How Salesforce Answers helped me improve my consulting skills?
By: Fodil Boudjedien
Tags: Salesforce Community, Salesforce, Trailblazercommunity, Answers

Most of salesforce newcomers ask this questions: How can I get Experience? How Can I get a job without having any kind of Experience? I got my First certification but why can’t I be hired?

Well, One of many ways to get experience is to put yourself in front of real case problems and to try solving them using Read-Ask-Search Method.

Salesforce answers is a great place where you can get a wide range of a handful of experience by solving others’ real problems.

What is SalesForce Answers?

Salesforce Answers is a Forum-like website where trailblazers can ask questions or answer to others. Those questions treat different subjects, from real-case problems to Superbadge questions & Certification Preparation Questions.

How to use it?

You can filter the posts according to the category that you want.

You can also filter according to the status of the question (Unanswered, Unresolved, Resolved, or All)

Unanswered: are the questions that have no answer. Unresolved Questions: are the ones who have got answers but no answer has been marked as Best Answer, the Resolved Questions are the ones who have an answer marked as the Best Answer.

For me, I select Unanswered Questions and I sort them by Date Posted (like the green rectangle).

For every question I came through: I check if that question talks about a product I knew and which I can replicate its steps on my developer org and check it. In the case where I can’t follow the same steps, I can search for the same problem on Search Engine, and then if I have found any solution to it, I’ll post my answer.

Why Should I spend time on Answering other questions?

“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn”.

Improve your communication skills

The first skill a salesforce consultant should have is Efficient Communication, After you solve the problem you should deliver it to the client in a precise, concise, and easy way so he can understand it and reimplement it correctly on his org.

Communication skills belong to key skills of a Business Analyst or Consultant

Improve your Problem-Solving:

In this Forum, you will find Questions from different categories (Real Business Cases, Trailhead Challenges), from different levels of difficulty from the easiest to most difficult, from different products: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud,…etc.

Whereas Trailhead problem challenges are more well explained, structured, and adapted to new learners, Real Problems are different: they lack some information, not structured, and it is hard to figure out the right solution. So we need research, analysis of the problem, and Solution Design to come up with a suitable solution.

Learning from Salesforce Experts:

The platform has also the option to follow questions, this feature allows me to receive an email on every answer posted beneath those questions. Sometimes, I came across questions about interesting problems but I don’t know how to resolve them so I click on the follow button, in order to receive notification about those problems, that helps me to learn to solve that kind of problem and also to learn How other salesforce Experts who answer on those questions.

Improve your Trailblazer profile :

All the activity you have made on that platform is counted in your trailblazer profile in the Trailblazer Community Activity: The Total Number of answers, The Total Number of best answers you’ve got, and the Total Number of questions you’ve posted. All of that make your Answer Rank.

Trailblazer Community Activity

And you can be one of the Trailblazer community stars

Other platforms with the same spirit :

There are also other platforms which follow the same principles as salesforce answers, such as :

Salesforce developer forum: It is a forum dedicated to the development fields including apex, Visual force, lightning components, LWC, Integration ….

Salesforce stack exchange: It is a forum similar to StackOverflow but dedicated to Salesforce Related topics.