Top 5 niches for Salesforce professionals in 2023

There was a question in the SFXD Discord a few months back:

It’s looking like specialization is king in the [Salesforce] ecosystem…I may choose my own adventure a bit and think about which road to go down, in an app sense. I think a new app specialty will help. CPQ/Revenue Cloud, FSL, and Industries-Vlocity are the top ones I’m thinking about at the moment. Does anyone have any thoughts on the coolest/best app to work on these days?

Instead of thinking about what app to learn next, it’s better to ask yourself what niches to focus on, then the “apps to learn” will naturally flow from there. I will answer this question by outlining emerging trends I’m seeing or have learned about from other coworkers/friends in the space.

These also aren’t some theoretical trends that have no practical value to you. When it comes to hiring for Salesforce BSAs, devs, admins, and product owners, we’re specifically looking for people who have worked on implementations that have dealt in some capacity with the niches I’m about to describe below.

IMPORTANT: None of these companies are paying me to recommend learning their software. If I were, I would 100% be up-front about that. I also wouldn’t be sponsored by anything I wouldn’t use myself.

Here are a few Salesforce specializations you can focus on to make you desirable in this market:

Customer Success, at scale

Customer Success (CS) teams are beefing up their headcount to match their companies’ expected growth and retention targets so that they can scale to meet customer demands.

As a practical example, how can you think of automating touch points with lower-paying customers so customer success teams can spend more time nurturing higher-paying ones?

What if you could figure out when to send the right piece of communication to a customer to help them renew or prevent churn?

Salesforce professionals should be looking into ways to standardize and automate customer success communication. Automating lower-tier customer communication would free up more time for teams to devote to their higher paying customers.

To do this, Salesforce professionals need to create a system of triggers that will send personalized messages at the right times. These could include renewal notices, satisfaction surveys, follow-up emails and notifications about upcoming events or product updates.

By strategizing how and when to send these messages, CS teams can be sure that their lower-paying customers are still being taken care of without taking too much of the team’s focus away from nurturing their high-paying customers. This is an important niche for the Salesforce administrator to focus on in the coming year because automating these touchpoints allows for better scalability and improved customer retention rates—a crucial element in any successful business strategy.

This company had its Sales headcount jump 137% in a year. Who will take care of all those new customers once Sales closes the deal?

Business applications you can learn

Gainsight

Gainsight is a powerful business application that helps Salesforce users keep customer data in one place and be more productive. It's great for Business Systems teams who want to integrate it with their Salesforce instance. The Salesforce admin will usually set up this integration.

Gainsight lets you sync data, activities, tasks, and opportunities from Gainsight to Salesforce. The goal is to make it easier to manage customer relationships and track progress.

Plus, Gainsight has this ecosystem of experts who can help you get the most out of the product.

Gainsight

HubSpot is a CRM that helps businesses organize, store, and access data (just like Salesforce!). It's a great tool for connecting customers with the products and services they need.

Business Systems teams who want to integrate Salesforce with HubSpot can benefit from its marketing (Marketing Cloud), sales (Sales Cloud), and customer service (Service Cloud) capabilities.

I should note that the HubSpot and Salesforce competition is heating up in the space.

End users use HubSpot to keep their teams up-to-date on customer interactions and have access to insights that can help drive better decisions.

Food for thought: How external applications play with the Salesforce platform

How do they inter-relate with Salesforce to make a seamless experience for the customer?

eSignature everywhere

Legacy, paper-based agreement processes are manual, slow, expensive, and error-prone. - DocuSign sales pitch

eSignature companies have made their coin by solving the problem above, specifically benefitting from their customers that grow rapidly. That growth means more documents sent via the eSignature software, which means more customized workflows, which means a career growth opportunity for you by being the eSignature subject matter expert.

Let's talk about DocuSign and Salesforce

Salesforce professionals can take advantage of the DocuSign integration to make the customer signature process faster, easier, and more efficient. By connecting DocuSign and Salesforce, you can create templates in minutes and quickly send them out to customers for signing. The integration also allows Salesforce professionals to track deals in real-time wherever they are, so they can maintain visibility into the status of a customer’s signature throughout the entire process.

So what? Well, they can save time and increase turnaround on new business deals and renewals. This integration helps them "streamline operations" while enhancing customer experience. B2B buzzwords, baby!

DocuSign Agreement Cloud

DocuSign Agreement Cloud is a suite of cloud-based services that enable customers to send, sign, manage and store digital documents securely. The platform offers a variety of options for Salesforce professionals, including eSignature, contract lifecycle management, and the ability to customize content with easy drag-and-drop features.

