With the launch of the Salesforce Business Analyst certification, the BA role has never had so much visibility and recognition in the Salesforce community.
The Salesforce Business Analyst Virtual Summit ‘22 – the only event for and by Salesforce Business Analysts – ran from October 7-14 to help feed the ecosystem’s demand for SFBA-specific content.
This is the seventh Salesforce Business Analyst Virtual Summit run by founder Toni V. Martin, but the first with new Program Coordinator and #baba Vanessa Grant (me!). Close to 2,500 Salesforce enthusiasts registered for the summit. Below you’ll find a rundown of this year’s highlights.
Foundational Salesforce BA Skills
New this year was the addition of live sessions, which allowed registrants to chat with speakers – this made for some very interactive sessions such as “Choose Your Own BA Adventure!” run by Pei Mun Lim and Alex Warneke.
In addition to the live “Choose Your Own BA Adventure!”, there were several other sessions highlighting foundational Salesforce BA Skills:
Communication, storytelling, and collaboration were all highly emphasized skills during these sessions. Actionable advice permeated the sessions, including Amanda Perkins’ recommendation to, if possible, have a 1:1 with an end user first.
“Engaging with a key stakeholder in each ‘topic’ area will help you develop process flows and user stories prior to bringing all key players into a workshop”.
Advancing Your Salesforce Business Analyst Career
The recently released, soft skill focused Salesforce Business Analyst and Strategy Designer certifications were definitely hot topics at this year’s summit. Both were released earlier in the year and are still highly sought after by Salesforce BAs, consultants, and admins alike. IIBA certifications were touched on as well.
Besides leveraging certifications to accelerate business analyst careers, LinkedIn and interview skills were also covered extensively:
- “Introduction to IIBA – International Institute of Business Analysis” by Supriya Nagesh.
- “A Business Analyst’s Guide to the Salesforce Strategy Design Certification” by Brian Shea, who also wrote an article covering some of the same topics.
- “Certify your Business Analysis Talent and Propel your Career” by Janeen Marquardt, Vanessa Grant, and Purposeful Architect blogger, Richard Cunningham.
- “Resume and Interview AMA for Salesforce BAs” – a live session by Pallavi Agarwal.
- “TikTok Has It Wrong, What Are Hiring Managers Actually Looking For” by RevOps thought leaders and hiring managers Ben Fuller, John Knight, and James McArthur. These junior talent advocates gave some amazing tips both times they ended up running the panel for attendees such as:
- Excel is a skill you should showcase as it is a great indicator of one’s ability to do the job of a junior admin.
- Data fluency will be more important to grow your career in the future.
- The importance of growing your tech stack expertise beyond just Salesforce!
- “LinkedIn Secrets to Success for Your BA Job Search” – a highly popular session by Bradley Rice, founder of SFBA Summit sponsor Talent Stacker.
Adjacent Skills for Salesforce BAs
Business analysis skills are often leveraged in Product Owner, Solution Architect, Designer, RevOps, and other roles. BAs often end up evolving their careers in these directions or even using business analysis skills on IT projects unrelated to Salesforce.
On the other hand, BAs on Salesforce projects do find themselves having to wear hats for adjacent roles such as the designer in the absence of a dedicated designer on a project. BAs will often take on this adjacent project work as the person closest to the business stakeholders:
The SFBA Summit touched on a number of adjacent skills that could propel a BA to the next step in their career, or support their current project teams when dedicated resources are not available.
Running Better Salesforce Projects
From helpful products to Salesforce features to mapping methodologies, the Salesforce Business Analyst Virtual Summit aimed to introduce tools that would enable Salesforce BAs to do their jobs better:
- “Documenting Business Process with LucidChart” by Kyle Gause.
- “Map Out Salesforce Enterprise Architecture with Business Model Canvas” by Stuart Edeal.
- “Technical Cents to a Business Analyst” by Maham Hassan.
- “The Tool Will Not Save You: When to Automate & When to Wait” by Jessica Dimino.
- “Uplevel Your Process Mapping with UPN and Elements.cloud” by Walter Bril.
- “Introduction to Salesforce Flow for Business Analysts” by Warren Walters.
Having more tools in your toolbelt and knowing how to use them effectively allows BAs to ask better questions and to communicate complex ideas to business stakeholders.
These sessions will certainly have made a lot of Salesforce Business Analysts’ jobs easier.
Summary
The role of BA has never had so much visibility and recognition in the Salesforce community, especially following the launch of the Salesforce Business Analysis certification. The 2022 Salesforce Business Analyst Virtual Summit certainly increased the ecosystem’s demand for SFBA specific content.
For those interested in watching these great summit sessions, the replays can still be accessed with the purchase of an All Access Pass (available for $89 USD). Thanks to sponsors Elements.cloud, GridMate, and Talent Stacker.
