‘The landscape right now isn’t just about selling new software. It’s about helping customers find the value and get the outcome,’ Nick Johnston, senior vice president of global consulting partnerships and partner sales, tells CRN.
Nick Johnston, Salesforce senior vice president of global consulting partnerships and partner sales, wants solution providers to leverage the investments the vendor has made to better enable its channel to help bring artificial intelligence agents to life for customers.
Along with growing interest by Salesforce in MSPs, the San Francisco-based enterprise application vendor has been building a Forward Deployed Engineering Partner Network, which it promoted during its annual TDX developer event. The event ran through Friday in San Francisco.
“The landscape right now isn’t just about selling new software,” Johnston told CRN in an interview. “It’s about helping customers find the value and get the outcome. Where every tech company is trying to be the same AI leader, you have got to really help prove it. And our partners have never been more important to help with that.”
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Salesforce’s FDE Partner Network: What It Means For Solution Providers
Salesforce named Johnston to his new role in February. He has been with Salesforce for about 13 years, previously serving as senior vice president of strategic partnerships and business development for about four years, according to his LinkedIn account.
Katie Serniak, a product marketing manager with Bozeman, Mont.-based Salesforce solution provider Atrium, told CRN in an interview that Atrium attended TDX to help promote its Andi full- life-cycle developer agent it built to augment its services for customers.
Users tell the agent what to do in natural language, and it builds and tests scripts for the user, Serniak said. Atrium, which is part of the FDE Partner Network, also built the agent so that it doesn’t eat users’ tokens, providing a cost benefit.
“We have a long, long running history of understanding AI,” she said.
Here’s more of what Johnston had to say to CRN about Salesforce’s investments in its partner ecosystem and building a platform that connects to other AI and data platform vendors.
What do you want Salesforce solution providers to take away from TDX?
Partners have never been more important to us. Our focus on the adoption of our AI technology is front and center, and hopefully everyone saw that with what we announced [at TDX] and our focus on Headless 360 and the intentional interconnectivity with all the other big players in the space.
We want partners to see they can build their business around Salesforce. And it’s open and extensible.
They can bring their data practice in, their AI practice in. But we want them to see that we’re investing in them, too.
What should Salesforce solution providers know about the Forward Deployed Engineering Partner Network?
To my knowledge, it’s the first of its kind where a large technology provider has announced 30-plus consulting partners at once who have committed to us [and are] going to put their people through our FDE program.
But for us, we’re committing to them—we’re putting you through the exact same program we put our own people through. We’re going to give you the same tools, the same frameworks, the same playbooks, the same expectation on quality. But we’re also investing in you.
We’re doubling our investments in partner funding, and so we want to make it as frictionless as possible from a cost standpoint, for our partners to train their FDEs.
But we also want to help make it easy for them to start seeding their FDEs into customer implementation work, where we can offset the cost of what the customer is going to have to pay and get them the experience to get the flywheel moving.
We’re going to keep announcing [more] partners [joining] our partner FDE program as we get going. We did the first intake for what we knew we could scale initially. But this is going to be an intentional strategy for us.
Our partners who maybe were sensitive when they knew we were building our own part or our own FDE programs hopefully now are seeing that, one, we’ve acknowledged our own FDEs could never reach the scale we need.
And two, we’re literally going to give them the exact same tools. And we’re going to teach them the exact same way.
We are going to give them direct access to our product team, bi-directionally. It’s not just the certifications. You’re going to be in a community of other partner FDEs that have the real-time ability to give us feedback.
But vice versa, you’re going to be getting way faster and direct insights into the product that will help scale for them. So hopefully they’re feeling like they’ve never been more important. They’re feeling we’re investing. They’re feeling like we’re creating ways to help them grow their practice.
Hopefully they get excited because it’s something they can build a practice on. I was actually talking to one of our largest partners yesterday. And they’re like, ‘Yes, I have an FDE program. It’s just not a Salesforce FDE program. My organization has FDEs and they’re cross-platforms.’
I’m like, ‘Great.’ Because our product is intentionally open. [And then] we can explain to your FDEs how they can connect it to Databricks and Snowflake and OpenAI and Anthropic and Google.
[We’ll] help teach them. We’re not trying to lock everybody into Salesforce. [Our new technology stack shown at TDX]—the system of context, system of work, agency and engagement—we’re also trying to really reinforce the bottom layer that showed open models. And then the right-hand-side layer that’s connected to anything—reminding our partners you can be bringing your data practice here.
You can be bringing your Workday practice here. You can be bringing your Snowflake practice here. And we want that. That’s been a big ‘aha’ for partners.
Why should solution providers bet on Salesforce?
There’s no better platform for engaging with your customers across all the touchpoints that you have.
If you’re orchestrating your data about customers, you should be connecting it to [Salesforce’s real-time data engine] Data 360. But it doesn’t mean you should be building it all on Data 360 and then no longer using those other data platforms.
