What Does a Salesforce Consultant Do?

Salesforce Consultants play a key role in implementing and optimizing Salesforce solutions to meet their clients’ specific needs, ensuring the platform is efficient, scalable, and adaptable to unique business operations. By leveraging a consultant’s expertise, Salesforce becomes a powerful, customized tool for businesses. These consultants represent the service side of Salesforce’s partner ecosystem, offering their knowledge through strategic advice and hands-on support. They may work for Salesforce Consulting Partners (also known as Solution Integrators), agencies, or as independent freelancers.

In this fulfilling career, consultants are essential, and this guide will explore their responsibilities at each stage of their journey. For more details on how to become a Salesforce Consultant, check out our complete guide:

Salesforce Consultant: Roles and Responsibilities

The responsibilities of a Salesforce Consultant can range from configuration tasks through to work that requires a level of emotional intelligence when gathering requirements or keeping a project on track. With seniority, consultants will become involved across the entire project lifecycle, yet less hands-on with configuration (jump to: Stages of a Typical Salesforce Project).

What does a Salesforce Consultant do? Let’s start by outlining what we mean by ‘entry-level’, ‘mid-level’, and ‘senior’ consultants:

• Entry-level consultant: 0-1 years experience (often described as a ‘build’ consultant). A supporting role that involves configuration tasks delegated by other team members, based on specific requirements with Salesforce’s most common features (e.g. field configuration). These consultants spend a lot of time observing and learning. 
• Mid-level: 1-3 years experience. Lead small projects, design solutions, and lead requirements gathering sessions/client workshops.
• Senior consultant: 3+ years experience (often described as a ‘lead consultant’/’delivery director’) who’s the subject matter expert. They work on the “big picture” solution design, possibly with multiple integrated systems.

Salesforce projects are an art, with numerous contributing factors balanced to either make or break the success of a project. Organizations won’t trust just anyone with the keys to their Salesforce org (the ‘beating heart’ of your operations), so they’ll look for consultants that possess a number of skills – including ‘soft’ skills. 

Functional vs Technical Consultants

You may hear the terms ‘functional consultants’ and ‘technical consultants’. Simply put, functional consultants are more declarative (low-code) professionals who are focused on the ‘business’ aspects of a project, such as business analysis. Technical consultants are pro-code professionals that typically have a background in development. While their role accountabilities differ in some ways, there’s a great amount of overlap.  

What Entry-Level Salesforce Consultants Do

As a junior Salesforce Consultant, you’ll implement and continually improve your clients’ Salesforce org, usually guided by experienced Salesforce Consultants and set requirements – your overarching objective is to observe and learn from them. Tasks could include:

• Configuration tasks based on specific requirements with Salesforce’s most common features (e.g. field configuration, Salesforce Flow).
• Building Salesforce reports/custom report types according to requirements.
• Get to grips with the tools that your consultancy uses to support your workload.
• Build rapport with the client-side project team.
• Testing configuration with different business scenarios and/or overseeing UAT (user acceptance testing).
• Simple data migrations.
• Data clean-up.
• Document solutions implemented.
• User training. 

For more on what you should do to become a Salesforce Consultant, read our full guide on starting on this rewarding career path: 

Get a flavor of what a ‘day in the life’ looks like for a Salesforce consultant:

When applying for your first Salesforce consultancy role, and you’ve landed an interview, what can you expect? Here’s a guide with Salesforce consultant interview questions, written by someone who has interviewed many consultants throughout her career: 

Progress to a Mid-Level Salesforce Consultant 

With between 1–3 years of experience and the right mindset, you’ll be considered a mid-level consultant. 

You’ll either be running “quick start” projects independently (that are guarded by a tight scope and follow a predictable set of tasks) or work on projects that go beyond the “cookie-cutter” implementations.  

At this stage, you’re able to work independently and are confident in being client-facing (requirements gathering/workshops/demos). You’ll be using a range of documents and resources. 

Tasks could include:

• Presales involvement where a consultant needs to gather/validate a potential client’s requirements with Salesforce products and simple integrations. 
• Be able to gather requirements independently and carry out business analysis to understand the ‘current state’ in depth. 
• Familiarity with popular Salesforce integrations and their effort/risk. 
• Solution design in terms of automations, custom objects, and data relationships in Salesforce.
• Configuration tasks for more uncommon Salesforce features (e.g. Revenue Schedules) are higher risk (e.g. complex Salesforce Flows) and require Salesforce best practice knowledge to complete them (i.e. they may not have been detailed for you on your behalf). You may find your role involves detailing specific requirements for an entry-level build consultant.
• Utilize Salesforce’s declarative functionality as far as possible (and briefing Salesforce Developers when requirements go beyond).
• The driving force behind analytics – defining which reports should be created for clients to measure their success and which reporting tool to use.
• Stakeholder management for client relationships/projects they’re responsible for.
• Form (or assist with) the project plan. Work towards the project to be delivered on time and on budget.
• Complex data migrations. 
• Overseeing deployments. 

