Land your First Salesforce Job with Expert Advice from Bradley Rice

Welcome to Salesforce Radio, your destination for insights, news, and community connections within the dynamic Salesforce ecosystem!

In episode 5, Ben Miller chats with Bradley Rice, owner of Talent Stacker. Bradley’s consultancy helps people across all industries land a job in the Salesforce ecosystem.

Bradley has many years of Salesforce experience and loads of advice to jumpstart your employment journey. Keep reading for all the highlights from this podcast, and find out what Bradley thinks are the biggest Salesforce trends in 2024!

Ben: Bradley Rice, welcome to Salesforce Radio. It’s a pleasure to speak with you today. As a way of introduction, I will mention that you are one of the main advocates for Salesforce admins starting out and for those who have been in the ecosystem for a couple of years.

So, it’s nice to have you on today and I’m excited to have this conversation!

Bradley: It’s a pleasure being here! It’s always fun to talk to the Salesforce ecosystem about what we are seeing, the trends, and the Salesforce career space.

The last 12 months have been interesting for career paths. You used to be able to dive in and land a job. But now you have to go toe-to-toe a bit.

It has become more exciting for career seekers, as it’s interesting to put your skills to the test and demand your spot.

Ben: I have seen you post a lot about your past journey. I would love to hear about your path into tech, Salesforce, and how Talent Stacker came to be.

Bradley: I’ll give you a quick rundown. I’ve got crazy long versions of this that I have accidentally spilled out. So, I’ll do better to consolidate it for you.

My Salesforce career started when I came out of college. I did well learning in that environment. I’m an auditory learner, so if I paid attention in class, I would do okay if a lecturer covered all topics.

I graduated with degrees in economics and education. My long-term goal was to be a high school teacher who taught economics because I enjoyed personal finance.

When I left school, I thought I would land a job. I was ready and completed a one-year unpaid internship through local schools. However, in 2011, I could not find a job. Unfortunately, teaching jobs were not as available as they are today.

So, I graduated college and applied to every school within sixty miles of my home in West Georgia. I emailed every principal of every school board in the local districts. I tried everything to get their attention. I got one response, and it was to say, “We are not looking for anybody right now, but we will keep you on the list.“

I had to pivot and took a job making less than eight dollars an hour. I worked at a local bank in the operations department doing financial advising. However, this “advising” was not advice but whatever the department said. The guidance was not based on my actual abilities or understanding of a market.

I did not know what was happening or how to get a job. So, I then applied for anything and everything around me. I ended up getting a Salesforce junior admin job. I did not know what Salesforce was. But I had a lot of great mentors who said to stick it out.

I stuck it out, and things started to click after nine months. I felt like I got Salesforce. I could do this job and see how the dots are connecting. This was long before Trailhead, so I had no training. That was the journey for me and I definitely had great mentorship. People had told me this is a career. It’s not just a job.

A couple of jobs later, I moved up into a Solution Architect role with a consulting firm. I made great money there – six figures. That was awesome for me at the age of 24 years old. I then started my own consultancy when I was 27, and when I turned 31, I started Talent Stacker.

It’s been this journey of going from junior admin to solution architect to starting my own consultancy. Eventually, I gave that up to lean in and help people start Salesforce careers. 

Talent Stacker began as a passion project to make a few bucks on the side. I ran this Salesforce consulting firm to help other people land jobs. It went way better than expected, and it was rewarding for me to help people in that aspect.

Ben: I have some questions. So, you wanted to be a teacher. Was there ever a point where you considered learning code or high-tech? And, when you were a junior Salesforce admin, what did it feel like you were doing? What did you think the job was?

Bradley: Number 1, tech wasn’t on my radar. I wasn’t a tech person. For context, I grew up on a cattle farm and got my first computer when I was 17. I only used the computer between 17 and 21 to do schoolwork in college.

Tech was part of my life, but I was not latched on to it. I was considering going back to school and getting a master’s degree. Everyone says a master’s is the new bachelor’s, and you can’t get a job if you don’t have one.

Ultimately, I decided not to study because I was applying for all these jobs and had a shot with Greenway Medical Technologies in West Georgia.

The interviewer called me and asked me one question. What is a business process? Describe it to me.

