Salesforce Certification Series: Sales Cloud Consultant

Overview

The Salesforce Sales Cloud Consultant Certification is intended for Salesforce experts who specialize in designing Sales and Marketing solutions to meet business requirements, designing applications and interfaces that maximize user productivity, and managing data and design analytics to track key Sales Cloud metrics.

The Salesforce.com Certified Sales Cloud Consultant exam is designed for implementation experts who have experience implementing Sales Cloud solutions in a customer-facing role. The Salesforce.com Certified Sales Cloud Consultant is able to successfully design and implement Sales Cloud solutions that meet customer business requirements, are maintainable and scalable, and contribute to long-term customer success.

As of Summer ’13:

  • 60 question, multiple choice exam (includes multi-select questions)
  • 68% is the passing score (41 questions correct)
  • 105 minutes to answer all questions
  • $200 fee with $100 retake fee
  • Prerequisite: Administrator certification

Personal Experience

I passed my Salesforce Sales Cloud Consultant certification on the Winter ’13 release. By the time I took the exam, I was working with the Salesforce platform for a bit over a year and a half.

From my experience, I found the Salesforce Study Guide to be pretty accurate for all of the exams. Also, if you are a partner, you can find training videos in the Partner Portal which contains all of the videos listed under “Recommended Training and References” in the study guide. Watch these videos. Also, it never hurts to know the Force.com Fundamentals. For this specific exam, I would have a very good understanding of:

Note: These are just some things to focus on, there will be questions outside of these particular topics. Focus on the Exam outline in the Study guide.

Tips and Tricks

It is important to understand how the Salesforce certification process works and how Salesforce in general works. Salesforce has 3 releases a year, Winter, Spring, and Summer. Each release adds new questions to the exam. From my experience, new features are typically tested more heavily.

Now, while taking the test it is important to do a few things:

  • Mark every question you aren’t 100% certain on. Remember, you only need 41 questions correct to pass, so if you only mark 15, you are good to go!
  • Eliminate any ridiculous answers from the multi-select options. Remember, you only need to select the specified amount of correct answers.
  • Read each question carefully. While I don’t think there are trick questions on the test, the questions do sometimes come in paragraph form and it is crucial to have an understanding of the entire question before you answer.
  • Take your time. You have more than enough time to finish this exam. Don’t be surprised if you finish with half of the time left. Utilize that time to review and ensure you selected the answers you intended.

Standard Information

Some aspects of the Salesforce certification process are the same no matter what certification you are attempting:

Maintenance Exams

As with all Salesforce certifications, you must maintain the certification upon every release of Salesforce. This means you must pass a maintenance exam three times a year. It costs $100 a year for each path, with Salesforce certifications falling under two paths:

  • Admininstrator
    • Advanced Administrator
    • Sales Cloud Consultant
    • Service Cloud Consultant
  • Developer
    • Advanced Developer

As you can see above, the Sales Cloud Consultant certification is part of the Administrator tree. This means you must complete 3 Administrator maintenance exams a year to maintain your certification. The maintenance exams are relatively simply, usually 10-15 questions related to the latest release. Your best bet is to read the release notes and watch the release webinar.

Final Thoughts

A Sales Cloud Consultant Certification identifies an individual who is capable of working with a brand new client and implementing the Salesforce platform for their sales team. This is an advanced certification (requiring an Administrator certification before attempting) and should only be attempted once you have a full knowledge of the Sales Cloud. This encapsulates a large amount of functionality inside the Salesforce platform. I would recommend at least 6 months of experience on the platform and one implementation before attempting a certification like this.

If you are qualified and are ready for the certification, it is definitely something you should try. Good luck!

This article is part of my Sales Certification Series. For more information on the other certifications, please check them out.

Advertisement

Go to Smartblog Theme Options -> Ad Management to enter your ad code (300x250)

Comments are closed.