In the past, anyone who was required to need a Salesforce professional was to find someone proficient with Apex and Visualforce. However, it is no longer the case today as companies are hiring professionals who can work in a more complicated Salesforce ecosystem characterized by incorporation of automation, Agentforce, Data Cloud, Lightning Web Components, and industry-specific clouds.
This shift requires businesses to hire Salesforce developers who can manage integration of various business systems, build AI-driven automations, operate with Data Cloud, and develop Lightning Web Components across Experience Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Sales Cloud. The challenge is to find a Salesforce expert possessing all these skills and on top of that, having knowledge of the target industry.
Therefore, we came up with this guide, where you can learn what to pay attention to when choosing a Salesforce specialist, what skills and qualifications are needed in 2026, and how to make the right decision according to your goals.
What’s inside
What Does a Salesforce Solution Developer Do in 2026?
When Should You Hire Specialists in Salesforce Implementation?
Development Team vs Administrator Team: Which One Do You Need?
Specialized Salesforce Experts You May Need
Skills You Need to Check Before You Hire
How to Find Developers that Deliver Business Value
Common Errors Committed During Hiring
Conclusion
What Does a Salesforce Solution Developer Do in 2026?
A Salesforce engineer in 2026 is responsible not only for creating smart solutions but also for implementing AI-powered workflows and integration of enterprise applications. Let us see what tasks they perform.
Create Scalable Lightning Applications
Salesforce development teams create contemporary, efficient, and responsive interfaces by means of Lightning Web Components that offer greater functionality than previous Visualforce pages. In addition, they extend Salesforce capabilities with the aid of Experience Cloud by creating self-service portals that allow customers, employees, and business partners to receive information, collaborate, and make requests. Besides, with the use of Dynamic Forms and Dynamic Actions, they create intuitive page layouts based on business processes, data, and user roles.
Develop AI-Powered CRM Experiences
The capabilities of Agentforce, Prompt Builder, and Einstein AI allow the Salesforce CRM experts to develop such assistants who would qualify leads, summarize cases, answer clients’ questions, and recommend the right actions. AI combined with Salesforce Flows and custom logic allows businesses to automate processes, improve productivity, enhance decision-making, and create a higher level of individualized customer experience. Generally, this means that AI-enabled CRM systems give companies a chance to expand their businesses in an efficient manner.
Connect Enterprise Systems
With the help of GraphQL, REST APIs, and MuleSoft, a Salesforce developer combines separate applications used for customer service, operations, accounting, marketing, and supply chain management. Also, they integrate Salesforce with different platforms such as Oracle, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, and SAP to have a smooth data exchange between different systems. Thus, eliminating duplicate information, providing employees with a single source of information about every customer interaction, and offering consistent experiences across all touchpoints.
Optimize Customer Data with Salesforce Data Cloud
Managing fragmented customer information with data collected from websites, marketing campaigns, and connected devices becomes increasingly challenging. That’s why organizations often hire Salesforce CDP developers who use identity resolution to merge customer records from multiple sources, creating a single and accurate customer profile. Professionals also design AI-driven personalization strategies and real-time segmentation of audiences for offering relevant and personalized recommendations according to current behavioral data.
When Should You Hire Specialists in Salesforce Implementation?
While delay in appointing Salesforce expertise may begin affecting system, customer experiences, productivity and revenue, recruiting the right CRM development specialists at the right stage can help accelerate digital transformation and prevent costly rework. Here are some signs of knowing when it’s time to hire Salesforce managed services.
Your CRM Adoption Has Stalled
When the team avoids using Salesforce, increases their reliance on manual work, and struggles to complete the routine tasks signify that CRM no longer supports the way your team works. The reason could be disconnected workflows, inefficiency page layouts, outdated customizations, etc. that may reduce the value of your Salesforce investment.
You’re Planning AI Initiatives
Companies interested in implementing Agentforce, predictive analytics, and Einstein AI solutions find out that the current Salesforce environment is not ready for intelligent automation. That is why they should hire Salesforce programmers who can develop a scalable, AI-ready, and integrated CRM platform.
Your Business is Scaling Faster Than Your CRM
An implementation that worked for a small team may struggle to support increasing customer interactions, larger teams, and growing operational demands. Common indicators include inefficient workflows, declining system performance, and frequent requests for new customizations. All these are strong signs that your Salesforce implementation has likely outgrown its original design.
