This Sales Cloud Consultant certification is designed for consultants who have experience of implementing Salesforce Sales Cloud solutions, generally in a customer-facing role. The exam zones into Salesforce’s most popular and customizable product, taking a deep dive into all the features that make up the Sales Cloud and adjacent functionality.
This guide will focus on key topics, as well as the best strategy for studying and taking the exam itself. You should be prepared for a heavily scenario-based certification, and make sure to check out the Trailhead exam guide.
Who’s the Ideal Candidate?
This exam is designed for customer-facing consultants with experience of implementing Salesforce from scratch. While consulting experience is nice to have, this Sales Cloud certification is still very much applicable for Salesforce Admins who want to prove their advanced knowledge of the platform – especially those dealing with slightly more complex Salesforce implementations and requirements.
This certification might be exactly what you’re looking for if you’re aiming for a promotion, transitioning from an administrative to a consulting role, or you simply want an accreditation to go along with your expertise on the Salesforce platform.
Note: The Salesforce Administrator certification is a prerequisite – you must obtain this before registering for the Sales Cloud Consultant exam.
About the Salesforce Sales Cloud Consultant Exam
- The exam consists of 60 multiple-choice/multiple-select questions and up to five non-scored questions.
- You will have 105 minutes to complete the exam.
- The passing score is 69%.
- The exam costs $200 and retakes are $100.
- The exam can be taken online or at a testing center.
- The Salesforce Administrator credential is a prerequisite to take this exam.
Key Topics
Salesforce exams are made up of different topics, each with different weightings. The Sales Cloud Consultant certification used to be split in a higher number of categories in comparison with other Salesforce exams, but following the June 2024 update, the certification curriculum was revised, questions were updated, and the number of topics was lowered to five.
It’s important to pay attention to all of these, as while a couple of sections will make up for most of the exam questions, you should invest the time to cover all the key points in greater detail to ensure as much as possible that none of the questions will take you by surprise.
Topic Breakdown
1. Practical Application of Sales Cloud Expertise (33%)
The largest section on this exam (with approximately 20 questions) is testing the candidate’s way of applying product knowledge in the Salesforce ecosystem. The question topics are sure to cover everything from the lead stage of the process all the way through to opportunity management, quoting, and fulfilling the orders. This includes product management as well as sharing settings and mechanisms, and even multi-currency considerations.
On top of the above, this is the section for which you will have to know when custom development is needed and the appropriate situations for using AppExchange managed packages or other third party solutions and integrations rather than building in-house.
2. Sales Lifecycle (23%)
Most, if not all, questions in this section will be scenario-based and will test your knowledge, not only on the product capabilities but also on your understanding and translating business requirements and KPIs into a solution leveraging Sales Cloud functionality.
Here is where the consulting experience – for the candidates who have it – comes into play. From gathering requirements through to the production deployment, you should be familiar with (and comfortable applying) concepts that make a consulting engagement successful as well as measurable.
It should come as no surprise that, in order to ace this section of the exam, you should also know about related products such as Sales Cloud Einstein and AI functionalities, Sales Territories, Salesforce Maps, Forecasting, and when to use each of them, as well as how to best leverage the core reports and dashboards features.
Here’s why:
3. Implementation Strategies (15%)
Although there will be only nine questions in this section, in any real-life scenario, it is crucial to properly address the change management and enablement aspects of any Sales Cloud implementation. Regardless of how new and shiny the functionalities and new processes are, without properly determining the desired user experience, deployment considerations, and of course, end-user training, blockers are bound to appear. Also, don’t forget to measure the success of the project and determine which KPIs should be considered to assess the impact.
This means that you will have to be familiar with both the above concepts and the technical functionality Salesforce makes available for you and your team to achieve the implementation goals.
Here’s why:
4. Data Management (15%)
One of the key sections of this exam, and of any Salesforce implementation actually, is data management. Since all Salesforce users rely on data to complete their day-to-day tasks, how any solution or process will impact the CRM data has to be taken into account from the get-go. This section will test your knowledge of data migration and overall data quality strategies, Data Loader and Data Import Wizard, as well as potential issues such as record-level locking.
You also need to be familiar with the integration considerations when it comes to data processing and how duplicate records can be addressed and prevented.
