Salesforce: A Lucrative Career and No Degree or Tech Background Needed

You work fully remote, spend less time commuting or biding time on site, spending more time with family, friends, hobbies and things you truly value! A world where you double your income and are suddenly racing towards Financial Independence. Imagine being respected by your co-workers and employer because of the skills you possess! Now, what if this all happened in less than 6 months, with free online training, with no specific background or college degree required?

This is becoming a reality for thousands of individuals every single year, this has been happening for the past 20 years and forecasts show that this is just the beginning of a massive wave!

We're talking about careers in the 1 Trillion Dollar industry of Salesforce Careers! So you’re probably thinking What is Salesforce? An MLM? A sales job? Coding? It’s none of the above and we will do our best to explain!

What Is Salesforce

Salesforce is a customer relationship management platform (CRM). It's actually the number one CRM in the world today.

If you've been in the tech world, that explanation means something to you.

If you haven't, it may not mean anything at all. So let's break down what Salesforce is and what a CRM is.

Or, if you want to see if a career in Salesforce is a fit for you, take the TalentStacker Salesforce 5-Day Challenge.

What Is A CRM And Who Uses One

Let’s try to keep this short, because it’s a lot to take in and we won’t fully understand all of it after reading one article, here is a quick description. A customer relationship management (CRM) platform is a tool that allows businesses to automate their processes and become more efficient and scalable.

It gives companies one tool to manage all of the processes and data for Marketing, Sales, Support and really any department! It allows them to quickly run reports to make informed business decisions, help customers instantly, improve sales and bring transparency to all of the employees of the company! This is a big deal because most small companies have many separate tools for Email Marketing, Customer Support, Sales Pipeline Tracking, Activity Tracking for calls/emails/meetings, Email platforms, Phone Systems, Survey Feedback, Finance Tracking… the list goes on. Can you see how incredible it would be for that business to have one tool to handle all of that?

Any business that deals with customers or interacts with the public is almost guaranteed to be using a CRM. That’s why becoming an expert in one is a smart career move — the job market is huge… like millions of open positions HUGE!

What Makes Salesforce The #1 CRM Solution

The key to Salesforce’s success is that it tailors itself to meet every business’s individual needs. Here are three key ways they do that.

Scalable

Rather than being a one-size-fits-all product like many of its competitors, Salesforce can be scaled up or scaled down so that it meets the needs and size of your company.

What this means for a company and its employees is that they can use the functionality they need now, without things they aren’t using getting in their way. As soon as they are ready they can enable additional functions to meet their needs. 

In project management they call it the Crawl/Walk/Run approach. This allows companies to Crawl - learning the tool and getting employees comfortable. Walk - adding more functionality to empower the employees to use Salesforce as a super tool! Run - onboard all departments, all processes and all reporting to scale the company upwards increasing employee morale, company ROI and customer satisfaction in massive ways! 

Security

This is important, many people think that the big skyscrapers and office buildings that businesses own are their most valuable asset… nope… that stuff is all insured. The real asset is their data. 

Can you imagine a business losing all of its prospect data, the customer data, their sales pipelines, all activity tracking and records? That would literally cause a business to shut down and start from scratch. 

Salesforce has always made keeping its data security a priority. Salesforce has different layers of data protection that other CRMs have simply not taken the time to pursue. This isn’t unusual though, Salesforce for the past 20 years has always tried to stay 5 steps ahead of the industry as true innovators.

Apps

“There’s an app for that” isn’t just a saying anymore, it’s a way of life. We look for an app to do just about anything we need. Did you know that Salesforce’s founder Marc Benioff was the original creator of the App Store as a concept? That’s right, not Apple, not Google but Salesforce! 

Fun Fact - Marc Benioff actually gifted Steve Jobs the rights to the domain “App Store” to be used by Apple. Marc liked the idea of the name App Store, but decided he wanted to call the Salesforce version the App Exchange and gave Jobs the App Store domain which he had purchased when determining the right name.

Salesforce allows you to create apps within the platform to handle business in ways that work for your company and customers. Having the ability to create specific apps that meet your business’s needs will save you untold hours of work trying to make something generic work for you.

