It is no secret that Salesforce is making significant headway in the central and
western European markets, with vast investments continuing to shape the trend.
Third Republic operates with great success in the German and Dutch ecosystems, meeting increasing requirements from some of our leading Salesforce clients. In
order to effectively perform and deliver to this hugely competitive and illustrious marketplace, it is essential for us to understand the future of the ecosystem.
To gain a better understanding into the ever-changing future of Salesforce across Europe, we have been speaking with experts in the market across the Netherlands and Berlin. This has allowed us to gain unique insights into their predictions for new releases, market growth, and the leading products of the future, as well as their thoughts on one of the fastest-growing ecosystems in the digital world.
Salesforce Communities and CPQ
One of the initial conversations our Salesforce recruitment specialist, Marco Montinarihad was with Paul Vemer, the CEO of a Salesforce partner based in the north of the Netherlands. Paul runs a consultancy that focuses on subscription-based projects, as well as CPQ projects.
The conversation began with Paul discussing his thoughts on the growing popularity of Zuora – “From our perspective, the growing popularity of Zuora in the market in recent times is in part, due to them recently going public on the NYSE, but also the fact they have a very strong product and the world is moving to more subscription-based business has been key. They have secured some large contracts, most notably with Philips.”
When asked about what he expects to be the products of the future, Paul goes on “Looking at the market now and the way tech is changing the world, I strongly believe that Einstein and CPQ will play a pivotal role in the future of Salesforce. When Salesforce acquired Steelbrick they gained a powerful CPQ tool. Salesforce is a marketing machine, and I am sure these products will be implemented more and more in the coming years.”
Pieterjan Standaert, Managing Partner at Talent Peaks weighed in on the topic too. Talent Peaks is a gold consulting partner, they have built a strong reputation in the Dutch market and have made quite an impact since they were founded in 2009.
“I think Salesforce Communities will be a hot item throughout 2019 and 2020.” Pieterjan explains, “Companies using Salesforce have successfully aligned their marketing and sales with these respectful Clouds, and servicing their clients became easy with the Service Cloud. But how do you ‘engage’ these clients? How do you keep them interested? The Community Cloud is becoming increasingly popular, I believe it is an excellent product that more and more customers will continue to realise the value in.”
In terms of the future; Pieterjan puts his money on Einstein as well. “Einstein will help us gain better insights on how to successfully go about our business. Also making important decisions at the right time will be easier with the help of the AI tool’.
Commerce Cloud and Einstein Analytics
Another of our Salesforce recruitment specialists, Jess Callaghan, was able to gain some insight into the market from our Berlin-based candidates. This enabled us to compare regions and whether they have differing opinions on the Salesforce product trends.
Jess spoke with Nick, a Senior Salesforce Consultant from an in-house background.
He expressed an interest in Commerce Cloud and has seen an increasing number of his friends and colleagues wanting to get into the commerce world. Nick’s current business is using Commerce Cloud and sees huge growth potential; however, his product of the future would be Einstein Analytics. Nick will be investing time into Einstein as it grows and becomes more popular.
We also spoke to a Lead Salesforce Developer at a medical company who shared a similar opinion. They are excited to be seeing the benefits of Einstein Analytics at their company and are looking forward to expanding their skillset. However, they were hoping for more trailhead modules to complete and found it difficult to pick up the skillset, but nevertheless, are still wanting to take on the challenge. They also found the current product to be incomplete and were hoping for more support from Salesforce themselves, but this is subjective.
The product to watch
It seems the market has some different opinions regarding what is ‘hot right now’, however, Einstein Analytics appears to win the users vote as the ‘product to watch’ and everyone is looking forward to harnessing the use of Artificial Intelligence in their Salesforce organisation in the future.
Based on the conversations both Marco and Jess had with experts in the market, it is clear that Einstein Analytics is going to continue to grow in popularity, thus there will be an increasing need for professionals with this skillset to drive the adoption of EA into businesses.
In order to get ahead of the curve, start using Einstein Analytics on Trailhead, this will allow you to get a feel for the product in a sandbox environment. You could even suggest a trial from Salesforce at your current company. If you have been thinking about broadening your Salesforce skillset, now is most definitely the time to learn.
