Top 10 Salesforce Influencers to Follow, Who are Pros!

Introduction

Salesforce with 1,500,000 active users is by far the most budding ecosystem that has shaped the dimensions of sales & marketing for businesses. 

The Salesforce ecosystem involves Salesforce users, admins, developers, IT specialists, consultants, MVPs. Wait, what are these MVPs?

Salesforce MVPs are the passionate folks who have ingrained Salesforce product’s knowledge end-to-end and now dive with the sole mission to help others shake hands with this technology. 

Other than just reading whitepapers, these Salesforce influencers are perfect people to follow as they have lived with this technology their entire life, been to several Dreamforce events, been a part of Salesforce user groups across the globe, have dealt with every complexity around this product and worked hard to resolve it.

So if you think you could have some Salesforce leaders' whereabouts and advice, here we have curated a list of such dedicated, braveheart, and passionate top Salesforce influencers who are worth exploring and following everywhere (only social media, yikes!). In the end, don’t forget to catch up on the best Salesforce blogs to read and expand your learning curve.

Top 10 Salesforce Influencers You Can Follow & Make Your Allies!

• Marc Benioff
• Ben McCarthy
• Daniel Peter
• Oliver Hansen
• Brent Downey
• Eric Dreshfield
• Amy Oplinger-Singh
• Chris Duarte
• Cheryl Feldman
• Tiffani Bova

1. Marc Benioff

We can’t start without Marc Benioff, the chairman, founder, CEO of Salesforce, no. 1 cloud computing, customer relationship management software, globally. He added his great wisdom to turn a Salesforce company started in a small apartment of Telegraph Hill in San Francisco into the largest building in San Francisco with a worth of 21.25 billion. Marc has exceptionally devoted his past 13 years to Oracle, before starting the idea of Salesforce. 

As of May 2020, the man has a worth of $8.8 billion. During his leadership, Salesforce has managed to take over 60 companies, ever since its inception. Out of which, Tableau has been its biggest bid worth $15.7 billion.

Why follow Marc Benioff? He is a great businessman, activist, philanthropist, who always strives to produce better outcomes through his company for its customers and society at large.

The man has won many accolades under his hood:

• He is one of the best CEO in the world as per Barron’s
• Businessperson of the year by Fortune readers
• Counted as one of the World's 50 Greatest Leaders by Fortune Magazine

His Belief

“You need to get ahead to the future, ahead of your customers, and be ready to greet them when they arrive.”

Where to follow in his footsteps? His Twitter handle is @Benioff 

2. Ben McCarthy

Ben McCarthy is an innovator & leader who founded SalesforceBen in 2014, one of the popular Salesforce blogs or communities to bring on Salesforce enthusiasts from global regions, to share their insights & build understanding around this CRM. 

This man has an uncanny ability to inspire & motivate others with amazing words of wisdom. If you have reached his blog, you would know how he pens down his knowledge & every information around Salesforce career, Salesforce certifications, SFDC configuration & development, or any latest news around this CRM, hot off the press. 

Currently, he lives in the UK, London, and He is also a Non-Executive Director at Cloud Orca, a platinum Salesforce consultancy based in London.

Why follow Ben McCarthy? This man inspires you to break your career into Salesforce with its insightful information & words. He is a true inspiration as he has obtained 7 Salesforce certifications of:

• Administrator
• Advanced Administrator
• Developer
• Platform App Builder
• Sales Cloud Consultant
• Service Cloud Consultant
• Pardot Specialist

He even won the Salesforce MVP (most valuable professional) award from 2016 to the next 3 consecutive years, because of his contribution to helping learners, professionals hone their Salesforce skills with his blog. And apart from focusing on his career, this man knows how to hit some grooves as he is a Dance Music Connoisseur too.

Where to follow in the footsteps of Ben McCarthy? He is active by the Twitter handle @SalesforceBen

3 Oliver Hansen

Oliver Hensen is a proud founder of Salesforceblogs.com. He digs deep into a variety of Salesforce resources & combines them with a flavor of thought leadership & inspiration. Over his blog, you will find a variety of topics/areas covered like:

• Salesforce Admin
• Salesforce Developer
• Salesforce MVP
• Salesforce legacy blogs
• Salesforce bestseller blogs
• Official Salesforce.com blogs
• Salesforce nonprofit blogs
• Global Salesforce blogs

There you can’t just read, but also submit a blog of your own piece to contribute and expand the Salesforce community.

Oliver Hansen, other than running this blog, has a full-time marketing job at Datacolor, where he is an amazing Digital Marketing Specialist & helps its company drive amazing marketing communications with Salesforce Marketing solutions.

Oliver Hansen Believes - “The best way to learn Salesforce is to teach. I founded SalesforceBlogs.com and listed different categories, invited hundreds of Salesforce authors with latest & insightful articles about Salesforce so help everyone discover SFDC in a new light!”