You’re Expanding into New Markets
Regional compliance requirements, distributed teams, and localized business processes, these are some operational challenges that come with business expansion. Managing these complexities via standalone configurations becomes increasingly difficult. This is where organizations must seek additional customization and development to support long-term growth.
You’re Integrating Multiple Business Systems
While adopting marketing automation tools, customer support systems, ERP platforms, accounting software, and eCommerce platforms, companies usually struggle with inconsistent customer information, delayed reporting, and duplicate records. In order to avoid the negative impact on the effectiveness of the operations, companies should take the help of Salesforce development specialists.
Salesforce Development Team vs Salesforce Administrator Team: Which One Do You Need?
Salesforce Development Expert
Salesforce Administrator
Build custom business logic and applicationsDevelop reports and dashboards
Create lightning experiences and advanced automationConfigure Salesforce using clicks instead of codes
Build the solutions in Lightning Web Components, Visualforce, and ApexPerform daily CRM data management
Optimize platform scalability, architecture, and performanceManage the users, profiles, permissions, and security settings.
Set up APIs and connect Salesforce with marketing and ERPStructure flow, validation rules, and approval processes
Scroll the table sideways on smaller screens.
While recruiting the Salesforce experts helps you focus on building custom applications, automation, and integration of CRM with other systems, hiring administrators lets you configure and optimize Salesforce with its out-of-the-box features. This way, you must ensure to hire a Salesforce administrator and developer together to form a balanced team for ongoing platform management and scalable solutions.
Skip the six-week hiring cycle.
Girikon fields pre-vetted, certified Salesforce developers and admins — Agentforce, Data Cloud, LWC, integrations. Tell us the gap and we will match the profile, usually within days.
Request developer profiles
Specialized Salesforce Experts You May Need
Here is a group of Salesforce specialists that you may need to deliver your project efficiently.
Hire Force.com Developers
Recruiting these developers helps businesses build custom applications beyond Salesforce’s standard capabilities. Using business logic, custom objects, and workflow automation, they streamline complex processes, thus enabling organizations to enhance efficiency without investing in entirely new software.
Hire Salesforce Lightning Developers
Having such specialists in place helps businesses build high-performance applications and reusable components that create digital experiences for Experience Cloud. They also perform exceptionally when issues like slow page performance, lower user adoption, and outdated interfaces are affecting employee productivity.
Hire Marketing Cloud Implementation Company
When companies want to create automated and cross-channel customer journeys using tools like Email Studio, Mobile Studio, and Journey Builder, it’s more effective to hire marketing cloud specialists. Starting from performance management of campaigns to personal communication via SMS and mobile, everything is handled by these developers.
Skills You Need to Check Before You Hire a Salesforce Developer
AI and Automation Skills
Salesforce is continuously embedding AI across its platforms. This makes it important for developers to adopt and work with modern AI capabilities like Einstein AI, Agentforce, generative AI, and Prompt Builder.
Integration Skills
Today, modern enterprises integrate their Salesforce with a variety of applications in finance, sales, marketing, and operations in order to facilitate data exchange on a timely basis. This requires the need for such Salesforce experts who have experience in APIs, cloud platforms, and middleware.
Business and Collaborating Skills
Besides technical proficiency, Salesforce developers also possess certain business and collaboration skills such as understanding the business process, converting business needs into technical solutions, and communicating effectively with stakeholders.
Salesforce Development Skills
Businesses hire Salesforce Lightning developers who know several key technologies to customize things beyond the usual setup. Apex along with SOQL and SOSL help with the backend work while Git keeps track of changes. It seems like DevOps and CI CD methods make deployments faster and more reliable overall.Visualforce and Lightning Web Components are used for the front end parts. Knowing these allows for apps that perform well and stay secure. This part gets a bit messy when trying to combine everything into one project though.
Security and Compliance Skills
Stored customer and business information within Salesforce makes developers with key skills like OAuth authentication, permission sets, Salesforce shield, data authentication, GDPR, HIPPA, and other compliance frameworks an essential consideration.