It’s more about orchestration and workflow. And in a world where a lot of companies are confused about where to start, if you have customer-facing or employee-facing—especially sales and service agentic use cases—we’ll get you there way faster. You’ve got the primitives with some of these other platforms. You can go build something. But why would you do that?
We’re not going to be the AI solution for everything for everyone. But if it’s customer, it’s sales, service, we’re here. Hopefully that’s the message that people are also seeing with this headless focus.
If you want to be using another tool to get these insights and to get these actions and the workflows, that’s cool, too.
But where the brain is for your customer experience AI, your sales AI, your service AI, we can take care of that.
Why the investment in the Salesforce partner program?
For traditional Sis, customers more than ever right now are seeing all the different plays where everyone’s got an AI play. Everybody’s technology is serving something really critical for them.
But they’re looking at it as a bunch of different Lego blocks, and they’re not quite sure how all the Lego blocks should fit together for the ultimate, finished thing that they want.
Partners are playing a really important role in that construction of—here are the steps to put the Lego block pieces together. Here’s how you build your base. Here’s how you create the next layer. Here’s where the roof comes on.
That advice has never been more needed where there’s just been so much noise. So the expertise of the consulting partners is coming in there. And SIs specifically on—how do you put it all together to deliver?
On the managed services front, that’s a place where I’m really trying to push us to embrace more intentionally as a go-to-market channel.
I’m seeing a lot of customers say, ‘Look, [there’s] all this noise. I actually don’t even want to pay someone to just build it for me. I want to just pay someone to deal with all of it. I want to pay them on outcomes. And I don’t necessarily have an opinion of how all the things fit together.’
I’m just going to say, ‘If you can reduce my cost by this much, increase my productivity by that much, I’m going to pay you X. And we’re all happy.’
It’s always been an important way of delivering software and technology. But I think it has a moment for us as a company.
We’ve traditionally been very direct-sales-focused. And we’re seeing more customers want those outcome-based engagements. That’s a great place where our partners can help us deliver. And we will give them the technology they need to make that real. And ideally, everybody’s benefiting from it.
What are the traditional opportunities for Salesforce MSPs?
We saw it a lot in contact center. That was a really good bread-and-butter place where you’ve got agents distributed all over the world by different companies. Outsourcing that.
That was a good place for us to have a managed service play. And that’s where we historically have been.
But now it’s like, look, if you’re trying to transform all of IT for a customer who’s kind of stuck because there’s just so much going on and they want to trust someone else to do it, we want them to be able to bring Salesforce to the next real customer.
What should Salesforce solution providers know about the relaunched program?
We simplified the program. We gave partners some new tooling to make it easier for how they work with us.
We’re going to be doubling down on the investments that we provide them to help incentivize the outcomes that they’re driving with customers. Last year, the programs that we had for incentivizing those behaviors were very much presale-focused. We were trying to grow customers investing in Agentforce.
We’ve actually widened the investment options to not just presale, but also customers who maybe have Agentforce but just haven’t gone as fast as they would have liked.
And we can say, ‘Hey, I have got an expert for you. And we’re actually going to help fund it. ‘
Get the partner in. Build them a practice. And that’s how the partner FDE connects to that. [And] we don’t only want to give you money. We want to help you get really good experts in. And then we’ll actually give you more incentives by putting those people into projects so that they can start getting experience.
And ideally you’ve got a flywheel. They go off and run on their own. But we want to help invest in the product.
So the biggest thing we did was double down on the investments. Where the AWUs [agentic work units, Salesforce’s measurement for discrete tasks accomplished by AI agents] come in is what we’ve started to do in all the QBRs [quarterly business reviews] we have with our GSIs and top partners is we’re actually showing them their version of the funnel.
The funnel for us is a very intentional view of how many Agentforce implementations do we know you’ve helped support winning. Actually activating the agent. The agent is doing something that’s driving some level of adoption, down to the agent is consuming 100,000 AWUs, which to us means at scale.
It’s not just about how many times it’s spinning and hitting the tokens. We want to actually be connected to a workflow. It’s doing something.
And so when we’re having these conversations with partners, we can show them the funnel. Not only for themselves, but we’re also showing them where they rank relative to the rest of our ecosystem to get a little fire going.
We want to incentivize them. We’re also going to hold them accountable to be able to receive said incentives once they meet certain milestones in bringing customers down the funnel.
Right now we’re being really intentional with our investments to be tied to Agentforce and data foundations.
We’re not saying, ‘You do X, you get a specific amount of money.’ We are saying, ‘Show us what you’re going to do. And let’s agree on how we’re going to incentivize you.’ And so we do have some touch on all these.
What are other big opportunities for Salesforce solution providers?
Industries, for sure, is a really good one. We want to help partners bring their secret sauce to these deals. And industry [specialty] is the best way to do that.
We’re going to start seeing probably more intentionality on helping partners build their own agents and their own expertise.
