Billions Flowing into the Salesforce Ecosystem

First off, thank you to everyone who subscribed to the first SFB Weekly. I believe there are just over 8,000 subscribers, which is unbelievable!

I also appreciate everyone's feedback. I'm not 100% sure about the direction this newsletter will take, but I quite like this format, as it's a bit like "old school" informal blogging that SalesforceBen.com used to do back in 2014. So any thoughts of what you would like to hear, please let me know.

C.R.E.A.M

First up, let's talk $$$. The Salesforce ecosystem has always been a hotbed for attracting serious money. At the moment, this is coming in thick and fast from VC's who are investing in the latest generation of AppExchange Apps, as well as masses of M&A activity in the Salesforce consultancy world (although this has been happening for a good 8+ years or so).

I knew that a few Consultancies had been acquired recently, but I did a bit of digging and realised that 4 have been swept up in the last WEEK, K2 Partnering Solutions (a recruiter) has acquired, Cloud Pacific, OSF Digital has acquired Datarati, GyanSys Inc has acquired Groundswell Cloud Solutions, and Spaulding Ridge have acquired Silvr Lining Group.

We all know that Salesforce skills are in demand, but companies are still willing to pay millions to acquire Salesforce talent and their book of customers.

In the ISV world, we published an article last year talking about how $1.35B (Yes that's billion), went to 12 Salesforce ISV's last year. 2022 has also been kicked off with a huge $45m Series B announcement from Spekit, and I'm sure this will be the first of many.

For a lot of us, Salesforce has been a Career for many years and is just our normal life. But for others; the millions of new Salesforce professionals joining the ecosystem, VC's investing, and large consultancies snapping up smaller fry, they are just getting started. I find this incredibly encouraging and exciting.

To provide another point of view, anyone who holds/follows Salesforce stock will have noticed it dropped by about 33% in recent months. UBS downgraded their rating of Salesforce which caused a big drop, mainly because after speaking to executives, they felt IT spending has been pulled forward in 2020/2021, meaning that 2022 could see slower growth for Salesforce.

We will have to wait until the earnings to see if this is true.

But I think the wild card could be Slack. I found this graphic the other day from a Salesforce investor presentation that showed the ROI Salesforce have received on some of their biggest acquisitions...

Pretty impressive, right? Slack cost nearly double what Tableau did, so we will have to see what Salesforce can pull out of the bag. One big opportunity I see for Salesforce is getting the huge number of Slack free customers (such as myself ??♂?), to convert to a paid subscription by providing access to premium tools/features or integrations into Salesforce.

It's all to play for though. As of yet, the available Slack features and integrations aren't blowing the Salesforce community away...

Migrating to Flow

To get back on track and start talking about some technical stuff. As I'm sure you know, Flow is coming! As we talked about in last weeks newsletter, Flow may soon become a skill requirement for most Salesforce professionals with the retirement of Workflow Rules & Process Builder, so it's time to get learning!

Tim Combridge put out a couple of excellent posts this week on SFB.com, talking about new flow features in Spring '22, as well as how to migrate your Workflow Rules & Process Builder to Flow.

One BIG point to highlight, is that this migration to Flow is a chance to completely reevaluate your automation strategy. Flow is 100x more powerful than previous declarative automation tools. The worst thing you can do is just migrate all your automation as is. Understand Flow's capabilities, and then put a migration strategy in place, which may involve condensing or re-solutioning some of your old automation.

If you're interested in learning more about Flow, why not come and join Salesforce Ben, Ohanaly, and a bunch of Flow-Influencers, at FlowFest. It's our first event, and we'll be looking to challenge competitors, and provide spectators with Flow tips and best practices. Sign up here!

App of the Week

I reserved this section to promote a great free app in the Ecosystem, but I'd like to change it slightly to also promote new startups that deserve a highlight.

So for this week, meet dataimporter.io. An App developed by Sam Hoult. Salesforce professionals can use dataimporter to upload CSV files, connect to Dropbox, external databases, and schedule jobs to be run automatically. They have also developed cool features such as Rollback. Data sampling, and application. A free plan is also available.

Have a fantastic weekend and I'll see you next week.

SFB