Make sure you’re tracking the impact of your contributions as a Salesforce professional.
If you build an automation that saves 15 minutes for 30 employees a week, that’s important.
That means you saved the company 30 x 15 = 450 minutes or 7.5 hours per week in time spent.
After 52 weeks, that’s 390 hours.
If the average wage of those employees were $20/hour, it means your automation saved the company $7,800 of payroll cost for work that can be handled automatically.
Those 30 employees can do something more valuable instead.
You’re in a highly leveraged position. Don’t forget that.
Why does this matter?
Well, the world is in constant flux.
And one example of that is inflation.
We’ve all heard about it in the news. Check out the chart below (source)
It shows the rate of inflation in the US by year.
In 2021 inflation was 7%.
In 2022 it was 6.5%.
In 2023 it was 3.1%.
The news may say “inflation is under control” but prices are still higher than they were in 2021.
$1 from 2021 is only worth $0.84 cents today.
When they say inflation is under control, it means that prices are still increasing – just not as fast as they were increasing last year.
Since 2021, we’ve lost 16% of our purchasing power.
Translated: if your total compensation is not ~17% higher than it was in 2021 – then you’ve lost ground.
What to do?
Make sure you’re tracking the impact of your contributions as a Salesforce professional.
Use that quantifiable impact to negotiate a higher wage.
One way to do this is by building a custom object to track the impact of your automations.
Name it Automation Analytics.
Add fields to this custom object that track the name of the automation and the number of hours it saves each time it runs.
When you’re building your flows, add a Create Element that creates an Automation Analytics record with an estimated amount of time saved each time the flow runs.
You can get that estimate from an end user during your requirements gathering.
And once this object is in place, you can run a simple report to show the number of hours you’ve saved.
In our earlier example, one flow saved $7800 in a year.
Imagine if you had 15 flows, all saving similar amounts of time.
$7800 x 15 = $117,000
You should use this number the next time you negotiate for a raise.
“I added $117,000 in value, I’d like 10% of that as increased salary please.”
Like we said earlier, you’re in a highly leveraged position. Don’t forget that.
The takeaway today is that tracking your impact is important, and there are creative ways to do that.
The specific math, impact, and negotiation approach to your future raises will vary on your situation, skill level, and work environment.
The world changes, our purchasing power is inflated away, and it’s our responsibility to make sure we position ourselves for continued success.
Take that responsibility seriously, because its unlikely someone else is thinking about it for you!
Hope this helps 🙂
Best,
Nick
