As a Salesforce Architect or an aspiring architect whether you are a solution, technical or enteprise architect, there is a common interest in setting goals or focus in 2025. The question will be on what areas do I focus for this year to make yourself valuable to your company and increase your brand and career? As an architect myself, I struggle with this topic area every year. We have competing goals like our certifications, company objectives, our time and Salesforce priorities. This leads to frustration, lack of clarity and sometime burn out. My post below will provide you a framework to think about which you can apply to focus and expand your career goals and aspirations.
- What skills are key for me to build my brand and my role in my company?
- What Skills and goals does my organization need this year where I can add more value?
- What topics is Salesforce focusing on where I can leverage to build my brand and knowledge?
1. What skills are key for me to build my brand and career as an architect?
As an admin, developer or architect, it is sometimes confusing for us to understand where to focus on, what this branding thing means given the explosion of youtube channels, blogs and contents by the salesforce Ohana. Sorry my blog is also one for you!! Here are some guidelines from a career perspective which will help. If you love salesforce like me , love a bit of handson on the tool and want to be on a career track, architect career path is the right thing for you. Now do not get confused on whether you are a solution architect, technical architect and enterprise architect and all that which will scare you and confuse you more. Here are 5 things which you can use as guideline for it.
- Pick up an architect certification exam as a starting point. If you do not have development experience, I will say start with an application architect exam area. If you are a developer, you can start on the system architect. Now I also understand that most of us have a fear for an exam and get annoyed on failures. So do not worry on the exam outcomes. It is about taking the exam and failing it is perfectly fine. I do it all the time!!
- Pick an area of softskill which is important as an architect you should have. I know there is a good amount of books for it and I will recommend this great book as a starting point. But it can be narrowed down to the following 3 areas.
- Verbal Communication( Presentations and public speaking) – I know a lot of folks have a fear of public speaking which really inhibits you to achieve your goal. A simple way to start exploring the skill is to attend your local toastmasters club and start practising with a small group.
- Drawing Pictures. As an architect, you are going to draw a lot of diagrams on slides,white boards etc. I will recommend leveraging Salesforce architect gallery for templates in lucid chart and visio.
- Story telling. – This is an important skill which as an architect you need to have to convince your leadership, internal team on a solution. I used to believe in power of knowledge and put a lot of bullet points on slides and get a lot of questions on my session and never able to convince teams. I would recomend the presentation company course which opened my eyes with a framework of why, what and how which will be a great starting point.

What Skills and goals does my organization need this year where I can add more value?
Once you have picked a goal for yourself, it is time to look at your organization goals and needs and have a focus which will add value to your company and increase your brand in your company. Even though company goals can be broad and sometimes not specific, it can be challenging to have an area of focus. Here are some guidelines which can help if you work at commercial, higher ed and non profit sectors. The key objectives will remain the same for any company which is increasing sales, reducing costs and doing more with less(productivity).
- Identify a team or subject area in your company where you can spend time and learn more which will help you in your current roadmap or projects. E.g sales teams, business unit teams , marketing teams where you have projects with and identify people , Sme whom you can network and learn more from them.
- This can be a perfect opportunity to learn a new salesforce product or get a new certification. If you feel there is a pain point with a current solution and have a salesforce product which can meet the needs, it is a great opportunity to learn on that product which can help your implementations on time.
- If you are an admin or developer aspiring to be an architect, you should network with other architects in other subject areas like ERP architects, BI architects, Enterprise architects and understand there jobs and how they present solutions and add value. This can become handy for you as you pitch your role in your company.
- If you are a consultant like me and work for a consulting company, here are areas which you can focus on to add value to your consulting company.
- Pick an industry to focus and try to learn more about the industry challenges and pain points. For e.g I am focused on public sector this year and so I have become a member of public sector focused organizations where there is a lot of content for me to learn on pain points on federal space.
- Attend Salesforce networking events like user groups, salesforce events with an intention to learn 1 thing and meet 2 new people. I know most of us go with a pen and pad to learn mostly on salesforce events. But instead of just focusing on learning, you should also reach out to your Account executives you know who work with your client and plan to meet them. Reach out to your client or prospects and plan to meet them. Bottom line is to have activities focused on business development.
- For any consultant who belives that they have unique knowledge and feel threatened on sharing knowledge, the world has changed. A simple google search, A LLM chat can help your clients more than you at this point. So the question is what should I do to differentiate yourself? Create content or colloborate with others on a session. The more you put yourself outthere , the more people watch you, the better leads and opportunities your consulting company gets which will increase your brand and your company.

What topics is Salesforce focusing on where I can leverage to build my brand and knowledge?
As an architect or aspiring architect, we all agree that we cannot leave Salesforce by itself and not pay attention to them on where they are focusing on. Given all messages from Salesforce, if there is one thing to focus on is Agentforce where Salesforce marketing and sales teams are going to be after with your company or your clients. So the question is What can be my area of focus which can align with Salesforce? Here are some guidelines.
- If you are a consultant or working for a consulting company, you should leverage your partner portal for learning Agentforce , setup demo orgs and think about the usecases which can apply to your company.
- If you are not in consulting, you should be registering for sessions done by Salesforce teams on Agentforce from a product perspective and figure out how it can be applied to your company. We also know that Agentforce is pretty new and it will take 2 to 3 years to really get your company to buy in as well. So start getting prepared for it.
- The other area where Salesforce focus has been on data cloud. Now you might or may not have an opportunity to learn data cloud or have a usecase for it. However there is an opportunity with unstructured data which will open a world for you. The simplest way is to look at all the notes, text fields, comments captured in your salesforce org and look at a way to summarize them. If that is what you find, there is an usecase for data cloud with vector database.
- If your company like other enterprises has a Microsoft solution for Gen AI like Chat Gpt, power bi and Azure solutions, there is a still an opportunity to align with Salesforce from unstructured data. Here are some options which you can think about and make the case for your leadership.
- You can still leverage Salesforce Einstein solutions for summarizing sales, service and marketing data and have it contextual for your users and aligning with enterprise Microsoft strategy on reporting.
- For knowledge stored in Salesforce, you can make the case for a Salesforce solution which will help your users quickly and still figure out integration options with your enterprise knowledge management to align with enterprise database.

As an architect or aspiring architect who wants to focus in 2025, here are some final pointers which will help you to set a focus.
- Have a focus based on Quarters. First quarter can be your personal goal focused on architect skill, soft skill or knowledge
- Second quarter can be a focus for your company. This can be a new salesforce product your company is investing, a new cross functional team where you can colloborate and learn more about your company customers.
- Pick a quarter to align with Salesforce strategy. This can be learning Agentforce and seeing usecases, exploring unstructured data within your company and colloborating on solutions, cross Salesforce product solutions with a focus on integration.
- If you are a consultant like me, I would focus on the following
- Pick an Industry to focus and learn more about the industry customers and pain points.
- Have key activities to focus on increasing Sales goals like attending events, networking and meeting with your Salesforce account teams.
- Have a goal focused on increasing your brand with content where you can start a blog, colloborate with others on sessions.
Please feel free to post your comments below and you are always welcome to reach out to me at buyan@eigenx.com for any questions.
Please subscribe
Subscribe to our mailing list and get tips to maximize salesforce to your email inbox.
I am honored to have your subscription. Stay tuned for tips to maximize your salesforce investment
Something went wrong.