💃 Q4 Salesforce Ponderings, Musings, and Sentiments 🤔 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! Least surprising stat, ever - booze sales go up +20% in Q4, compared to the rest of the year.

How much do you think Salesforce professionals are contributing to this?

Now that booze has been covered, what is in store for Salesforce this Q4?

Let’s dive in ⬇️

Agenda for today includes

• Q4 Salesforce Ponderings, Musings, and Sentiments

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

Q4 Salesforce Ponderings, Musings, and Sentiments

Today we will discuss-

💃 The Mothership 🕺 

💃 The Product 🕺 

💃 Worker Marketplace🕺

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THE MOTHERSHIP

Friendly reminder that Salesforce absolutely owns the CRM marketshare 💪.

They’re not going anywhere.

Whether the overall market is up or down. Or if they re-brand from Ohana to Data+AI+CRM.

Salesforce is entrenched and holds all the keys 🔑.

But what they do with those keys matters.

Year-to-date 2023 we have seen some peculiar patterns, for example-

😳 Activist Investors invest.

👀 Activist Investors exit.

😳 Layoffs.

👀 Re-hire former workers (boomerang hires).

😳 Disbanding the internal M&A team.

👀 Acquire Airkit.AI

Making predictions out of mixed signals is a fool’s errand.

What you know for certain is that AI will maintain its position as Salesforce’s North Star 🌟. Most major announcements in the foreseeable future will be AI-related.

What else from the Mothership in Q4?

✔️ The Winter Release, of course.

✔️ The Q3 Earnings Call, which is not scheduled yet but will likely be 8 weeks after other big-tech companies have theirs. Maybe an analyst will ask about Marc’s succession plan 👀?

✔️ AE’s frantically squeezing down their pipelines like a tube of toothpaste. Will be interesting to see if there are still amazing deals to be had after the the fiscal tightening-of-the-hatches from earlier this year.

Hmmmm. What else from the Mothership, in Q4? 🤔 

That’s a good segue into ⬇️

THE PRODUCT

Dear Salesforce. We understand you need to be an industry leader in AI 🤖, the hottest tech since, whatever - cell phones? Internet? It’s big, we get it.

But….

Sales Cloud put Salesforce on the map 🗺!

It needs some love 💔.

The admin console is way-outdated and some of those AI bucks 💵 can be invested in improving the Object Manager UX.

Have you experienced Hubspot’s Admin UX. It’s a good example of leap-frogging in an area that Salesforce professionals care about 😞.

And that’s just one example. Here’s another-

The DevOps Center.

The community was pumped for an on-platform devops solution, and Salesforce has basically abandoned this once-hyped product. Thankfully partners, like Gearset and others, continue to fill this void 🙌.

What about Flows? They’re powerful and complex. But, was the community begging for powerful and complex 🤔?

Process Builders were dead simple and intuitive. Not as powerful as Flows, but what a great UX! When you needed a simple automation to be quickly spun up, PB’s were like a warm blanket 😊.

And data management and query tools. And developer tools. There are still big gaps in the core offerings (that some great partners are filling in the meantime).

Here’s the good news - we know Salesforce still has an eye on you, and Q4 will deliver product improvements that Salesforce professionals care about.

Take this, for example, an amazing UX enhancement that will save you hundreds of clicks 👏 !

Hopefully there are more hidden gems in the Winter release 🙏.

Please, Salesforce, give the core offering more love ❤️!

THE WORKER MARKETPLACE

As mentioned, Salesforce’s CRM marketshare is ridunkulous. That’s great news for Salesforce professionals 👍.

But we are also about 12 months into realizing the epic 2020-2022 growth was not sustainable.

So, while there are more roles available than ever, there is also more supply of professionals than ever 😮.

Here are 3 Q4 musings on the worker marketplace

1) Salesforce is Hiring/Re-Hiring

An overcorrection on hiring too much led to an overcorrection on firing too much which is leading to more hiring….

😵‍💫 

This scenario is not unique to Salesforce. The last 12mo have been crazy for everyone 💯 .

Besides, this is net-good news. More Salesforce hires should trickle down.

Saturation at the < 1 Year of Experience Level

If you have 0-1 year of Salesforce experience, then you are in a crowded room.

The insane 2020-2022 growth in job openings AND salaries made the Salesforce professional role highly desirable.

Unfortunately, that demand turned out to be partially vapor 💨.

And Q4 will not be any kinder to these newly-initiated…😞 

Salaries Can Only Go Up From Here (with one exception…)

Just like the hiring/re-hiring phenomenon, there is some double correcting going on.

Consulting partners are finding, or will find, that there is no saturation in the mid or expert level worker marketplace. They will NOT get quality consultants or team leads for cheap.

Now, about that exception.

Once upon a time, SalesforceChaCha proclaimed the days of the $40k Admin were over.

Whelp, the ChaCha was dead wrong ☠️.

0-1yr experience admins are having trouble finding volunteer gigs. $40k jobs on Linkedin and Indeed have hundreds of applications within hours of posting 😳.

Daily Principle

and now....Your Daily Memes