Salesforce Career Questions Answered: AI Integrations, Team Retention + Contest Winners and More

Unlock the secrets to a thriving career in Salesforce as we transition from X Spaces to LinkedIn Live in our landmark episode. We're revealing the lucky winners of our Salesforce certification voucher contest and answering your burning questions about succeeding in the industry. 

Explore the future of tech careers with us, and learn how AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity are not just buzzwords but essential components in securing your position in the ever-evolving tech world. We share practical tips on weaving AI into your daily tasks and discuss the creation of custom GPTs to provide tailored, project-specific solutions. With a focus on enhancing your soft skills, this conversation is packed with insights on staying ahead of the curve.

Join Vanessa, Fred, and myself as we unravel strategies for navigating the dynamic Salesforce job market. We tackle predictions for a post-layoff tech landscape and the implications of potential U.S. government reforms. From the rising demand for Salesforce's Data and Commerce Clouds to the value of adjacent skills like agile methodology and DevOps knowledge, we offer guidance on carving out a niche in this competitive field. Whether you're an industry veteran or just starting, this podcast is your guide to adapting and thriving in an era defined by technological innovation.

Chapters

• 0:06 Salesforce Career Show Contest Winner
• 12:18 Future-Proofing Your Career With AI
• 20:27 Predictions and Strategies for Salesforce Career
• 35:08 Navigating Global Salesforce Job Market
• 45:33 Industry Applications of AI and Salesforce
• 51:48 Navigating Employee Departures and Career Paths
• 1:04:21 Negotiating Salary and Value Communication
• 1:13:43 Adapting to Changing Salesforce Roles

Transcript

Announcer: 0:06

And now the number one audio program that helps you to hire, get hired and soar higher in the Salesforce ecosystem. It's the Salesforce Career Show with Josh Matthews and Vanessa Grant.

Josh : 0:21

Okay, well, welcome everybody. This is absolutely our very first show on LinkedIn Audio and, interestingly, it's also going to be our very last show on LinkedIn Audio because within like three days of booking this you know, scheduling this event and making the big transition from X Spaces to LinkedIn Audio we were notified that they are sunsetting LinkedIn Audio and everything moving forward is going to be on LinkedIn Live. So if you are a dedicated listener, or even a new listener, to the live program, which this is right now, you might be listening to this on the podcast, but if you like coming to these live programs, we're still going to be on LinkedIn regular Wednesdays, every other Wednesday. So we'll be back in two weeks right here on LinkedIn, but it's going to be under LinkedIn live and not LinkedIn audio.

Josh : 1:14

Now, there's good things and bad things about that. The good things are we get to stay on the LinkedIn platform, which I, you know, have a mild love affair with, but we also. The bad news is you might have to look at us because we're actually going to be video and we're no schlubs, but that's the deal. Now we've got to. I guess what are you going to do, vanessa? Put lipstick on before every podcast moving forward. Is that what's going to happen?

Vanessa: 1:39

Well being in remote work for over a decade now. Even if I'm in my pajamas, I always have my trusty cardigan and my desk lipstick, which, oh, and a scrunchie which lets me be put together on screen within like a minute.

Josh : 1:57

There you go Desk lipstick. I've never heard that one before, but I like it. Now, most of you who are here and I'm looking at your faces your happy faces, by the way thank you for coming to this program Feeboard. It's great to see you, larry Reid. You guys are fantastic and we appreciate your dedication and how consistently you guys come to our program.

Josh : 2:16

Now, this is a special episode because for the last month, we've been running a contest and we will be giving away five free vouchers worth $400 each for certifications with Salesforce courtesy of Gilda and courtesy of Salesforce. So let's go ahead and get right into it, but first I want to tell you a little bit about the format. What we are going to do is we're going to read one of the questions. By the way, we received a ton of questions. Thank you so much. We also received some wonderful, glowing reviews, both of which were opportunities to become a contestant for these, and you guys have left us some very beautiful, sweet, thoughtful and daring messages on both Spotify and on Apple. So, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you so much for doing that. We really appreciate you and we're very happy to be able to give back to you and our small way of showing some support by running this contest. So we'll be reading a single question and then we will announce one of the winners.

Josh : 3:20

The way that the winners will be selected everyone's on a Google sheet. There's a number, and Vanessa is going to run an automatic number generator to select the winner. If your name is called twice, you can only win once. So just know that you can only win one certification, even though you may have two entries into the contest. Now we're going to hopefully get through more than five questions and I think we're going to try and limit our responses on some of them to, at least, you know, like 10 minutes at most. Also, and this is very important to note, a number of your questions were very similar, and it's good to see that. It's good to see that people have oftentimes very much the same level of curiosity around specific issues as it relates to their career. So you may not hear your specific question, but you will probably pick up that it has been asked in one way or another. There's a few that are sort of compounded, so with that, I think we can go ahead and get started. Vanessa, would you like to read our very first question?

Vanessa: 4:28

Sure. So our first question and I'll just throw out there we did get a lot of questions, so if we can't cover them on this episode, we're excited to hopefully cover them on future episodes. But our first question of the podcast of the show is what would be a great start to a career as a BA in the Salesforce ecosystem? I think that one might be for you, josh.

Josh : 4:53

Yeah right, Says the woman who helped pen the certification exam for BAs. Okay, off you go, Vanessa.

Vanessa: 5:00

Well, not the whole thing. I helped with some of it. There's a team of SMEs. Well, not the whole thing.

Announcer: 5:05

I helped with some of it. There's a team of SMEs.

Vanessa: 5:07

Okay, close enough, close enough. I'm the only one that's loud about it, that's the only one. So what would be a great start to a career as a BA in the Salesforce ecosystem? Well, at this point I would say a lot of folks even get their start in the Salesforce ecosystem as a BA, or they start as an admin or as a consultant. So, generally speaking, I would say and if I'm understanding the question right, I find that the easiest route into Salesforce business analysis is through consulting.

Vanessa: 5:47

Consulting, business analysis is generally a project based role and salesforce consultancies si's are the ones that generally have the salesforce projects, usually internal bas it's you're looking at like big companies and they're probably looking for folks that are more experienced, I think, at the consultancies. It's a really great way to get exposed to a lot of different industries and projects and to wear a lot of hats. So if you can show that you're versatile, if you have a lot of transferable skills let's say that you have some expertise in a specific industry that may be that SI those are all great ways to get your start, are all great ways to get your start. Lean as much on your transferable skills as possible and learn the language of business analysis, be able to use vocabulary words in your interview and yeah, I think those are the big things and know Salesforce. I don't think you can call yourself a Salesforce BA without knowing Salesforce. So, certification-wise, make sure you get that admin certification I would say first.

Josh : 6:48

Okay, so just to be clear, the best way to start a career as a BA in the Salesforce ecosystem is number one get your admin cert. Do they need to get their BA cert immediately after?

Vanessa: 7:00

Or should they?

Josh : 7:01

operate as an admin first? Admin first Okay, admin first. Should they start their career as an admin first? Admin first, okay, admin first. Should they start their career as an admin first before becoming a BA?

Vanessa: 7:10

No, I don't think that's necessary. But I do think if you get an entry-level role as a BA, most of those roles will expect you to do some level of configuration, at least initially, when you're first starting out in business analysis, at least in the Salesforce ecosystem. That's my experience.

Josh : 7:28

Okay, and, by the way, guys, this is a live audio program and what that means is that if you're listening and you would like to comment on this, share your perspective or challenge something that one of the speakers is saying, you absolutely get to do that. I think. What do they do?

Vanessa: 7:44

Just raise their hand or something like that yeah, raise your hand and we'll bring you up, just raise your hand, we'll bring you right up.

Josh : 7:49

So that's all you got to do. Look, you're the queen of the BA stuff, so I don't have too much to share here, but I would absolutely work on your soft skills. You should probably be a curious person, you should be interested, you should care about business, you should care about business processes and how things work and the flow of activities to conduct the business that is occurring. If you don't have that, you may want to question whether the BA role is absolutely right for you. But if you do have those, if it's your natural inclination or maybe even if it's not natural but you've worked on it over time to be a good communicator and to be able to elicit good quality information from stakeholders and power users and this sort of thing, then definitely go for it and go all in. Don't let go Grab your dream and just hold on to it. Man or gal, whoever it is, I think with that, vanessa, we can go ahead and announce our very first winner of the contest. You have a number for me.

Vanessa: 8:53

Our first number is Tom Sabacio.

Josh : 8:58

All right, tom, tom Sabacio. Congratulations, tom. You have just won yourself a $400 gift certificate or voucher for a Salesforce certification. We will be sending that to you no later than noon tomorrow, so keep an eye out for your email. If, for some reason, you don't see it, maybe it's going to come directly from me and it's possible that it's in your spam. So make sure that you check your junk folder by noon tomorrow and you will have that certification Now. These certs are. These vouchers are good, I think through March, so make sure that you're getting your studying in and getting ready for your next cert.