Where to follow Oliver Hansen’s Footsteps? You can follow him on Twitter with handle name @nesensa 

4. Daniel Peter

Daniel Peter is a Salesforce practice lead, who holds great specialization in Salesforce Admin & Development and works for Robots and Pencils. He is also involved as a leader of the Bay Area Salesforce Leader group and a lead app engineer at Kenandy. He is an active member of the Salesforce community and began his understanding & interest in Salesforce in 2009. 

He was once a guest on a Salesforce admin podcast & has even written many great articles for the Salesforce community. Currently, he is working for Startups Accelerate Program as a Salesforce Advisor.

Daniel Peter Believes - “If you want to work hard to accomplish ambitious things, you have to learn how to make the work enjoyable. Most of this is just in how you think about it. Always remember why you are doing what you are doing.”

Why follow Daniel Peter? Daniel Peter is the epitome of great inspiration. His words, knowledge & ability to obtain 22 Salesforce certifications are worth acknowledging. He believes anyone can be a good developer from nothing and can achieve as many Salesforce badges as they want. They should see the process as a marathon, not like some regular sprint. And one should involve proper leisure between tasks including things like talking with others, enjoying music, and taking breaks.

What 4 things Daniel Peter Vouches on:

• Don’t believe you can’t do something (he believes anyone can be a good coder & earn as many badges they want)
• Make the work enjoyable in order to make it less tedious
• Take risks. Don’t be afraid of going for new technology, starting a company or so
• Don’t expect that success happens overnight - Even the biggest success stories took many years or decades to onset

Where to follow in Daniel Peter’s footsteps? You can follow him on Twitter with handle @danieljpeter

5. Brent Downey

Brent Downey is another well-known Salesforce influencer, MVP, leader, past speaker at Dreamforce, based out of Colorado. He is also a founder of the blog “Admin Hero” and helps newbie or professionals admins pave their career as Salesforce Admins with how-to steps & soft skills a professional need, all posed with updated information, based on his personal experience, his findings, his missteps, solutions that worked for him, and every best practice.

This man has achieved Salesforce admin, Salesforce advanced admin, Salesforce developer, Salesforce sales cloud consultant certification under his hood. 

Where to follow in his footsteps? You can follow him on Twitter, with his handle @brentdowney

6. Eric Dreshfield

“Eric Dreshfield is a long-time Salesforce MVP, since 2013, and now a member of the Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame who has spoken at multiple Dreamforce events and been an active participant in the Salesforce community, since 2009. In 2010 Eric started the Evansville, Indiana Salesforce User Group and still leads that effort to this day.

He is the brains behind the founding of Midwest Dreamin', first started in 2011. Midwest Dreamin' is an annual Salesforce Community Conference designed to share the latest around Salesforce use through Community collaboration. The event, which called Chicago home from 2014 to 2019, is the standard by which many other Community Conferences were founded. There are now dozens of "Dreamin' Events" across the United States and the world, in places like the U.K., South America, Spain, France, Australia & more. Midwest Dreamin' will be in Minneapolis on July 20 - 22, 2022.

Eric somewhat jokingly says he started Midwest Dreamin' because he was unable to attend Dreamforce in 2010, so he wanted to bring Dreamforce to him. But all joking aside, Eric states often that “For me, one of the greatest strengths of the Salesforce Ecosystem is its people and the connections that are shared.” Dreshfield believes the reason behind the success of Midwest Dreamin' and all the Community Conferences is due to how easy those events make it for people to network & learn about Salesforce from the challenges and successes of others.

Apart from bringing people together to share insights around Salesforce, Eric is a mentor to those new to the Salesforce ecosystem, a blogger and a community advocate. Professionally, he is the Product & Community Evangelist for Mogli.

Want to learn more from Eric? Follow him on Twitter, with his handle @ericdresh.”

 

7. Amy Oplinger-Singh

Amy Oplinger-Singh is based out of Ohio, she is another Salesforce MVP, Awesome Admin, active Salesforce community member, past Dreamforce speaker & freelance Salesforce Consultant. She paved her career from being a Sales Rep to sales consultant, specialized in SFDC admin roles, and loves training others.

This Phenomenal lady has acquired 171 trailhead badges under her hood. This woman has an amazing gift of gab, which she used splendidly as a spokesperson at events other than Dreamforce like Southeast Dreamin, India Dreamin, Midwest Dreamin.

Not just that, this woman even tirelessly leads the Cleveland nonprofit user group and Cleveland Salesforce Women in the Tech user group.

Amy Oplinger-Singh doesn't just talk about SFDC related or purely technical, she even talks about insightful topics that people should be aware of & shouldn’t shy away from. Like at one Dreamforce event, she mentioned how she got a chance to talk about “imposter syndrome” - a state where we believe that we are not as confident & competent as how we appear or are perceived as.