How to Find Salesforce Developers that Deliver Business Value
Review Their Portfolio
Developers who can explain why they built a solution, not just what they build often bring greater strategic value. So, rather than focusing on the number of Salesforce projects, you must examine the complexity and business value of those implementations by assessing their expertise in:
Data Cloud
Agentforce
Enterprise Integrations
Marketing Cloud
Industry-specific Salesforce solutions
Experience Cloud
Lightning Web Components
Assessing Trailhead Activity
In comparison to a resume, Trailhead profiles give an idea of the process of learning and practical participation in the Salesforce ecosystem of a developer. Assessing the activities of a developer implies the identification of proof that he/she enhances his/her professional skills on a constant basis. Here is what you must consider:
Superbadges
Certifications
Hands-on projects
Recently earned badges
Learning paths
Verify Salesforce Certifications
Validating a developer’s technical knowledge and commitment via Salesforce certifications is one of the easiest ways. While certifications alone do not guarantee project success, it indicates that developers understand Salesforce best practices and keep up with the platform’s evolving capabilities. Here are a few of certifications that can be relevant to your project:
Platform Developer I
Platform Developer II
AI Specialist
JavaScript Developer I
Data Cloud Consultant
Application Architect
Assess Their Architectural Thinking
In an interview or while reviewing portfolios, it is important for you to hire a developer with good architectural skills who can create solutions which are scalable, secure, reliable and meet business needs. Also, ensure to assess whether the developer understands:
Salesforce architecture
Platform scalability
Integration strategy
Solution design
Performance optimization
Searching for Relevant Experience in the Industry
Due to the fact that Salesforce implementation varies from one branch to another, it is better to look for a developer experienced in the sphere you work in because he/she is more likely to be aware of all the peculiarities of regulation, processes in your company, and needs of your clients.
For instance, a developer with experience in financial services is likely to be familiar with regulatory compliance, risk management, and financial services cloud. Similarly, those who worked in Manufacturing have experience in the field of supply chain automation and ERP integration.
Common Errors Committed by Companies During Hiring of Salesforce Developer
While focusing on short-term hiring decisions, many organizations make certain common mistakes that lead to delayed projects, expensive rework, and poor user adoption. Here a few of them that you can avoid:
Choosing the lowest cost freelancer
Hiring based only on certifications
Not evaluating communication skills
Ignoring AI expertise
Overlooking DevOps knowledge
Skipping code reviews
Not defining testing standards
Conclusion
It requires a team that understands your business objectives and follows Salesforce best practices when it comes to hire Salesforce admins and developers. As a Salesforce consulting partner, Girikon brings certified professionals with experience across Experience Cloud, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, and Financial Services Cloud products.
From custom app development to API integrations, and lightning web components, the experts provide end-to-end Salesforce development services tailored to complex business requirements. So, are you looking for the right Salesforce expertise? Connect Girikon today to discuss your project requirements and discover how these certified professionals can accelerate your Salesforce implementation, scale the platform, and maximize your investment with confidence.
Salesforce Development Services
Hire the specialist, or hire the team that already has them.
Girikon is a certified Salesforce consulting partner with developers, architects and admins across Sales, Service, Experience, Marketing and Financial Services Cloud. Scale up for a single build or retain an ongoing squad — without the recruitment cycle, the ramp-up or the bench cost.
Certified developers, admins & architects
Agentforce, Data Cloud & AI capability
LWC, Apex & enterprise integrations
Flexible full-time, part-time or project engagement
Get matched with a specialist
Explore development services
Hiring this quarter? Call +1‑480‑241‑8198 (USA)
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Most business leaders across the world recognize the value of Salesforce. They are aware of how the world's leading cloud-based CRM platform can help them cultivate rewarding customer relationships, address gaps in customer service, and enable them to adopt a more holistic approach to managing day-to-day operations. What many of them are not aware of, however, is the role of a Salesforce consultant to help them navigate the challenges involved in transitioning to Salesforce. And that's not the full picture. Salesforce consultants can also help to optimize and automate business processes to enable a seamless transition.
What is a Salesforce Consultant?
Salesforce consultants help customers achieve their long-term business goals by ensuring the smooth implementation of Salesforce tailored to their unique business needs. They also assess the dynamic market landscape and adapt the customer's operations to be future-ready.
