Top Salesforce Books To Read And Listen To In 2023

Talent leaders worldwide conducted a survey to determine whether companies offering upskilling to employees will boost employee retention rates.

They found that 94% of employees would be happy to stay with an employer who invested in their career development. Investing in learning is the key to having happy, loyal, and productive team members.

Online tools like the Trailblazer Community and social media are excellent ways to stay up-to-date. Still, numerous books are available for every Salesforce role at any level of expertise, providing insight, knowledge, and helpful hints on various Salesforce topics.

Salesforce books to get you hooked

Our picks of books will be categorized as follows:

• Salesforce DevOps books
• Salesforce Apex books
• Books for becoming Salesforce certified.

Salesforce DevOps books

Behind The Cloud: The Untold Story Of How Salesforce.com Went From Idea To Billion-Dollar Company And Revolutionized An Industry

Author: Marc Benioff

Behind The Cloud gives an account of Salesforce's development, showing how Benioff and his team utilized business, technology, and philanthropic models to create a $46 billion industry.

You'll also learn how Salesforce not only weathered the dotcom bubble but also became a leader in cloud-computing technology by taking informed action.

Uncover Salesforce strategies like the following:

• Inspire employees to soak up leadership in action
• Expand innovation
• Turn customers into longtime partners.

Practical Salesforce Development Without Code

Author: Philip Weinmeister

You can use analytical thinking, creativity, and logical reasoning to create business solutions through Salesforce. This guide provides real-world examples of business applications, teaching you how to:

• Build objects
• Develop approval processes
• Automate business processes
• Manage your environments
• Deploy your solutions.

Salesforce Architect’s Handbook

Authors: Dipanker Jyoti and James Hutcherson

The Salesforce Architect's Handbook is unlike any other Salesforce book on this list. This book was designed for Salesforce professionals who want to deepen their knowledge of architecture and gain access to best practices in the industry.

Beginning the book, you'll learn the intricate details of Salesforce's architectural framework and technology. Afterward, you'll delve into each of its seven domains.

You’ll also:

• Become familiar with the most common Salesforce products
• Understand data architecture design and security architecture
• Learn strategies to design mobile solutions using Salesforce
• Touch on DevOps and development lifecycle principles.

Mastering Salesforce DevOps

Author: Andrew Davis

The Salesforce Architect's Handbook touches on DevOps topics, but this book goes into much greater depth regarding DevOps concepts.

This will enable you to:

• Ensure continuous delivery
• Apply a full range of automated tests
• Allow admins to participate in developer workflows
• Build packages and architect code for easy deployment
• Improve software delivery performance using Salesforce DX.

Salesforce Apex books

Learning Salesforce Development With Apex

Author: Paul Battison

This book thoroughly introduces Apex code and teaches you everything you need to know to write, run, and deploy Salesforce applications.

It includes Apex development's fundamentals and guidance on building scalable applications.

While exploring best practices, you’ll learn how to:

• Work with Apex
• Develop Apex triggers
• Use Salesforce object search language (SOSL) and Salesforce object query language (SOQL) to retrieve data
• Write object-oriented Salesforce code.

Mastering Apex Programming

Author: Paul Battison

In the process, you will learn to:

• Avoid common mistakes
• Improve the performance of your Apex code
• Use asynchronous programming tools.

Once you have read this book, you can build robust, scalable Apex applications.

Advanced Apex Programming In Salesforce

Author: Dan Appleman

During this exploration, you'll learn how to create architectures for responding to triggers and handling asynchronous operations.

You'll be able to try different methods for testing and diagnostic code. The book will ultimately provide practical examples of the tasks Apex developers regularly experience.

Salesforce books for becoming certified

The Salesforce Career Playbook

Author: Martin Gessner

You’ll find ample case studies and advice that will help you:

• Sift through available careers
• Find job opportunities that showcase your skills
• Learn insider tips and strategies for advancing your career.

Salesforce Advanced Administrator Certification Guide

Author: Enrico Murru

This guide goes beyond administrator certification and covers advanced platform features like:

• Configuration
• Automation
• Security
• Customization.

Moreover, you can explore data model management, content management, file organization, and automation tools.

You will have the opportunity to experience mock questions and learn advanced administrator credentials. After completing this book and its teachings, you should successfully earn your certification.

Becoming A Salesforce Certified Technical Architect

Author: Tameem Bahri

Discover how to create robust and reliable Salesforce solutions that meet business requirements. This book offers real-world examples to learn how to:

• Design scalable and accurate features on Salesforce Lightning
• Build a framework pipeline
• Engage with skilled Salesforce professionals.

Salesforce e-books to consider ‘e-reading’

Salesforce For Beginners: A Step-By-Step Guide To Creating, Managing, And Automating Sales And Marketing Processes

Author: Sharif Shaalan

Be ready for an in-depth overview of how to direct sales, advertising, customer service, and general operations for your business. You'll discover ways to customize and utilize Salesforce to maximize efficiency and get more benefits.

Your team will increase their marketing abilities by leveraging campaigns by getting familiar with making activities, handling leads, and building your sales pipeline through opportunities and accounts.

This Salesforce book provides a wealth of real-world business case studies to help you analyze your business data and make sound decisions.

Furthermore, it offers guidance on building practical reports and dashboards in Salesforce so that you can uncover valuable insights.

Salesforce Coding Genius: A Complete Salesforce Coding Framework Reference Guide

Author: Markus Koche

This book outlines the optimal practices for coding in Apex on Salesforce projects, which all developers should abide by.

