Salesforce Consultant salaries are a hot topic in the ever-growing Salesforce economy, with many more ways to specialize cropping up, year on year. Professionals with the right approach to upskilling and career progression will still find themselves in a good position.
With this in mind, how much do Salesforce Consultants make? Read on to find out – plus which factors influence your earning potential, and tips on how to improve it.
Jump to: Which factors influence Salesforce Consultant Salaries?
Jump to: How to improve your Salesforce Consultant salary
Read more about roles and responsibilities: What does a Salesforce Consultant do?
Salesforce Consultant Salary Averages
North America
| Junior | Senior level | Contract | |
|---|---|---|---|
| US ($) | $130,750 | $155,750 | $122 p/h |
| Canada (C$) | C$103,375 | C$123,125 | C$117 p/h |
Europe
| Junior | Senior level | Contract | |
|---|---|---|---|
| UK (£) | £57,750 | £75,375 | £681 p/d |
| Ireland (€) | €57,375 | €71,750 | €541 p/d |
| Italy (€) | €30,000 | €40,375 | €325 p/d |
| France (€) | €44,250 | €60,875 | €585 p/d |
| Germany (€) | €59,625 | €82,000 | €699 p/d |
| Spain (€) | €27,000 | €47,500 | – |
| Switzerland (CHF) | 102,625 Fr. | 122,625 Fr. | – |
| Netherlands (€ – monthly) | €3,735 | €4,700+ | – |
| Belgium (€ – monthly) | €2,885 | €3945 | – |
Asia-Pacific
| Entry level | Senior level | Contract | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Australia (AU$) | AU$129,125 | AU$151,125 | AU$1,242.50 p/d |
| Japan (¥) | ¥6,905,000 | ¥10,540,000 | – |
| Singapore (S$) | S$80,250 | S$102,875 | – |
Data source: the data is from the Mason Frank Careers & Hiring Guide, based on self-reported information from 2,500+ Salesforce professionals, spanning a range of job titles, industries, and geographic locations.
Note: These figures are the salaries of ‘Functional Consultants’. You may also hear consultants referred to as Technical Consultants, Business Analysts (usually at end-user organizations), Technical Leads, Pre-sales Consultants. You will find these roles at larger consultancies, as part of large project teams. While their role accountabilities differ, there is a great amount of overlap. For the purposes of this guide, we will focus on the most widespread type: “Functional Consultants”.
Factors That Influence Salesforce Consultant Salary
One single salary figure can be misleading without context. Certain factors at play can result in differences between one professional’s salary, to the next. We will dive into the following factors in this guide:
- Experience (seniority)
- Certifications
- Generalists vs. specialists
- Location
Experience (Seniority)
As with any profession, the more experience and responsibility you take on, the higher your salary expectations should be.We defined an entry-level/mid-level/senior consultant based on experience (not determined by years in the role!) and the tasks they are carrying out.
Certifications
Salesforce professionals love gaining certifications – they are a milestone in your career that proves that you know what you are talking about. Certifications can potentially be used as leverage if you are looking for a more senior position internally, or looking for a job in another company.
In the annual career survey, respondents were asked if they experienced an increase in their salary after earning (any) certification:
- 67% did, reporting an average salary increase of 21%,
- 33% did not, their salaries remained the same.
Note: In the report’s previous edition, the split was 63% did, 37% did not. While the positive % is higher, the average salary increase has dropped from 26% to 21%.
The chance that your salary could increase with the more certifications you earn can’t be ignored, but should be taken with a ‘pinch of salt’ alongside the other factors.
All consultancies will encourage personal development – in fact, Salesforce consultancies are ranked by the number of certified professionals that work at their organization (i.e. how many people hold Salesforce certifications). Some consultancies will even incentivize you with bonus schemes!
Generalists vs. Specialists
There are so many options for Salesforce Consultants to specialize, including by:
- Salesforce platform products: For example, Marketing Cloud Consultants can boast some of the most in-demand expertise and the hardest to retain skilled professionals for.
- Industry: Salesforce Industries are hot, hot, hot! We’ll talk more in-depth about industry specializations later in the guide.
An organization looking for a consultant skilled in more than one platform area will expect to offer a bigger salary, especially for a less common combination of products! However, understanding best practices across multiple feature sets, and business analysis, will also be attractive to organizations that don’t want to lose you.
Location
Salary figures are influenced by location, due to the differences in the cost of living between countries – and within countries (the US is a good example of this economic influence).
Converting all the salaries into US$ makes the geographic comparison easier. Senior consultants in the US reported an average salary of around $155K. The UK Consultants on average earn $94K, in Spain $51K, and in Japan, the figure is $77K.
Geographic location plays an influence where demand is greater than the supply of professionals in-region. Let’s not ignore the fact that there will naturally be differences within countries, too. While the pandemic “hybrid”/”remote” working models have democratized location vs earning potential, there will naturally still be some variation.
How to Improve Your Salesforce Consultant Salary
If you want to increase your salary, this section is for you. First, familiarize yourself with what an entry-level, mid-level, and senior consultant does.
2023 will be the year to jump onto a specialization to stand out from the crowd. Here are our picks from the pack.
Tip 1: Industry Specialization
Salesforce Industries are hot, hot, hot! Word on the street is that Salesforce salespeople are pushing industries to their customer base.
Salesforce Industries offers pre-built solutions on the Salesforce platform that solve the needs of particular industries. Since Salesforce acquired Vlocity in 2020, Salesforce Industries have grown from a few select verticals to 12 purpose-built cloud industry solutions.