With DocuSign Agreement Cloud Salesforce professionals can quickly create documents (contracts, invoices or payment forms) for their customers to sign and securely store them in their Salesforce orgs.

What's so good about this? This helps them speed up deals and improve customer satisfaction by providing an intuitive signing experience for customers.

DocuSign Apps Launcher

DocuSign's Apps Launcher (DAL) helps Salesforce professionals make the most of the DocuSign integration with Salesforce. It provides a place to connect apps and manage their data in Salesforce, allowing users to customize their own experience.

With DAL, users can access all their DocuSign documents in one place and quickly create custom templates. This allows Salesforce professionals to easily organize documents related to deals and customer renewal activities, so they can focus on managing customer relationships instead of wasting time searching for the document they need.

Food for thought

Automate renewals with your customers by sending out what they’re on the books for ahead of their renewal period and have them sign it via the eSignature platform of choice. I’ll take some of those royalties when you do it 😉

Learn about pricing and how it meshes with your Salesforce implementation

Usage-based pricing, as an illustration!

Usage based, flat rate, tiered pricing...oh my

SaaS companies are increasingly shifting to consumption-based pricing models as a way to better serve their customers.

For example, customers can get started cheaply, which removes the cost barrier of getting started with a new product (source).

Companies that use consumption-based pricing trade at a 50% revenue premium and can grow their revenue base without getting more customers. (source)

This shift to newer pricing models has put pressure on pricing teams who must have the flexibility and agility to update their pricing models quickly and accurately.

Unfortunately, Salesforce CPQ’s design model makes it difficult to achieve this level of nimbleness, as it was designed with a more static pricing model in mind. Therefore, gaining expertise in working with Salesforce (or similar CPQ vendors) to store and apply pricing data presents an opportunity for those looking to stay ahead in the industry.

Knowing how to make the most out of Salesforce orgs by integrating them with CPQ systems (like nue.io and Cacheflow) can give developers an edge that sets them apart from others, potentially making them even more sought-after than traditional Salesforce developers.

Revenue management

Imagine this common scenario: As a company grows, so can the product complexity. Each product line could have different selling and booking motions. If a customer bought multiple products, they might get an invoice for each one. In addition to it being a bad customer experience, the Finance department would have clean up the mess, potentially by rejecting orders and throw off revenue projections. In other words, growing pains.

How you could help: If you're a Salesforce consultant, I'd recommend learning general revenue accounting practices, Zuora RevPro, Salesforce Revenue Cloud, NetSuite, Salesforce Billing, Xactly (for compensation)

DevOps

Salesforce DevOps is the set of practices, tools, and processes used by organizations to streamline their development process. It allows them to quickly deliver features, manage changes and deploy code in a safe and reliable way. The goal of DevOps is to increase collaboration between developers and IT personnel, reduce manual labor, minimize errors and optimize workflow.

Flosum

One of the most popular solutions for Salesforce DevOps is Flosum. It simplifies the deployment process by providing a variety of pre-built workflows that automate tedious tasks such as change set creation and managing data dependencies.

Their main value add is that their DevOps product is "built for real-life environments with real-life complexity." Aka, people write stuff directly to production and Flosum can help you detect that so you don't overwrite something.

Flosum also offers automated testing capabilities which can help ensure quality control before releasing any new updates into production environments.

Copado

Another popular solution is Copado which helps accelerate the time to release while also providing built-in governance controls. With its streamlined drag-and-drop GUI interface, it makes managing metadata easier than ever before. It also offers advanced deployment options such as installing packages with multiple users or deploying different versions across different sandboxes.

Gearset

Finally there’s Gearset which offers powerful version control capabilities allowing users to easily review changes made across multiple environments or discover conflicts between components during deployments. This makes identifying issues faster and simpler than ever before, reducing the chances of introducing bugs into production instances due to incorrect deployments.

Just learn one of them, they're better than Change Sets

Overall, these Salesforce DevOps solutions offer several advantages over traditional Change Sets including increased efficiency, improved reliability and greater control over development processes when compared to Change Sets alone. With these solutions, Salesforce teams can save time while remaining confident they are pushing the right code with minimal effort making the whole process simpler than ever before.

Let's conclude

There are riches in niches, but make sure you enjoy the niche and don’t worry if you don’t find yours quickly.

I plan to learn more about becoming Marketing Cloud consultant or Marketing Cloud developer, but no promises.

What Salesforce niches are you focusing on? Are you a Salesforce CPQ expert? Are you the only person who knows about enterprise territory management at your company? Let me your specialties.

‍