EXPERT ADVICE CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF AND YOUR JOURNEY I’ve been lucky to experience a broad range of jobs within the WITH SALESFORCE? Salesforce ecosystem. This has included working as a Salesforce admin for an end user of Salesforce, working at Conga, which had one of the most popular AppExchange apps at the time, and then moving on to be a co-founder of a London-based Salesforce consultancy. Throughout my time in the ecosystem, AppExchange has played a large part in each of my roles — from using apps in my role as an admin to build solutions on the platform, to partnering with ISVs when I was running a consultancy, to providing key end-to-end solutions for our customers. HOW HAVE YOU SEEN THE SALESFORCE ECOSYSTEM EVOLVE? Since I joined the ecosystem back in 2012, I’ve seen huge shifts in how the Salesforce Platform has been used. Back in 2012, Salesforce had two products: Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. Fast forward to today, and Salesforce has more than eight major clouds and countless add-ons to help drive even more business value. With products like Tableau, MuleSoft, and Slack you get a true “Customer 360” view. I think one of the most impressive ways Salesforce has evolved has been through the Salesforce Platform. The shift from Classic to Lightning was huge for Salesforce customers, enabling them to completely customize the UI to be even more unique to their business. Through the Eyes Other platform advancements such as the Lightning App Builder, Flow, and MuleSoft Composer mean Salesforce professionals can drive more value for their Salesforce implementations at a much faster pace. of Salesforce Ben A huge side effect from these innovations is that more professionals from non-IT backgrounds can skill up on Salesforce and learn to provide business value using clicks, not code. With the Trailblazer Ben McCarthy, aka Salesforce Ben, started writing blog movement, I think it’s truly amazing to see people change their lives through careers in the Salesforce ecosystem. posts on his site SalesforceBen.com in 2014 to help others FROM YOUR PERSPECTIVE, WHAT ARE navigate their career in the Salesforce ecosystem. The site THE BENEFITS OF By creating AppExchange, Salesforce has created a hive of innovation. has grown to be one of the largest Salesforce news sites in APPEXCHANGE FOR Entrepreneurs and skilled IT professionals come together to build SALESFORCE solutions that help Salesforce customers find even more value from the world, with over 400,000 monthly readers. So naturally, CUSTOMERS? the platform than they are already getting. we were excited to get a chance to talk with him recently In my role at Salesforce Ben, I’m lucky enough to work with a lot of these entrepreneurs, and it’s amazing to see them spot a gap in the about the ever-evolving Salesforce and AppExchange market from their day jobs working as admins or consultants, and then get to work building an innovative app that they can market and sell via ecosystem. Here’s what he had to say. AppExchange. I think it’s also important to note the impact that some of these apps can have. Take document generation for example: Some of these implementations can save thousands of hours of employee time per month, allowing professionals to focus on their actual roles, instead of building out documents manually. And that’s just one example of a great app category. 27