Unlocking Business Analysis Opportunities
Toni Martin launched the Salesforce Business Analyst (SFBA) Academy with a webinar about her lessons learned while she struggled to become a Salesforce business analyst. She recommends that those pursuing a Salesforce business analyst career have at least:
A Salesforce administrator certification.
A portfolio of their “Salesforce-specific deliverables.”
A Valuable Portfolio
Toni credits her deliverables portfolio for advancing her career. A solid portfolio highlights what a business analyst has accomplished, especially with the business impact of the deliverables. For example, a Salesforce business analyst’s portfolio solution boosted lead conversions by 25%.
Put yourself in the position of a hiring manager looking for an SFBA. The two finalist candidates have excellent oral and written communication skills. One has an Entry Certificate in Business Analysis (ECBA™) and a Salesforce admin certification but has limited Salesforce experience and no portfolio. The other candidate has a Salesforce admin certification, a portfolio of 25 deliverables with business results but no business analysis certification.
Which candidate would you hire? The first candidate has shown she can pass certification exams - and not much else. The second candidate has shown she can drive solutions to completion and deliver results. She may need some business analyst education, but that’s less investment and risk than on-the-job Salesforce training for the certified business analyst.
An Opportunity Within an Opportunity
If you have an interview for a Salesforce position requiring business analysis skills, you have an immediate opportunity to showcase your skills.
An organization has expectations of Salesforce talent similar to having requirements for solutions. Experienced business analysts recognize that requirements often need clarification. Likewise, they need clarity about what an organization expects from them. For example, the organization posts a job opening for a system administrator requiring change management, including user change requests. These are business analyst tasks, but the organization rolled them into an admin job posting because their admin handled all Salesforce change requests.
In the interview process, clarify what the organization needs from the position. For example, a manager may start with a pain point, like “we have no way of tracking changes and need it fixed immediately.” They may lack a change management process - users requested changes from an overloaded admin, who deployed some changes while others fell through the cracks. You could promote a change management process, like advocating an essential process in a solution.
Look for opportunities to discover the organization's Salesforce environment during the interview. Express curiosity about how they set up their org(s) and what they want to improve. Candidates can lead interviewers to good ideas, asking questions with a fresh perspective.
Continuous Business Analysis
Aspiring Salesforce business analysts should maintain a portfolio of their deliverables and how they benefited their organization(s). Creating the portfolio builds an aspiring business analyst’s confidence while reflecting on what he or she has accomplished. It may start with simple deliverables like Salesforce reports and workflows. On the other hand, an experienced candidate’s portfolio could include many custom solutions driven from discovery through deployment. In either case, each deliverable should include the results and benefits the organization received from it, showing a hiring manager what the candidate has accomplished.
As the portfolio opens doors to interviews, the aspiring business analyst discovers the hiring organization’s business analysis needs. How do they evaluate the business value of new solutions? How do solutions and changes go from request to deployment? Hiring interviews go both ways, especially for a business analyst.
A portfolio of deliverables showing their results and benefits opens doors for a business analyst to discover a hiring organization’s needs.