Vanessa: 9:35

Yes, let me make it clear. It's an up to $400 value. It's only going to be good for one cert. So if you decide to spend it on an AI associate cert even though I think that's free now, but you know- free to the end of the year, as is the AI.

Josh : 9:51

Yeah.

Vanessa: 9:52

Free to the end of next year.

Josh : 9:53

Oh, next year.

Vanessa: 9:54

Okay, it's free to the end of the next year. But if you decide to spend this on the certification voucher, on it on an associate cert, it'll only be worth 75 bucks.

Josh : 10:08

So I would encourage folks to aim high for those architect certs, all right, all right. Next question I'll go ahead and read that and this one, fred. We've got Fred Cadena up here as a speaker as well. Fred is a close friend. He's the host of the podcast Banking on Disruption. He's a stalwart fixture in the Salesforce ecosystem. He's very bright, and I may want to lean on him a little bit for this next question, which is how can I navigate the new AI buzz and improve capability in what is really important within that space? And that was who sent it. It's an anonymous question, though. What do you think, fred? Can you unmute and maybe share some insights on that?

Fred: 10:48

Yes, thank you, josh. I really appreciate the stellar introduction. I will tell you one other thing. I am today, which is dealing with travel delays, and I'm getting ready to board a flight, so I might have to drop the call a little bit early, but also, I'm going to this guy's on more airplanes than a pilot, I swear to God it does happen pretty frequently, very frequently.

Fred: 11:07

So I don't think of an answer that I'm going to just guess is going to warm Vanessa's heart, which is start with figuring out what is the business problem you're trying to solve with AI.

Fred: 11:16

Like AI is like the cool, exciting, sexy buzzword Everybody wants to do it, everybody wants to talk about it. But if you're just throwing AI at a problem and you don't know what the problem is, you don't know what the value is you're trying to get out of it, you're just going to end up wasting a lot of resources and you're not going to get the value of the time that you've invested. So I would definitely start with that. But as far as if you're looking for interesting use cases, I think right now where it sits the strongest in the Salesforce ecosystem is both in leveraging it for agent assistance. So I definitely look into that set of capabilities as well as helping with summarizations of large bodies of work, so pointing it at an account and all of the records around an account, like opportunities and cases and other records, and then presenting a summary to somebody who's maybe stepping into a situation so you don't have to spend 20 minutes reviewing everything, right? So those types of use cases, I think tend to generally offer a significant amount of value.

Josh : 12:16

That's great, fred. Thank you for sharing that. And for some folks, I think that they may still feel like they're even behind some of that right. I mean, what are your thoughts on them? I think that they may still feel like they're even behind some of that right. I mean, what are your thoughts on them getting really good at prompting large language models like chat, gpt and perplexity.

Vanessa: 12:33

Oh for sure that's helpful. I mean, there's so many different directions you can go with this, but I think the important part is that you go in a direction like start learning, whether it's you're going to be a really great prompter, whether you're going to focus on your soft skills, which are going to be increasingly more important in this age of AI. So, maybe, business analysis, user experience, you know, part of that is, you know, communication. If we're also talking about data cleanliness and data architecture, documentation, because you know again, ai is only good as the information that you're feeding it. All those things are going to be valuable in this AI future and future-proofing your career.

Vanessa: 13:17

But I don't think that there's any. I don't think that AI is going to overtake actual serious expertise anytime soon. A developer that knows their stuff is always going to be valuable, at least right now.

Josh : 13:35

Yeah and guys look, here's the thing with AI. The whole point of AI is to make life easier, so it's not really hard. Here's something that I did that I'm going to recommend everybody do it. Whether you're into AI or not, it doesn't really matter. We're going to be answering some other questions about AI here a little bit later on in the program, but something that I found particularly helpful number one I use Perplexity.

Josh : 13:59

I use it every day. I almost never Google anything anymore. I think getting really comfortable with the you know the LLM of your choice, and really leaning on that for your general research is helpful. You just need time in the seat. Think, look, you don't need 10,000 hours to get good at you know prompting AI, but you do need a number of hours and, more importantly, it needs to become more of a habit. So the other thing with these LLMs is I recommend you do the paid version. When you do a paid version, it saves your threads, you can go back to them and not only that, but it understands and learns how you prompt.

Josh : 14:39

So perplexity, for instance, which again, I love it. I prompted it. I said, hey, look, just I love it. I prompted it. I said, hey, look, you've seen a lot of my stuff, how can I improve in getting the most out of your software? And you know, give me 10 things or five things that I can do. And it very quickly looked at all the stuff that I've ever done, ever prompted, and it said, look, you can get more specific. Here's an example you can do this, you can do that. And it gave me personalized advice, not just general advice like we're sharing today. Give me personalized advice based on the kind of searches and prompts that I've been doing for the last whatever it's been six months with the product. So, pick one chat or perplexity or whatever, stick with it. You can use a lot of them, but I recommend leaning on one 80% of the time so that it gets to know you and then prompting it for how to get better at that specific product.

Vanessa: 15:34

Okay, yeah, I think. General takeaway yes, use GPTs to accelerate your learning and your productivity. Learn what Salesforce is offering if you're looking to use AI in Salesforce, and then understand the soft skills around it so that you can execute those projects well.

Josh : 15:54

Yeah, it can also help you with your communication, right? So if you're writing use cases, for instance, or if you're doing long form emails or anything to do related to marketing, all of these tools are very helpful, but you must just start off daily using it and just start integrating it into your life, and what's going to happen is you're going to feel like, oh man, that saved me so much time. You're going to start getting a lot of little wins, and those little wins are going to cause you to lean more and more into it and to develop an even deeper curiosity. And when you develop that deeper curiosity and, by the way, you know, sent us a question so clearly you're curious and when you develop that curiosity, it's just going to grow and build on the foundation that you're picking up in the first couple months of usage as well.

Fred: 16:46

So good question, Josh, if you don't mind, one other thing and I did go right to Salesforce related implementations.

Fred: 16:55

But on the GPT side I 100% will echo the paid model. And the other advantage I'll call out is this On OpenAI they have the ability to make custom GPTs. It's on the paid plan. On Cloud you can do what are called projects. They work a little bit differently.

Fred: 17:13

What's the same about it is you can seed that GPT, that project notebook, in Cloud with source information. That is true only for the things that you use in that project or in that custom G Compute. And what that would get you, as an example for a use case, is if you want to use it for coding, you could upload your coding standards documents that shows like how your organization wants code written and documented and notated, and then if you ask it to generate code, it will reference that document and generate code in that format. Or if you're writing content, you can upload your brand standards and your editorial standards and it will reference that as it's creating the content. You can imagine a lot of different other things you can extrapolate that to, but then you can pivot and have a different project or a different custom GPT that has different standards, and so you're able to kind of context switch. It's remembering all of those things, but in the context of that particular use case.

Josh : 18:17

I like it, fred, and thanks so much for jumping on the program here on a travel day. Appreciate you, man.

Fred: 18:23

On the program and on C8A. All right guys.

Josh : 18:27

I think we're done with that question, Vanessa. What's the number for contestant? Number two or number three? Yeah, number two. Who's our next winner?

Vanessa: 18:36

Our next winner is John Klein.

Josh : 18:42

All right. Oh, john Klein, that's pretty cool. All right, I got to tell you guys something about John Klein. So I know John and he's a wonderful guy and John Klein is. I'm glad that he won because he put so much energy into this ecosystem. If you don't know him, it's J-O-N. John Klein, c-l-i-n-e.

Josh : 19:00

John Klein is actually going to be helping us with our next contest, which we're going to be doing in January, and we're going to announce it in two weeks how you can enter, who the contest is for, and you're going to love it. So I just want to kind of tease that out a little bit. So stay tuned. Two weeks from now, we're going to be announcing the next contest. But congratulations, john. Thank you for your stunning review of us. We appreciate the five star rating and we appreciate you also. All right, my friends.

Josh : 19:30

That brings us to our next question, which is how do you see the Salesforce ecosystem developing in the short term, so a year from now and in the longer term two to three years?

Josh : 19:42

There's a follow-up to that question, but I think we will dive into that after we cover this first part. So this is usually something that we answer in our year-end session, which is going to be in two weeks, but I think it's good that we're going to go into it right now. I was just tapped yesterday by Ben McCarthy from Salesforce Ben to help contribute to his big article. They do a huge article in the first one or two weeks of January that addresses this very topic. So if you don't hear all the information that you would like about this right now, make sure you tune in two weeks and also check out Ben McCarthy's year end wrap up and sort of what does 2025 have for us. That's going to be released early to mid January on salesforcebencom. Okay, who would like to go first? Vanessa? What do you think? What do you think is going to happen in the ecosystem in the next year and possibly longer?

