJS();
}
</apex:page>
6. What is an attribute tag? What is the syntax for including them?
An attribute tag is an attribute of a custom component and it can only be a child of a component tag. Such attributes are automatically created for all custom component definitions. For example:
<apex:component>
<apex:attribute name="myValue" description="This is the value for the component." type="String" required="true"/>
<apex:attribute name="borderColor" description="This is color for the border." type="String" required="true"/>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<h1 style="border:{!borderColor}">
<apex:outputText value="{!myValue}"/>
</h1>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
</apex:component>
7. Explain the different types of reports available in Salesforce
There are 4 different types of reports in Salesforce:
- Tabular: It offers a fast and simple way to view your data. They have a set of fields arranged in columns.
- Matrix report: The grouping is done based on both rows and columns.
- Summary report: The groups appear based on columns.
- Joined report: Two or more reports are presented in a single report.
8. What is the use of custom settings?
Custom settings are similar to custom objects. Developers create custom data and associate it for an organizational profile or user. The exposure of custom data settings to the application cache is beneficial because of the efficient access with no need for the cost of the repeated queries to the database. There are two types of custom settings in Salesforce: 1) Hierarchy type and 2) List type.
How to Find the Right Salesforce Developer?
If you’re wondering where to find a Salesforce developer, there are some things to keep in mind. As the demand for these types of developers has increased within the last few years, hiring one will not be an easy task. The first step is to to figure out what type of contract you want, whether part-time, full-time or on a freelance basis, this will help you understand what is the best hiring strategy to implement. The right place to find a Salesforce developer depends on whether you want to hire a local one or expand your options and hire a remote Salesforce developer.
Take your time to figure out what you need and, based on that, make a decision. Here are the most popular places to look for a Salesforce developer:
1. Freelancing Platforms
Upwork, Toptal, PeoplePerHour, are some of the platforms with many developers ready to work for you. Think of them as a catalog of candidates, where based on your needs, you’ll be able to select which one works the best for you. At a simple glance, this might seem like a reliable option. However, keep in mind that freelancers don’t fully commit to your company. They are most likely to finish a project and move to the next client.
This is the best option if: You need someone to work on a short-term project, and you’re okay with having a developer that isn’t involved directly in your company. It’s a fast and easy option.
2. Referrals
If your company already has a solid IT team, consider asking them directly if they might know of a Salesforce developer. Instead of going through the entire recruitment process of creating a job ad, posting it, recruiting, you could start by recruiting a talented candidate internally. Perhaps, you know someone related to the IT industry that can give you a great candidate.
This is the best option if: You need to hire someone urgently and you have, in your social circle or company, people who are strongly involved in the IT community.
3. Social media
Social media makes everything possible. With platforms such as LinkedIn and Facebook, you can directly view the applicant’s credentials and even message them directly. Many recruitment teams use LinkedIn to headhunt candidates and provide them with attractive job offers.
This is the best option if: You want to be on top of the recruitment process and have time for it. You get to analyze candidates before even applying in some cases. And you can corroborate credentials and understand more about their personalities.
4. Remote Recruitment Agencies
Remote recruitment agencies bring up the best of both worlds: talent for a lower cost. Years ago, people thought that remote staffing was the same as outsourcing. However, it’s completely the opposite. Remote recruitment consists of hiring fully remote employees to work for you. It’s that simple! And the best part is that as some countries have lower living costs, you could hire an eastern European developer for half the salary as one in the U.S.
This is the best option if: You want to have access to a big pool of talent and save costs doing so. Also, if you don’t have enough experience hiring tech talent, these agencies take care of everything, so you don’t have to worry about hiring the wrong unqualified candidate.
Hire a Salesforce Developer with DistantJob
At DistantJob, we are a leading tech remote recruitment agency helping companies hire IT talent for more than a decade. We specialize in understanding your needs to help you hire the candidate you need in just two weeks. How does the process work? You tell us the candidate of your dreams, you meet the top 5 candidates, and then you hire your favorite one! Additionally, we take care of all the HR aspects, so you don’t have anything to stress about. Contact us and let us help you find your perfect – Salesforce- match.
