Salesforce
Clearly Marc Benioff isn’t a fan of the status quo, as it is executive reshuffle time again at Salesforce.
John D MacDonald had this to say about shuffling:
If the cards are stack against you, reshuffle the deck
But I’ve always preferred Mikhail Bulgakov’s take:
The most amazing combinations can result if you shuffle the pack enough
Whatever the reason, Brian Millham has moved from Chief Customer Success Officer to President and COO, while Gavin Patterson has switched from President and Chief Revenue Officer to Chief Strategy Officer. There’s no word on what this means for Alex Dayon, who previously held the Chief Strategy Officer title, but he’s also the Chairman of the Advisory Board so maybe that is now a full time job - certainly the Salesforce leadership bios page suggests that is the case.
What I find most remarkable about this is Gavin Patterson spent 2 years as CRO - where does the time go?
Times are also a changing for Salesforce in China, as the strategic partnership with Alibaba is “accelerating”, resulting in some new roles and the elimination of existing ones.
Zahra Bahrololoumi (Salesforce UK EVP and CEO) calls the current skills shortage a crisis in an interview with City AM. It feels right now that there are hundreds of organisations out there offering a Salesforce quick start/bootcamp/academy, yet it’s not solving the problem. Is it a lack of skills or a lack of skills combined with experience?
There’s a great new order of execution diagram on the Salesforce Architects site - while I usually prefer written descriptions, this is something where a picture really is worth a thousand words. The caveat is that the written description is the source of truth, so you need to check both!
Microsoft win a 5 year deal to supply business software to Coca Cola, a longtime and spendy Salesforce customer, reportedly to include Dynamics 365.
Very tangential to Salesforce, but I found this entertaining so here it is. Crypto mesh company Helium had to remove the Salesforce logo, and at least one other, when they were found to be less than truthful about their customers. That’s not the entertaining part though. After receiving $350 million of investment and persuading people to part with up to $250 million to buy 500k+ hotspot nodes to earn crypto via mesh network access, the last month brought in $6,500 in access fees. If it sounds too good to be true (spend $500 on a hotspot node, passively earn $100+ every month forever after) it probably is.
Other
Presenteeism hasn’t gone away with the shift to working remotely, according to a report from Qatalog and GitLab. While the freedom is there to nip out and run errands or take on the school run, the flip side is making sure everyone knows you are working hard.
It appears that tech layoffs are picking up, in the US at least. This isn’t something that those of us in the Salesforce ecosystem have had to concern ourselves about for at least a decade, maybe longer (Sofiaworks anyone?) so it will be interesting to see if this does impact the white-hot Salesforce job market. A sudden influx of experienced techies looking for a well paid safe haven for a couple of years would present a material change. If you want to keep track of tech layoffs, especially from a European perspective, I’d recommend following Gergely Orosz on twitter.
Me
The Dreamforce session notifications went out on August 4th, and I’m delighted to once again be selected to speak.
Code Builder is finally in open (ish - there are limited spaces and a waitlist) beta and I’ve been checking it out.
The Winter 23 Sandbox Preview process has begun and I’ve published a few key dates and tips. One of these was to remember the credentials for your existing pre-release orgs and this has turned out to be better than I expected - while the pre-release signup goes live on August 11th, the pre-release pods get upgraded a week earlier so if you have an existing org you get a whole extra week!