Salesforce consultants also manage customer relationships, and project plans, do market research, understand user needs and sentiment, gather requirements, research organizational data, and train employees to get the most out of Salesforce.
The best Salesforce consultants have deep knowledge of Salesforce technology, rich experience in similar prior implementations, and awareness of the best business practices.
Challenges that Salesforce Consultants face and how they can solve them
As a business leader, if you really want to unlock the true power of Salesforce, we recommend that you choose the best Salesforce Implementation Partner. Apart from implementing the CRM, they can also help you solve various key business challenges. Here’s a look at some of them.
1) Handling sensitive information
One of the key challenges organizations must deal with while transitioning to Salesforce is ensuring their customer data is safe. Any data breach can result in drastic consequences for the business.
A Salesforce consultant will follow industry best practices to ensure that there are adequate safeguards in place to secure the data exchange between your existing systems and Salesforce. Additionally, they also ensure that once your data is in Salesforce, it can be accessed easily by users. This allows them to get a comprehensive view of their customers including contact details and interaction history in the least number of clicks. This helps them to make data-driven decisions leading to greater customer satisfaction.
2) Providing personalized assistance
All businesses are unique. This is true even for businesses offering similar products or services with a similar customer base. Each business has its unique vision, goals, and strategies that set them apart from each other. Consequently, they may have completely different reasons to implement Salesforce and completely different expectations from the implementation based on their unique business objectives. A vastly experienced Salesforce is well aware of the nuances of customer goals and expectations and works closely with customer and implementation teams to ensure the CRM implementation is fully tailored to the customer’s unique needs.
3) Offering valuable insights
Salesforce has been purpose-built to provide a 360-degree view of your customers. It includes everything from your contact information, purchase history, service interactions, interests and preferences, and social media interactions. As a business owner, you want to have deeper insights into customer behavior along with intelligent recommendations in a single place.
A good Salesforce consultant makes that possible. They can help aggregate siloed data and give you a unified, single-window view to help you better understand customer preferences and behavior patterns, regardless of which channel they interact with you on. This enables you to provide seamless interaction experiences to your customers across sales, marketing, and customer service across multiple channels.
4) Providing instant support
When customers interact with a business's customer support, they want instant resolution to their problem. And businesses are no different. When you invest in a platform like Salesforce, which includes licensing and implementation costs, you want your users to be up and running quickly so that they can close deals faster and resolve customers' concerns quickly.
While a library of documents, manuals, and videos may be helpful for your users, they may not be able to help in resolving a critical issue that may be disrupting operations. What businesses need is the support of an expert who has been there and done that. That expert is your Salesforce consultant. A Salesforce consultant understands the nuances of the platform and knows where to make tweaks to resolve common issues.
5) Configuring user permissions
Would you allow complete access to your financial data to all your employees? Would you allow access to customer information to your HR department? Sounds absurd, right?
Assigning the right access privileges to users is a critical part of any Salesforce implementation.
Creating the right user-profiles and customizing permissions in Salesforce requires a certain level of expertise that your existing IT team may not be equipped to handle. This is where the roles of Salesforce consultants become important. They can ensure that your users have access to only that functionality of Salesforce that allows them to do their job effectively. Not less and certainly not more. A Salesforce consultant can help you navigate the complex domain of user management to get the most out of your users.
6) Discovering business-specific solutions
The goals and needs of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are different from their larger counterparts. Consequently, their CRM platform needs are also different. How do you go about designing a solution that is tailored to your unique requirements?
Purchasing a Salesforce license is just the starting step. Salesforce has virtually limitless capabilities and you may not have the requisite expertise in-house to choose the best-fit features of the platform to achieve your vision. A good Salesforce consultant leverages their prior experience and deep knowledge of the domain to establish clear goals and business requirements. They then use this information to recommend solutions that are aligned with your goals and needs.
7) Boosting user adoption
Poor user adoption is one of the primary reasons why many Salesforce implementations fail to achieve their true potential. In fact, industry research indicates that the problem is so acute that in the absence of adequate guidance and training, teams are likely to stop using the platform altogether. And this should be a matter of concern for you. When users don't use the platform, each of them relies on personal, non-standardized methods to manage customers and their data. Without a unified view of customers based on gold-standard industry practices, your executives are unable to make critical strategic decisions.