Now, organizations are faced with a question: invest in Vlocity, or undergo custom development? You can imagine how the trade-off looks – invest in Vlocity and seek out specialists to implement, or risk the potential headaches of designing and maintaining a custom architecture.
There are a range of accreditations that target specific Salesforce Industries (e.g. Manufacturing Cloud), that are available to Salesforce Partners. These are great to study for, as not only will they verify your knowledge to others, but also the reportedly tough exams will push you to learn what you need to succeed.
Don’t discount any of your previous experience where you may have built up transferable knowledge – especially from non-Salesforce related roles. In fact, consultancies favor those who have some Salesforce experience paired with industry know-how, as opposed to those who lack the industry aspect. Why? Well as a consultant, being able to talk the lingo, understand the processes, and emphasize with client challenges, will ultimately instill confidence in the client and deliver successful outcomes.
There’s a catch. You should also get familiar with OmniStudio – the suite of digital engagement tools that simplify the creation of complex, industry-specific experiences on Salesforce. (There’s an accreditation for this, too!)
Tip 2: CPQ
Another ‘hot’ specialization is Salesforce CPQ (now known as Revenue Cloud). CPQ: (configure, price, quote) helps your sales reps create accurate quotes for customers, going beyond rudimentary opportunities, products and quotes, to sell complex sets of products and bundles.
So where do consultants come into the picture? Organizations will often seek external services for CPQ implementations due to the:
- Sheer volume of CPQ features available.
- Mind-bending use cases to configure into the CPQ data model.
- The fact that deployment is notoriously difficult. The amount of data relationships between CPQ objects makes it difficult to deploy changes between environments (in other words, you will be working with CPQ object data across multiple orgs, each record with their own unique CRM ID per org).
Ready for the challenge? Perhaps some motivational words from our CPQ expert author will spark your interest:
“CPQ (Revenue Cloud) is an ever growing field in which resources are scarce. This creates the potential for high earning potential and the ability to work with some very cool companies. CPQ takes some time to learn and understand the basic concepts, but once you understand them, you can apply them to a multitude of use cases. Personally I like the ability to be creative within CPQ – there’s usually more than one way to achieve a desired outcome, and I like exploring the possibilities in CPQ.”
– Alyssa Lefebvre, CPQ Expert & Solution Engineer.
Tip 3: DevOps
When you’re working in consulting, timelines are tight, with little room for error. The stakes are high with client deployments; mess up a deployment and you’ll have disgruntled clients, be working late nights, and risk the project profitability going ‘into the red’.
DevOps are the practices that enable teams to manage releases, working with a single set of configuration and code. The result? Closer collaboration (no overwriting each other’s work), and less risk of errors and rollbacks.
While a relatively new concept in the Salesforce ecosystem, DevOps has taken flight over the past three years.
Technical consultants should be familiar with DevOps concepts, and as they become more senior, be able to establish and refine those processes for the team. Regardless, a solid understanding of DevOps will mean that your team will be able to respond and deploy changes faster on behalf of your clients (minus the risks).
Tip 4: Flow (+ Refactoring Automation)
Salesforce Flow is the future of automation on the Salesforce platform. We’ve all heard this by now, especially as:
- Salesforce is to retire workflow rules and Process Builder.
- Salesforce has been pushing Flow enhancements and adoption hard.
In fact, Salesforce dropped the “clicks, not code” messaging in light of recent changes to Flow – it’s a programming language, after all, albeit a low-code programming language.
Flow is going to become a focal programming language for the Salesforce platform, and one with a huge scope of possibilities. Even for technical (i.e. developer) consultants, anything which isn’t bespoke (very custom) should be built through Flow.
As organizations move from legacy workflow rules and Process Builder automations to Flow, it’s not a one-click to migrate, and you’re done. Take the time to analyze each automation before migrating it to Flow. As Flow includes additional features, there may be a better way to build your automations, and a good idea to rebuild and combine a number of automations, rather than simply perform a 1-1 migration. This is where consultants will become indispensable, to make sense of the mass of automations that need migrating, keeping best practices in mind.
Tip 5: Business Analysis
Performing business analysis is a key skill for any consultant. Your role is to understand what the business needs from its technology. Keep asking ‘why’ – why a process happens the way it does – and design solutions to meet those real needs (rather than perceived needs that either you assume the organization needs, or the organization thinks they need).
Elicitation, requirements gathering, process mapping, stakeholder management, user acceptance testing, and documentation are all core skills consultants need to carry projects ‘over the line’ to successful outcomes.
As you can tell, these are ‘softer’ skills that are hard to teach, and are deployed with tact. This reflects back to Salesforce projects being an art, with numerous contributing factors balanced to either make or break the success of a project.
The conversation around business analysis has picked up pace in the Salesforce ecosystem, with Salesforce releasing the Business Analyst certification (2022), and more.
Project management and change management also will enable you to stand out in the job market, as these skills are gained through experience, versus ‘book learning’.
Tip 6: Community Engagement
Attending Trailblazer community group meet-ups, speaking at events, and overall, supporting others are signs you are active in the Salesforce community. Mentoring is another fantastic way to sharpen your soft skills, which will be sought after for more senior consulting roles.
Being visible in the community is attractive for your employer, as you are an advocate who is showcasing their expertise, so this could lead to more opportunities and be reflected in your earning potential.
Summary
Becoming a Salesforce Consultant is one sure fire way to upskill your knowledge of the Salesforce platform. You will be working across multiple industries, clients, and solutions, with each project forcing you to learn new aspects of the platform, and challenging your solutionizing ability.
Hopefully this provides you with a good understanding of how Salesforce Consultant salaries work, and how you can aim for a higher one.