I did my best. I thought I blew it, but the interviewer called me and said he didn’t have a problem teaching people technology. He has a problem teaching people how businesses function and what they need. He mentioned that I did a much better job answering that question than many technical people.

He did not see a problem with teaching me the technical side and was keen to put me on some material, give me a few books, and let me shadow their team. However, he did not want to teach me how to generate and nurture leads, get leads into a sales funnel, support customers, or upsell to them.

He was glad I already understood those things. Some of that knowledge came from my business degree, which took me down the path of getting into the right job with the right person.

And to answer your second question, what did I think I was doing? I was confused. They hired me to be a Salesforce developer. We had the orientation call, during which they mapped out where everybody was in the company.

Only through good onboarding practice did I understand my role. I shadowed the developer on one day, the analyst the next day, and the admin on another day. I would also use a day for training and another for attending meetings with the director of business services. We would meet with various teams like marketing, accounting, or sales for an hour.

I didn’t understand the lingo, and after a few months, I was dying. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I was sitting in meetings, not understanding a word that had been said.

Slowly but surely, it came together. I got my admin certification, so I started to understand Salesforce. The senior admin still in the Salesforce space taught me a lot, too. She would pull out a marker board occasionally when she could tell I couldn’t understand something.

I remember her teaching me about record types and page layouts. She would explain these topics to me, and those lightbulb moments carried me forward.

The certification gave me confidence, as other professionals have the same credentials. After nine months, I realized that I could handle tickets by myself. I could ask the senior a few questions, but I realized I could do this. If I just kept my head down, I can excel at this and not just have a job.

Finally, I realized what we were doing at work, but it took a little while to figure out how all that went together.

Ben: That is interesting. One of the things I am hearing is that there was an advantage of joining a large organization where you had access to resources and people.

Today, we see that businesses are looking for a Salesforce admin, and they want this person to have all the requirements and years of experience. But in reality, they don’t have another team supporting the admin.

So, after that, did you end up staying with larger companies?

Bradley: I want to touch on one thing you mentioned, which is absolutely true. Companies try to hire talent but have been burned so many times.

I get why they put three years of experience on entry-level talent. It’s because of how often they have hired someone entry-level with a certification. However, the person does not know how to function in the business or what to do in Salesforce.

I’ll tell you an aside story. Me and my daughter play video games. The game that we are playing now is Fortnite. We have been doing really well and playing online with other people at different skill levels. We played in our first tournament a couple of weeks ago and she was scared.

I told her to play the way she usually does:

• Play the way that you have been trained
• Use your strategies
• Play how you like

But this was a live tournament. It was the real thing!

The reason why this story comes up, is because when you are working in Trailhead, you’re doing your thing. You get your certification and you feel so good about yourself. You’re on LinkedIn and community groups and everybody is lifting you up. Everyone is patting you on the back.

Then you get into the live environment and hope nobody asks you to do anything. Hopefully you can figure this out without anyone finding out you don’t know what you’re doing. All these things come to mind.

But once you put yourself in the fire you realize you can be humbled. Maybe there is more to Salesforce than anyone could have imagined.

I think what happens is that a lot of professionals come in and get that first job. Then suddenly they get scared and they don’t want to speak up. They don’t want to raise their hand. They don’t want to be the one to push back on an idea or a request. Or when somebody calls them and asks for insight as a Salesforce administrator to explain how to implement new processes, they are not ready for the conversation.

This is why we created Talent Stacker. The typical person who graduates from our program are at that one and a half year mark, like someone who:

• Trained on Trailhead
• Got a certification
• Joined a community group
• Landed a job

It’s a very different entry-level person. I will still call them entry-level, but we noticed that the entry-level market got tougher to compete in. Companies need qualified professionals to enter their teams.

“Easy” is not always good for the market, and we need it to be a little more competitive so we can get qualified talent. I wanted to touch on that for a moment. Please remind me about the question you were leading me into because, obviously, by now, I have forgotten.

Ben: I completely forgot it, too. I’m thinking of other things. Right now, I think it’s easy to forget your purpose in the Salesforce ecosystem.

As someone who sells a solution for Salesforce, the technical people sometimes have a hard time translating how the solution will help the end user. That is the purpose of the job, but sometimes people will forget that the solution they are looking to solve is a real business solution and it’s not just something technical.

If you get stuck in Trailhead or the back end of Salesforce, you can lose sight of what is going on in the business.

Obviously, you are not going to understand that from learning Salesforce. That’s something you have to learn somewhere else. Whether it’s your family store or school.

One of the cool things that I learned when I joined the ecosystem in 2020 was seeing all these success stories of people coming from the service industry and how their skills were able to transfer.

Bradley: You are exactly right. With those transfers we saw many people coming out of healthcare and education. We have recently seen many people coming out from a nonprofit background, but you can think of anything.

For example, you can take a nurse who transferred to a Salesforce professional. When you put them on a Healthcare project and let them ask a hospital team questions about how to implement Healthcare Cloud for the company, you will see the person’s ability to carry that conversation and understand nuances of what is going on there.

Half the battle is learning what a business actually does. I worked for a business called Liberty Tax, and it wasn’t even about the taxes. It was about operating a massive group of companies that were spread out across all these owners across the country.

I worked in software, manufacturing, and healthcare. I like what Salesforce has done here in the last few years, which has made the consultancies more industry-specific. They separated the Clouds to drive specifics into the industry.

I have seen people from a nonprofit background jump into consultancy companies and give value immediately. They have a couple of certifications and at least a 100 hours of project work. Ultimately, they have a background in fundraising and donations, the struggles of nonprofits, and what they have seen organizations do really well. They have incredible industry knowledge to bring to the table.

Ben: It’s interesting that you say that, especially with the nonprofit piece. I speak to many people who are admins for nonprofits.

One of the cool things I have seen is people going from the for-profit to the nonprofit sectors and vice versa with the amount of knowledge they can bring.

It shows you how flexible Salesforce is. It can be used in many different ways to support business processes.

Many times, we are not even talking about salespeople, right? Salespeople are not the main use case for Salesforce at this point.

What do you see in 2024? What do you think the trends are in the Salesforce space from a technical perspective? Where do you think things are going to go this year?

Bradley: In 2024, 70% of talent will go to internal companies hiring directly for their Salesforce solutions, and 30% of our talent will go to Salesforce consultancies.

If I had to guess why, I would say budgets are tighter. Companies are more thoughtful of their money. I think, typically, they would have gone through a consultancy and paid the rates for services. But, because things were tighter, they looked for alternatives. One of those alternatives was onboarding and training internally for their Salesforce talent. We have seen quite a bit of that happen.

That is one of the things we noticed is the cause of another massive trend. This trend is throwing off a lot of Salesforce thought-leaders or influencers. This is the fact that we are not seeing the same titles we saw in 2021.

In the first half of 2023 and before, you could see five to seven titles for very typical roles:

Suddenly, a massive shift occurred because consultancies had a more formatted naming convention. They know how to structure the roles to operate their projects. They hire a bunch of the same people, like ten admins.

But, the internal roles are wild. I don’t even know how they come up with these names sometimes. We will see a finance company call their business analysts – finance analysts. And now, even on LinkedIn, they are not a Salesforce business analyst but a financial analyst. This can be misconstrued in different ways.

Those are two major trends that we have seen.

Ben: From your perspective, the requirements for these jobs are pretty much the same for the different roles.

Bradley: I would say 80% of the training that we do in 2024 compared to 2022 is the same. It’s simulated projects, interview prep, job search strategies, certification training, and workshops to get as much hands-on experience inside of Salesforce.

But at the end of the day, it’s effectively the same training process, resulting in a massive skew of different job titles. The only reason we have come up with it is that we are seeing the same shift from consulting to internal.

Ben: How do you teach people to find appropriate roles for themselves with all these new naming conventions?

Bradley: We have started to post our program statistics every single month along with the outcomes like:

• Average number of jobs landed
• Average salaries
• Jobs landed by gender.

We try to break things down to keep a pulse on the state of the entry-level ecosystem.

We now also share the unique job titles for those roles, whether those are in offices, fully remote, or hybrid roles.

By sharing this data, I hope people will open their minds on how to search for jobs. In the program, we teach people how to search for a variety of keywords, dive into job descriptions, and keyword search that description for the word “Salesforce.”

Ben: That is an interesting method you guys are using. So, now you are helping people who have decided this is the path they want to take. How do you pitch Salesforce to them?

Bradley: That is pretty easy for me because I was involved in finance communities. I got deep into these groups that focused on lifestyle around finance and early retirement.

By spending time with these individuals, many were looking for a higher paying job so they could retire even earlier. They were looking to fast-track that process, like working more to make more.

Most of the people we speak to at Talent Stacker are unaware of Salesforce. We go and talk to people in different industries.

Many people with training programs like ours sit in Salesforce communities all day long trying to convince Salesforce-aware people to buy their program. However, there is a massive market of people who have never heard of Salesforce. We spend more time finding people who are Salesforce-unaware to listen to our message.

So what do we say? At first, we sounded like a scam sales job. Our talk is about explaining that entry-level salaries start at 70,000 dollars, you don’t need a tech background, you don’t need a college degree, and you can come in and do most of the training for free online, especially if you want the DIY approach.

It sounds way to good to be true right? If you are in the Salesforce space, you probably work from home, make more than 70,000 dollars per year, and feel respected at work.

These three things alone are far beyond what most people in the world get to do for a career. So, yeah our jobs sound too good to be true for most people. Telling people what we do for work sounds like an absolute scam and there’s got to be a catch. But, it’s not. It’s just what we do at work.

Ben: I really appreciate that and the idea of choosing the “hard.” That took me back to starting my role at Titan. One of the conditions was that I had to become a Salesforce admin. I said, okay, I’ll do it, whatever it takes!

I was nervous to pass that first exam without any real-life experience, but I was really privileged to do the exam as part of my job.

It was a great feeling to pass the exam. Then, you have to keep getting more skills. That is one of the cool things about this idea of continuous learning.

The culture of continuous learning and growing in Salesforce is amazing. Resources are always available to get people ready to innovate and keep pushing the envelope.

One of the things that I love about the industry and ecosystem is its value. We are not going to stop learning!

Bradley: You are right! When I started 13 years ago, Workflow was the only declarative automation perspective. Then, Process Builder came out around 2015. Switching from Workflow to Process Builder was incredible, but you had to re-learn everything. At the same time, you were switching from Classic to Lightning, and many transitions had to be taken with an entire interface overhaul.

Then, Salesforce switched from Process Builder to Flow. That’s just one example. So many features and functionality are changing with every release, three times a year.

Another big thing we see in 2024 is a big AI push from Salesforce. I’m a typical millennial. I want everything immediately.

I am really excited about that. I have no doubt that at the beginning of 2025, we will see more general availability of some of this functionality. My bet is that we see a lot of those generic roles like Salesforce admin, business analyst, and developer re-emerging. If you want to be in demand, you will have to be that person with a skill set that includes AI functionality layered on top of a role.

Ben: We are all excited. When I speak to people at events, AI is at the top of our minds. Especially in terms of what it will be like and where we will see that return on investment.

A question for you! What would be your dream Salesforce project right now?

Bradley: I enjoy working on brand-new implementations. I’m not a big fan of enhancements.

I want to help an organization that is local to my area, but I need to be aligned with their mission as a company. I have got to the point in my career where I don’t want to do work just for money. I rather lean into a project to do the best job that inspires me to create the finest solution for a company.

I have also gone beyond Salesforce. I enjoy marketing and sales, but I only like selling and marketing things I believe in. I enjoy email copy, writing, or thinking about how emails can create scalable sales and marketing processes. I also like getting my hands dirty inside the marketing automation platforms.

Ben: I appreciate that you have got to a place in your career where you can see things from a higher perspective. Before we wrap up, if someone would want to contact you to learn more about Talent Stacker, where should they go?

Bradley: Search Salesforce for Everyone online to find our podcast. If you are new to the Salesforce ecosystem, check episodes 1-8. Those are a walk-through of how to land a Salesforce job.

Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn by searching for Bradley Rice.

If you want to start your Salesforce career, head to talentstacker.com/now. You can try out the free 5-day challenge. It’s five days of figuring out if a Salesforce career is the right fit for you.

Ben: Bradley, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for joining Salesforce Radio.

*Note: This article is an edited transcript of the interview with Bradley Rice.

We hope to see you soon!

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