Where to walk in the Amy Opilnge shoes? You can follow her on Twitter handle @salesforceamy (wow, her love for Salesforce is intact even in her username :))

8. Chris Duarte

Ever since 2015, Chris Duarte has been editor-in-chief of Trailhead - an online, gamified, self-learning platform for career enthusiasts to skill up for variant Salesforce careers. As editor-in-chief of Trailhead, she helps writers in polishing their pieces around Salesforce, its features, & newest additions. 

She spends her time polishing the craft of fellow writers, ensures the pieces are depicting a story, has no clutter, simple to skim through, and adds fun storytelling with animated themes to make learning hassle-free & interesting.

Chris Duarte Says - “My job is to work with the finest of tech content creators, and ensure our technical resources are conveyed in a very simple & storytelling context. Like we use pirates to explain the concept of APIs or easter eggs in code snippets. We work building a story around technical concepts with good imaginative characters & their visual identity so that the task of understanding any technical concepts becomes fun & less overwhelming.”

Where to follow her? You can follow her over her Twitter handle @TheChrisDuarte

9. Cheryl Feldman

In 2001, Cheryl Feldman was a hairdresser but once when she suddenly faced a right rotator cuff injury (muscle injury around arm and shoulder joint), she was asked to look for another career.

Later Cheryl was employed in a large healthcare company, where she was asked to use 5 different systems to create a Friday report from the week-old’s data. She proposed the idea of creating one live report and on getting impressed by the idea, her company installed the Salesforce system and upgraded her title as “Salesforce Manager”.

Later, was questioned for not having a degree, with her dedication and problem-solving skills, Feldman managed to hear “We need you!” from her new boss.

“Cheryl Feldman Turned Her Can’ts into Cans”

Feldman is an inspiration, currently, she is working for "Salesforce”, who lets others get the privilege of her amazing leadership, knowledge, and endless contribution. 

Where to seek Cheryl Feldman’s amazing leadership? You can follow her @CherFeldman.

10. Tiffani Bova

Tiffani Bova is the global growth evangelist at Salesforce, a member of the 2021 Thinkers50 list of leading global management thinkers, keynote speaker and a Wall Street Journal bestselling author with her book Growth IQ [now translated in 9 languages]. She works across the globe to support Salesforce customers on sales transformation and growth initiatives. Her objectives are simple in life “that is to drive customer success & growth”.

Before joining Salesforce, Bova dedicatedly spent 10 years as a Research Fellow and VP at Gartner - one of the biggest research & advisory firms globally. During that time, Bova helped big labels like HP, Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce, Dell, IBM, AWS, Cisco, VMware, Oracle, as well as startups to expand their market share & business revenue. It seems it was her passion to drive sales & business growth that compelled her to join the massive community of Salesforce, later in her career.

She was even the host of the “What’s Next Podcast with Tiffani Bova”, one of the top 100 business, marketing, management podcasts on iTunes. Where to follow Tiffani Bova’s footsteps? You can follow her with the Twitter handle @tiffani_bova

If you just don’t want to stick to following Salesforce Leaders, here are a few Salesforce blogs for beginners and professionals that are worth exploring to stay updated in and out of this CRM.

Best Salesforce Blogs for Beginners & Professionals - You Can Subscribe to!

1.Salesforce.com/blog - Salesforce.com is one of the best salesforce blogs to get tips, insights, news, updates globally. It will also give you updates on global enterprises infused in a cloud ecosystem, like how they use this CRM around their sales, marketing, services, analytics, apps, and other areas.

2. JanBask Training - Yet another one of the top Salesforce blogs to get updated articles around Salesforce career path, salary, certifications, feature updates, tutorials, interview questions & answers. It’s a complete platform to get knowledge around this product from a career perspective. 

3. Salesforce Ben -  Salesforceben.com is another one of the salesforce blogs for beginners that unveils every Salesforce news, new feature, update, certs, and everything else that can help aspirants make a profound career in this technology.

Final Thoughts!

Salesforce leaders, MVPs, preferably called Salesforce influencers are worth discovering and following, who have amazing viewpoints, past experiences, merit to share and inspire you for making that career around leading Salesforce CRM technology possible. 

So follow them, adapt their thinking, and learn how they turned every challenge into a stunning opportunity! To ease your effort, we just jot down the eminent 10 Salesforce influencers. Also, if you don’t just want to stick to following these MVPs, we also share some resourceful, top Salesforce blogs list for you to subscribe to, to get updated on this technology’s every trend and career aspects.

If you haven’t started exploring a long-haul career in Salesforce, or are still rowing a boat of doubts, talk to our career counselors or take our free demo Salesforce master class.

Comments down below which one is your favorite Salesforce MVP or which Top Salesforce blogs you follow in day-to-day life!

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