Which is why you need a Salesforce consultant. With adequate guidance and training programs tailored to each user group based on their job functions, they can ensure that your employees feel empowered when they look at customer data, giving their productivity a shot in the arm.
8) Other challenges
Quick setup
Setting up and managing Salesforce can be complex unless done by an expert. A Salesforce consultant knows the nitty-gritty of configuration, where to tweak the platform and configure the right security settings to ensure a robust and secure CRM that works for your business.
Enhance customer experience
Organizations that have achieved success with Salesforce will be able to tell you the value a Salesforce consultant brings to the table to improve productivity and provide enhanced customer experiences. With deep insights on customer behavior, and automation of customer service, they can help you close service cases faster translating to greater customer satisfaction.
Easier and faster Salesforce adoption
A good Salesforce consultant can help you go live quickly with minimal disruption in your day-to-day operations. They draw upon their extensive experience and deep business domain knowledge to come up with a comprehensive roadmap that includes implementation, training, and strategy to drive user adoption.
Risk reduction
A certified Salesforce consultant has the right experience and technical know-how to help organizations manage uncertainties associated with Salesforce implementation such as data migration and security, process automation, and migration to ensure a seamless holistic transition.
Salesforce Consulting Services from Girikon, a Gold Salesforce Partner, can help you unlock the true power of Salesforce. With customized solutions aligned with your unique business needs, we have helped many businesses improve productivity, boost efficiency, and increase revenues. Get in touch with an expert to learn more.
Salesforce, the world’s leading CRM platform empowers businesses with tools and services to manage customer data, automate processes, streamline operations, and drive customer satisfaction. Salesforce consultants aren’t just experts at handling the software; they recognize that Salesforce is a great tool to improve business productivity and align themselves with customer goals, wants, and needs to unlock the true power of the platform. In short, they empower teams to do what was earlier not thought to be possible.
As a Salesforce Consulting Partner for over a decade, our experts have compiled a list of tips to guide the next crop of Salesforce consultants on their path to success. These tips are a result of over a 100-man years of Salesforce experience, countless hours spent with customer teams, and millions of lines of coding. Let’s dive right in.
1. Understand the ‘Why’
While there are certain skills that can be acquired such as data management, data analytics, and process automation, critical thinking is one area that can only be awakened from within. Critical thinking entails having a larger-than-life view of the business while having an in-depth view of the everyday activities of the organization. Many Salesforce consultants have a great technical background and are adept at turning requirements into recommendations and ideas. But what is truly required to be understood is the "Why". Why do they need it? What are their business goals and what is stopping them from achieving them? What are their people like? What are their pain points? What do they want in terms of work satisfaction? Finding answers to these fundamental questions will go a long way to advance your career in Salesforce consulting. You need to evolve from being a manager or business analyst to being a problem solver, and for that, you need to identify and understand the problem and all its constituents and dependencies to the last detail.
2. Adapt your communication strategy
Salesforce consultants have to work closely with engineering teams, customer user groups, and senior leadership which may sometimes be spread across the globe. For you to be successful as a global Salesforce consultant, you need to adapt your communication depending on who you are interacting with. Understanding the audience, their vision, and the way they see the business and its horizon (both short-term and long-term) plays a vital role in the success of the projects you are working on.
As an example, if you are interacting with engineering teams, you may want to interact in a way that they understand via a common language. As a representative of your organization (like a front office), you need to be aware of your unique communication style and how your interactions are received by others. As a thumb rule, communication strategy varies from who you are interacting with to the size of the group you are addressing.
3. Know Your Audience
Whether you are presenting to a CXO at a Fortune 500 company or interacting with individual project members, knowing your audience is one of the key skills all Salesforce consultants need to have.
When you are involved in multiple projects and have to interact with different audiences, whether it is for project updates or course corrections, an instinct is to use the same template for interaction. This approach rarely works as each individual user group has its own perspective and level of understanding. Recognize the value each stakeholder is seeking and develop a mindset to tailor your presentations to align with the audience.
4. Develop a self-help attitude
One of the job responsibilities of a successful Salesforce consultant is to hire new consultants. And you can only attract talent as good as yourself. When recruiting new consultants, veterans of the game often look for leadership traits such as taking self-motivated initiatives. What homework did they do before they sought help from seniors? Demonstrating a self-help attitude would go a long way in cultivating strong leadership and problem-solving skills.
