Why and How to Hire Salesforce Commerce Cloud Consultants?

If you have ever hired a software developer or any IT-related person, you know the struggle first-hand. 

You go online, compare their rates, ask top ecommerce interview questions to assess their skills and resources, and… understand that it’s already been a month and you are still unsure whether what’s claimed in the CV actually represents one’s skills. When it comes to hiring a Salesforce Commerce Cloud consultant, the story repeats itself. 

But what if it shouldn’t?

What if you already have pre-selected, qualified professionals to choose from and rest assured they will do the job perfectly? Elogic made it possible — our ecommerce development agency houses one of the largest pools of software engineers and consultants across multiple platforms. 

In this article, you’ll learn when it’s time to start looking for Salesforce Commerce Cloud consultants, what their responsibilities are, how you will benefit from making them a part of your team, and how you can find the best fit for the role. 

Let’s start with the most fundamental question.

When Should You Hire SFCC Consultants?

The short answer: before your business starts crawling because you lack expert advice. 

The long answer: your business needs Salesforce Commerce Cloud consultants in the following cases:

• When you need to choose the best ecommerce solution for your business. Modern martech and ecommerce tools can streamline your business operations, improve data management and analysis, allow better customer relationships, and so on. But since your business needs are unique, you should choose which solutions will benefit you most now and in the years to come. A Salesforce Commerce Cloud consultant will guide you through all the available options and help you pick the most optimal one to achieve your KPIs.
• When your administrators can’t handle the tech anymore. As your business grows and you explore new opportunities, the tech requirements increase proportionally. Guess what remains stable? Right, your team managing all that. And when they suddenly get more work than usual (during long-term marketing campaigns, in particular), their productivity falls and with that — the quality of work they do and client satisfaction. 
• When you need to integrate non-Salesforce solutions. Salesforce allows integration with various platforms and tools, but you need a skilled engineer to make it all work smoothly. Preferably, the one that isn’t exclusively a Salesforce developer but also has cloud computing and backend development expertise.
• Your current solution isn’t enough and you want to switch it. Your ecommerce platform might serve a limited number of users at a given time. If you plan to grow your business and explore other markets, you need a solid performant tech base and a person that can scale your existing solution or set up a new one.
• You want to take your customer management operations to the cloud. If you want an optimized way to deal with customer management, Salesforce Commerce Cloud will be the right pick as it offers a lot of needed cloud-based services and tools, making your store management friction-free from any place or device.

The list may go on, and you may have other reasons to switch to Salesforce and hire a Salesforce Commerce Cloud consultant. Let’s discuss what they will do after joining your team.

Tasks of a Salesforce Commerce Cloud Consultant

Salesforce is a leading customer relationship management (CRM) solution in the world that helps businesses manage customers’ data and provide a better shopping experience. This software-as-a-service (SaaS) provides plenty of services, such as ecommerce platforms, customer service, and ITSM solutions, marketing tools, business analytics, and so on. 

Read more: Salesforce Pricing Plans: A Guide to Choose the Solution That’s Worth Your Money

The products they offer are low-code, meaning that the business team doesn’t need engineering degrees to access and set up basic features. The problem starts when the basic features aren’t enough to cover the business needs. That’s one of the cases when companies hire Salesforce consultants to do the hard work.

Whether you hire an in-house Salesforce consultant for your company or choose an outsourcing/outstaffing vendor that provides you with specialists on an ad-hoc project basis, you need to know what to expect from the specialists. Here are their typical responsibilities and tasks.