Vanessa: 20:35

Right now for all of it I'm still seeing it's the AI thing. I mean, salesforce is pushing it so much Between that data cloud and multi-cloud solutions. I think that's what we're really seeing. I think previous years was a real push in the Salesforce ecosystem for best practices and that's you know kind of DevOps practices. The UX certification went out, the strategy designer certification went out, devops Center came out and then maybe just my opinion but I don't think those were really very revenue generating for Salesforce. So we are back to pushing clouds and Salesforce has got those two AI certifications free through next year and also offering free courses for AI agents. And also they were offering like a free class for getting the data cloud certification for partners. That's really where the push is and for all of their conferences. If you want to get picked to speak at those sessions, you really need to be talking about those things or a multi-cloud solution or otherwise. It's just a matter of you getting lucky with a session abstract.

Josh : 21:55

Sure and Fred. Before I share anything, would you like to offer any predictions for what's coming in 2025 or in the two to three years that follow?

Fred: 22:03

Yeah, I'm trying to think of anything that I'd say that would be different than that.

Fred: 22:06

If you remember I think it was both on Victo last year and on the Magnet Disruption Prediction Show I predicted that Salesforce would acquire Databricks, which obviously they will not do this year. I guess two weeks left, three weeks left, it may happen, but I doubt it. But the reason for the prediction was Salesforce CDP or Data Cloud now really did not have the capability set to do the data centers that it needed to be to power where I could see Salesforce is going from a real-time data infrastructure to eventually power what has become their AI offerings. I think they've made a lot of moves this year. I think they've made a lot of moves this year, and I did say last year and I'll say it again, like Vanessa said, data cloud is definitely a skill set that people should embrace. If that's something that they're interested in leaning into the AI space, they're interested in leaning into where Salesforce is going, I would absolutely get it and it's actually one of the most straightforward certifications one can get.

Josh : 23:10

I definitely get it, and it's actually one of the most straightforward certifications one can get. So I definitely get it. Fred, I think Data Cloud was included in at least 25 or 30% of every million dollar plus deal that Salesforce closed last year.

Fred: 23:23

Absolutely. That's good, but you need it to leverage all of the new agent force stuff and more and more of what Salesforce is going to roll out from an AI and even from a platform and has some capability is going to end up being data cloud dependent.

Josh : 23:39

If I had a prediction, it would be that yeah, and guys, look, you can't buy agent force without paying for data cloud, right? That doesn't mean you have to use Data Cloud for AgentForce. You can use it without it, but you're going to miss a lot of the leverage that Data Cloud offers when paired with AgentForce, which is why it's paired together. So something to keep in mind. All great insights, guys. I'm going to share a couple little things here. I'm seeing an increase in, of course, data Cloud, also RCA and Commerce Cloud. Those products are all increasing in demand, so, if you're interested in some sort of specialization, I would absolutely track those three products. Also, I think that there will be a bump to the job market. Many of you follow this show for advice and recommendations on how to present yourself as a more desirable candidate, how to be more efficient, more productive at work, all of these sorts of things, but it is, at the end of the day, a career show, and so, as far as 2025 goes, I think that we're going to start to see a little bit more hiring going on. We spent two years of dealing with layoffs. I mean, there's no question about it, the tech industry in general wasn't great. We lost about half a million tech workers over the last two years and that is massively significant. Many of you, by the way, have felt the burn. It's not a good feeling. Now I do not think that there will be a massive bounce back. This is not going to be like the COVID super bounce, where everything dropped off and then everything came back like a tsunami wave of demand for both employees and demand for products as well. This is going to be slow. I expect it's going to take a few years just to get back to where we were right. There's been enough of a dip that we've got a lot of climbing to go in the ecosystem to get that growth going Now, like it or not.

Josh : 25:43

I also believe that the incoming White House administration is definitely interested in doing some reforms around regulation, specifically also around technology and around taxation as well, for corporate taxes. You may not like the policies, you may not like who's coming in, it doesn't matter. I think that we're going to see a little bit of a boost because of some of those initiatives that are happening at the highest level, but I don't think that you're going to see a lot of activity from it for at least six months after things actually get enacted. So expect a better year, you know, a year of improvement, not a year of decline, and I think that's a good thing. I've got a lot of other predictions around what I think is going to happen in the ecosystem, but I'm going to save it for our year-end show. So wonderful question. Now we've got Bunting McCauley. You have asked to speak, so would you like to speak on this or something else? You've got the mic.

Caller: 26:40

Actually, this is very relevant to what I'm going to ask, so thank you very much for allowing me to talk. Hey, vanessa, good to see you Good to hear you again.

Josh : 26:49

What about me, dude? Please Hunting McCauley naughty list, Go ahead.

Caller: 26:56

Sorry, josh, this is the first time I get to meet you.

Josh : 26:59

You're welcome to the show.

Caller: 27:01

Thank you. I guess because of the upcoming administration and just trying to really figure out our careers, if someone again for me is a rookie admin, how do I strategically go after the consultants that might know my skillset? So, for example, I'll take a look at AdWords Exchange how do I go about really presenting myself? Is it just a cold contact to those firms and saying hi, my name is, you know, bunting, just wanted to know more about your company. Or how do I strategically overcome maybe, that particular hurdle as someone that's a little bit apprehensive sometimes.

Josh : 27:42

Yeah, look, it's a great question and I can help you out very quickly. Okay, number one make sure that all of your assets are dialed in, and by assets I mean your resume and your LinkedIn profile. If you haven't redone it, reviewed it or checked out best practices on how to have a stunning and interesting profile, I would absolutely do a little research. We have some information on recruitercom under insights and videos and some blogs on how you can improve your LinkedIn profile and improve your interviewing skill sets and improve your resume as well. There are also a number of recorded audio podcasts that Vanessa and I have produced that speak directly about how to improve those assets. We did one this summer, all about basically the top third of your LinkedIn profile. So before you start door knocking, you want to be as best dressed as possible.

Josh : 28:34

Okay. Step two would be to review an article that I penned a while back. It's on Salesforce Ben and it's called the Salesforce career checklist. All right, so just search for a career checklist, or you can search for me as an author under Salesforce Ben. I've only written one thing for them and you'll find it, and that is an exhaustive, an exhaustive summary of all of the steps that you need to do to go through and actually effectively review different consulting partners, si partners, isvs, all of these things to help you determine which ones you actually want to get acquainted with. Right. And then for networking we don't have enough time to go over it today, but we do have a lot of recorded episodes on how to improve your networking abilities and how to improve your networking skills.

Josh : 29:27

The real short answer on that part is get everything dialed in and then just start making friends right? You know, every day or every week, reach out to you know CEOs, presidents, vps, practice directors, practice leads. You know directors of delivery at the consulting firms that you've determined would be a wonderful fit, and just say, hey, you know, we're in the same ecosystem, I thought it'd be good to be connected. And then you comment on their posts and you wish them a happy birthday and you let them know hey, by the way, I'm keeping my options open about new opportunity at a consulting firm. If something comes up, I would really love an opportunity to chat with you about how I might be able to bring a lot of productivity, efficiency and happiness to your customers. That kind of messaging Does that make sense, bunting?

Caller: 30:14

It makes perfect sense. Thank you very much. Yeah, you're welcome.

Vanessa: 30:17

I'll tell you what I did. So one I think you have a better chance if you've got SIs that are more in line with industries that you're familiar with. The line that I've used often is with industries that you're familiar with. The line that I've used often is I'll, from day one, be able to speak the language of your end users, of the end users that you serve. So anytime you can use that, as always, plus, even if you don't have any actual Salesforce experience.

Vanessa: 30:44

And then the other line that I've used when I got my role at Simplist about, I would say, nearly a year before I landed that role I knew that was on the short list of places that I want to work, and so I reached out to their recruiter. I said, listen, I'm not in the market right now, but what should I be doing now so that I'm someone you'd want to hire in about a year? And recruiter was more than happy to get on the phone with me for 15 minutes, directed me to some resources and we stayed in touch and he called me when they had an opening.

Josh : 31:17

Yeah, I will tell you too, like people have different opinions on this, I'm not a huge fan of the branded talent stacker banner. Okay, on a LinkedIn profile, I'm looking at yours right now, I think. For some people I look unless you are an absolutely sort of middle of the road of your cohort, you know. Fine, keep it. If you think that you're brighter, smarter, more effective, a better communicator than the other people that were in your cohort, well then, you don't want to tie yourself to all of them, because I've met some really wonderful talent stackers and I've met some folks that I don't know why they were even in the program Right, and it can color the view of someone. So just don't lean on where you got trained Right. Lean on what you know. You know what, what you know how to do and how you're going to do it. Does that make sense? It makes perfect sense, thank, you, I really appreciate it.