5. Always be willing to learn
Salesforce consultants, especially ones who are still young in their consulting journey, need to constantly upgrade themselves on products, processes, and frameworks, but more often than not they get no guidance or direction. Well, if you want to grow, you are on your own. It’s your mindset to self-direct your learning and find solutions to challenges that will take you on the path to growth. Having a keen learner’s mindset goes a long way in building a keenness to take on new challenges and learn to grow.
6. Pick an Area of Expertise
While it’s great to be a jack of multiple trades (skills), it’s important to be very good at something. Whether it’s a certification in Sales Cloud or your early experience as a Salesforce administrator, it's important that you pick one area in which you are an expert. Expertise in a certain area builds client trust and establishes credibility. And once you pick an area you want to build further on, make sure you are up to date with the latest product innovations in that area and establish how you can help businesses leverage your expertise in these new innovations.
7. Know When to Say No
Customers want the moon. Literally. If it was left to them, they would want to implement their entire roadmap for the next 10 years as of yesterday. Many times, consultants agree to customer requests while working on a project even when they know it is not in their best long-term interest, or it just cannot be done at this stage. While customer satisfaction is extremely important in your line of work, you also need aware of what is in the best interest of the customer and the project. Make your point politely yet firmly, with an irrefutable basis. You were hired because you are an expert in your field, and this is time to say it emphatically. While it's always tempting to say yes to every customer request, learn to say no when you have a reasonable basis for it.
Draw on your past experience working with multiple customers on a variety of Salesforce projects. Offer alternative suggestions and help the customer see the larger picture. Your job as a Salesforce consultant is to be a partner with your customer, working towards a common goal and that job includes knowing when to say no.
Conclusion
Hiring a Salesforce consultant is an investment you make to achieve the heights that you envision for your business.
Ready to unlock the true power of Salesforce? Team up with a Salesforce Implementation Partner who can guide you on the right path.
The latest Summer '23 features have been released by Salesforce. If you are looking to upgrade your Salesforce instance, the right Salesforce Implementation Partner can help you with the implementation of these new features and training of your Salesforce admins to make your operations more efficient and productive.
Here’s a look at the top 10 features from the Latest Salesforce Summer ’23 Release
1. Integrated Analytics Services
The summer ’23 release comes with a consolidated interface for Analytics and Slack. Which means you can now enjoy a seamless engagement with all your CRM Analytics, Lightning reports and dashboards, and Einstein Discovery models and forecasts. The Analytics tab now comes with powerful search capabilities and recommendations, giving you access to organized statistics that you can turn to for all your Lightning dashboards and CRM Analytics.
Using the Post to Slack feature on Lightning dashboards, you can share information such as dashboards and CRM data with colleagues throughout Slack workspaces easily.
2. Unified Analytics
With the new release of Analytics Home, you no longer need to deal with analytics spread over different products. This new feature unifies all your CRM analytics data in a single place, allowing you easy access to information. Now you can get access to a consolidated view of all your CRM reports and dashboards in a structured and organised way, so you can easily access all the information you need to take quick decisions.
3. Customer Data Platform reimagined as Data Cloud
In the new release, Salesforce has transformed the erstwhile Customer Data Platform into Salesforce Data Cloud with all the necessary documentation and additional features.
4. Barring Unverified Emails Sent by Guest Users
This feature update disallows companies from sending emails from unverified email addresses of guest users. However, Salesforce customers that have a validated company-wide email address will not be impacted by this update. In such cases, the sender’s email address always updates to the authenticated email address. With the Latest Summer ’23 release, this enforced change effectively disallows shadowy emails from being sent by a guest user using an unverified email address.
5. Upgrade to Hyperforce Using Hyperforce Assistant
The latest Summer ’23 release comes with Hyperforce Assistant which streamlines the upgrade to Hyperforce. The new Hyperforce Assistant comes with the latest Hyperforce messaging authorization feature that has better in-built reference checks to support Salesforce organizations that have a large number of Apex classes. Hyperforce Assistant is available in all editions of Salesforce Lightning as well as Classic.