But Salesforce takes the creation of apps a step further. They created the Salesforce AppExchange which allows third-party developers to create apps that can be accessed by any company using Salesforce. This allows companies to rapidly improve the functionality of Salesforce for their company without hiring massive development teams and building everything internally.

So when you think “Why is Salesforce successful”,? Just consider what it would be like if your phone didn’t have any apps, it just placed calls and sent text messages… that’s how companies who don’t use Salesforce feel, they’ve got a tool with severely limited capabilities. It puts them at a massive disadvantage to competitors, making Salesforce the clear choice.

Understanding what a CRM is doesn’t translate on its own into a career. Like most tech products, the key to turning CRM understanding into a lucrative career is knowing how to use it in a way that makes a business operate more efficiently. Let’s talk more about that!

Why Companies Are Hiring CRM Professionals

CRMs exist to make the relationship between a company and its clients better by putting all of the company's knowledge of, interactions with, and plans for its clients all in one place. Knowing how to use one well make a tremendous amount of difference to the bottom line of the company using it.

If you know how to run a CRM, you have the potential to find work in any field that uses one. That means you should have many job prospects once you're knowledgeable enough to be employed using one.

What Sets Salesforce Apart

Businesses that use Salesforce as their CRM have seen huge jumps in productivity, revenue, and other key ares.

Behind those numbers are people working the platform for companies. And with so many companies signing on with Salesforce, more people are needed every day.

Salesforce CRM professionals who have expertise and experience dealing with the product are in high demand precisely because the platform is so broad and yet so tailored. These statistics tell the story of what happens when Salesforce is utilized.

What Salesforce needs is qualified people to help them expand into more businesses and serve better the companies that already use them.

Qualifications Needed To Work In Salesforce

One of the first questions people ask when they want to switch to a certain career field is whether or no they need a college degree or any other special qualifications in order to get a new job.

Do You Need A College Degree

No, you don't. You can make definitely the career change with a degree. However, that's not to say that you can just go right into Salesforce with no experience at all.

Knowledge of the Salesforce CRM is obviously a key piece of working with Salesforce. What you really should have is experience with the platform and certifications that show your expertise and knowledge of the Salesforce system.

So while you can definitely have a Salesforce career without a degree, you will need to pursue more knowledge and learning in order to be successful.

Salesforce Certification

There are eight different career paths in the Salesforce universe. Take some time to explore where your skills and interests fit within those possibilities. They range from sales reps to developer to administrator and more.

From there, you'll want to consider what certifications you need to get you on your career path and then help you advance. Trailhead is the program that Salesforce has set up to help people get certified in their chosen career path.

Trailhead has a comprehensive guide to the different certification paths you can take. Reading through it will give you a really good idea of how you should progress in getting your certifications to optimize your expertise and employability.

Job Security And Flexibility With Salesforce

Both job security and flexibility are - and should be - concerns for people who are switching careers. Jobs with Salesforce have the potential to provide both.

Security

The pandemic changed business worldwide. Jobs that previously seemed completely secure before 2020 disappeared almost overnight. Anita saw it in the field of hotel management. It also happened in the entertainment, hospitality, and travel industries.

Furthermore, the collapse of those industries undoubtedly led to the loss of many more jobs that were peripherally attached to them. It was undeniably catastrophic for millions of people.

Because of that, asking fundamental questions about whether learning Salesforce is a viable, secure career with little prospect for collapse is valid.

To answer that, let's look at some statistics on job prospects within the Salesforce world. They're important because they hold true even while the world still grapples with the pandemic, which means they'll be true in a post-pandemic world too.

When you're working for a product used extensively around the world, one that is still actively hiring and plans to create more than four million jobs through 2024, you can be fairly certain that job security is not a major issue for people working with Salesforce.

Flexibility

There are two aspects of a job's flexibility: the ability to work remotely and the ability to shift jobs within the field.

Working Remotely

If there's one thing we learned from the pandemic it's that many more jobs can be done remotely than we ever thought possible.

In a post-pandemic world, people will still be able to do remote work. Salesforce can remain a remote job because it's cloud-based. For most careers within the Salesforce realm, you should be able to work from the comfort of your own home.

