Within the last two days, 4,000 Salesforce employees (out of the 7,000 slated to be fired) disappeared from the company’s Slack channel, bidding aloha to ohana and adding the hashtag #opentowork to their LinkedIn profiles. Yes, the news sounds dire, but Salesforce remains in high demand for countless customers. As agencies that specialize in connecting Salesforce talent to clients understand, consulting and contract development projects abound. And these are the Salesforce technologies to master (for developers) or seek out (for customers) to maximize your outcomes in the market.

It’s About Profits More than Growth

Since the start of 2023, 297 tech companies have laid off nearly 95,000 workers, according to data provided by Layoffs.fyi, which has been monitoring and reporting on industry layoffs since 2020. The site estimates that 900,000 jobs could be cut this year if the current rate persists. Some CEOs cited over-hiring during the pandemic as the cause while others succumbed to pressure by investors. For juggernauts like Google and Salesforce, the cuts hit hard, with employees expressing shock, surprise, and dismay. 

Here’s the thing. Companies such as Salesforce are by no means hurting or sponging for tidbits of business left in the wake of the so-called Cloud Wars. Economic fears, consumer caution, and investor demands are largely fueling the overhead-cutting tactics. The focus on profitability over growth is the catalyst. Investors want the most money they can get. If that means slashing jobs, they don’t put up much resistance. 

Salesforce Customers Still Need Salesforce Professionals

As Eugenio Catone points out in his editorial for Seeking Alpha, the slowdown of Salesforce’s growth may not be as apocalyptic as the media would suggest:

Another issue that has probably raised some concerns is related to lower revenue growth than previous years. Compared to Q3 2022, revenues increased by 14%, whereas they used to grow at a rate of 20-25%. In my view, I do not see how this is a problem for two reasons:

• If we had not considered the negative effect of the exchange rate, the growth would have been 19%, so very close to the growth rate in the past.
• Macroeconomic conditions have totally changed since last year, so it is natural that the company is growing less. In any case, growing in these market conditions by 19% Y/Y CC for a company that generates $30 billion in revenues does not seem to me a negative result at all.

Catone’s assessment probably comes as cold comfort to thousands of newly unemployed Salesforce professionals, but outside of the organization, these workers are very much in demand. As a niche workforce solutions provider that specializes in Salesforce projects, we encounter fresh opportunities every day, in both the commercial and federal spaces. The government, in fact, continues to adopt the Salesforce platform to improve its service delivery offerings to customers. From where I’m sitting, Salesforce talent have no shortage of other avenues to explore, where their skills will be appreciated and needed. And Salesforce customers can benefit from the expertise and skills these professionals bring. Here are some key technologies to focus on in order to maintain a competitive advantage, whether you’re a developer or a business trying to enhance your customer experience.

Salesforce Technologies to Master

DevOps

DevOps has represented one of the most talked about terms in the Salesforce ecosystem since 2020. What is DevOps? Amazon Web Services offers one of the clearest definitions: “DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.”

DevOps, like Agile project management, seeks to streamline processes and remove silos that interfere with team dynamics, communication, speed to delivery, and automation to remove bottlenecks created by manual processes. 

For Salesforce, DevOps establishes routines that ensure development efforts go through to production, eliminating conflicts with other developments and reducing the likelihood of bugs appearing once configurations are promoted into production. In 2022, Salesforce introduced its anticipated DevOps Center. Why is this a big deal? As Salesforce Ben explains, “For one, the Salesforce DevOps Center is such an enormous improvement on old workflows using change sets. Secondly, change sets have become outdated and cumbersome, the bugbear of many Salesforce professionals. Superseding change sets, the Salesforce DevOps Center offers version control and visibility over your release pipeline, which ultimately leads to better quality releases with fewer bugs and errors, and seamless collaboration.”