Vanessa: 32:07

In general, I'm not a big fan of marketing somebody else's business on my LinkedIn. Certainly, if TalentStacker or whatever associations you have can get your foot in the door because maybe the hiring manager is also part of those same groups, then that's great. But that's still something that you can kind of gauge from the rest of their LinkedIn without necessarily throwing like logos or things on there.

Josh : 32:33

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Great question. And now we need a winner, because I think we haven't covered yet the winner for our. What was our, I don't know.

Vanessa: 32:41

third question yes, we've got Azeem Tlaib.

Josh : 32:46

All right, azeem, congratulations, you are the next winner. And again, guys, we'll be sending out your voucher numbers no later than noon tomorrow. That's noon, eastern hey.

Fred: 32:57

Josh, I didn't know you noticed tonight, but Azeem is actually in the live crowd.

Josh : 33:01

Oh, hey, dude, Come on up, buddy, raise your hand. Azeem, do it.

Caller: 33:06

Thanks guys, take care, azeem do it All, right, thanks guys, take care, yeah, take care, buddy.

Josh : 33:09

Yeah, and I know we had Reid had raised his hand as well. Reid, I'm not sure if you still want to come up, but you are welcome to.

Vanessa: 33:16

Yeah, all right. Sorry, josh, I can't bring people up. I'm only a speaker, not a host.

Josh : 33:28

Yeah, poor thing, azeem man. You've already got 10 certifications. What are you? Which certification are you going to go after with this new voucher?

Fred: 33:36

I'm going for Data Architect. Nice Good for you, yeah.

Josh : 33:40

I'm going to make you something for $100.

Fred: 33:43

All right.

Josh : 33:44

All right, my friend. Well, thank you so much for entering. We appreciate you and you're always welcome to on the show. So thanks so much. Yeah, thank you, you're welcome, buddy. All right, vanessa, we've got another, another interesting question. Why don't you read this one?

Vanessa: 33:59

Okay, our next question comes from Joelle. I used to work with Joelle. I'm seeing businesses start to lose confidence in Salesforce products and, by extension, salesforce ISVs and partners. So I'm concerned that as an employed Salesforce developer. So she's concerned as an employed Salesforce developer. She wanted to ask for opinions from people who are more involved in the industry regarding this and if she should be concerned. That said, will gathering more certifications somehow increase job security?

Josh : 34:34

Okay, look, that's a great question. And you know, again, I'm going to bring up Ben McCarthy again, because just last week he released was it last week or two weeks ago? I think it was two weeks ago he released an article that specifically addressed this and there's a couple of things going on with this. Why are people actually losing confidence? Well, there's a couple of things. Number one I think we nearly doubled the number of Salesforce partners in the last two years than we'd had for the prior 10. So this is what happens normally in a down job market, right? Vanessa, you can speak to this. You're not an official partner, but you're doing consulting and a lot of people when they've lost their jobs or they, you know whatever someone calls them and they're like, hey, can you help us out with this? And it's enough money for them to walk away from their job, and then so they start an SI partner you know partner consultancy, right? So what you have are a lot of people, all ages, starting businesses for the very first time and they're working with new clients. They're doing the same kind of work, but it's you know.

Josh : 35:37

I'll give you an example. I got a call from a company it's a $100 million company and I got a call from them last week and they said Josh, we're having problems the implementation. We don't even know if we got the right product. Okay, we don't know, if I know for a fact, our salespeople are not using this product the way it's supposed to. We don't think it's configured in the right way. Can you help us? To which I say yes, of course. So like, let's figure this out. I got them someone and they met with them and they're going to likely work together. During that conversation, the woman tells me she's like well, I'm just, we just want to check you out because I know these other people and I think that they could help us just as much. I was like, okay, well, you know, it's good that you're shopping around. What's the name of this company? And they shared it and I looked it up and it's three three young guys in their that just whatever decided to hang a shingle and start a consultancy practice.

Josh : 36:33

Now I happen to think that doing that in your 20s is a great thing. I think it's a bold thing, I think it's a lot of great people start companies in their 20s and somehow figure it out. You know they do it, but they miss something and they miss leadership and they miss mentorship. They do it but they miss something and they miss leadership and they miss mentorship and they miss going through years of cycles and deal cycles to do things the right way right. There's just no way to get your 10,000 hours of high level anything in that short of time. And when I looked at these guys I was like come on.

Josh : 37:10

So then I had my guy say, look, ask your, ask the other team these questions. And, by the way, the guy I sent he's got gray hair, a ton of certs, it's you know, he's had his own LLC for many years, very successful, very good solution architect. And ask these guys, you know these questions. And she did. And she came back to me and she's like oh my God, it's night and day Right, night and day Right. So that's it in a nutshell. People don't know what questions to ask, they don't know which products to use, and then they just trust whoever they're working with. But 50% of all Salesforce consultancies are the worst 50% of all consultancies. And now there's well over 2000 of them right, that's a thousand that are in the bottom half of being good. So I don't think you have to worry about your career, joe. Okay, there's plenty of good companies out there. If you're a good developer, if you can walk and talk, you know you don't even have to walk If you can talk and code like you're going to be. And Joel's right.

Josh : 38:09

Yeah, so don't worry. But just because businesses are starting to lose confidence in the products, it's because either it was implemented wrong, it's not functioning accurately, they didn't pay for the support that they needed, they didn't hire the right person to administrate, they didn't invest in even temporarily getting an architect in to really map it out and get everything dialed in. Perfectly Generally, when people are losing confidence in the products, they actually haven't invested enough in the products, either time or money or expertise. You see, Okay, so it's not plug and play. This is not like downloading Microsoft Excel and then now you can use Excel. It's not like that. This is complex stuff. Microsoft Excel and now you can use Excel it's not like that.

Josh : 38:52

This is complex stuff and unfortunately, small to mid-sized businesses really struggle with this. They don't want to spend a lot of money, they don't have a lot of time to spend. They hope it's going to be a panacea for all of their ills and it's not even close. But then you say, well, where's your documentation? Oh, what's that? Well, when was the last time you did a training on this? Oh, never. It's like what? Are you sending people to YouTube to figure out your specific instance? Come on, Right. So, yeah, there's some bad actors out there, but that also creates a lot of opportunity to come in and fix these things right. You don't want to throw good money after bad, but you can throw good money to fix bad if that makes sense. So hopefully that's at least my take.

Vanessa: 39:33

The floor is open for anyone else's opinion on this well, I'll throw in I don't think that certifications lead necessarily to job security, because unless they're, you know, helping an si that you're working for in the partner community, really I don't think anybody's keeping an employee because they have X number of certs. I think what will make you more valuable are those adjacent skill sets to development. So can you offer guidance to your teams if you see team dysfunction, because you're well-versed in agile methodology. Do you know how to configure JIRA in a way to optimize the development workflows? Are you able to identify a good and a bad user story? Are you, do you know how to you know come up with? You know what DevOps should look like, how to use Gearset, how to use things that integrate with Salesforce. Do you know MuleSoft? Those are all the things you know beyond just code. That I think would lead to better job security more than just like hey, I got a user experience designer cert or whatever.

Josh : 40:56

Yeah, yeah, and guys, look, I mean anyone who loses confidence in Salesforce products isn't using either A the right product or using it correctly. Period. So figure it out right. Call an expert, call me. You can call me. I'm Josh. I help people find awesome people that fix these problems, so that's all you got to do. Great question, joelle. Thank you for that contribution and hopefully, vanessa, you've got another name for us to announce.

Vanessa: 41:20

I do, it's Joshua Bevers.

Josh : 41:24

All right, joshua. Well, congratulations to you Again. You will have this in your inbox no later than noon Eastern tomorrow. Thank you for your contributions to asking questions and doing reviews of us on Spotify and Apple. We appreciate you and we wish you hearty congratulations. Okay, my friend Vanessa, you want to read the next question.

Vanessa: 41:44

Sure. The next question comes from Rodrigo. I know how the job market is right now globally, but, other than enhance your LinkedIn profile, go to networking meetings and buy my guide to land a job, can you recommend a solo accidental Salesforce admin in a country that's not America to land a job over there?

Josh : 42:06

You want me to take this one, vanessa? Yes, please. Yeah, I don't think it's going to happen easily at all. Just so you know, I've been asked this over the years. It's very rare and very challenging to land a job that's going to get you the visa that you want over here in the United States from a foreign land. I just think it's tricky, and it's even trickier when there is. You know, there are so many American citizens and current green card holders here in the United States that are also very capable and not employed or not satisfactorily employed.

