🥳 The Course Curriculum

You’ve been a business analyst for some time now and have been exposed to Salesforce along with other connected technologies (ERPs, Marketing Automation, Financial systems etc…) but you’re feeling that you want to take a leap and try out being a functional salesforce consultant. It’s a steep learning curve and the change may be daunting. You may have tried to apply to a few positions but could not get the traction that you are were looking for. 

Your next steps - learning the technical aspects of Salesforce through Trailhead is a great and necessary first step, but to make the jump to a consultant, it’s not enough. Trailhead gives you a general understanding of the architecture, features, and functions of Salesforce but what it doesn’t do is teach you how to use those features to implement Salesforce with a team while keeping every stakeholder in mind.  

How the course can help - This course will be useful if you’re committed to taking Salesforce seriously and if you’re joining the course for accountability, community, and support, rather than just the content alone. 

I’ve held a business analyst role for rolling out a digital Clinical Trail Solution for COVID vaccines, we were a team of 32 people (3 business analysts and the rest were a mix of developers, QA testers, and project managers). I understand the importance of the role but also the limitations you would have within a project if you’re looking to make a larger impact. 

Making the jump from a Business Analyst to a Consultant is a natural career path and can impact your salary in a significant way. 

You will be able to leverage this community and even go over a few of your use cases to help you solve some of the harder problems. Additionally, the goal of the community is to help each other get a head start and can get the inside scoop on who’s hiring, and maybe get a referral or two ;)  

Congrats, you’ve taken a huge step into the Salesforce world either as an Administrator or may even be the Subject Matter Expert in your organization. You realize the power of Salesforce, but more importantly, you realize the vast community and many opportunities Salesforce has to offer. You’ve probably dabbled in or worked with Sales Operations due to the nature of your job and you understand the bottom line impact that Salesforce has to offer. 

Now you want to take the next step in your Salesforce career and become a functional freelance consultant, but making that jump can be daunting and you’re not sure if you have the right skills and experience to make it in the consultant and agency world. Or you may not know how to generate consistent demand.

How this course can help - You have the foundational skillset of a system administrator and know how to configure Salesforce, but you are unsure of the other skills needed to become an effective consultant (and to get hired as one).

This course can help you in two ways: (1) It will help you strategically position yourself to get in conversations with agencies around the world and constantly be speaking with prospects (2) It will help you understand and develop the framework of running effective projects, even if you’ve never run one before. 

The first module of the course is focusing on mindset and framework, you will learn how a consultant thinks, speak and lead. The latter modules will focus on the actual implementation, you already have the foundational administrative skills and this course is taking that foundation and applying it to fast paste projects. 

The latter modules will talk about client acquisition and how you can position your skillset to have consistent demand.

Another huge benefit would be the 1:1 session that you will have as I started my Salesforce career as a Salesforce Admin and jumped into consultancy making over $180k in salary. You will be able to get there too, it’s a matter of having the right mindset, framework, and network.

I’ve always loved interacting and working alongside developers. Your advanced technical abilities in combining flows, triggers, and webhooks to build a truly connected experience are magical. You already have one superpower, and now you’re looking to bring that in the forefront and have a client-facing role in your organization, or maybe you want to become a freelance Salesforce consultant with very specialized skills, and of course, the specialized skills would translate into a higher hourly rate. 

The problem is that you’ve never held a non-technical client-facing role, mastering the art of conversation and listening, I mean truly listening to your client’s wants and determining their needs is hard to do and not exactly second nature. Additionally, you’re unsure how to market your skill set to the world and generate demand.

How this course can help you - It’s time you take things to the next level, but first the basics. We need to unlearn some of the habits and questions asked when identifying highly technical requirements and ask more open-ended business process questions that will get the client to talk about their pains and wants, ideally, you would want them to think of the art of the possible while you are there acknowledging what they are saying, communicating to them what you understand and earn their trust. 

Believe it or not, listening while guiding a conversation is easier said than done. It will take time, it will take practice, and that’s what we are here for. You will really benefit from personalized feedback from myself and from the peer group that you will join, we can help you refine your process and build a solution focused on deriving value by honing in on the customer pain points (not just being a yes-man). 

Once you have mastered the fundamentals, the second half of the course will help you execute your plan in the most effective way possible. You will be able to articulate your business needs into technical requirements where all parties will understand the intended outcome and technical specs, from UAT users to QA testers, to other developers, your user stories will have the key elements that you would need to clearly identify the necessary points for the intended stakeholder. 

Finally, you’ll learn how to leverage the Salesforce ecosystem to generate consistent demand for your skillset and negotiate your optimal rate.

You’re a pro (and we hope it feels like it), you’ve had a decent career so far but you may be in a bit of a rut. You want to make the jump to a freelance consultant but you (and your employer) feel like you’re not quite there yet. You’re not sure what the next best step is for you and your Salesforce Career. 

Your next step - You have a few projects under your belt, you’ve seen end-to-end implementations and you’ve seen different types of project management methodologies. At this point, you want to focus on honing your skills, perfecting the ability to run discovery sessions, and solution design, and lead a small to medium-sized team. 

How this course can help - Content-wise, the first half of the course is aimed at leveling up your current skill set, you will take what you already know by running discovery sessions to learn from specific use cases on how you can achieve the maximum ROI for your client. You may have already seen different iterations of how projects are run, how user stories are written, and how UAT sessions are organized, and you’ve probably gotten most of the fundamentals down, but the hardest part of perfecting your skill is the next 20% of honing your skills. 

The systems, processes, and templates that I will share with you are derived from different processes of various organizations, I took what I liked in certain projects and built a system that would consistently generate high-quality solutions. 

Additionally, you will get access to a network of smart individuals and mentorship where you will receive critical feedback and position yourself to achieve a promotion in your career, or even jump to becoming a freelancer with a healthy pipeline.

You’ve had a decent career as a Sales Engineer at Salesforce and you have a solid understanding of the Sales cycle and the value that Salesforce brings. The problem is that, other than a POC or a Demo, you’ve never led an end-to-end implementation before. You may have been exposed to implementation strutcutes through Partners, but that may not be enough exposure to lead an implementation project. 

Even though you are familiar with the Sales cycle, you have also been fortunate enough to leverage Salesforce’s billion-dollar marketing initiatives to generate demand. It’s a different story generating demand on your own and it can be scary to make the jump to a consultant, it feels like a leap of faith. 

How this course can help - The first half of the course will focus on setting the right mindset and framework for approaching a project as a consultant to build for value rather than to build for a POC to land a sale. Very different approaches. 

The second part of the course will break down the exact steps each phase of a project would deliver. You will learn exactly how a project runs and you can do it in a way that is very practical and straightforward. Using the 14-Day SF Consultant strategy and framework, you will be enabled to lead a project in no time. 

The latter part of the course will be about demand generation and closing deals with clients. There are many different revenue streams that can be generated from this and I will break down what’s worked and what doesn't.