Shifting Jobs

There are eight distinct careers related to Salesforce. They include sales, service, marketing, analysis, and more.

As we've discussed, you can have a Salesforce job without a degree. Success in a career related to Salesforce is instead often tied - at least in part - to having a certification. So if you're certified in one area but not another, it might be difficult to switch focuses or job.

However, once you're in the Salesforce world, you're going to have a holistic understanding of the product. That inherently makes it easier for you to consider switching paths.

For example, if you're in service and want to switch to marketing, you could continue working your current Salesforce job while also working towards the Marketing Cloud Administrator certification.

Dive Deeper:

From Pandemic Layoff to $100k+ | A Salesforce Success Story |EP 297

Top 7 Reasons to Become a Salesforce Professional | Talent Stacker

Why Salesforce Is A Smart Choice For Financial Independence

If you’re on the path to Financial Independence, you might be wondering if a career shift to Salesforce can help you achieve that goal. The answer is yes.

A FI Story

Bradley Rice shared his story in a recent ChooseFI podcast.

In summary, Bradley was on the typical career path. He worked 8-5, made a decent salary, and was on track to retire around age 60.

But the birth of his daughter changed Bradley’s life perspective. He decided he didn’t want to be a part-time parent to his child, so he needed to make some changes.

Right out of college, Bradley had gotten a job with Salesforce. He decided that if he worked harder and used his time better during his 8-to-5 workday, he could actually earn certifications and advance his career. He didn’t take breaks like his co-workers did, and he didn’t spend a lot of extra time getting coffee or talking around the water cooler. Instead, he worked smarter and used his time to better himself.

By doing this, he quickly passed his peers in Salesforce expertise. He started earning a lot more money even as he cut his hours down to half of what he had been working before.

Salesforce Salary Averages

Like we told you, people are employed as Salesforce experts everywhere in all different kinds of industries.

Salesforce put together a graphic highlighting salary averages of different careers in the Salesforce world. You may not start at this salary, but it will give you something to aim for – and strive to pass up! High-paying jobs are definitely attainable in the Salesforce world.

Real Earning Potential

Here’s an additional graphic that shows how, if you apply your knowledge and are willing to work hard, you can achieve a drastic increase in income as a Salesforce specialist.

Below is a graphic that we put together based on Bradley's observations and experience over the last decade in Salesforce It demonstrates how your income grows exponentially within a few short years.

As incredible as this looks, in some cases it's overly conservative. Bradley helped 300 people land jobs in 2021 and the real survey data revealed the average starting salary was $72,000 with many individuals starting out between $80,000 to $110,000.

Looking at this model, it’s easy to see how a Salesforce career can easily shorten your path to FI and help you retire early.

In Bradley’s case, once he applied his own theories, he was able to work less and yet earn more. Even though he cut back his hours in 2018, he made $170,000 working 25 hours a week. More time with his family and more money in the bank at the same time.

Bradley made the choice to optimize time with his family now at the expense of retiring as early as he could. But with the amount of money he’s earned through Salesforce, he had the freedom to make the choice that was right for him and his family. And he recently took a year to travel the country in an RV while working part-time. So he’s living his dream life.

Dive Deeper: Salesforce Admin and Analyst Salaries| Talent Stacker

Is A Career In Salesforce Right For You

In order to figure that out, you can ask yourself these questions.

Do I Like To Think About Business Structures?

Maybe you're the kind of person who takes one look at a business and immediately knows what to do to improve it. Perhaps you're the kind of person that likes to think about ways to improve customer service while you're on hold with a business. If analyzing a business structure and imagining ways to make it better appeal to you, Salesforce could be for you.

Do I Like Working In the Technology Field?

So if you answered "yes" to the first question, the next thing to consider is the tech field. Salesforce is all about using technology, in this case a CRM platform, in order to optimize business. Salesforce careers revolve around being able to use and adapt their CRM, so you'll be spending a lot of time behind a computer analyzing, strategizing, and building systems. At heart, you need to love tech work.

Do I Like Figuring Out How To Meet People's Needs?

At its core, Salesforce is about how to best track the relationship of a business team with its customer. Salesforce's goal is to give the same shared view of every customer to every person on a business team. So it's the goal of Salesforce employees to structure their CRM in a way that meets each business's individual needs. Part of your responsibility at Salesforce will be to figure out what those needs are.