Here’s why:
5. Consulting Practices (14%)
Once again, a section where real-life consulting experience will come in handy. Be prepared for questions about the project management lifecycle, ways of working, and methods which can ensure the success of the implementation. You are expected to be familiar not only with solutioning the business requirements but also with how to best gather, analyze, and properly prioritize them through different mechanisms.
Here’s why:
Study Strategy
The Sales Cloud certification is a popular follow-up qualification to the admin exam. As the most popular Salesforce product, it’s often the first one that professionals familiarize themselves with before exploring the other clouds.
Luckily for you, this means there is an abundance of resources out there to help you revise for this exam. As previously stated, this exam is heavily scenario-focused, as it’s designed for a consulting role that takes business requirements and translates them into a Salesforce solution. This means you need to understand the technical side, as well as the business side, and how to navigate both of them successfully.
Trailhead is a great way to get this experience, as most modules will follow a scenario, giving you exposure to the consulting skills you will need. Additionally, the dedicated Trailmix provided by Salesforce brings all the necessary resources you need under one roof. If you want to take this a step further, try completing the Superbadges available on Trailhead, as these go through more complex use cases that result in a solution touching multiple topics.
Here’s another way to keep things interesting while studying the key concepts and features. Try inventing a business with its own requirements and challenges – spin up a new Salesforce Developer Edition Org and pretend you are a B2B company with a complex sales process and reporting requirements, as well as opportunities in multiple currencies. This way, you can test out everything you need to know and learn to implement from the inside out.
Exam Strategy
To prepare for exam day, we have gathered a bunch of tips over the years to give you the best chance of passing with flying colors.
Firstly, if there are any concepts you are struggling to get to grips with, then print off a cheat sheet and try to memorize it before you take the exam – this will keep everything fresh in your memory. You could also write down the key points, depending on your learning style.
When taking the exam, pay particular attention to the question and read it through a few times. For scenario-based questions, the answer options will give you huge clues as to what the correct answer actually is. If you are taking the exam in a test center, make use of the pen and paper provided to draw out a data schema, role hierarchy, or any other diagram that will help you visualize the answer. Please note that this is not allowed during online proctored exams.
When deciding on the answer, be sure to use the process of elimination to get rid of the answers that are definitely incorrect. Salesforce likes to throw in answers that are made up of different features or just plain incorrect. They also like to throw in curveballs – features that appear to be correct but aren’t best practice. You can often work these out by focussing on standard Salesforce features that accomplish a task. For example, you could build a custom approval process with Flow, but why do this when there is a standard feature that could be used instead?
You also have a great tool at your disposal, the “Mark for review” checkbox that appears below each question. This is great if you can’t think of an answer right at that moment or if you are doubtful about your answer. At the end of the exam, you will have a chance to review the questions marked for review (as well as all others), which will give you a pretty good idea of how likely you are to have passed the test. I would always recommend going through every question if time permits. I do this on every exam and often spot mistakes I’ve made or even find the answer to another question I hadn’t yet completed.
Even if you don’t pass the exam on your first attempt, be sure to write down the topics you found most challenging – this will allow you to study further and test again. It is recommended that you schedule the retake as soon as possible to avoid disrupting the flow and prevent you from forgetting the things you don’t work with day in day out.
Similar to all other Salesforce exams, the Sales Cloud certification retake fee is half price, and you can have up to three attempts per release – as this is subject to change, make sure you check out the retake policy.
Tips
- Bookmark the official Trailhead exam guide and use this as your master revision list.
- Ensure you not only read about the features and concepts but thoroughly test them out in a Developer Org or a Trailhead Playground. This will ensure you cover all functionalities, preparing you for some very detailed questions.
- Once you feel confident with some of the modules, book your exam to give you a date to aim towards. This will give you the motivation to invest time, revise all topics, and pass the exam.
- Try out our mock exams to practice for the real thing and test for any gaps in your knowledge.
Final Thoughts
The Sales Cloud Consultant certification is great if you’re looking for a more advanced qualification that can be applied in the real world. Sales Cloud is the most popular Salesforce product. As a result, there are a lot of resources available, as well as guidance within the wider Salesforce community. And, of course, companies are always looking for qualified individuals to help them get the most out of their purchases.
If you are looking to switch roles and join a Salesforce consultancy from another background, this certification will inspire confidence. Employers will know that you have advanced knowledge of a product they will be implementing and can seamlessly translate any business requirements thrown your way into scalable technical solutions.
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