Josh : 42:45

Yet my advice over the last 25 years to this question and I've been receiving it for exactly that long is find a way to get to America and then find the job. There's no guarantees here, guys. There's about half a million people that come to the United States legally every year. There are lotteries, there's a lot of different ways to get in, but there are millions more that wish that they could be here tomorrow. And while it is the land of opportunity, that doesn't mean that it's not a grind to get to it, but your location matters. The location matters when you're applying for jobs and getting a job overseas, no matter which country you're trying to get into. It's just hard to do without already going through the visa process. So I would start with the visa process. There are United States attorneys and probably attorneys and organizations that specialize in trying to get you your golden ticket here to the US. I would start there and in the meantime, what you can do is really focus on being the absolute best candidate possible and gain some meaningful experience where you are.

Josh : 43:59

I'm well aware that this is not probably the preferred answer. Okay, this question is coming from Rodrigo Rodrigo. Thank you for the question and I'm so sorry, but I don't have a great answer for you here. I think it's going to take take you actually landing here stateside to get done what so many people are already trying to do, who already live here. Okay, all right, my friend Vanessa, let's get our fifth and final winner. That does not mean that the show is over. We've got a couple more announcements and I think we've got plenty of time to cover some more of these questions too. There's one or two that I'm really looking forward to. Who is our next winner of the contest?

Vanessa: 44:40

All right, our final winner is Evelyn Gagard. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, but I did my best.

Josh : 44:47

It sounds good to me. Congratulations, evelyn. Thank you so much for your contributions to the show here and we wish you all the very best success. And, by the way, guys, once you go out and go get these certs, we would love it if you would come on the show and talk about what your experience was like training, studying for the cert, which cert you got and how you're going to apply it in your career. So thank you so much. Okay, next question Do you want to read this one, vanessa?

Vanessa: 45:13

So this one comes from Tim K. My question is what industries do you see as looking to leverage AI more than others? What industries do you see as looking to leverage AI more than others? I ask is currently studying for the data cloud cert and have passed the AI associate slash specialist.

Josh : 45:30

Okay, well, what do you think?

Vanessa: 45:33

So two things I'll offer here. One, if folks look hard enough, or if you want to message me on LinkedIn, I'm also happy to help here. But Salesforce actually for the Data Cloud certification did a very specific training for partners so that they could get more folks certified on Data Cloud. It's amazing training and it is publicly available. So if anybody looks hard enough, free Salesforce training on Data Cloud. We'll see how long it's public, but now is the time. So that's one thing if anybody needs a good Data Cloud cert resource. And two, as far as the industries that are looking to leverage AI, I think the easy one is going to be any time, any type of support. So customer support, customer service Salesforce is pushing agent force really hard and the more that they can get folks to speak to agent force as opposed to somebody in the customer support or customer service department, that's going to be the real push.

Josh : 46:36

Okay, good insight. My gut told me it's going to be marketing and support as well, but I did. If you can just mute for a second, we'll get you in just a moment. My, my gut can be misleading sometimes, so I just asked, perplexity, this question and you know, sorry, this isn't coming from like years of experience with ai or anything, but it does make a lot of sense and what they're saying is the information technology and telecommunications are going to be leading it in a very big way, as well as professional and scientific right.

Josh : 47:09

So think of all the AI that's going into, for instance, the genome project, right? Or trying to identify new cures or how to create different molecules for medicine. There's also all the technical services which we are in technical services and professional services they're leaning heavily into it, with an adoption of somewhere between 12 to 18% of businesses are currently reporting current use of AI. So pharma, retail, e-commerce, marketing, sales, big one. Transportation and logistics as well, right. So I've worked with a number of transportation and logistics companies over the last 25 years and they are absolutely going into it. Think of this the way like field service works, right, and some of the mapping systems are like how to map a truck driver's most efficient way to do deliveries based on accurate real-time information weight load, gas usage, time to drop off rush hour traffic. All that stuff I think it's using. I think every industry is using it right now. Every single industry is using it, so it's a really good question.

Josh : 48:19

Even if they don't know it, they're using it right. So I think it's a really interesting question. But whether you're in banking, pharma, high tech, telecom, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, marketing, sales, it doesn't matter. There is an application for AI. That does not mean that you should be like, oh well, trucking is really bigger, you know, logistics is really big and I want to be involved in AI and therefore I'm going to go into that industry. I wouldn't let that direct your career. The response to this question don't let that direct your career. Go with what you like, go with what you know. You'll always be more successful when you're operating in an industry that you already have some knowledge in and that you like and you can speak the language and you are networked in. So that's what I would do there. So great question, and, reid, do you have a point of view on this? You hear me all right.

Vanessa: 49:08

Josh, yeah, welcome, reid.

Caller 2: 49:10

Thank you. A new setup, so I want to make sure there before I started in a diatribe. I agree with you both. Let's have little contributions, go ahead. I agree with you both. I think you know, like everything in this world, there's a bit of a spectrum. I see a lot of the agentic eating a variety of people's lunches that are especially on repetitive customer service sort of things. You know checking balances, all that stuff, everything we do now with like IVRs and you know the dumber, shall we say, chatbots on all sorts of sites. I think they'll gradually be replaced and enhanced with agentic ai, agent force. What have you?

Josh : 49:46

well, even surrey and alexa, right? I mean, those are so crap sometimes.

Vanessa: 49:51

Yeah, they're not even accessing this stuff yet, so I can't wait for that to happen and reed, can you explain what an ivr is for folks in the audience that might not know?

Caller 2: 49:59

oh, integrated voice response system. So, whatever you're calling up your bank, your Comcast, your whatever, and they're pushing you through a variety of menus, whether that's verbally or you know sometimes you do it with the dial pad there but leading you down some sort of click path and try to get you service. And then ultimately you get frustrated and say representative or agent or what have you.

Josh : 50:21

Yeah, if anybody here watched the Dreamforce keynote, they did a demonstration of that technology as it is tied in with AgentForce and Data Cloud, so you know it's a good, it's a really cool example.

Caller 2: 50:46

If you want to, you know, if you want to check it out, you can go back and re-watch that keynote with uh, mark benioff and I. I had some thoughts here, josh, about a variety of the the questions and I. First of all, we should have perplexity as a a sponsor, because I I echo that sentiment. That's the one ai system that I use every day. I've essentially replaced google with it, and those not into that, you know, know form, function. I would just say it takes you one step further. You know you Google something and you either click through or open multiple tabs for whatever topic you've looked through and then you research that. This is like the consolidation of all that and a little more brainpower to show you results. You know hallucinations can occur and you may not agree with the results, but it's a much better starting point than what we'll call zero at a Google prompt.

Josh : 51:27

It is. And Reid, I appreciate your interest in going back to some of these questions that we've covered earlier. I did see your hand up and I'm sorry that we didn't call on you sooner, but for the flow of the show I'd like to keep going with some of these questions, if that's okay. So let's go ahead and jump into the next one here. Vanessa, what have we got?

Vanessa: 51:44

All right. Next one is from Steven Mann. As a hiring manager slash team lead, we often deal with employees who are nurtured and led to develop at our organization. I take pride in developing talent and fostering relationships, but relationships can be broken when these employees eventually leave to competitors or even clients because their skill is in demand. Given the nature of the tech industry and a norm of job hopping, how should hiring managers feel when talent they've nurtured gets acquired by direct competitors or even clients?

Josh : 52:23

Yeah, I love this question. I really do. But, vanessa, why don't you share your take on this?

Vanessa: 52:30

Sure, well, first, every time I've signed a contract with a consultancy, there's always some language in there that says that I can't get scooped up by a client because that is directly will take work away from them, so that I wouldn't be able to work for a client for, like I don't know, 12 to 24 months or something like that, and I think that's totally reasonable. Don't sign anything, or if it's, you can't go to a competitor. The competitor thing, that's just business. I would say don't take it personally.

Vanessa: 53:03

As a manager, I always kind of feel like it's a win for me, it's success for me if the person that I have nurtured is able to grow beyond me, able to move on to the next thing and be successful with what I've invested in them. I mean, I'm not I guess I'm not looking for loyalty, I'm. You know, I nurture folks because I want them to be good and good every day, and if they're so good that somebody else is offering them more money, then kind of good for them. Hopefully they'll refer other people for the role when they go.

