Behind the scenes: A day in the life of a Salesforce consultant

Behind the scenes: A day in the life of a Salesforce consultant

Working with multiple clients helped Jared Soell become a more adept Salesforce consultant. Here’s how he did it.

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Before Jared Soell entered Slippery Rock University, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to study. He’d come from a long line of educators, and he followed in their footsteps, spending his first year in school as a physical education major. 

“But after some reflection, I wasn’t sure that that was really my best path,” he said. He transferred to Thiel College, switched to study business administration, and earned his business degree. He considered law school, interning at a law firm in his last year of university. Soell even took the LSAT, and was accepted to Akron University’s School of Law. 

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But right before he went, he took a job in sales.

“I don’t know if I was scared, or enlightened, maybe,” Soell said. None of his family had been to college, and “I wanted to move ahead from where my family was,” he said. Sales was somewhere he could be successful without more education, he realized.

Despite lacking the technical background, Soell was successful using Salesforce as a salesperson. This job, at Concept, started in outside sales and then moved to sales development in the B2B space, prospecting and qualifying leads and generating opportunities for sales reps. He eventually moved to a sales development manager role. 

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Soell began helping clients began helping clients develop and follow promising leads and manage their sales territories, he explained. The company was good at leveraging technology and using it responsibly, he said, while many of the clients were focused on closing deals and working with customers—helping them with basic things like building reports, customizing their page layouts and getting started with Salesforce. 

Soell ended up as an account executive in his next job at MobyMax, as one of the first three salespeople at the company. 

“We made a great impact on how students were learning in the classroom through personalized learning software,” Soell said. He kept moving up, and eventually landed in the national sales manager role, handling the sales development and account executive teams responsible for customer acquisition. 

“I was looking for an opportunity in my career that sort of aligned with where I wanted to go in life, which was to get married and buy a home and start a family—and working from home at the time allowed me to do those three things,” Soell said.

At MobyMax, his “personal objective was to move into a sales-enablement/sales-operational position to oversee the sales team,” Soell said, “but also to have a very strong hold and own the Salesforce CRM that we were using at the time.” He was a part of developing Salesforce for the organization, designing it and building it out in a way that supported the sales and service teams at MobyMax. 

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In 2018, he implemented a remote work policy, and transitioned into “managing the forward-facing client base in communication with the department’s clients,” he said. He’s been in that position since then, and has been able to “put some more processes in place around our Salesforce practice.”

“Salesforce is really just like any CRM,” Soell explained. “It’s really just different Excel tables that are connected together through objects and relationships.” He and his team would discuss “how reports are built, and what we can do in terms of visibility and access to different records, and what sort of automation we can put behind the scenes to streamline repetitive tasks.”

“It pushed me to understand the way CRM works,” he said. During that time, he also earned his Salesforce certification.

Salesforce would get new customers that would “want to buy 20 new licenses and get their sales team using Salesforce,” Soell said. His job was as “the implementation partner to set up and design in Salesforce.”

Working with one company, alone, using Salesforce, wouldn’t have helped Soell gain knowledge of CRM as quickly as he did, he believes.

A typical day for him as a project manager focuses on “weighing our priority items that we need to get done for our clients,” he said. A big part of that is constantly evaluating the timeline. Soell wears different hats on any given day. As a Salesforce project manager, he takes a peek into where the Salesforce ecosystem can go in the future. 

“Whether you’re a junior Salesforce admin today or you’re a developer or a consultant or project manager, progress happens quicker from talking to new clients and, you know, putting on my hat of being sort of a Salesforce sales consultant to ask questions and understand what a business’s pain points are and how we could potentially help them to working in the more traditional project manager’s face,” he said, “to then putting on my technical hat and being able to jump in as an analyst or a consultant or architecting new solutions, new objects or new automation.”

“That’s really the root reason that it’s exciting to be in this space,” Soell said. “Because if you’re working for a company as their dedicated Salesforce admin, rest assured, you’re always going to have new products, new options and new features and functionality to introduce to the team and to improve their use of the platform.”

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