Salesforce Consultant jobs: skills, pay and how to get hired

What a Salesforce consultant does

A Salesforce consultant, a Salesforce Berater in German ads, turns how a sales or service team works into a working system on the Salesforce platform. Administrators run the system day to day: users, permissions, fields, reports and small automations. Consultants run the workshops, design the data model and processes, configure, test, move the data and train the users. Architects decide how the whole platform, its integrations and its data fit together. All three titles are covered on this page, in consultancies, Salesforce partners and in-house teams.

Salesforce brings out three releases a year, so the work never stands still: each release brings new features to try and old automations to check.

Some titles sit next to this one. A Salesforce developer writes code on the platform and is a software developer. The account executives and sales managers who work in Salesforce every day keep their own roles, and Salesforce is a skill on their pages. The consultant advises on strategy and organisation, the IT consultant on IT in general, and the SAP consultant does similar work on an ERP system. The steps from Salesforce administrator to head of Salesforce are in the career paths of this role.

Privacy rules differ by country, and each country's section names its own. This page describes the work; it is not legal or career advice.

The skills the ads ask for

We read a sample of the ads every day and count the skills they name. On a computer, hover a skill in the text to see its share; on a phone, the table has the same figures.

The core is the SalesforceConfigure objects, fields, page layouts, permissions and automation, and know what the platform does out of the box. platform and CRMUnderstand how sales, service and marketing teams track customers, and what each team needs from the system. sense: how leads become customers and how cases are solved. Ads name the clouds, mostly Sales CloudSet up leads, opportunities, forecasts and quotes so that the sales process in the system matches the real one. and Service CloudSet up cases, queues, service levels and knowledge articles for a customer service team., and automation with FlowBuild automation with Flow, test it, and know when a requirement has outgrown it.. They ask for requirements workTurn what a sales or service team says into user stories with clear acceptance criteria., data migrationPlan, clean, map and load records into Salesforce, without duplicates and with the owners checking them., integrationsUnderstand how Salesforce exchanges data with the ERP, the website and other systems. over APIsKnow what an API call does and what its limits are, so you can specify an integration., enough ApexRead what a developer's Apex code does and write the requirement it must meet, even if you do not code. to talk with developers, and agileDeliver in sprints with a backlog the business ranks, which most Salesforce projects use. delivery with ScrumTake part in planning, reviews and retrospectives as the person who knows the platform. and JiraKeep stories, acceptance criteria and bugs where the team can see them.. Some ads add query skillsQuery and check data during a migration or a report, using Salesforce's own query language or SQL. for checking data, and change managementHelp users adopt a new process with training, simple guides and support after release. for the users.

Salesforce's own exams are named side by side with the rest: Salesforce runs Salesforce certificationsExams for administrators, app builders, consultants and architects that many ads name, kept current each year. for administrators, platform app builders, consultants for each cloud and architects, and holders keep them current with short yearly maintenance modules. Many ads name one; projects you delivered count as well. Much of the job is working with sales and service leadersBalance what sales leaders, service managers, IT and the data protection team each want. and explaining design choicesExplain a design choice to a head of sales and to a developer in words each understands., in GermanAsked for in most German Salesforce ads, for workshops with German sales and service teams. where the users speak it and in EnglishThe language of the platform, its documentation and most international Salesforce projects..

Where the jobs are, country by country

Each country below has its own figures: which cities have the most jobs in our list, whether the number is going up or down, how often ads offer remote or hybrid work, the titles used in the country, and pay ranges from published research, in the local currency.

A CRM holds personal data, so privacy rules shape every project; they are named side by side, each with its place. In the EU the GDPRKnow what the EU's privacy rules mean for customer data in a CRM: consent, retention and deletion. sets consent, retention and deletion; in Germany a works council has a say before a system that can watch employees' performance goes live; US companies with California customers follow the CCPA; UK companies follow the UK GDPR, the UK's own version of the EU rules; Swiss companies follow the Swiss FADP; and India has its Digital Personal Data Protection Act. The client's data protection team says how each applies.

One Salesforce release, step by step

1. Discover: sit with the sales or service team, see how they really work and collect the pain points.
2. Design: decide objects, fields, permissions and automations, using the standard where it fits.
3. Build: configure in a sandbox, with developers for the few pieces that need code.
4. Test and release: test with real users, move the changes to production on a planned date and train the teams.
5. Adopt and improve: watch whether people use it, clean up what nobody uses, and plan the next release.

The measure of a CRM project is not the go-live but whether the sales team still enters its deals three months later because the system helps them.

Your CV for a Salesforce consultant job

A Salesforce consultant's CV first meets software that searches it for the ad's words, then a lead consultant who wants to know which clouds you worked in, what you built yourself and whether the users kept using it. Give both: the keywords and the evidence.

Use the keywords the ads use

• Name the platform parts as the ads do: "Sales Cloud", "Service Cloud", "Flow", "data migration", "integration", "user stories". The skills table above shows which keywords the ads use most.
• Say what kind of org you worked in: the number of users, the teams and the countries.
• List your Salesforce certifications by their exact names and dates.
• A certification exam you are preparing goes on the CV as in progress, with the planned date.

Prove each skill

A Salesforce line proves itself with the team it served, what you built and what changed.

Where a client's name is confidential, name the industry, the number of users and the clouds instead.

How we read our data

• The jobs: the Salesforce consultant jobs in our job search (Salesforce consultants, administrators and architects, and the German title Salesforce Berater), matched by their titles the way the search matches them; a job that names Salesforce only as a skill counts for its own role. Our list is not the whole market, so we give shares and rankings, never counts.
• The skills: every day we read a sample of these ads and count the skills in them with a fixed word list. Only the counts are kept, never the text of an ad.
• Pay: from published salary research, each source named with its date, as a range from entry level to senior. Our ads are not used for it.
• Dates: every figure is worked out again each day and shows the day it was worked out.

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