💃 Your Salesforce Team Is Splitting in Two 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd!

Have you heard of the K-shaped economy?

Have you put it up against how it shapes your Salesforce world?

First, what is it? The letter K - one arm angles up. The other angles down. They start from the same point, then diverge. That's the K-shaped economy in 30 seconds.

After any major disruption (a recession, a pandemic, an AI revolution), some people and businesses recover faster than before while others fall further behind. The middle disappears. You're either riding the upper arm 📈 or sliding down the lower one 📉.

Now look at your Salesforce team.

See it?

The upper arm: your architects, your strategic consultants, your platform leaders who connect CRM decisions to revenue outcomes.

Their market value is climbing.

Their skills compound.

Demand for Technical Architects jumped 27% last year while admin supply flooded the market by 47%.

Two Salesforce resources, both alike in dignity, on opposite trajectories.

K-shaped.

ONE KITCHEN, TWO MENUS

How the K-shaped talent split shows up inside your Salesforce org

Think of your Salesforce org like a restaurant kitchen. You've got chefs creating tasting menus, experimenting with ingredients, pulling diners from across town. And you've got line cooks reheating the same five dishes on rotation. Everyone is cooking in the same kitchen and on the same equipment 👐.

The tasting-menu chefs are your upper-K talent 💪. They're using Salesforce to reshape how the business operates- predictive pipeline scoring, automated revenue operations, platform consolidation that kills three redundant tools. Every dollar you invest in them multiplies.

The line cooks keep the system functional 🫡. Creating reports. Implementing Flows. Nothing breaks...but nothing advances either. Every dollar there maintains the status quo.

Both groups show up on the same budget line. Both reside in the same Slack channels. But one is compounding value 📈 while the other is slowly depreciating 📉. And the gap between those two menus gets wider every quarter 😬.

THE SQUEEZE PLAY

Why are Salesforce hiring costs rising while talent ROI is falling?

The K is creating a cost trap that sneaks up on you 👻.

Your upper-K people know their value. Senior Technical Architects are clearing $200K 💰 and they have options. Retaining them costs more every year because the market keeps pulling them upward.

Meanwhile, your lower-K roles feel cheaper to fill. So the instinct is to hire more of them. But volume doesn't replace velocity. Three admins maintaining the system don't equal one architect transforming it 🙅.

So you're spending more to keep the top AND spending more on a bottom that delivers less per dollar 💸.

The middle, where you used to find solid generalists who could "figure it out"? That middle is thinning fast. 51% of admins who changed jobs last year took a pay cut. The generalist admin is either leveling up to architect territory or getting lapped by AI tooling that handles the routine work faster and cheaper.

SAME RECEIPT, DIFFERENT MEAL

Is your Salesforce investment keeping pace with the market?

Back to the kitchen. Two restaurants pay the same rent, the same utilities, the same equipment leases. One is putting out brown butter gnocchi and the other is crackin’ a can of Dinty Moore.

Salesforce charges the same license fees whether your team extracts strategic value or just logs activities 💯.

The org with upper-K talent gets $5 (or more 🙂) of business value per $1 of platform spend.

The org coasting on lower-K talent gets fifty cents.

And because the platform keeps getting more powerful (new frontier models, improved open source models, AI-embedded everything), the ceiling for the upper arm keeps rising 📈 while the floor stays flat 🫳.

The widest gap in the Salesforce ecosystem today is between companies whose Salesforce teams are effectively leveraging AI and companies whose Salesforce teams have AI access but little to show for it.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

As an executive, it’s important to be aware of the k-shaped economy and how it impacts your Salesforce responsibilities - both the org and the team enhancing, supporting, and maintaining it.

And since we’re still in the early stages of AI adoption, answering these questions can be highly impactful to your business success

❓ Can your highest-paid Salesforce person articulate how the platform drives revenue, or do they describe what it tracks?

❓ If your best Salesforce talent left tomorrow, would you lose institutional knowledge or strategic capability?

❓ Are you hiring to maintain or hiring to transform? (Be honest.)

❓ When's the last time a Salesforce initiative killed a redundant tool or shortened a sales cycle?

❓ Does your team have a path from admin to architect, or are those two separate hiring pools with no bridge between them?

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes