Each year at SF Ben, we enjoy looking at the current trends in the Salesforce ecosystem and seek to answer questions about how this might affect your career.
The past couple of years have been dramatic, to say the least, with the Salesforce ecosystem labour market facing a slowdown for the first time in its 25-year history. So, to round off 2024, let’s look at how some of our predictions and trends have fared against reality.
The Salesforce Economy
In January 2023, the word on everyone’s lips was “recession”, and whether or not the global economy was slipping into one. This was right about the time when technology stocks had dramatically tumbled after the 18-month bull run caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, with Salesforce seeing its lowest share price since 2019.
Salesforce wasn’t in the best place two years ago – their quarterly revenue growth had started to decline, and Co-CEO, Bret Taylor, had handed in his resignation, as well as Tableau CEO, Mark Nelons, and Slack CEO and Co-Founder, Stewart Butterfield. The cloud giant was also facing an onslaught from activist investors who sought to join their ranks and push for aggressive changes, such as the possible disinvesting of Tableau and Slack.
Two years on, and things are looking brighter. Although Salesforce’s revenue growth remains under 10%, which is historically very low, they are improving margins, and 10% of just under $40B is still impressive.
Salesforce’s Agentforce strategy has also caused a surge of optimism amongst the Salesforce ecosystem, investors, and the general tech community. Although it’s too early to say if this will have any meaningful impact on Salesforce’s bottom line, it seems Salesforce is making all the right moves. In their Q3 earnings last week, Salesforce revealed they had closed 200 Agentforce deals in the week before Q3 ended, emphasising the strong demand for agents.
The big takeaway from our analysis two years ago is that Salesforce is resilient, and this has proved to be the case. Of course, there have been layoffs and a slowdown in growth, but overall, the Salesforce economy is much larger than it was back then, especially taking into the wider ecosystem.
The Job Market
One of the biggest market shifts that has been at the forefront of Salesforce professional’s minds is the job market. We have moved from a place where all Salesforce professionals, no matter your role or experience level, were extremely in demand. And those who had a few years of experience under their belt could switch up jobs every couple of years for huge bumps in salaries.
This was explored in depth in our article earlier in the year, The End of an Era for “Easy” Salesforce Jobs?
Whilst the Salesforce market is resilient, it is not bulletproof, and the lack of Salesforce’s quarterly growth has perpetuated across the Salesforce ecosystem, affecting every type of Salesforce role.
Ultimately, this comes down to supply and demand. With less supply in terms of new Salesforce products and, therefore, projects being sold, coupled with layoffs and the rise of boot camps promising entry-level talent outlandish salaries, there has largely been a saturation of professionals in the Salesforce job market.
It’s safe to say that the Salesforce job market has gone through a huge reset in the past two years to establish a new baseline after the unprecedented demand that the pandemic placed on technology professionals.
Moving into 2025, and we have some slivers of good news. Inflation is falling, interest rates are slowly dropping, and Agentforce/AI implementations seem to be on the horizon. But with the current pace of technological advancements, the job market may have changed for the foreseeable future.
As explored in our 10 Crucial Facts and Figures About the Salesforce Job Market in 2024 article, based on the findings by 10K’s Talent Ecosystem report, the shift and demand for roles is changing in unexpected ways, including less demand for some roles, and more demand for roles in offshoring countries.
Layoffs
Layoffs have been an unfortunate hallmark of technology companies for the past couple of years, and we highlighted it in our trends post at the start of this year.
As much of the technology landscape, the Salesforce ecosystem was not immune to layoffs, with Salesforce letting go of many thousands of employees. This unfortunately also hit AppExchange companies, end-users of Salesforce, as well as Salesforce consultancies, with some unfortunate few going out of business.
Layoffs.fyi reported a total of 264,000 layoffs in 2023 across nearly 1,200 companies, with 2024 including nearly 150,000 across just over 500 companies.
Whilst things are getting better, it seems we are not out of the weeds yet.
But another saving grace, courtesy of Salesforce, is that they have announced they will be hiring 1,000 new sales people to sell their Agentforce product. In their Q3 earnings, Brian Millham, Salesforce’s COO went a step further to say they will be hiring 1,400 sales people in Q3. A positive sign that will surely see the effects trickling down to the ecosystem.
Salesforce DevOps
Salesforce DevOps has been a present figure in many of our posts for the past few years but after our first annual developer survey, we can see just how much of an impact it’s having across the ecosystem.
With the maturity of many leading third-party DevOps platforms such as Copado, Gearset, AutoRabit, and Flosum, as well as the release of the Salesforce DevOps Centre, DevOps has been adopted by 70% of the Salesforce ecosystem.
This is made up of 40% using a custom-built solution using SFDX or other tools such as Jenkins, 23% using a third-party tool such as those listed above, and 6% using DevOps Centre.
This adoption is pretty amazing, and it shows you just how important it is to understand core DevOps processes and tools.
One stand-out statistic from the survey is whilst tools are very well adapted, most developers admitted to only having a basic understanding of SFDX and Git. This presents a possible issue with how well tools are being used, but also a big opportunity for professional development.
Salesforce Flow
We don’t deserve any prizes for identifying Salesforce Flow as a core trend two years ago, it is, of course, the go-to automation tool after the official retirement of Workflows and Process Builder (which is coming up at the end of 2025).
But another insight into how professionals are using Flow comes from our developer survey, which identified that a majority of developers are using an equal mix of programmatic and declarative functionality. This proves just how powerful Flow is for developers, as well as functional professionals.
One of the biggest trends we will probably see going forward is just how important Flow will become to Salesforce’s Agentforce strategy. Flow is one of the ways that professionals can trigger actions in an Agentforce conversation, from creating a case, or updating a customer’s shipping address, the amount of flows being created will be increasing exponentially.
Flow has been an important skill for all Salesforce professionals to understand and master, but it may soon become a non-negotiable.
Salesforce Slack
In our 5 Important Salesforce Job Trends for 2023, we looked at how important Slack was becoming to Salesforce’s strategy. After they paid a pretty penny at $27.7B back in 2020, the mothership needed to be sure that they got ROI on their investment, and integrated the product into their wider suite.
But with AI taking the spotlight over the past 18 months, Slack hasn’t got the attention or growth that Salesforce had expected. This was matched with a lot of executive departures, including Co-Founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield, his successor Lidiane Jones, and Co-Founder and CTO Cal Henderson.
This promoted Salesforce to put their Co-Founder and CTO, Parker Harris, at the helm as Chief Engineering Officer.
Whilst Slack hasn’t had the integration into the core Salesforce platform that some had expected, things could look a lot brighter in 2025.
Parker Harris made the bold claim at Dreamforce that he will be “killing Chatter”, Salesforce’s previous collaboration tool released in 2010, with the goal of presumably replacing it with Salesforce Channels, a new integration that allows you to work with Salesforce records directly in Slack.
Slack may also become the internal home for agents built within Agentforce. At Dreamforce, Salesforce demoed how Slack channels can now have agents within them, meaning you can call on these agents to perform actions within Slack.
Slack also had some good news in the recent Q3 earnings call – the annual spend on Slack AI grew nearly 50% quarter over quarter. Slack was included in more than a third of the tech giant’s deals greater than $1M.
Salesforce Niches
Salesforce niches, or “specializations”, have had a very important part of ecosystem conversations over the past few years, and are something we have identified as a core trend in the last two years.
As Salesforce has evolved as a platform, so too have the roles within its ecosystem and the products that require specialized skill sets. While Sales Cloud and Service Cloud remain the core of the Salesforce platform – widely used and understood by the majority of the ecosystem – these roles are becoming increasingly commoditized as new professionals enter the space.
To stand out, individuals need to focus on more specialized Salesforce products that are harder to master and have fewer professionals working within them. Examples of these products could include MuleSoft, Marketing Cloud, and CPQ.
But as the tables below show, the growth of some of Salesforce’s more niche products has been slowly falling for many quarters, placing less of a demand on these professionals. This is most evident with MuleSoft, which has fallen from solid 17-27% quarterly growth, down to 1% last quarter.
Summary
There is never a dull moment in the Salesforce ecosystem, and although 2024 hasn’t been the best of years for the job market, there is still much to remain positive about.
Salesforce, as a company and as an ecosystem, seems to be in a great place. Although we have seen a significant ‘reset’ in terms of the job market and the demands of clients, Agentforce could give Salesforce a much-needed second wind in the next technological revolution.
