That being said, to get the most out of the tool and to make solutions that add value to an organization takes experience with Salesforce.com and someone with some decent level of business acumen. That’s the value of a consultant. A good consultant can pull the requirements out of a customer and formulate a great solution leveraging the tools available. A great solution can be a mixture of things – low ongoing maintenance for the Administrator (it wasn’t “overdeveloped” with custom code), one that drives great User adoption because it adds value and also cost effective.

The second point that I would make is that Salesforce.com is not your father’s CRM. Salesforce in its brief existence has grown from a core CRM suite to a platform for development. A newbie is bound to be overwhelmed at the scale of the product – and many companies don’t have the time to stumble their way in their dark and risk launching a poor solution while the clock is ticking on licenses.

To illustrate the point, I had a close friend start looking at Salesforce.com and the conversation on the phone went something like this: “You can have a portal? What’s a portal do? Do I need a portal? There’s more than one? Which portal do I need? It depends on what kind of access I need for my Portal Users? Well, wouldn’t it be access to everything?….”

More on this subject on my blog…. http://www.ShellBlack.com/SFDC/implementing/using-consultants/

I had almost every exam Salesforce offered inside 4 months of picking up the product but I have 13 years experience in CRM from developer to Senior Architect. All the younger staff I work with get certified as quickly as possible.

So the answer I would have to give is experience as long it was the right experience.

By the way if you got no intelligence neither is no good.

This depends on the circumstance. In an ideal world you would go and ‘get’ someone with solid relevant experience knowing they will be quicker and produce high quality code. Easier said than done I hear you say! If you are in the situation where you don’t know anyone and don’t know who to trust to do the job, then the certification would give you a greater confidence if a bunch of CVs looking similar experience wise.

In my situation, having done partner certification ages ago and having lots of experience, I shan’t go down the road of revising and paying for more exams and taking time out to do them. Build up a reputation and use quality agents (like ROD).

Another beer you owe me..

I fully agree with this. One needs to get work experience as well as undergo some formal training to get better traction in this industry.

Sathish