Once admins schedule the upgrade, they will be asked to initiate the assistant. Admins can activate the assistant manually in case you are scheduled for a major migration. During Setup, you can enter “Hyperforce Assistant” in the Quick Find Box and select the appropriate option.
6. Accelerated Quote Template Creation With OmniStudio Document Generation
Quote generation is now much simpler with this latest add on. With Salesforce CPQ Plus, your reps can easily create templates to generate quotes for your customers. You can generate a Microsoft Word file in the format and language of your preference, insert tokens and upload the document. Then associate the inserted tokens with relevant Salesforce fields. Your sales reps can then start utilizing the template once it is active. They can also easily convert their documents to PDFs. This Salesforce CPQ plus update is available in both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience.
7. Real-Time Collaboration with Partner Relationship Management for Slack App
This feature improves communication and collaboration across internal teams and external partners by bringing them together in a single channel using Slack. With Slack you can automate key business processes, and update and share records easily across collaborators. Partner Relationship Management for Slack connects your Salesforce CRM with partners seamlessly, with easy access to important information through partner portals, thereby boosting productivity, and fostering better communication. This upgrade impacts the Enterprise and Unlimited editions of Salesforce. The mandatory requirement to access this feature upgrade is to be a Slack Enterprise Grid user.
8. Codeless flow of External Data into Flow Builder
This new feature allows admins to use Flow Builder to automate processes that involve external data without the need for coding by developing an HTTP callout action through a web service API. Once you enter the API details, Flow Builder automatically generates a reusable callout action which admins can immediately deploy in Flow Builder and across Salesforce. This commonly used feature has witnessed several enhancements since the last update. Now it is easier to configure and edit the API responses to HTTP callouts. This allows the use of external data inflows to be simpler and more declarative. This upgrade is available across all editions of the Lightning Experience – Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited and Developer.
The reason why this feature has been introduced is that APIs often go through modifications, such as the addition of a new field or updation in an existing field in an external system. Admins with the relevant permissions in Manage Flow and Customize Applications can create an HTTP callout action.
Previously, admins had to modify the auto-generated API definition in JSON to modify the HTTP callout action. With the latest update, this action can be modified with just a few clicks. Instead of editing and configuring JSON to parse the API response, admins can easily select data types for fields. With this new feature, admins will also receive more lucid error messages, simplifying the troubleshooting process and prevent runtime issues.
9. Quick Create Sandbox to Enhance Productivity
Quick Create Full Sandbox is another new upcoming feature of the Salesforce’s Summer 23 Release. This feature accelerates sandbox creation and refreshing. This update means no additional actions will be required from Salesforce admins as it is the default setting. This feature will be available on eligible Hyperforce instances. Salesforce will initiate a staggered release after June 10, 2023, and users with the Manage Sandbox permission can use this feature.
10. Process Builder is on its way out.
Rules have changed. Process Builder does not have the capability of adding new processes anymore. However, you can still activate/deactivate existing processes or edit them. Having said that, it is recommended that for most use cases, you migrate to Flow Builder. The upgraded flow builder can take automation of business processes to a whole new level.
Summing Up
With the Summer ’23 release, Salesforce endeavours to make your daily tasks simpler, more efficient, and productive. The Summer ’23 release is designed to empower organizations to improve their engagement with customers, automate businesses processes, and drive growth.
At Girikon, a Gold Salesforce Consulting Partner, we recognize that staying up-to-date with these new changes in the Salesforce platform and leveraging the new capabilities are key to maximizing your Salesforce RoI. Contact one of our experts today to know more about how you can make the most of these exciting new features of the Summer ’23 Release.
Digital transformation is not a goal post. It’s a continuous journey involving the evolution of people and processes. Here are some of the steps you could take to transform your business digitally and advance your business growth.
How can you advance transformation in an hour?
Do your homework. Education is the first step to empowerment. Study about organizations that have had a successful digital transformation. There are many great case studies to explore. Comb your network and identify someone that you might know at a senior level who was part of the digital transformation at one of these companies. Schedule a time for a discussion to pick their brain. In fact, do one better. Become a customer of these businesses if you are not one already. Use their app, social media pages or other digital touchpoints to get a first-hand experience of what they have created and how they deliver the customer experience.
