Salesforce Admin vs. Salesforce Developer, Which One Does Your Business Need?

If you want to enjoy the great benefits that Salesforce offers to your organization’s external and internal customers, please pay close attention. The process requires careful work with specialized personnel in various roles. These include Salesforce administrators and developers, who play a key role in creating, implementing, and maintaining these solutions.

Let us start by accepting that, although both roles share responsibilities, their respective scopes are well defined. At the same time, there is a porous border between the praxis of one and the other. This is because the possibilities of the declarative language of administrators are progressively approaching those of the programming language of developers. In small companies, this difference tends to become even more diffuse since the tasks of managing clients and creating programmatic applications can fall on a single person. I will clarify this tongue twister for you!

Salesforce Admin vs. Salesforce Developer: What Are Their Roles?

A Salesforce admin plays a vital role in successfully deploying the apps in your organization. They are the ideal link between technology and your business, since they are the one who will help you implement the solutions that best suit your needs. In general terms, a Salesforce admin is in charge of managing and administering the configuration of the CRM, as well as ensuring the application in practice of the appropriate services of the platform, in order to obtain ingenious solutions and improve the integral standards of the company. Additionally, they are responsible for making minor declarative changes and managing new versions in the production environment. They must also support existing Salesforce instances. An admin does not require a deep understanding of integrations as they do not configure any functionalities.

A Salesforce developer, as their name suggests, is involved in the exciting world of development. He or she is responsible for building functionality in a sandbox with Visualforce or Apex to be sent to the administrator and scheduled for deployment. To do this, they are dedicated to designing and developing codes, as well as specific functionalities, in order to offer personalized and optimal solutions for your organization. They are the ones who conceive new functionality to enable successful solutions with Salesforce.

Salesforce Admin vs. Salesforce Developer: Responsibilities

The responsibilities of a Salesforce administrator can be grouped into:

Click and not code

• Customization and Development: Using the configuration menu, adding picklist values, modifying page layouts, creating assignment rules, and more.
• Generation of reports and dashboards: They are responsible for creating Salesforce reports and dashboards to concentrate and visualize key information that optimizes both the operation and decision-making.
• Data Cleanup: Removes duplicate contacts or accounts by mass updating or merging them. In addition, perform data import and export using specialized wizards.
• Security and access to data: Guarantees the security of user accounts and access to data.
• Workflows: Create, manage, monitor, and regulate workflows in order to maintain the correct execution of projects.

Training

• Continuous Documentation: Provides continuous documentation to colleagues and clients by updating existing Salesforce documentation. This allows the documentation to be kept up-to-date with the latest Salesforce releases and enhancements.
• User training: Deals with the training and training of beginner users in the CRM platform.

Maintenance and support

• Support for the continuous development of the system: Communicates with clients and colleagues about new developments, support, and other topics.
• Support: Be a part of the support service together with Salesforce developers, other related profiles, and specialists from your own company.

As for the Salesforce developer, their responsibilities can be grouped into:

Construction & application logic

• Design and development: Takes care of building a Salesforce solution for a specific organization. This includes writing the source code, creating Visualforce pages, creating triggers, and other elements based on customer demands.
• Integration: Is responsible for controlling the adaptability of the many Salesforce APIs in order to achieve the proper integration of all processes and information in both directions. They must ensure that all systems and applications can communicate with each other efficiently.

Testing and implementation

• Testing in sandbox environments: Deals with testing the development of a functionality or solution in a provisional sandbox before its implementation. This guarantees that the new functionality will operate as projected and will not interfere with other existing processes.
• Bug Fixes: Handles bugs and bug fixes to ensure a smooth and seamless launch for users. They collaborate with the Salesforce administrator and the QA (Quality Assurance) specialists so that they can verify, through specialized tools, the usability and strength of each solution.

Documentation

• Continuous Documentation: This is a shared responsibility with the Salesforce administrator. In this case, the developer must provide ongoing documentation of the entire development phase. Thus, the administrator is prepared for any eventuality of support/interaction with the client.

Salesforce Admin vs. Salesforce Developer: Required Skills

While the Salesforce admin doesn’t need to have great programming skills, there is one set of skills that every admin should have:

• Strong knowledge of the company’s organizational structure and business process logic in order to build strong relationships with key external and internal audiences.
• Project management and analytical capabilities to adjust to the changes and customizations to be introduced.
• Excellent presentation skills such as oral communication and gestures to achieve a motivating approach when dealing with various types of audiences: distributors, customers, partners, users, and others.

On the other hand, a Salesforce developer must have technically sound knowledge. The skills they must have are:

• Mastery of Salesforce and related technologies to come up with optimal solutions. JavaScript, PHP, .Net, and XML are similar technologies that make it easy to get into the Apex and Visualforce concepts of a CRM.
• Curiosity about technology. They must be a person willing to find the best answers to a problem.
• Understanding and organic adaptation to the corporate culture of Salesforce. This promotes the implementation of the best services based on the values of a CRM.
• Patience, creativity, and a hard-working nature are requirements that allow Salesforce developers to appropriate the essence of Salesforce and transfer it to the solutions they design.

In short, both roles are not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary. At present, more and more administrators are improving themselves and learning to write code. This makes a more than subtle difference. However, they are two different roles that have their specific responsibilities and skills. SkyPlanner, as a Salesforce consulting partner, has solid experience in this field and can put, at your disposal, a work team certified by the platform in both roles. You can write to us at hello@theskyplanner.com.