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 I have been receiving this question a lot lately, at least 2–3 people daily ping me up on Quora and Instagram asking me how do they get started with Salesforce, how important are the certifications, can they get it free of cost somehow, how beneficial is it to learn Salesforce anyway? Is it good for the future and the main thing, without having any relevant work experience, how can they get a job in Salesforce? I will try to explain all the points in this answer so that it answers most of your queries.

What is Salesforce?

To give you a one-liner answer, Salesforce is a CRM tool, as a matter of fact, currently the world best CRM tool available in the market. Let me help you understand the concept of CRM tool.

Almost on a daily basis do we shop online. We use various e-commerce websites like Flipkart, Amazon etc. Then you may also try ordering online via Dominos. You may have a subscription at supermarkets like Walmart or Target or Big Bazaar and Spencer’s from where you get notifications that this particular product is on sale. Many times you get targetted advertisements too. All the data that you feed into the system, based on your shopping list and a number of other criteria help the company to understand your shopping needs and the CRM will device various strategies to improve the company’s sales by customer retention. Targetted ads are one thing when you shop online, it helps you with various recommendations. And side by side, it also stores all the information, your data, your last orders, even your credit card information.

All these go into making a CRM tool that not just provides you with the service but helps the company to increase its sales. Now, this is just one example of what a CRM tool does. A tool like Salesforce offers many more options to the users to work with.

What is the scope of Salesforce in future? Is it beneficial to learn Salesforce as a fresher?

This is something my seniors used to tell me at my first project and now I would say the same thing. You would consider yourself lucky to get a chance of working with Salesforce as a fresher! The demand for Salesforce professionals is higher than ever! The technology not just pays well but has a huge potential, huge market and huge opportunities for the future.

Being the Number #1 CRM tool in the world, Salesforce is one of the niche technologies that you can think of building your career with. Even though the salaries differ from company to company, a Salesforce professional earns decently, above the market standards and it increases handsomely as you gain work experience. The Salesforce ecosystem is predicted to create 1.1 million new jobs by 2022 in India alone.

How to get started with Salesforce? What are the pre-requisites for it?

Pre-requisites:

From a high-level point of view, Salesforce has two career paths - Administrator and Developer.

For the Developer track, yes, you would need to learn to code. One needs to know Java and SQL in order to start writing code in Apex, which is the programming language for Salesforce and HTML and CSS in order to code in Visualforce. You would also need to know Javascript in order to code in Lightning. However, if you are someone who is not interested in coding, there is a parallel career path which is that of an administrator. The work of a Salesforce administrator mostly revolves around declarative tools that do not involve coding.

In Salesforce, we do not directly jump into coding when there is a new requirement. We first check if this can be done using the declarative tools that Salesforce provides, which is the role of an admin. If the tools do not suffice, only then we move to the programming approach.

Being a Salesforce administrator requires a lesser amount of technical expertise and over the years, you can find yourself as a Consultant. However, the salary prospects of an admin is a little lesser than a developer and the demand for developers are more than admins.

Getting Started:

Being a hot technology which is in high demand, Salesforce is attracting professionals a lot lately. By 2022, Salesforce expects to have an $859 billion revenue and generate 3.3 million jobs! So many people are trying to get their hands on Salesforce, learn it and apply for jobs.

The best way to learn Salesforce is through Trailhead. Trailhead is Salesforce's own learning tool where one can sign up for free and learn almost everything Salesforce has to offer. Trailhead is a gamified portal where there are modules you can learn from, get hands-on experience in modules, build projects and earn badges along the way. You also get an exposure to real-life simulated scenarios where a business use case is presented to you and you work on the solution and attain Superbadges.

You can start learning with Trailhead, go through the trail mixes which are specially curated for Admin and Developer roles. Try to implement the same in your Sandbox so that you can have practical knowledge. You can choose to learn from other online resources like Udemy for reference. In the end, you need to complete the Superbadges on Trailhead. Completing a Superbadge really boosts your confidence which goes a long way to help you during your Certification exam.

How to earn Salesforce Certifications?

See, the two basic certifications in Salesforce are the Salesforce Certified Administrator and Salesforce Certified Platform Developer - I. If you are looking to bag a job offer, it is suggested you earn at least one of these two certifications; better if you can earn both! As I said, you ideally start with the Admin portion first and then move on to the Developer portion. For the preparation, Trailhead is the ideal path. There are specially curated trail mixes for the certification exams that you can practice.

Anyone who wishes to appear for these examinations, I would suggest you go through Trailhead for starters. You may choose to skip the Hands-on just for the exam purpose but it is good practice to solve them too. Followed by courses on Udemy, they will help a lot to understand the concepts deeper and I would definitely recommend that. Also, please do not refer to any kind of dumps that are available in the market. It is a myth that you cannot pass without the dumps, I am one example who passed three of them without any malpractice.

How much does it pay as a Salesforce professional?

Without giving you imaginary figures, I will share the real-world scenario that is out there. Salesforce Ben has recently conducted a survey where they planned to understand the average salaries for Junior, Mid-level and Senior level Salesforce professionals. They also checked for the number of certifications each held and how the salaries differ by seniority and cities. A total of 1,670 Salesforce professionals participated in this survey all over India.

To give you an idea of how much in demand Salesforce is, here is the list of the annual salary details for Salesforce professionals working in different roles in India:

Pardot Consultant - Rs 6,61,518

Tester - Rs 7,52,285

Marketing Cloud Consultant - Rs 8,37,200

Business Analyst - Rs 8,49,695

Marketing Automation Specialist - Rs 8,63,333

Salesforce Administrator - Rs 8,86,659

Salesforce Developer - Rs 9,00,835

CRM Manager - Rs 12,07,500

Salesforce Consultant - Rs 12,77,967

Project Manager - Rs 19,17,739

Solution Architect - Rs 22,09,977

Technical Architect - Rs 26,76,672

The survey also did a city-wise breakdown of the salaries:

Ahmedabad - Rs 9,27,001

Bengaluru - Rs 12,66,478

Chandigarh - Rs 10,60,286

Chennai - Rs 12,18,069

Delhi - Rs 16,75,918

Gurgaon - Rs 14,56,577

Hyderabad - Rs 10,13,945

Indore - Rs 7,56,250

Jaipur - Rs 7,65,688

Kochi - Rs 7,65,353

Kolkata - Rs 12,97,381

Mumbai - Rs 10,49,865

Noida - Rs 8,48,068

Pune - Rs 10,40,428

How to get a job in Salesforce?

Coming to the most important point, how to get a job! Without having a single certification, it is difficult to get a job in Salesforce unless you join some service-based companies who allot you in random projects and you get lucky to land up in Salesforce. That was my case actually but you cannot surrender everything to fate.

LinkedIn is your best friend in that case. There are plenty of job openings that you can find on LinkedIn for the requirement of Salesforce Administrator or Developer for entry-level positions. While learning Salesforce, if you can build some cool stuff on your own in your trial org, you can showcase them too during your interview. that will provide you with a little experience and the interviewers are bound to be impressed.

I hope that clears many of your questions. If you still have other queries, do let me know and I can append them in this answer itself so that it provides the readers with a one-stop solution for all their questions, doubts and queries. Do feel free to suggest edits if you wish in order to keep the information up-to-date.