Josh : 53:43

Yeah, I think that's a really good outlook and there's a little nuance here. So we get non-competes. So non-competes are not enforceable in every state and certain states have certain requirements. So, for example, in the state of Oregon, a non-competes and this is actually, I think may have gone to federal court, and so it's probably in most states. But for the most part non-competes are only enforceable if the employee is given enough time, a reasonable amount of time, to review the non-compete prior to starting work. So I tell all of my clients I recommend that they share all of the documentation the employment agreement and the non-competes that they insist on, and don't have that employee start for at least two weeks. That gives them a chance to get ready and prepare onboarding as well, gives the candidate time to give notice if they have to. But also it's unenforceable if they don't have at least a couple of weeks from reviewing to starting. Now in California none of that's enforceable at any time you can walk across the street, take your clients with you and there's almost nothing that can be done about it. So I'm not sure what state, I'm not sure what state you're in here, Steven. So that's something to keep in mind. Now I want to echo what Vanessa said, I would feel very sad, but not hurt, right, Maybe disappointed, that you're losing a good employee to a competitor and you know that has not, fortunately. I, you know, I've had a lot of employees and it's really not happened to me very much, but I've certainly seen it happen with a lot of my clients, and so here's a couple things that I would do. Number one be proud of them, be happy for their success. If you thought, I saw this on this new tv show, landman, with billy bob it's a taylor sheridan like a yellowstone style uh, new tv show and he had this little conversation with Billy Bob it's a Taylor Sheridan like a Yellowstone style, a new TV show and he had this little conversation with on the show he had a conversation with his teenage daughter and she was all upset about, you know, boyfriend, that didn't work out. And he said well, honey, you know, did you think that you guys were going to, was this going to be the last relationship that you ever had? And she's like he's like every relationship ends except for the last one, Stephen, including you.

Josh : 56:06

And where you work, you may choose to leave. Where you are, unless you own the organization, you may choose to leave, and even owners sell businesses and start new ones and retire. So when you hire someone, particularly in their early thirties or in their twenties, you have to ask yourself is this the last job that this person's ever going to have? The answer that will probably ring in your head clear as a bell is no, of course not. Everybody leaves someday. Most people leave someday. The only people who don't leave are the people who end their career there, and that just doesn't happen. You already have a grip on that, based on the wording of your question. So now we have a choice Be happy for them, congratulate them and try to maintain that relationship. Don't get hurt and don't let them get hurt.

Josh : 56:54

I have actually seen people leave. When I was at Robert Half. They left. They went to a competitor and there was always sort of bad blood between these organizations, but it was mostly from the other organization, Because we were huge. We were the biggest in the world. They were the little, small, regional one, so they had a chip on their shoulder. Hey, chips on their shoulder work really well. Worked for Tom Brady, you know. So there's nothing wrong with it. Just don't take it personally. The other thing is I would be talking to senior leadership and trying to determine how can we create career pathways and opportunities within our organization that entice people to stay here so that we don't lose all of that experience and IP. This is really important to do, really important to do.

Josh : 57:36

In that same role, I noticed that we had 1, know on a thousand people in the or in Robert Haft's technology, right. So we had a thousand people and it worked out to about five pages and you could see everybody, like every single employee, and what their numbers were every single week. Right, and you wanted to be on page one meant that you were a badass, and when I looked at all of the badasses, everyone had been there minimum four or five years, right, Usually, some a little bit less. But the people who were on there and stayed there were there a long time. But the people that were having turnover in two years, three years, they never got up there. Now, partly why they left is because they never got up there. They weren't that good, right. So there's that. That's okay. But I brought to leadership at that organization.

Josh : 58:21

Look, we're not doing enough to keep people here. We lose veterans all the time and we're churning people in and out. Junior people training. Some are successful, some of them stick, some of them don't, but when they are good, we were losing them like crazy. Now I've since left that organization clearly many years ago and since I'd left, they'd introduced a number of different programs, For instance, certain job titles. After you've been there for a number of years, people started to get associate VP titles and they weren't a vice president of anything except their own desk right, but they earned that title because of their deep experience. So you can offer people bonuses, but the most important thing, the meaningful thing, Stephen, is going to be offering them career advancement. People want to learn and they want to get better period. They want to, and if you're not offering it, then someone else will. And here's one more thing. This is a lens that everyone should pop into their eyewear from time to time.

Josh : 59:23

I was talking to a fellow recently, a really nice guy. He was referred to me by someone that has done a lot of work for my clients in the past, someone I really trust Vanessa, you know this person as well and he referred a friend. And when I talked to this person, he's underpaid, he's not getting the promotions. He wants this, that, the other thing, and so he's thinking about leaving. But when I really dived in, he wasn't doing everything that he could to really make sure that he's milking opportunity as best he could at that organization.

Josh : 59:56

Now, that's an employee, but the employers. What they weren't doing, they were making promises and not fulfilling them. Hey, yeah, we're going to get you promoted. Just give us six months. We're not ready yet. It's coming soon and after you listen to that shit for two or three years. I mean you just stop caring, right? No one's going to care more about their career than the individual. But, boy, you better care pretty darn close to as much as them. You better care pretty darn close to as much as them, or they will leave. Someone's going to woo them. Take them out for steak, take them out to golf, show them their fancy desk, give them their own office right, Give them an Eames chair in the corner. I mean, company, these things are cheap. You know, spend three grand on a fancy chair. All of a sudden you get to pay people half. You know, it's the weirdest thing, Trust me. I've seen it in the agency world time and time again. So start developing an employee retention plan. That's what we call it. Employee retention plan. Okay, Career path plan.

Josh : 1:00:51

That means quarterly, or at least by annual, conversations about are you happy? What can we do differently? What do you want? What projects do you want to get on? What aren't we doing? That is really interesting for you. Where you want to grow, how can we offer that to you? How can we cross-train you?

Josh : 1:01:11

You guys are picking up what I'm putting down, I'm sure, and I'll wrap this up here in a second, but there's so much to be done. But the number one thing that you don't want to do is harbor any ill will. Number one thing that you don't want to do is harbor any ill will. When you see someone doing what they need to do for them, for their family, for their mom that's in the nursing home that they support, for their children that they're trying to give a good education to, for their spouse, who's not well and needs to work hard, or whatever it may be, you have to put the energy in and show some care and give them a path. No path, no, stay right Period. So give them a path and I think that you're going to feel a little bit better and be happy for their success.

Vanessa: 1:01:51

So we have a related question that's come in through LinkedIn DMs. If you want to go a little spontaneous, Josh, yeah go for it, it's rock.

Josh : 1:02:02

All right, hey, real quick. I'm curious because I want to give Reed a chance. Reed, do you have some input on this?

Caller 2: 1:02:09

You hit on a lot of it in the preemptive side there, josh. The one thing I would add that's maybe on a more personal note and maybe we deviated from what his question was make sure that people know that you can talk to them before they decide to leave or interview elsewhere. You know, whatever you want to call it cliche open door policy, but if you're not letting people know that you're at least open to conversations and so forth that allow them to talk about their career path and all that I mean their retention program and all you mentioned was great, josh, but if they don't think they can even talk to their management, then you've already lost most of those battles.

Josh : 1:02:43

That's it, brother. I love that man. Great contribution. Thank you, reed.

Vanessa: 1:02:47

All right. So in a related question, I think, because it's actually a real scenario that's similar to the question we just had I have a friend who just about reached their two-year mark with the company they're working for. Since they've been in, they've become the subject matter expert and accidental JIRA admin for the company, among other things, after two excels above expectations on their reviews and finishing up the sales and service cloud and AI associate and specialist certs. They have further gained additional experience on sales and service cloud projects and have been assigned as a project manager for the last two projects. They were going to ask for a raise, but before they could, the company awarded a 5% raise, but they were expecting more based on what they've done with the company. So the question is should they ask for a larger raise right away or wait for a potential opening with another company that pays higher and comes up in their job hunting?

Josh : 1:03:48

Yeah, great question, ask, always ask period Right, like it's first of all you've got to take stock of what do you have there? First of all, it sounds like they've invested. I mean, you read the question and I don't have it right in front of me here. Vanessa, sounds like this company has invested in the employee. Is that correct?

Vanessa: 1:04:09

It's it sounds like it if they've put them on as a PM and they've grown in projects that may they maybe didn't have experience in, with only two years experience.

Josh : 1:04:18

Yeah.

Vanessa: 1:04:19

I think so.

Josh : 1:04:20

Yeah, okay. So, and this is kind of what I was I actually kind of got distracted on the last question. What I was trying to say is, like you've got to what I was talking about the lenses. I mean, you've got to stop looking at them like they're junior, you know. You've got to try to look at them, almost interview that employee of yours, as if you were going to bring them into the company today, because oftentimes we bring people in.

Josh : 1:04:43

They're junior and all we see is that junior young buck or young gal who's just kind of getting. They're a greenhorn, they're just getting started and it's hard to change that view of them. Their view has changed, but yours hasn't. So that's really important. I think it's really important to demonstrate your value and ask for what you believe your worth is. On the open market period, there's a lot of information out there, including at the salesforcerecruitercom under insights and even on this program, about how you can improve your. You know, in fact, fred and I did a role play on this in the past year in one of our. Remember that.

Vanessa: 1:05:22

Yes, I'm still feeling residual anxiety from that episode.

