Industry Knowledge
Sales Cloud consultants are expected to speak the language of the sales organization before configuring anything. The backbone is lead-to-cash: a lead is captured and qualified; on conversion it produces an account, a contact and an opportunity; the opportunity progresses through stages carrying products, price books and quotes; a win generates an order and a contract that eventually renews. Nearly every Sales Cloud object maps to one of those steps, and questions frequently ask you to place a requirement on that map.
You should also recognize common sales methodologies and what they imply for design. SPIN, Challenger, MEDDIC/MEDDPICC and solution selling all define qualification criteria - the fields, stage exit criteria and Path guidance a consultant configures. A methodology is not a process: the sales process is the ordered sequence of stages a deal moves through; the methodology is how reps reason inside those stages. Questions love to blur the two.
Metric vocabulary matters: pipeline coverage, win rate, average deal size, sales cycle length, forecast accuracy, quota attainment, customer acquisition cost. Prompts often describe a symptom ("deals slip to the last week of the quarter and discounts spike") and ask which metric or process change diagnoses it.
Traps: confusing forecast categories with opportunity stages; assuming every industry shares one pipeline shape (subscription renewals and channel/partner selling need different stages and sometimes different objects); forgetting B2B2C models need partner or distributor structures.
Rule of thumb: if a requirement can be expressed as "who does what, with which record, at which stage, measured by which metric," it is a Sales Cloud design conversation.