Consultants / Career

How Does Salesforce Support Their Partners?

By Sasha Semjonova

Last year, I explored the darker underside of the Salesforce implementation market, seeking to answer the question of whether Salesforce had a problem with “bad” consultancy partners or not. The conclusion? The problem wasn’t bad consultancies as a whole, but rather the way that many implementations are delivered.

As we progress through 2025 and beyond, concerned consultancies, end users, and customers must know that solutions are out there and that the near future of implementations is already looking bright. That’s why in this article, we pivot to a new question: how does Salesforce actually support their partners?

What’s the Problem?

Salesforce implementations have faced underlying challenges for years, particularly with numerous unfinished or failed projects, leaving customers and subsequent partners to deal with the fallout.

In discussions with partners, consultants, end-users, and CEOs, it became clear these issues are so widespread that they’re now influencing business practices.

Joey Chan, Principal Consultant and founder of Cloud Jedi Solutions, and Chris Smith, an independent Salesforce Consultant, were among the first to highlight the common “clean-up” efforts required after problematic implementations.

“I work with smaller consultancies whose entire business is cleaning up after them,” Chris shared.

Recurring concerns include prioritizing profit over quality, ignoring best practices, and inadequate documentation.

Why Is This Happening?

So, why is this happening? Well, although it can be easy to try and point fingers to place the blame somewhere, this problem is definitely more complex than that. 

Two key issues surfaced: the certification hiring dilemma and a perceived lack of support from Salesforce.

The certification hiring dilemma involves partners and consultancies prioritizing Salesforce certifications over experience, often to appease stakeholders with visible markers of “knowledge.” This approach risks building teams with impressive credentials but little real-world application ability.

Support from Salesforce elicited mixed feedback. While Zaid Usmani, a Senior Salesforce Developer and Architect, found their implementation support sufficient, others highlighted resource gaps. Some felt training “stopped” at Trailhead, and one consultant even admitted feeling “not really wanted” as a partner.

These issues demand attention. Thankfully, Salesforce has acknowledged the concerns and joined the conversation.

READ MORE: How to Avoid Bad Salesforce Partners: The Three-Question Test

Market Facts

So, we know about the problems and their severity. We have even previously discussed some solutions. But before we delve even deeper, we need to understand what Salesforce’s partner ecosystem looks like right now.

Jim Steele, the President of Global Strategic Customers, Alliances and Channels at Salesforce, said that customer implementations and success have always been a crucial part of what Salesforce does.

“Of our 75,000+ people in the company, over 25% are focused on customer implementations and customer success,” he said. 

“We now have a partner network that has over 250,000 certified Salesforce consultants; when I think about all of the implementations out there in the whole ecosystem, our partners touch about 70% of the entire customer ecosystem of Salesforce.”

Key Resources

For partners looking for extra support, there are a number of different resources available to utilize.

Acting as a self-learning option a step up from regular Trailhead modules, partners can explore the Partner Camp – a place to expand product and industry knowledge, develop project readiness, and access role-based curricula with a learning destination made just for them.

Alongside this, partners also have access to virtual and in-person workshops, webinars, and partner-specific in-person and virtual events like Partner Kickoff (PKO), which is launching in February 2025 at no extra cost. 

For an idea of the full scope of benefits that come with being in the Salesforce Partner Program, the Consulting Track guide can provide some insight. This includes but is not limited to access to demo orgs, contributing to a Partner Advisory Board, as well as the opportunity to liaise with a Salesforce POC for a Consulting Relationship.

Jim reflected upon the difficulty of “not being able to reach” all partners, all the time, which is why focusing on how to support them better is something that Salesforce consistently looks back at. 

“We always have to triage to some degree right? You focus on the ones that have the biggest impact, and you can’t give the same level of attention and support [across the board].”

However, specialist support is still available through Salesforce’s Professional Services routes, and one person I spoke to in a consultant role recalled that their consultancy had been having dedicated SE sessions with a specialist from Salesforce dedicated to partner education. 

It doesn’t stop there either; Salesforce’s next step in partner system support, perhaps unsurprisingly, lies within Agentforce.

Agentforce Support

You might think that the extent of Salesforce’s dedication to Agentforce stops when the customer is satisfied, but it doesn’t. Instead, one of Salesforce’s own unique use cases for Agentforce is now partner support. 

According to Jim, consultants will be encouraged to use Agentforce to help them work better with their customers and deliver exceptional results much easier, preventing mishaps or bad implementations. 

“We have now trained 80,000+ consultants on Agentforce,” he told me. “It’s something that we think about every day. Are we training partners properly? Are they getting the right skill sets? Are we helping them?”

Out of the 80,000 SI Partner practitioners trained, 14,000 achieved the more rigorous AI Specialist Certification and 78,000 have the AI Associate Certification. 

READ MORE: Salesforce’s New Free AI Certifications: Your Guide to Courses and Premium Training

The work doesn’t stop there either; 727 Global Tech Partners have been helped via three in-person workshops and a two-part webinar enablement series, as well as 18 hands-on workshops. 

As we speak, the Salesforce Partner Team is creating agent actions and templates to support partners and customers as they get involved with Agentforce. At the most basic level (outside of Trailhead), partners can utilize the Agentforce Partner Guidebook, which is the latest rendition of The Partner Readiness Handbook and guides them through the process of launching with Agentforce. 

I’m a Partner: What Can I Do Now?

Salesforce’s range of available support is certainly not slim, but even with the boost from the Agentforce initiative, we’re still left with some of the issues.

Most notably, Agentforce is very clearly part of Salesforce’s partner support solution going forward – which is a great idea – but Agentforce is still not a completely accessible tool. For partners with smaller budgets or no rigid plans to get started with Agentforce right away or in the future, the availability of support might seem lesser to them.

The workshops, webinars, and self-learning are of course extremely valuable, but it does pose a question of whether that will be enough as the support path heads in a specific direction. However, this is not to say that they shouldn’t be explored; there is evidently a lot of value to come from these resources delivered directly by Salesforce themselves.

Beyond that, we must not forget that part of solving the problem still lies with the partners themselves. Salesforce can step in and help with implementations that go wrong, but half of the work starts with preventative measures. 

“You’re always going to find some implementations that are not going as planned, and those hit our alert system pretty quickly,” Jim said. “We swarm them and make sure we’re doing everything we can to support them.”

“They [consultancies] don’t all follow the same script. We try to get them to because we show them best practices and have these programs in place.”

Not following best practices is one of the most common complaints received by consultancies fixing implementations, and it’s evident that this issue is more widespread than ever. This is why it is crucial for partners to take personal responsibility to ensure best practices are always being followed; an important step to making a real change in this ecosystem. 

Final Thoughts

The partner implementation issue is intricately complex and cannot be solved quickly or easily – too many moving parts, obstacles, and deeply rooted behaviors and processes prevent this. 

Salesforce’s support of its partners is and will continue to be an integral part of getting closer to a solution, and they have evidently had this in mind with their dedicated Agentforce efforts. However, for partners that need the support now who might not have financial access to Agentforce, is the availability of the rest of the support enough?

The seed of this discussion has now firmly been planted, and whatever the next outcomes are, I’m sure that Salesforce will be ready to step in and help.

The Author

Sasha Semjonova

Sasha is the Video Production Manager and a Salesforce Reporter at Salesforce Ben.

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