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Salesforce developers are Salesforce-certified professionals with technical expertise to work across the Salesforce ecosystem.
Engaging Salesforce developers as your employees alleviates the complexities associated with implementing, customizing, and integrating Salesforce within your business. They can meet your specific business needs by developing customized solutions on top of the Salesforce platform by effectively leveraging its functionalities and capabilities.
Salesforce developers are fluent with Salesforce’s technical stack. They can code and leverage no-code or low-code tools to build and customize solutions. Beyond their development expertise, they provide technical training and support to your teams, handling the technical intricacies on your behalf.
This is not it! Salesforce developers are professionals in a dynamic role. This blog is your guide towards the roles, responsibilities, key skills, and certifications of a Salesforce developer.
Let’s get started!
We have listed some of the key roles and responsibilities that a developer performs for your business.
Salesforce experts closely collaborate with you to understand your business needs and challenges. Through their expertise, they suggest applications that can be developed or integrated to overcome those challenges. They create a plan to guide you on how the development process will proceed.
Developers can customize various types of Salesforce Orgs according to their needs. They configure out-of-the-box features available in the Org and develop additional functionalities that are required for your business’s scalability.
They ensure security, manage your users and data access, ensure the right users have access to the right resources and APIs, and facilitate seamless integrations with other Salesforce products, including but not limited to Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Sales Cloud, or third-party applications. They are responsible for performing a health check and keeping the Org up to date with the latest innovations and advancements.
Developers create, deploy, and maintain a variety of apps within the Salesforce platform. Using Salesforce-specific programming languages such as Apex, Visualforce, and Lightning Components, they adhere to coding best practices.
They develop custom apps to cater to your unique business needs. Automated applications improve your business’s productivity, while mobile-supporting applications allow easy access and offline availability to business teams. Developers also ensure the upkeep of these applications, making them future-proof.
With their expertise, developers can suggest which Salesforce product or third-party solutions can extend your Org’s capabilities. They carefully plan the integration process by analyzing the most efficient integration method, whether APIs or middleware tools like MuleSoft, and facilitate seamless yet secure integration. They accurately map data objects and ensure easy flow between the systems.
Not only the development, but developers are also responsible for packaging your application into a managed or unmanaged package. They ensure it meets Salesforce standards before listing it on the AppExchange marketplace. These professionals create compelling descriptions, add screenshots and demo videos to showcase your app, allowing its reach to other businesses looking for a similar solution.
Developers handle the technical aspects of the listing and approval process, making necessary revisions and resolving issues if the app fails the review process.
Salesforce developers create clear and concise technical and operational documentation of the solutions they develop.
Technical documentation could be anything from code, API, or integration. These include detailed information about data formats, APIs used, data mappings, workflows, and error-handling mechanisms.
Operational documents, such as process maps and data dictionaries, help visualize a process and document all Salesforce elements along with their relationship.
This ensures fellow developers and business teams understand the functionalities and workings of the solutions. While keeping the documents up-to-date, they ensure easy accessibility to relevant users.
Salesforce developers ensure the quality of your solutions and integrations by employing a variety of testing methods. Through functional testing, they verify that the solution is working correctly and resulting as expected. With unit testing, they ensure that individual components function as intended, addressing any issues or errors immediately to prevent future occurrences. Additionally, they test the system using different roles and permissions to evaluate the user experience thoroughly.
Developers offer support to your technical as well as non-technical teams, on-call or in-person, to address issues with the platform or solutions. They proactively communicate issues with you, diagnose and troubleshoot code or application errors, and assist your business teams in improving the existing functionality.
List of key technical skills possessed by developers:
Formerly known as Force.com, it is a Platform as a Service (PaaS). Developers use it to build custom solutions such as applications and websites through low-code and code-intensive capabilities. Salesforce developers’ proficiency in this skill transforms them from coders to business solution architects.
Developed by Salesforce, this is a building block of any Salesforce application. Similar to Java, developers write Apex code to add custom business logic, automate processes, and build and execute flows and transaction control statements.
It is a tag-based markup language through which developers can create custom UIs for mobile and web apps that support dynamic and advanced experiences. It simplifies multi-step process building, adds business logic, creates custom dashboards to visualize data, and much more.