• Creating and managing project plans. Salesforce consultants are responsible for creating and managing the tech side of the projects on Salesforce. For example, if your business starts data migration from your previous CRM, a Salesforce Commerce Cloud consultant will be in charge of planning it all from the tech perspective.
• Customer relationship management. B2C, B2B, or both, the consultant will supervise and configure the functions of the platform so that the administrators can further fill it with the relevant content. 
• Business process planning. Salesforce consultants perform analyses and audits to evaluate and plan internal processes and estimate where Salesforce Cloud implementation could have a crucial impact.
• User and employee support. They supervise and support site admins and users in their journey with the Salesforce-based tools. Salesforce Commerce Cloud consultants process tasks and queries from the IT departments and customer support officers when they have issues with Salesforce performance.
• Technical staff management. Salesforce consultants supervise and manage the technical team on the client’s end during Salesforce implementation to make sure that the client’s existing infrastructure works seamlessly with cloud solutions.
• Product testing control. The consultants participate in manual and automated testing of Salesforce components and analyze the performance and UX to improve the solutions before launching them to the public.
• Staff training. Salesforce consultants train the client’s team to effectively use all Salesforce features, report issues, and fix the most common ones independently. 

If your Salesforce Commerce Cloud consultant turns out to have other skills like coding, they can also combine the aforementioned tasks with others. But let’s explain why as an ecommerce business owner, you want to have this specialist onboard. 

Why Do You Need Salesforce Consultants?

In-house or project-based, a SFCC specialist is a valuable part of the tech team for your business. Here are a few benefits of hiring Salesforce consultants.

Take your business to the next level

Hiring a Salesforce Commerce Cloud consultant, especially if you are just transiting to this solution, is a must if you want to set up a robust infrastructure or scale your existing one. Skilled experts will develop an efficient plan and strategy, implement the chosen solution, expand the functionalities needed to work with your customer and their data smartly, and solidify the tech basis for your further plans.

Receive business-specific solutions faster

Another reason why hiring a Salesforce CC consultant makes sense is that you can always tailor the solution to your company’s and clients’ specific needs. While Salesforce offers ready-to-use products that don’t require hard coding skills, they might not have the necessary functionality. This is where professional Salesforce-certified consultants step in.

With them on your side, you will be able to roll out a uniquely configured commerce solution that will give you an advantage over your competitors faster and cheaper than if you order a custom from-scratch development.

Manage your sales chain with high efficiency

The sale itself is just one of the many activities along the sales chain (or sales pipeline) — it also includes lead generation, customer acquisition, reactivation, etc. Salesforce has plenty of solutions that help you keep the focus on the whole sales pipeline and manage the activities from one place. For example, their Customer 360 is a great solution for managing customer relationships and tracking changes in real-time.

Evaluate your processes and strategies 

You may have an epic idea about Salesforce implementation and already know that it’s the CRM solution you need. Salesforce consultants can evaluate whether your plan will work with the existing ecommerce architecture and find space for improvement. A few technical details can affect the budget tremendously, so their opinion on the ideation and strategic planning phase will keep you down-to-earth. 

Understand the needs of your customers

To know your customers’ needs is to provide them with products that solve their problems and keep them loyal to your brand. Since the clients’ demands and preferences grow and change lightning-fast, your business should spot the changes faster than your competition. 

With Salesforce Marketing Cloud consultants, your business will get access to the tools and software that give you a 360-degree overview of your customer buying patterns, habits, and other insights you can act on when making strategic decisions. The result? Always relevant, customer-centered, personalized approach at every customer touchpoint.

Stay technically relevant

Having a dedicated specialist that can implement any Salesforce solution when needed is gold. And quite literally, as it saves your time and money. Imagine you already have an implemented Salesforce tool, and your customers report bugs or the team suddenly loses access to the feature. Here’s what happens next. 

Your customers will have a terrible shopping experience (which will result in sales drops and them switching to another seller), and the team will have a performance bottleneck that grows bigger every hour. By the time you find a Salesforce engineer that fits your needs and budget, you will surely waste a lot of time and lose a few clients who won’t come back or recommend you.

Hiring a Salesforce consultant allows you to solve issues fast, maintain high performance of your Salesforce cloud, and deliver a positive customer experience daily.

Implement Salesforce updates seamlessly

Salesforce issues new updates and schedules maintenance regularly. But if your website has a complex infrastructure with multiple integrations, you need to make sure the updates work well with one another. With a Salesforce consultant by your side, you can rest assured that new features and functionalities are available to your company and clients as soon as Salesforce publishes them.