DevOps Center, Salesforce announced, brings improved tooling to build apps faster and more reliably across sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT teams — including apps powered by the Genie Customer Data Cloud (powered by Tableau) — which delivers faster time to value: 

• IT teams can track the customization of sales processes within visual pipelines and work items, providing their sales leadership stakeholders with visibility into each step of the project.
• Admins can build Flows (automation) within secure sandboxes to automate customer support, while a programmatic developer extends that work with code in their own sandbox, with DevOps Center orchestrating the changes to avoid conflicts.
• Developers can use their preferred tools to customize out-of-the-box financial services solutions, directly committing changes to source control. Their extended team can then see those changes in DevOps Center and iterate on them.
• Release Managers for health businesses can bundle and migrate changes across sandboxes using clicks, delivering better patient experiences faster, and without having to wrangle change sets.
• CIOs can also use DevOps Center to more quickly and easily build apps and Flows to understand and unlock customer data and deliver actionable insights in real time and at scale.

Key features of the DevOps center include better organized work, automated change tracking to accelerate releases, customized pipelines, seamless integrations with Source Control, easy ways to migrate and deploy changes with clicks, and support for fusion teams.

Flow

Salesforce is spending a lot of time promoting Flow. As the platform continues to push low-code functionality and encourage the use of citizen developers in customer organizations. Flow supports those initiatives. 

“Salesforce Flow empowers you to build complex business solutions using clicks, not code,” the company explains.” Flow Builder is the most powerful tool that a Salesforce Admin has at their disposal, giving you similar powers that Salesforce developers have. If you need to perform mass updates across multiple unrelated records, or complex logic into opportunity conversion, these are common examples for when you should use Flow.”

Flow is primarily targeting admins and citizen developers within a customer organization. Developers are expensive and more difficult to find, but there are two reasons why developers should learn Flow. First, it’s a communication tool of sorts, allowing developers to interact with admins, offer guidance, share ideas, and collaborate. Second, even as a low-code offering, Flow is still a programming language that will be integral to the Salesforce platform. 

Through Salesforce's Dynamic Interactions, which encompass over 150 components, companies can leverage low-code/no-code functionality to create locally developed applications (LDAs) conducive to citizen development. This produces reusable building blocks for citizen developers to configure the platform to promote ongoing digital transformation. Large organizations require more structure behind their citizen developer efforts. Salesforce developers remain instrumental to that process.

• Development teams define tiers of application types after reviewing requests from citizen developers and organizational users.
• They determine whether the requests can be accomplished through citizen development, joint development, or fall out of scope for citizen development.
• Salesforce developers may build components for use by citizen developers in composing apps.
• When custom coding becomes necessary, developers write the code to supplement the efforts of citizen developers.

Second Generation Packaging (2GP)

Salesforce Ben’s Lucy Mazalon noted that developers should be aware that second generation packaging will be crucial to anyone working “for an ISV, or in a product situation, where there is intent for it to go onto the AppExchange.”

“There will come a time when all packages will be second generation packaging – while that’s unlikely to be in 2023, it’s likely that Salesforce will allow free migration from 1GP to 2GP,” Mazalon added. “Potentially, get on board early; Salesforce will give you support because you’re an early adopter. The cost savings when moving to 2GP are massive in terms of how much time it saves development resources.”

Lightning Web Components (LWCs)

LWCs are huge in the Salesforce ecosystem, particularly for front-end development. Since the advent of LWCs, Salesforce has repeatedly warned of Aura components heading toward the grave. Any developer or Salesforce customer that is not already familiar with or well-versed in LWCs could also find their lifespans in the Salesforce ecosystem to be limited.

Parting Thoughts

Salesforce is a foundational aspect of our business here at Oloop. And despite the struggles that Benioff and his team are facing with investors, the product endures as one of the most robust and widely used CRMs on the market. Salesforce development skills are very much valued and sought after for the still growing number of Salesforce customers out there. The platform will continue to evolve, adding new solutions as it always has. For customers and developers who stay current on emerging Salesforce technologies, your opportunities will have no bounds. 

‍Photo by Kafui Yevu on Unsplash