Recently, we looked at how you could take advantage of free or low-cost resources to learn how to code. Now, we’re going to look at free training offered by Salesforce, a popular set of sales, marketing, and customer service tools.
Salesforce is a cloud-based set of applications designed to help run a business, but it requires administrators and programmers to help run and customize the system. As with any technical skills, some companies will have them, and some won’t.
The company has been tremendously successful since it launched in 1999, building a strong base of customers of all sizes. At a basic level, it provides a way for sales people to track their customers in a single place.
In recent years, they have been building in a layer of intelligence to help customers find the next best prospect and surface the most important emails in their inbox. Salesforce isn’t the only company offering these kinds of tools, but it is a tremendously successful one.
According to Gartner, at the end of 2018, Salesforce led the CRM space with almost 20 percent of the market. The next closest company, SAP, had just 8.3 percent. If your clients are using Salesforce, there’s a way to increase your skill set around managing this group of applications. Best of all, you won’t have to even have to pay any money to do it.
Trailhead training resources
The Trailhead training site offers a range of free courses to build your Salesforce administrator skills to help your clients run and customize their versions of Salesforce, or to hone your programming skills on the Salesforce Lightning platform. It’s set up like a game to make it more fun, and you can earn badges and certificates, which ultimately could lead to new skills and additional business.
If you don’t want to learn new skills, you can still increase the value of your firm by building a network of outside contractors you can call upon whenever you have a project. While it’s useful to have working knowledge of a particular skill like being a Salesforce Administrator, it’s also useful to have access to a group of experts.
However, if you choose to use this platform, you can provide additional value over and above the core skills your firm offers. And what’s more, when you bring other people in, they could end up recommending you for other projects where your skills would fit. It’s an approach that could help you build a more successful business by offering a broader range of services and enhancing your network.
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