Forecast sales and mitigate security risks with smart analytics and reporting

If you do business, you know that it comes with risks. It’s the speed of reaction, flexibility, and risk management plan that make a huge difference to whether your business can withstand the pressure. And timely analytics is essential here to forecast things and prepare a plan B.

Salesforce consultants help develop a risk management plan and a framework for predicting sales based on users’ and market data. They will also set up reporting tools so you can understand the performance, spot weaknesses, and assess the success of your marketing campaigns. 

Inviting a Salesforce specialist to your team is, undoubtedly, a win-win situation. Let’s talk about what you should do to hire the best talent.

How to Hire a Salesforce Commerce Cloud Consultant

Hiring an IT professional has its own peculiarities that business owners and HR managers should know to avoid costly mistakes and high staff turnover. Follow these steps to ensure a smooth hiring process.

Set tech & business goals

Setting clear and achievable business and tech goals will help streamline and narrow the candidates’ pool. Here are a few questions that will help you define your business targets:

• What is your current business state and needs? 
• What are your present KPIs and strategic goals?
• Which tech difficulties have you encountered recently?
• What is your business strategy for the future and how does your Salesforce engineer fit in?

By answering these questions, you will clearly understand what your business needs a Salesforce consultant for and create an image of the ideal candidate you should seek.

Check Salesforce certifications

After you have screened and shortlisted candidates, you should double-check their Salesforce certifications and that they are authorized by the Salesforce company to provide quality services. Now, here’s the thing: the company has a lot of certificates (Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ), Platform App Builder, Marketing Cloud Administrator, etc.) In the case of their ecommerce product, look for certified B2C Commerce Developers, B2B Commerce Developers, and Administrators. 

Arrange technical assignment and interview to test the candidate’s expertise

You may want to check that everything written in the CV is actually true, and nothing works better than giving a candidate a technical task and arranging a technical interview with a pro. Here’s an example of interview questions you may want to use as a reference. But when it comes to a technical task, it better be designed and tailored to the tasks that may occur in your IT environment. 

It will be an advantage if a candidate also has certifications of completion of IT-related courses, especially in web design, cloud engineering, and related programming languages and frameworks (Apex, C#, Java, SOQL, SOSL, Visualforce, Aura framework, etc).

Pay attention to communication

Trust us: you want to find Salesforce consultants that are capable of communicating effectively with the team and clients. And it’s not only about the knowledge of English (which is important) but about how the applicant communicates throughout the first stages of the hiring process. If someone doesn’t respond within a reasonable time or is late with paperwork and portfolio submission, it’s probably a red flag unless an explanation is provided.

Request portfolio & testimonials

Your business needs skilled and experienced Salesforce consultants that can prove their expertise with related cases and portfolios. You can request them and see whether the applicant was involved in the work awaiting them at your company. And here you should know that some cases might be NDA-protected, which means the candidates may not disclose the company or project details.

Do the final interview

After you have collected and processed all the information you received from the applicant, it’s time to arrange the final interview with the company’s HR and learn more about them. You may ask about their expectations, tell them about the corporate culture and your expectations, inquire about the optimal salary, and so on. 

Sign the contract

When you have a deal with the most suitable applicant, you may proceed to signing the job contract, indicating the important clauses for your company (NDA, data processing and protection, trade secrets, etc.). Make sure you have a solid, lawyer-reviewed contract and be ready that they may ask to show it to their lawyers, too. It’s also worth walking through the most important conditions, so you both understand the rights and responsibilities that it entails.

Now you know the basics of hiring a Salesforce consultant. Let’s see how much you should spare in your budget for employing one.

How much does it cost to hire a Salesforce consultant?

Hourly rates and salaries of Salesforce consultants vary greatly and depend on the following factors:

• SFCC consultant experience
• Country/state of residence
• Programming skills
• Knowledge of niche markets and technologies
• Available certifications
• Industry 

The price will also depend on the kind of Salesforce specialist you’re looking for. For example, a freelancer Salesforce Administrator can charge $85-115/hour in the US, while a Salesforce Marketing Cloud Developer will work for $100-145/hour. 