Step one is to get them excited about the opportunity and get them in some deals. Step two is to really get some deep practitioner work with the FDEs. And step three is to build some differentiated data and agentic capabilities on the platform. And then you have a really good recipe.
You’re going to see us really leaning into managed services more. So hopefully the partners who have felt like because we’re such a direct-focused business that that wasn’t really a sweet spot for them, they’ll feel better about it.
Hopefully some of the partners saw the first step we took this week in announcing our AgentExchange and transactability of partner-specific assets in our products.
We’ve seen how the hyperscalers have done a nice job with private offers and making third-party products transactable in their technology. We’ve intentionally invested there.
We’re going to shout, using our megaphone, about how well they [partners] are doing when they do great work to bring end customer outcomes to life. So we’ve always, historically, done a really good job of making our customers the hero and our products the hero.
Partners have never been more important. And we’ve intentionally decided that we’re going to start marketing partners and the work that they’re doing in some unique new ways, including doing really large partner awards at Dreamforce. That’s going to bring that energy back to recognizing the ones that make the biggest mark.
What’s led to Salesforce’s greater interest in the channel?
The landscape right now isn’t just about selling new software. It’s about helping customers find the value and get the outcome.
Where every tech company is trying to be the same AI leader, you have got to really help prove it. And our partners have never been more important to help with that.
Maybe that is a little bit more of a shift. And we’ve seen that we just can’t do it on our own. And I hope the partners are starting to feel that a little bit more as we’ve reinforced that with them this year.
We’re trying to help our partners understand some of the new agentic tooling they can use to make their practices more effective. We’re blessed with a very large partner network—4,000 active consulting partners [worldwide] is pretty impressive.
Some of them have built very large businesses doing Salesforce implementations. But the work of building and deploying on Salesforce has changed now, too, with all these tools.
So some actually really cool ISVs in our ecosystem are building things that can help our partners understand how to reimagine their practice to be more productive and use AI specific for Salesforce and how they build and deploy faster.
Hubbl is a company that’s pretty interesting, giving really good data insights to go and get things structured and cleaned up before you go and build agents on top of it. Swantide is a company we’re starting to see used more [for powering faster Salesforce implementations with AI].
Sweep.io is [used for indexing automation logic, dependencies, permissions and other data to unlock agentic AI]. And there’s MeshMesh [for aiding with Salesforce product management with a context model that better understands Salesforce data structures].
There’s a bunch of these companies that we’re starting to see pop up automating and either providing data signals or better automation ahead of being successful with agents. And we’re hoping to help our partners see the benefits of those in their toolkits so that they can be more productive as a practice.
Then, of course, the intentionality we have in working with Anthropic and OpenAI. And if you want to do some things with Claude, we’re probably going to help make that easier, too.
What’s your advice to Salesforce solution providers for moving customers further along their AI journeys?
A lot of the customers don’t know where to start. [And] we tout our own story of how we use Agentforce for Help.Salesforce.com. It’s pretty straightforward ways to just get some automation going and the first step of getting agents helping run your business.
And you start getting more creative with your voice channels and start getting more creative with bringing your service agents in. But start with those customer touchpoints because that’s where our platform is.
Generally, I’ve been guiding partners to start with service. And not to say that they can’t start with other places if a customer wants them to. But if they really want to go fast and then win the next couple of deals behind it, you can go really fast.
Other things I’m recommending to our partners is let’s get hands on. There are a lot of partners that know the old Salesforce and haven’t yet really gotten hands on.
We’re showing partners the funnel that they’re influencing. We’re also showing them their own implementation. Like, you guys as a customer of ours haven’t really turned on Agentforce. You should be learning this.
We’ll help you. We want you to see the value of it and then be able to be a customer zero in the market with your customers.
Are there cross-selling opportunities you’d like to see solution providers explore more?
Informatica is one I’m most excited about. I was speaking with a pretty senior executive from one of our GSIs a couple weeks ago who’s actually got a huge Informatica practice. But the funny thing is, as I walked him through that new stack that I referenced and the intentional openness, he’s like, ‘I don’t think anybody outside of our Salesforce practice actually understands that.’
And he goes, ‘By the way, our Informatica practice doesn’t sit inside the Salesforce practice. That’s our data practice. We need to start cross-pollinating.’
One of my asks to the partner leaders is let our team come in and educate your non-Salesforce practice people about the new Salesforce and how you can start putting together different parts of your other practices into a bigger strategy. Because it is very intentionally an ‘and’ conversation.
Do you see more solution provider opportunities with Slack?
We’re giving it away to our partners. We’re setting expectations that, hey, there should be no inhibitor for you to be able to use it.
And then use it with us. That’s the baseline. At a minimum, we’ll use Slack Connect [used for leveraging Slack with clients, vendors and external organizations].
Being able to integrate with [other leading communications tools like Microsoft] Teams is also important.
We think Slack can do its own thing. They’re not the same product. If you’re talking about collaboration and you want to get Agentforce in there, great. We want to support that, too.