Josh : 1:05:26

It's a little cringey. It got a little cringey, but there are ways to communicate this and you know, one way is to go in first of all gratitude. We talked about this in the last question a little bit, right. Thank you so much for the raise. I appreciate it. It's important for me to share that. I believe that my abilities, capabilities, have increased at a rate faster than the compensation and I wanted to see if you would be open to having a discussion about that.

Vanessa: 1:06:05

I'd also throw in. And, josh, see if you agree with me, I know, when I was going to bat for my teammates, I used to be a manager and I had some folks on my team that I was trying to go to bat for, with leadership, getting metrics in there. So if, hey, these are the certifications I've gotten since I've started, these are the accomplishments, this is the money that I've saved you guys, these are the great things that I've done. I think that helps, especially if there's an increase in responsibility.

Josh : 1:06:33

Yes, yeah, absolutely Not the first conversation okay, okay, second conversation, okay right.

Josh : 1:06:40

So if you've got to prime people because they're gonna think they're gonna go like, yeah, I'm happy to have that conversation. Now if they shut you down, they're like, look, we just can't afford it. I'm sorry, I wish I could give you more, but I can't. You know like you can overcome that objection right, but it's a little tricky and it's a little bit advanced. It's like, okay, well, thank you for sharing that.

Josh : 1:07:02

But let me ask you this what would it feel like? You know, how would you then go about? Let's say you were navigating my personal career? You know how would you go about making sure that you were compensated fairly for what you bring? And this and your manager shared this with you what do you think? What advice would you give to me? You know, in that situation, like you got to make them think about how shitty that is Right. And the idea here is we don't want to put their back against the wall. We don't want to start making a case, and God forbid, whatever you do, people do not ever come in and start talking about inflation or your expenses or your new car or your cost of daycare. Nobody wants to hear it. Everyone's got problems, including money problems. Nobody wants to hear it, so don't do that. This has to be about your value and the cost to replace you on the open market. Does that make sense?

Caller 2: 1:07:55

Yeah, so if I may, what's that? I would just add, if I may, that if that, that 5% raise, if it was across the board, then that you everyone rose with the tide. So your perspective is that wasn't didn't have anything to do with that individual person You're talking about that person's value Exactly.

Josh : 1:08:11

It would be great Grateful for it. Thank you for the raise. I know that you know this has not been the best economy in the last couple of years. I appreciate you giving me anything, but even so I'd still welcome an opportunity to discuss my career here and where it's going and a little bit about compensation. Can we get together for a cup of coffee on Friday and close them to the meeting? You close the meeting before you close the subject. You see, close the meeting before you close the subject. Do you see, close the meeting and give them time to process and think? And they're going to be thinking of objections or they may be going to bat for you with senior leadership and saying guys, I just got asked this. I want to be able to go to bat. Can you please give her 10%? You know I don't want to lose her. It's going to. I've invested so much time in her and her training and she's doing a great job. Can I please tell her on Friday that we're going to give her a bump? Give them time.

Josh : 1:09:04

Most people that you're going to bring this up to aren't the owners or the decision makers. They could be a vice president and still not have the authority. So you've got to sell them on the meeting and prime them on the subject of the meeting and you've got to have all your ducks in a row around your accomplishments and you don't need to bring those accomplishments up. You can give a short summary at the start of the negotiation, right, but you do not want to. You know, just like slam them with a bunch of facts right off the bat. You know how do you think I'm doing? You know, let's say this, let's say you weren't a manager here. Let's say that you were the owner right Of this business. Do you feel like? You know what percent raise do you think would be appropriate for the skillset that I'm bringing right now? Oh, I can't answer that, but it's like, okay, but you're getting them to think because what you want to do and when I gave that presentation at Florida Dreaming on negotiating skills for Salesforce professionals, we covered this in depth. We'll cover some of it on one of our podcasts, which would be about one year ago I think it came out November of last year okay, where we talk about negotiating skills for Salesforce professionals and I would check that out. I would also bone up on your negotiating skills. I definitely recommend. Is it Chris Voss, not Tim Voss? Chris Voss, I always get it wrong. Chris Voss, v-o-s-s. Never Split the Difference. That's my favorite book on negotiating. The audio book's great. It's got this deep baritone and he actually reads it himself, so I really like his storytelling. So that can help you too.

Josh : 1:10:30

Make sure that you're fully prepared before entering into these conversations. Okay, entering into these conversations? Okay, but you need to sell them on your one, your value. And two, you don't want to tell them that you're going to leave for another job or for more money If you don't have something lined up. Okay, because they might be like oh, they're on the outs, let's find a way to replace them. The other thing you want to think about is who's coming up under you who could probably do your job and is happy with the 5% raise right? Or how is business? You want to understand they've got business coming in, they're growing, things are good, or it's been really slow, it's been a really bad quarter. I tend not to like to ask for raises during bad quarters, you know so in the timing category.

Vanessa: 1:11:12

What if they were on the bench but they had a project that's going to come in? You know, once the SOW signed in the next like month, should they wait?

Josh : 1:11:23

Yes, God, yes, Don't ask for a raise when you're not working. Yeah, definitely don't. And understand, too, that you know one of these things, like I'm. You know one of these things that I shared with Ben McCarthy just yesterday around what's happening with salaries is salaries have gone down. The more people on the street, the lower the salary. It's supply and demand folks. So there are people that might even be willing right now to work for less money than you're making currently, who have the same level of experience as you because they're not working at all.

Josh : 1:11:57

So you've got to read the room. You've got to read the whole room. The whole room is the United States economy and you've got to figure that out right. You've got to figure out that timing. If you're not actually doing work right now and you're sitting around for a month and that company's paying you, that means that you're going to have to work three or four months just for the company to recoup their losses on you over this next coming month. Does that make sense? Yeah, definitely don't ask for a raise. If you're on the bench, Just be grateful. And if you're on the bench too much, you should probably start looking for a company that's able to attract clients and generate revenue.

Vanessa: 1:12:33

You made a good point, josh. I mean I haven't done any deep analysis on this, but I feel like back in 2021, starting salary for admins was around like 90, 100. And now it's kind of more in the 70, 80 for entry-level talent. It really has gotten. It feels at least I don't have the data, but it feels like it is no, I do.

Josh : 1:13:02

I have the data and you're absolutely spot on. We've seen about a 20, we can go by percentages, but really in general it doesn't matter the job, it's about 20 grand less than it used to be. You're an architect you're making 200, now you're making 180. You're an architect you're making 200, now you're making 180. You're a developer now you might be making 130. Now it's 70K. Now it's not 100% of the time. In fact, I've got two openings right now. I might as well plug. I don't have the posting up yet, but by the time this podcast is released you can go to thesalesforcerecruitercom. Click on jobs. You're going to see thealesforcerecruitercom. Click on jobs. You're going to see the posting there. But I have an opening for two people. These are going to pay about $170,000 each. You've got to know your stuff. You don't even have to be super technical. But if you're sort of on that track to become a solution architect or you are a very good, highly competent solution architect with very good communication skills who can manage projects on your own, then this job's for you. It's with a consultancy. It's fully remote. So check that out. We're looking for the best of the best. If you think you're not the best, please don't apply. If you think that you're amazing and awesome, I definitely want to hear from you. So, yeah, it's just a dip.

Josh : 1:14:11

And look, I know that can be painful, excuse me, I know it can be painful, but the truth is, personally, I think a lot of these folks have been overpaid for many years. Sorry, but you have been. You look at a developer who's doing NET or Java and you compare that to what a Salesforce professional that I'm seeing is getting paid. It's different and one's generally harder than the Salesforce. Java developer is generally harder than being a Salesforce developer. So it's just about supply and demand I don't think a lot of these people have. The only thing that's justified their high levels of compensation is the lack of other people who are willing to do or know how to do the work. Compensation is the lack of other people who are willing to do or know how to do the work. That's it. It's not because it's harder, if that makes sense. Well, I think that what has happened is a right sizing of compensation. Comp continued to grow the way it's been growing, everyone would stop using Salesforce because it's too expensive to manage. Right, a lot of people dropped out of SAP because they don't want to spend $300, $400 an hour for a consultant and you couldn't even find them back in the day. Good luck even finding someone who could do that work.

Josh : 1:15:26

So a lot of me wants to say when you get a raise, when you get that promotion, don't go out and buy the new car. Don't put that big addition on the house. Go out and buy the new car. Don't put that big addition on the house. Put that money away. Just sock it away. Try and live well within your means and save money for the future, because positions become commoditized.

Josh : 1:15:48

I mean we're seeing it with Salesforce administrators in a very big way. Right, I mean, to be a Salesforce administrator nowadays, you better have some really good communication skills or you're out. You've got to be able to lean in and leverage AI. You've got to have some specific cloud product knowledge. I'm not saying everyone, but a lot of you. You've got to have that.