Here’s the average Salesforce developer salary in the USA, according to Payscale: 

Apparently, this sum will also include the costs of onboarding, sick leaves, vacations, insurance, and other employee-related expenses. With outsourcing, you can trim down these hiring costs and get the same quality of work.

Read more about the differences of hiring in-house vs outsourcing: Building an Ecommerce Team: A Best Practice Guide in 2022 

Another way to save money on hiring is to go offshore and find a Salesforce Commerce Cloud consultant in Europe. Because the cost of living varies from that of the US, the engineers in Europe will charge you less and will still deliver the best results for your team. 

Here’s what Salesforce consultants can charge for their services in Europe: 

You may also hire outstaff/outsource specialists from other countries and save your money for high-quality services. Here’s what other countries offer, according to Salary Expert:

Let’s see where you can find Salesforce Commerce Cloud consultants.

Where to find the best Salesforce consultants?

You can find Salesforce consultants on:

• Freelance websites (Upwork, Guru, Freelancer, etc.)
• Job search platforms (Jooble, Glassdoor, etc.)
• Through LinkedIn, developer marketplace (AppExchange)
• Conferences (Dreamforce)
• Developer community meetings
• Facebook groups
• By reference

The choice of where to find one depends on who you are looking for and how much time you have to properly select, interview, and onboard before they jump into their work. 

And there is another option — to hire an experienced Salesforce consultant(s) from an outsource tech vendor like Elogic. Here’s what makes us a reliable partner:

• All our Salesforce developers have relevant certifications and experience, proven by references, portfolios, and case studies we can share
• We guarantee a high quality of work because we know that’s what our employees deliver. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have a reputation of a go-to IT vendor and praising testimonials. Read what our clients said about us on Clutch, TrustPilot, GoodFirms, and DesignRush
• We can assist you with organizing independent testing of our developers for you to rest assured they have the skills needed for your project
• We’re experienced players in the ecommerce field, helping dozens of clients globally to solve their business challenges online. Here are a few cases we’re proud to show.

We understand that your business needs will differ from the needs of companies we worked with, and because we’re an all-in-one ecommerce vendor, we provide any and all services needed for the ecommerce company to transform and improve its presence in the digital realm. 

Final thoughts

Hiring a qualified, experienced, and skilled Salesforce consultant is a lengthy and resource-consuming process. It involves thorough research, in-depth technical skills evaluation, and an understanding of the applicant’s needs. If you want to save time and hire a professional Salesforce consultant fast, don’t hesitate to contact Elogic. 

With proper experience in developing ecommerce products, we know how to build them from scratch and how to make ready-to-configure solutions fit specific business environments. 

Let’s talk about your project and provide you with the expert, who will take care of the Salesforce infrastructure for you and ensure the system is ready to back your business strategies!

Frequently Asked Questions

What can I ask a Salesforce consultant during an interview?

During the technical interview, it’s desired that you have a team lead or Salesforce specialist to be present at the interview, as they can ask specific questions regarding Salesforce consulting, development, and integration. Here’s an example of interview questions you may want to use as a reference.

However, you can always ask about their experience (with references and portfolio) of working on Salesforce-related projects, inquire about certifications, and overall developer experience. It will help you assess the applicant’s hard and soft skills.

What skills are required for a Salesforce consultant?

Salesforce skills are must-haves for your ideal applicant. It would be a great advantage is they are also well-versed in web design, cloud engineering, and related programming languages and frameworks (Apex, C#, Java, SOQL, SOSL, Visualforce, Aura framework, etc.)

How long should the trial period be for a Salesforce consultant?

It usually depends on the results the applicant shows during the probation period. Ideally, it takes 1-2 months or one completed project to understand whether this person is a good fit for business. 

Why hire Salesforce Commerce Cloud consultants at Elogic?

Hiring Salesforce consultants at Elogic spares your time and effort in finding an ideal professional. We have already tested their skills and can guarantee they can complete any Salesforce tasks for your project. Plus, since they are not only Salesforce developers, you can benefit from other software engineering skills they have.