To progress from a junior consultant to a mid-level role, you should do the following:

• Understand which questions to ask to a client to understand their ‘current state’ in depth. With practice, you’ll be able to pick up small hints that the client shares that will lead to additional questions (and know the right questions to ask in order to tease out the information, if not).
• With solution design, knowing which option to choose in which scenario in terms of automations, custom objects, and data relationships. For example, for this client’s requirements, should I create a custom object? Should this process be built with Apex or can we achieve it in Flow?  
• Observe more experienced consultants – how they organize their workload, the risks they anticipate, and how they communicate with clients while handling difficult situations. See what works for you.
• Find a mentor internally, usually a consultant that you’re supporting day-to-day. Question everything!
• Understand the mechanics of a Salesforce project – which parts come first, what’s expected of the client, predicted timelines.
• Gain a solid understanding of the project manager’s role (or the concepts of project management).
• Conduct project debriefs at the end of every client project to reflect on what went well or how things went wrong.

What Senior Salesforce Consultants Do

As a Senior Salesforce Consultant, you’ll take ownership of all stages of a project. While you won’t be as hands-on with configuration, you’ll have a ‘helicopter’ view of the project, being ultimately responsible for the project to be delivered on time and on budget. As the subject matter expert, in most organizations, you’ll have the opportunity to manage a team of consultants (or build one). 

The senior Salesforce Consultant role (often described as a ‘lead consultant’/’delivery director’), begins to edge into Salesforce Architect territory – in fact, this is where the consultant and architect roles overlap. 

“Big picture” solution design means stepping back from the small details and looking at a client’s Salesforce platform as a whole (possibly with multiple integrated systems). Because of this, senior consultants control the data model and release management.  

You’ll be expected to work with the client-side stakeholders from a variety of business functions, acting as the clients’ escalation point. Responsibilities and tasks could include:

• Presales involvement where a consultant needs to gather/validate a potential client’s requirements with multiple Salesforce products and complex integrations. 
• Gather requirements for cross-organizational transformation, with changes impacting multiple teams. 
• Carry out business analysis to understand the ‘current state’ in depth. 
• “Big picture” solution design, with multiple integrated systems.  Understand the considerations involved with solution design (and therefore, concepts in the Salesforce architect domain).
• Control the system architecture* and data model
• High amount of stakeholder management, acting as the clients’ escalation point.
• Oversee large deployments. 
• Control release management.
• Detail a roadmap for future enhancements.

*in project teams where there is no Salesforce Architect involved.

To become a Senior Salesforce Consultant, you should:

• Become a subject matter expert (in Salesforce generally or in a specific part of the Salesforce platform).
• Understand and have experience with Salesforce integrations and their implications. 
• As you eventually will be expected to lead complex projects with integrations, participate in these kinds of projects when there’s an opportunity. 
• Delegate well and have the qualities of a leader.

Read Consultant Job Descriptions

Get an idea of what responsibilities consultancies will ask their consultants to undertake. While the sample job descriptions below are focused on marketing professionals, most of the tasks apply to all consultants:

• Marketing Cloud Consultant Job Description
• Pardot Consultant Job Description

Salesforce Consultant Career Path

Let’s see what practical steps you can take to climb the ladder and finish up with what a typical Salesforce Consultant career path looks like.

What about Salesforce Freelance Consultants?

Salesforce Freelancers, also known as “independent consultants”, are self-employed (not employees of a Salesforce consultancy) and work for a Salesforce customer organization on a project basis/specified length of time. 

While the pay may be higher, the life of a freelance consultant may not be for you. These guides will help you find out if it’s a good fit for you:

Appendix: Stages of a Typical Salesforce Project

Discovery

Get to know the prospective client’s business by asking questions about how they operate and what challenges they face. This is “presales” before the client signs on the dotted line. 

Design

Having gathered requirements, consultants put together a scope of work detailing the effort required, factoring in any foreseeable risks. For more complex projects, this would also involve mapping out processes and integrations in order to understand how they’ll interact with one another. 

Development

The building commences where configuration tasks are completed to an agreed timeline.

Testing 

Processes are tested from a user’s perspective, applying different scenarios to ensure that the requirements are met and no bugs are encountered. Project stakeholders (or designated users) test the processes too to confirm they meet expectations.  

Deployment and Training 

The changes are moved into the client’s production environment, including any data migrations. End users are trained on how to use their new Salesforce org. 

Summary

Salesforce Consultants play a pivotal role in helping organizations unlock the full potential of Salesforce by tailoring the platform to fit their unique needs. They ensure that businesses can streamline operations, enhance scalability, and maximize efficiency through expert implementation and optimization. 

Whether working as part of a consulting firm, agency, or independently, consultants provide invaluable strategic advice and hands-on support, guiding clients through every stage of their Salesforce journey. As businesses increasingly rely on Salesforce, the demand for skilled consultants continues to grow, making it a rewarding career with a clear path for progression.