Should I Consider A Career That Doesn't Need a College Degree?

For a long time, having a college degree was considered the benchmark for landing a great job. However, given the skyrocketing cost of college, it's out of the reach of a lot of people.

If you're the kind of person that is willing to work hard but doesn't have the money or the drive to go to college, Salesforce is a fantastic college alternative that doesn't require a degree. You're getting knowledge beyond your high school diploma without having to attend college. You still have to work hard to learn the CRM software and earn the certifications. However, you don't have study for four years to earn a degree that might not even land you a job.

If you've answered "yes" to these questions, it's very likely that Salesforce is a good career choice for you. So what are your next steps to making that career change?

Dive Deeper: Top 10 Skills You Need to Succeed as a Salesforce Admin Professional | Talent Stacker

Take The Next Step

The next step to a career at Salesforce is to take the Talent Stacker Salesforce 5-Day Challenge. It's the absolute next step you should take for several reasons.

It's Totally Free

It costs you absolutely nothing to enroll in this challenge. What you get when you enroll is a great explanation of what Salesforce is, how to excel at it, and what exact steps you can take to land a great Salesforce job. If it costs you nothing to try it out, you also lose nothing, so there's no reason not to enroll in the 5-day challenge.

Concrete Actions To Take To Get Started On Your Salesforce Career

Many of us have taken a three-day, five-day, ten-day challenge before. Often they're nothing but teasers for a large product or service that someone wants you to buy.

The Talent Stacker Salesforce 5-Day Challenge is loaded with concrete, actionable steps to start on your shift to a Salesforce career. In fact, if you follow what it recommends, you'll quickly see how in-depth it is. You'll spend about an hour a day getting insight into Salesforce and how to be successful at it.

Day 3, for example, explains how important your LinkedIn profile is. The lesson of that day tells you how to beef up your profile to show your Salesforce experience. Doing that will help you attract the right potential employers. It takes you from the top of your profile to the bottom. It explains the big changes and little tweaks you can make so that more employers looking for Salesforce assistance will find your profile and want to interview you.

And that's just one day! There are four more days full of videos and tips to get you started off right.

It's A Great Sampling Of The Salesforce Career Development Program

The Talent Stacker Salesforce 5-Day Challenge is very comprehensive. It's designed to tell you if you're a good candidate for a Salesforce career. Elements of the challenge are pulled right from the course. If you determine as a result of that challenge that you are, the last step would be to enroll in the Salesforce Career Development Program.

What Is The Talent Stacker Salesforce Career Development Program?

This program walks you through the Salesforce certification process and specifically prepares you to pass the Salesforce Certification Exam.

It gives you a pacing guide to help you study for your exam. You'll get support, study guides, encouragement, and help to successfully pass the test. You'll also get real world experience, learn strategies for finding a job, get help preparing for interviews, and learn industry secrets to set yourself apart in the hiring process.

You will graduate from this program ready for a career in Salesforce. If you aren't happy with what you see as you start this program, there's a money-back guarantee. So much reward, very little risk.

Want to learn more? Get the free guide to the Talent Stacker Salesforce Career Development Program here.

How Much Does The Salesforce Career Development Program Cost?

The Talent Stacker Salesforce Career Development Program is an investment in your future. The good news is that at just under $2,500, it costs less than many college courses.

But the difference is that that college course is usually just one of many that you have to take in order to earn your degree before starting your job search after graduation. And even at that point you might not be qualified for any of the jobs you want.

Final Thoughts

This article began with a story about Anita. She was lost in the middle of the pandemic, trying to figure out what to do with her life after being laid off.

Anita found Salesforce and took the TalentStacker Salesforce 5-Day Challenge. She liked what she saw and enrolled in the Salesforce Career Development Program. It took her a couple of months to go through the material and get herself ready for her new career.

In January, just 2 months after she completed the training, Anita landed a job for a salary of more than $100,000 using her newly developed Salesforce credentials.

If you want a job change, prepared to put your time in getting certified, and ready for a job that can change the trajectory of your life and your journey to FI, Salesforce is the right option for you.