Josh : 1:16:12

Ai is going to take over a lot of your tasks. I've got companies that I've talked to and I'm working with right now. What they do? They use AI to build a persona, to build basically an agent outside of agent force, to act as an admin a badass admin too. It's got oversight, but you need some basic things done. They're going to pay 24 grand a year, 25, 30 grand a year instead of 90 or 100, plus benefits, plus days off, plus sick leave and all this other stuff.

Josh : 1:16:44

Ai is coming for your jobs, people. It actually is, and I don't mind saying that it's coming for it, but not all of them. So you've got to shore up some of these communication skills and you've got to leverage yourself and position yourself as a badass in something in some way. Ask good questions, the human aspect, be a good communicator, be able to resolve person-to-person issues, be able to make stakeholders feel really good about projects. Because if you're sitting there just knocking out your little admin stuff for and I'm not trying to minimize the role, guys, I apologize, because sometimes I talk in my language, I can hear myself and I think, oh, that sounded funny, I'm not minimizing, but just sitting there, you know, yeah, I'm going to add another user and then I'm going to just fix this issue and just, you know, going through your list of routine things, if you can say routine things, ai is coming for you, right?

Vanessa: 1:17:42

So you've got to start getting good at other things like flows and this kind of stuff.

Josh : 1:17:45

Be an expert of something, Do not sit on your hands. All the Luddites in the world, all the people who are anti, like someone asked me recently do you think AI is a good thing or a bad thing? It's an inevitable thing, it doesn't matter. And one of the things that I jotted down as a note yesterday was think about the industrial revolution. Okay, and the industrial revolution. Think about farmers. Well, a lot of farmers lost their jobs when the tractor came in and a lot of people got new jobs building tractors, right. So this is as big a shift as that, if not bigger. It's a very big shift. Jobs are changing. They're already changing right now. Okay, so you've got to get good at AI and you've got to get good at communicating, and if you don't do either of those things, you will find yourself there will be a day when a Salesforce admin, I think, is 50 grand a year.

Vanessa: 1:18:38

I've already seen some roles like that, yep.

Josh : 1:18:41

Yeah, yeah. So you know I'm not trying to be a doom, this is I'm not like predicting doom, I'm just predicting different and I don't even have to predict that. Everybody already knows. If you're listening to this, you guys already know the writing's on the wall. It's already happening, it's changing. So if your company can't keep you working, no, don't ask for a raise. If you're on the bench, don't ask for a raise. Start looking around, start having good conversations.

Josh : 1:19:06

If you listen to the early part of the program, get your assets dialed in when we were talking. We were talking a little bit earlier with bunting, so rewind, listen to that again and again and then get that work done and start seeking new work. Or one thing that you can do is figure out how can you bring more revenue in? Hey, I noticed that I'm on the bench. What else can I do to support the company with internal projects?

Josh : 1:19:30

I've noticed that we've been challenged with our pay system. I noticed that we've been challenged with our time system. I noticed that we've been challenged with XYZ system. I noticed that some of these new people who've been brought on board are really getting stuck on these aspects of the product. Are you open to me running a training session for our users so that they, or even a free training session with past clients to make sure that they still like us. There's so many ways to insert yourself in a really positive way and, vanessa, you've heard me say this at least a dozen times. I quote Jordan Peterson look for where responsibility has been abdicated and assume responsibility for that. All right, we've got Chris Newdecker. I like me some, chris Newdecker, and you are on the floor, my friend. Welcome, chris. You're live buddy, go ahead and unmute.

Caller 3: 1:20:19

Ah, thank you, sir. Sorry about that. Hey, thanks for letting me join in real quick. I hope you guys are doing great and y'all having a wonderful conversation, and you brought up a great point like how can you bring more revenue?

Caller 3: 1:20:27

Another thing that I've always seen no matter, and I've seen unlimited amounts of just Salesforce licensing waste and what I do is I walk in a place and I say here's how I'm going to save you money, and I just go right through all the licenses they have, what they're not using, what they can do, either swap, get rid of or on the next Salesforce licensing deal, and where they can save typically millions of dollars, and that helps you get some cred or possibly even get that raise as well too, which has happened for me in the past at the same time.

Caller 3: 1:21:00

So just wanted to bring that up that there's an option out there and those are things admins can do. So when you talk about I know that role has been diminished and people say that I haven't seen it be diminished, I know people have said that and it's out there, I know right, but it's a valuable person and a valuable role and you just have to think about better ways to maybe align yourself with the company goals and company needs ie, save money or bring in revenue and if you can show that, I swear to you you'll get what you need. You will. You'll always get your word at some point in time. It doesn't have to be today, but it will come to you. It doesn't have to be today, but it will come to you. So just stay positive, stay focused and stay driven. If you're excited about something, go for it. Don't let any other obstacle get in your way.

Caller 3: 1:21:42

Stay thirsty, my friend. That's all I'll stop there.

Josh : 1:21:44

Amen, chris, thank you, thank you for that insight. You are 100% correct on this. I hope everybody really heard him there. I had a client out of New York City as a medical company and they needed some help. So I got them an administrator or not an administrator I got them an architect. To first come in and just look at everything. His name's Tony. He's a very smart guy and within two weeks he figured out how to save them $150,000 per year just on their licensing alone.

Josh : 1:22:14

So if you don't know how to do that, ask perplexity how to do it. Or if you're friends with an AE or an AVP or RVP at Salesforce, ask them someone not your AE, right, and just be like, hey, what's a good way of approaching Salesforce and approaching leadership and stakeholders when I'm aware that we're overspending on licenses? And how would you know what have people shared with you in the past to help them right size their spend, their monthly spend, right? Chris, thank you so much and, guys, we're going to start wrapping it up here too. I can't tell you how grateful I am for all of our live listeners, how grateful I am for our amazing podcast audience. You guys have been so fantastic. We thank you for the questions. We thank you for the kind words. Many of you shared some really lovely, heartwarming messages with us when you shared your questions. We thank you for that and we're very much looking forward to continuing this show all the way through 2025.

Josh : 1:23:15

This show is not going away. We want to be as consistent with it as possible. So, whether you need the help right now or you want it down the line that you can come here, you can ask us anytime every two weeks on a Wednesday and get your questions answered. If you're not able to attend these live events, that's okay. You can message us, right. You can hit me up on LinkedIn. You can hit Vanessa up on LinkedIn. You can hit Vanessa up on LinkedIn. We're very easy to find. Or you could send us a message.

Josh : 1:23:39

I can be reached, josh, at the salesforce recruitercom. And, by the way, if you're a client, if you're struggling to hire people I just talked to a client today. They have been looking for a very long time and they just can't. They feel like they're good at screening people. The problem is no one's passing their screening. They're really struggling to attract the right kind of people. If you're struggling with that, you can talk to me and I will help you. It's a lot more affordable than you think and our clients are extremely just ecstatic about the quality of candidates that we deliver. So please reach out to us. If you're a candidate and you need some additional help, please visit expandexchangecom. That's mostly a Vanessa thing, but we put together a directory to help you be integrated in the Salesforce community in the best ways possible with some of the best content creators, some of the best schools and so on.

Josh : 1:24:32

And then I'd also ask you guys to please, if you haven't and we've got hundreds and hundreds of listeners, if you like this show, even if you liked it once if you could give us a nice rating on your podcast platform of choice. It actually does a lot for us. It really does, because we haven't had a lot of reviews. So even one little five-star review helps bump us up, gives us a little bit more visibility and we're able to help people. And again, of course, we do this because we like it. We do this because we care about you, we care about the community. This is an expense. It's not a revenue generating podcast. We do not advertise on here other than my own business, and even that doesn't. I don't even think that works. So, but we appreciate you guys.

Josh : 1:25:14

Please tune in for our year end show. Last time we had a year-end show. It turned into our number one best podcast of all time. I think that we're gonna see just as many sparks fly when we share our year-end review and our full predictions of what's coming in 2025. Tune in in two weeks on LinkedIn Live and it will be Vanessa and me and, with any luck, we'll have Chris back, we'll have Reid back, we'll have Fred back, peter and Larry and all of our friends. We want as many people to come and we want as many people to speak as possible and share your perspectives, so absolutely join us and in the meantime, I want to wish everyone a retroactive, very happy Thanksgiving. We're very grateful for you. I hope that you had time to whether you're in the US or not. I hope that you had time with your family last week time with the people that you love the most, vanessa. Any final words before we sign off for the night.

Vanessa: 1:26:08

Excited to see where this LinkedIn stuff goes. Thanks Josh, thanks everybody.

Josh : 1:26:13

We're gonna have to comb our hair. It'll be all right. All right, everyone Signing off. Have a great week and we'll see you soon. Bye for now, bye.