Additionally, it details specific design patterns and testing frameworks to create reliable and scalable platforms like:

• A Salesforce Lightning Wizard Framework
• A Salesforce Batch Apex Framework
• A Salesforce Trigger Framework
• A Salesforce Lightning Component Framework.

Salesforce Platform App Builder Certification Guide: A Beginner's Guide To Building Apps On The Salesforce Platform And Passing The Salesforce Platform App Builder Exam

Author: Paul Goodey

The Salesforce Platform App Builder Certification Guide helps you learn how to design and build apps for the Lightning platform confidently and guides you in your preparation for the certification exam.

The book begins by exploring the essential features of the Lightning platform. It outlines techniques for data modeling to design, create, and publish applications without coding, allowing you to quickly attain outcomes with the informative features that the Lightning platform hosts.

You will then learn about importing and exporting data tools and how the Lightning platform offers to limit or enlarge access to objects, fields, and records.

With this certification study guide, you can learn how to customize the Salesforce Lightning experience user interface (UI) and build custom buttons, links, and actions.

By reading this Salesforce book, you will have the knowledge and assurance to pursue Platform App Builder certification by mastering:

• Data models
• Protecting data security
• Applying business logic and process automation.

All of which are vital to app building.

Getting Started With Salesforce Einstein Analytics: A Beginner’s Guide To Building Interactive Dashboards

Author: Johan Yu

Getting Started With Salesforce Einstein Analytics introduces you to how you can create informative visualizations and explore datasets with Salesforce Einstein Analytics.

The book also explores how AI-driven enhanced analytics inside Salesforce can harvest the data you need quickly and easily.  You will also learn to monitor datasets and customize dashboards to your specific needs.

The core modules focus on learning about data sources, data flow, datasets, and lenses before creating dashboards from scratch.

More advanced topics like data transformation with "computeExpression" or "computeRelative" and multi-value lookups in data are studied.

You will learn to:

• Use data from Salesforce and external sources
• Create a dataflow to build a flexible dataset
• Build dashboards using Einstein Analytics
• Explore and analyze data using Einstein Analytics.

Top Salesforce audiobooks to listen to

Trailblazer: The Arrival Of Business For Good

Author: Marc Benioff

In Trailblazer, innovator Marc Benioff demonstrates how businesses can shift their long-held focus on profit and take on new corporate responsibilities that ultimately create more positive change.

At the Davos World Economic Forum, a controversy erupted when Benioff called for increased regulation of the tech industry and suggested that Facebook should be regulated in a manner similar to how the cigarette industry is.

Benioff's strategy of creating a successful technology business founded on shared values and responsibility to society has caused industry leaders to call him out, perplexed by his behavior.

However, by providing a model of what it takes to succeed in this era of corporate accountability, he inspires others in the business world.

At Salesforce, the goal was to make beneficial decisions for both business and society, and this book provides insight into how to achieve that.

Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices Of Salesforce.com

Authors: Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler

Learn the outbound sales strategy enabling Salesforce.com to almost double its enterprise growth without making cold calls and contribute an extra $100 million in recurring revenue.

This book provides CEOs, entrepreneurs, and sales VPs with a new perspective on sales that emphasizes how to build a sales machine rather than simply learn how to cold-call and close deals.

Discover how an outbound sales strategy without relying on cold calls or marketing costs can yield a 9% response rate and make millions from previously unknown prospects.

Plus, understand the seven deadly sales errors CEOs and Sales VPs make despite their experience.

Data Driven: Harnessing Data And AI To Reinvent Customer Engagement

Authors: Tom Chavez, Vivek Vaidya, and Chris O’Hara

This guide provides essential insights on data-driven marketing from the people behind Salesforce's world-famous data management platform, the leading CRM app in the world.

Marketing is experiencing a massive transformation due to digital technology, social media, and e-commerce. These innovations have changed how people access data, purchase items, and buy services.

Data-Driven will show you how to:

• Target your customers with accuracy and success
• Bring customers closer to your brand and inspire them to remain loyal
• Capture, organize, and analyze data across every channel
• Create a customized, data-powered marketing strategy
• Serve consumers with highly personalized interactions.

The Perfect Salesforce: The Six Best Practices Of The World's Best Sales Teams

Author: Derek Gatehouse

Despite the hundreds of billions spent yearly on personality profiling, motivational coaches, and incentives, companies still lack an effective formula for constructing a team of top sales performers.

Derek Gatehouse's mission has been to uncover the perfect 'recipe' for sales for several decades.

Gatehouse sought to uncover the traits of top-performing salespeople and why certain sales teams had a higher percentage of 'superstars.' He conducted interviews with over 2K executives from various industries. The outcomes defy previous assumptions about hiring, training, managing, and rewarding a sales team.

Instead, the world’s greatest sales teams share six simple but critical practices. For instance, they all:

• Hire for talent, not skill or even experience
• Blend positive and negative motivators
• Measure marketing goals and results instead of a micromanaging process.

This book offers a range of anecdotes and easy-to-follow strategies for businesses aiming to drive sales.

A Salesforce book is a gift you can open repeatedly

You can find plenty of CRM and Salesforce-focused materials online, but a traditional book is the way to go if your team demands something more comprehensive.

Regardless of skill level, there is a wide selection of business analysis, DevOps, and certification titles for you and your team to choose from.

We recommend seeing it as an opportunity for growth. You wouldn't let your favorite plant wilt away, so the same can be said about watering your team’s thirst for knowledge and advancement.

As you can see, books are a Salesforce gift that keeps giving!