What exactly separates the experienced Salesforce consultant from the junior?
From my perspective there are four main factors:
- Technical knowledge, of which Salesforce is the largest component.
- Industry knowledge, to know the common challenges facing your target industry.
- Interpersonal skills, like communication, trust building, and negotiation.
- Personal skills, such as decision making and optimism.
FYI, you can find a diagram of these traits in the article What does it take to be a “good enough” consultant?
One of the detailed elements of Salesforce knowledge is knowing the quicks in the system. These are little things that you would expect to be consistent or common with the rest of Salesforce, but for some reason, just aren’t. They are things that make your head tilt and think, “huh, that’s odd”.
Whenever you come across these oddities, I highly recommend you record it for future reference. Here are a sample few I’ve tracked over the years.
Please keep in mind this list may change, as Salesforce releases updates.
- Whenever you work on a flow, be sure to always refresh the main flow page before opening a flow. If you don’t, clicking on the flow name sometimes brings you to an older version.
- In order to open links in a new tab in Chrome, you often cannot middle-click. Instead, you can right -click and select “Open link in a new tab”.
- Opportunity Products cannot have actions, only buttons and links.
- You can force a page repaint by changing display density from Compact to Comfy or vice versa.
- If you want to change a picklist value that’s associated with a path, you need to delete the path first, and then value.
The takeaway
Knowing the quirks in Salesforce is one way to distinguish yourself as an expert.
What are some weird behaviors you have noticed about Salesforce?