A drag-and-drop interface offering low-code capabilities that developers use to customize the application layout and pages of mobile and web applications.
These are reusable blocks of code that enable a developer to build dynamic, scalable, easily customizable, and responsive UIs that accelerate the development process.
SOQL is a query language like SQL, used to get data from the Salesforce database. Developers use it to fetch information from objects like accounts, contacts, or custom objects. It helps them quickly access and filter large amounts of data, which is useful for building applications, automating tasks, and creating reports with real-time information.
Salesforce developers use it to search for text across multiple objects, like accounts, contacts, and opportunities, simultaneously. This helps quickly find records that contain specific keywords or phrases, making it useful for building search features in apps.
The suite of products includes Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and more. Developers are proficient in customizing and integrating Salesforce products as per your unique requirements to enhance your business processes. By understanding the functionality and features of each product, they leverage the right product for the right use case. Staying up-to-date with the latest Salesforce advancements and releases allows them to adopt new capabilities and deprecate old ones.
These skills help in communicating with your teams, establishing trust, and building long-term relationships.
They share ideas with your team members and stakeholders and also explain the technical concepts to your non-technical business teams.
It is a key skill that the developers have. The ability to solve business problems and any issues that arise between teams to achieve results that benefit the company.
They keenly keep up with new trends and technologies, learn new languages, and experiment with new advancements that Salesforce rolls out.
It is the ability to change approach and adapt to changing situations. Salesforce developers have to work on multiple projects that require them to shift their expertise relevant to meet the project’s needs.
A key skill that developers excel at is innovating. The ability to learn and innovate quickly to keep up with the pace of new Salesforce features.
Here is a list of various certifications that developers hold:
This certification specifies that a developer can build custom applications, business logic, and interfaces using Apex, Visualforce, and Lightning Components.
It is an advanced certification that describes the ability of the developer in performing complex data modelling, designing algorithms, building advanced integrations, and developing scalable solutions within Salesforce.
It focuses on expertise in JavaScript and the development of Lightning Web Components for custom user experiences. With this, modern, dynamic, and tailored user experiences can be created.
This certification validates skills in building CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) solutions for industries such as telecom, energy, and media on Salesforce.
With this certification, the developers test proficiency in building flexible, scalable applications and components using Salesforce’s OmniStudio tools such as FlexCards, OmniScripts, and more.
Salesforce developers hold various cloud-specific certifications as well. These certifications show their expertise in a particular cloud.
With so many instances where you need a developer, it is important to make the right decision. You must know how to hire the right Salesforce developer, as this decision will directly impact your business processes.
One of the key factors that lies in this selection is cost. To gain a brief understanding of the same, you can read on to learn how much it costs to hire a Salesforce developer.
After making the hiring decision, it is advised that you follow the best practices for onboarding a Salesforce developer.
A Salesforce developer plays a crucial role in customizing the CRM as per your business needs. From tailoring features and automating tasks to integrating third-party tools, they help you get the most out of Salesforce and improve efficiency.Â
Whether you’re building from scratch or enhancing your CRM setup, hiring the right Salesforce developer on your team can make all the difference. At Smart IT Staff, we provide pre-vetted Salesforce developers to fit your unique needs. We are a global staff augmentation firm with 400+ certified Salesforce developers ready to join your team. Whether you need extra hands for a project or want to fill in IT skill gaps on an immediate basis, we provide skilled professionals to get the job done right.
They often engage in continuous learning by using Salesforce Trailhead and participating in webinars and the Trailblazer Community. They attend Salesforce events like Dreamforce and closely follow official release notes rolled out by Salesforce and other best practices.
Both roles are crucial for managing your Salesforce instance, but the difference lies in their responsibilities. Developers primarily focus on building custom solutions through coding, integrations, and advanced customizations, whereas administrators handle configuration, user management, data maintenance, and daily operations.
A Salesforce developer acts as a consultant as they guide you on implementing Salesforce solutions required in your business, identify issues and areas of improvement, and optimize solutions, ensuring successful project outcomes.
Industries that commonly hire Salesforce developers:
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