Get conversational. For most people, the phrase digital transformation can seem ambiguous. It’s a broad term and a discussion on it may revolve around technology, business models, and emerging trends. Businesses are embracing new technologies to reinvent how they work, to connect with customers, and to innovate. It would be prudent to invest an hour in reading the latest about how business leaders see the future of work, navigating through change, and the impact of technology on the economy from renowned publications and organizations such as the World Economic Forum.
Identify a champion. Even before COVID19, many digital transformation initiatives did not work out. In fact, some of them failed miserably. And this evidence became immediately tied to digitization without clearly defined purpose, outcomes, or ROI. Avoid these pitfalls by identifying a champion for your digital transformation, be it the CTO or someone else, who can own and drive the change from the very start. They should have clear and to the point discussions with all business units about what digital transformation implies and what they will get out of it. And while you identify that champion, also come up with a responsibility matrix for cross-functional overlap and ownership.
How can you advance transformation in one quarter?
Run an innovation pilot. Choose a customer journey that you recognize must be digitized. Put together a small cross-functional team (take the help of an external consultant if required) and throw them the gauntlet. Ask them to build a digital journey prototype in three or four iterations. Hand over this pilot to real customers to do a test drive to demonstrate what’s possible.
Automate a single business process. A simpler way to imagine digital transformation is through automation of a business process. Put together a cross functional team to use collaboration and workflow tools, for instance Salesforce Slack, to streamline or redesign a business process that is manual, repetitive and causes pain for your team today. For instance, scheduling meetings with team members spread across multiple time zones can be a difficult task. If a technology tool can help teams collaborate asynchronously, it may free up meetings stacked up in your calendar and free up staff inboxes. This improves work efficiency, augments capacity, and enables better coordination between your teams.
Identify the gaps. More often than not, business leaders don’t know what data they have access to, or where it lies. Spend time to get a complete view of data across the entire organization. Don’t just ask the senior management. Ask your peers and subordinates. The further down you go in hierarchy, the more likelihood of finding honest answers. To measure the digital transformation you seek to bring to the organization, you need to understand the true picture of all data.
How can you advance transformation in a year?
Renovate one business function. Whether it’s making your supply chain more visible by integrating the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technology or if it’s renovating your data systems to support better production planning and analysis. Choose one key business function and rebuild it digitally from ground up. Set challenging goals, timelines and identify measurable criteria, and use objectives and key metrics to drive effort and outcomes.
Create a roadmap. Do achieve the desired outcome from your digital transformation, your vision and plan require critical inputs from customers and employees, to establish how technology innovation can help you meet their expectations. Eventually, driving innovation requires a great deal of perseverance built on a powerful foundation of data, tools, and skills. And digital transformation is not just the implementation of technology. It also necessitates changes in user behavior, and for that a fresh perspective may be necessary. So, don’t attempt this digital journey alone. Collaborate with technology agencies, systems integrators, consultants, and independent software vendors that can help you throughout your digital transformation journey with strategic planning, change management support, implementation best practices, training and upgrades.
Reimagine your relationships. On the other side of digital transformation lies relationship transformation. Define how you want an ideal customer and employee relationship to be, and then guide the transformation. The following questions would guide you along the journey:
How have the operational and technology changes impacted your relationships with your customers?
How can you improve staff efficiency?
How can you ensure staff wellness?
What are the areas of improvement?
What are the areas of friction?
What are the new ways to add value to customers and employees?
Study other companies. Not just the ones in your industry, but across the business landscape. Everyone has customers, identify who is delivering the best customer experiences. Learn from them and bring those learnings on board.
Re-imagine the way you use data. Static dashboards are a thing of the past. Instead, explore using real time data in meetings, driving the discussion with dynamic data. Augment your internal communications with data-driven insights and be transparent. Include the uncertainties these data reveal. Ensure all employees have comprehensive training on data fluency and measure the training objectives at the end of the training as a key business objective. Promote a culture of making data driven decisions. Be aware of when your employees can’t make decisions because data isn’t available, and work diligently to fill those gaps quickly.
Girikon is a Gold Salesforce Consulting Partner. We have worked with businesses across the globe and delivered success for over a decade. To know more about how Digital Transformation can benefit your business, contact an expert today.
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