26. May 2016

E-learning and Certification in Salesforce? Get prepared for English

Although Salesforce is an internationally utilized platform for CRM solutions, in Slovak or Czech you will not find enough online material to become familiar with it. Those, who have full command of English, have an advantage.

When you type the keywords “How does the Salesforce work” or “What is Salesforce” into a search engine, you will come across the article on Wikipedia and a few old blogs with basic information that will not tell you much. On, why is Salesforce the best solution for CRM, however you could read in our blog at length?

What does Salesforce offer?

If you are looking for more comprehensive instructions in your native language, you would be searching in vain. In English, it’s a little bit better, because Salesforce itself offers to all of its existing and potential clients various freely available documents and videos, on individual cloud solutions and their benefits,  within the ordinary service of the assistance center. For example, you will thus find e-books, but also webinars, and demo videos – all as the component of “resources” for each product.

In addition, Salesforce also prepared a series of Succes plans, to help to get oriented and successfully launch the processes in the company and in your team, within the implementation of the respective clouds. There is really a lot, to be found directly on the website, but you should know what you expect and what you need to find and your search will be easier.

Finally, the Salesforce blog itself can be very beneficial and – although it brings more of the news and tips for the actual use of Salesforce products and does not provide the answers to the obligate question – ‘How does this actually work? “.

If you are interested in learning how to operate Salesforce at the general user level, you can take offline training. These are organized by several local partners of Salesforce, and a big advantage is that they are available in Slovak or the Czech language.

If you use the services of the Anodius at the implementation, the training in the orientation at the interface comes naturally, as well as the instruction of the common and especially of the functional use.

E-learning and Certification in Salesforce? Get prepared for English

The training program and certification for Salesforce experts?

The Salesforce University is what you need when you need something more than just an extensive Help Centre and would like to become a Salesforce certified professional (administrator, developer, designer of applications).

For successful certification, on one hand, it is extremely important to study the materials available, but without real experience in working with the Salesforce interface, you will not succeed in this case. However, everything depends on the level and type of test. Salesforce therefore virtually nonstop organizes one or more day training. Depending on the training, their price ranges from $ 499 up to $ 4,950. You can take part in them only if you are willing to travel – unless it is a virtual course that can be tracked online, most of them are conducted in the United States.

A more affordable option, in this case, is self-study. The first thing you have to do is find the Study Guide which can be found at each of the selected certifications. It includes tips on the sources from which you can study, but particularly decisive is the percentage of subjects covered by the tests. This is useful from the point of view that if one topic has only a 1% share in the test, it makes no sense to devote hours to studying it – it pays to focus more on those with more percentage cover.

After registration, you will also have access to videos, for example. Be careful with video tutorials and practice tests from other sources – as Salesforce updates applications each quarter of the year, they may not be up-to-date.

In addition, use also the sophisticated e-books at the Help Centre – particularly the How to be successful with Salesforce. Do not be put off by its “thickness” – although it has up to 5,400 pages, you will browse through most of them quickly.

Watch also the instructional videos on the Salesforce YouTube channel.

The certification itself takes place in a very strict manner and you can attend it in two ways – under onsite or online supervision. Onsite, it takes place directly at one of the many test centers around the world. The closest to us is in Prague and Brno.

Online testing is done under the supervision of a webcam. At the same time, it is necessary to have installed special software from Salesforce, the webcam must read your face, your work desk, and 30 cm on each side. The room should be quiet and only items that are allowed in the manual can be present there. 

The test consists of 60 questions on different topics, for the solution of which you have 90 minutes. For a successful certification, you must have at least 39 correct ones.

Salesforce is an extremely useful tool and, depending on the chosen product, it can facilitate the work of teams in the marketing or sales department, but also in the customer support and analytics. Even user reviews criticize, in most cases, the initial complexity of the interface, not the product itself. This also indicates the importance of thorough preparation before you begin to make full use of Salesforce.

Lukáš Endal, Partner – Salesforce Services

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