In today’s age of technology, the journey to learn and grow is becoming increasingly vital. Below you will find an interview with Erwin Bautista, who is the Lead Consultant for Lingaro’s Salesforce Market team.
Erwin, it is great to have you. To start, tell us a bit about your role.
I am a Salesforce Lead Consultant for Lingaro’s Salesforce Market team. I also function as a Salesforce Presales Consultant, which means I take part in designing the solution that gets implemented in our Salesforce projects. Furthermore, I help to grow Lingaro’s Salesforce Consultancy business by training Lingaro resources to skill up in Salesforce and by actively engaging the Salesforce Ecosystem at large for opportunities to introduce Lingaro as a Consulting Partner.
In your own words, can you explain what Salesforce is? What are the main benefits of using it?
Salesforce at its very core is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. Whereas other platforms leave customer information in silos, Sales Clouds and Service Clouds, Salesforce’s core clouds, provide its users with a seamless view of their customers – from the beginning of the Sales process all the way to the After-Sales Service processes. All relevant activities throughout the sales lifecycle are recorded. This provides the After-Sales Service agents with a complete view of the customer that they are maintaining a relationship with. Over the years, Salesforce has made several acquisitions that had led to it becoming a complete enterprise solution for achieving a Customer 360 view, putting the customer at the center.
Is it difficult to learn and master Salesforce? Do you have any top tips that you could share with the Salesforce users out there?
The Salesforce enterprise solution has become so much bigger than when I started, and it would be ambitious to say that it is easy to master. I will say that it is easy to get started in learning Salesforce, beginning with Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, and learning them in Trailhead. Trailhead provides aspiring Salesforce professionals with bite-size modules for learning Salesforce, and it also gives its learners access to their very own, fully functional, Salesforce org; so, they can start learning hands-on.
From your experience, what are the most important factors when it comes to implementations and trainings?
As with any implementation, I think it is most important to ask the right questions during the customer discovery session, so that we know that we are solving the right business pain points. The next crucial factor is to have a good grasp of the technology that can be used to solve the client’s problems. Salesforce can sometimes be compared to a Swiss Army pocketknife because of the many things it can do, but that does not mean you need to use all that is in it to provide the best solution.
So, an ample amount of knowledge of the Salesforce technology will be particularly important to provide an optimal (minimum) solution to a client’s business pain points. On top of just meeting client requirements, a deep understanding of the Salesforce technology will enable the implementation team to make recommendations for improving the minimum solution.
