Become a Salesforce Business Analyst

Are you ready to take that next step in your Salesforce career and have decided you are passionate about working with people and technology? Then this guide is for you!

We have curated a path to success for anyone wanting to become a successful Salesforce Business Analyst. First things first, let’s define the role!

Who Is a Salesforce Business Analyst?

Salesforce business analyst is a project-based, business-improvement role who help guide businesses to improve business processes and efficiency in Salesforce.

They elicit, document, and analyse requirements around business challenges, and then produce data-driven solutions.

They’re the go-to person when it comes to communication between IT and business stakeholders to ensure all involved work together to attain the best results.

That sounds great! But, what skills does a successful BA need?

Required Skills

A good mix of technical and nontechnical skills helps a Salesforce business analyst to be successful.

Let’s explore some trailhead modules that are tailored to making sure a Salesforce Business Analyst is setup for success! If you don’t know what trailhead is or don’t have a trailhead account, then follow this guide to set up and learn more about learning Salesforce for Free.

Here are the soft skills a BA should have:

	Essential Business Analyst Skills	45 mins
	Business Process Mapping	40 mins
	Process Mapping for Business Analysts	30 mins
	Business Analyst Best Practices	41 mins
	User Story Creation	20 mins
	Strategies for Presenting to Executive Audiences	30 mins

A BA should also have at least a basic understanding of these Salesforce technical skills:

	Salesforce User Basics	1 Hr
	Salesforce Platform Basics	50 Min
	Company Wide Org Settings	25 Min
	Data Modelling	45 Min

	User Management	50 mins
	Data Security	1.5 Hrs
	Accounts & Contacts for Lightning Experience	30 Min
	Leads & Opportunities for Lightning Experience	1 Hr

What does a Salesforce business analyst actually do?

Key activities of a Salesforce BA are:

Communication: A BA creates an environment for open conversations, and clearly communicates information back out to the appropriate teams.
Elicitations: The BA asks lots of questions, with the purpose of understanding project goals and getting clarification on what stakeholders want to accomplish.
Documenting requirements: The BA must be thoughtful about how they choose to document requirements so they can be easily understood by stakeholders and anyone else involved.
Analysing information: The BA reviews requirements and gets a sense of how to accomplish their team’s business goals.
Facilitating solutions: The BA then identifies options for solving business challenges. Then they choose the best option and move forward with the best solution.
Quality Check: The BA builds training material to support the implemented solution, and records feedback to start eliciting requirements for the next iteration of the project, if needed.

Key things to remember

Salesforce business analysts DO NOT need to be super technical. They only need a basic understanding of the Salesforce platform.
They can do configuration changes if they have the skills, knowledge, and bandwidth to do so.
BAs aren’t solely focused on requirements. They form the entire base of the implementation by drawing up process maps and advising on solution.

Salesforce Business Analysts Certifications

A Salesforce BA should know the ins and outs of what products are on offer especially the cloud platforms. For this reason, it is recommended that they attempt the following certifications:

If you have given yourself a couple of months to get the knowledge above and be prepared enough to attempt your certifications, then I recommend training with the best in the industry. Read our review on Focus on Force exam guides and prep exams to fast track your certification path.

Some companies prefer if a Salesforce BA has the following two certifications only:

It is totally up to you on the path you choose. For a Salesforce BA, excellent soft skills and only some technical skills are needed but if you want to see a good bump in your salary compared to others then go for at least 1 or 2 certifications.

In Conclusion

If you are wondering what a career as a business analyst might look like, check out the new Salesforce Business Analyst Careers page.

Do you feel ready to go and start applying for Salesforce Business Analyst Jobs and want to prepare to ace that interview? Then we have just the guide for you, click here to read more.

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