With every new journey, there are many paths, and with every new technology there will always be course corrections. Last year I got my Salesforce Data Cloud Certification. This year, I am getting my Salesforce Admin and Salesforce Developer Certification. Now why would a Salesforce Marketing Cloud Developer of 5+ years be doing a full pivot towards jumping into core after so many years of not needing to, yet now we will have to jump into such a new pond? Well thats a story.

As everyone knows, Marketing Cloud or as I like to put it simple, it is the middle child of Salesforce Products. When ExactTarget was bought out by Salesforce back in 2013, no one could have predicted what the outcome of all that would be. Even now many years later there are still so many traces of exact target still kicking strong, you see the URL, the icon and the mismatched design and fun UX choices for user interaction within all of the different ‘studios’. Now while the jank is one of those things we have come to get use to such as, can’t have contact builder opened in more than one tab, it goes slower at the top of the hour, can’t use comments within query builder but you can use them within automation studio, and there is rollback with journeys but not the content within the journeys etc etc. etc. All of this will change, with the upcoming Marketing Cloud Next and current Salesforce Data Cloud. I see a path that leads back into someone like myself becoming not just a Marketing Developer but on a path that is needed to refocus on becoming a full fledged developer and becoming very well versed in Salesforce Core development while keeping my knowledge of Marketing Cloud and the missteps and growth areas it can be put into as I become a Salesforce Developer

Now if Salesforce Marketing Cloud NEXT becomes the tool that creates that new Marketing Experience with bringing that Marketing Cloud into that core experience, it could help make everything easier. Flow builder, Custom Pages, Easier Data Integrations, and quite possibly the biggest thing, Custom Apps based on your orgs needs. But that will require some knowledge with getting to that Salesforce Core Development world and understanding what it means to be an App Builder and finally being able to use git and using a code editor and not having to copy and paste all the time between dialog boxes to text editors. If you know you know. Now some of the ideas I could totally see happening in the future is building custom apps to fill in the gaps that might come with the move from Marketing Cloud to Next, imagine being able to build your own contact builder that will fit your needs, or a journey builder inside of flow builder that checks for certain updated data fields within a contact record and allows for custom email development based on a variety of outcomes or even just a journey builder that allows for many forms of communication not just SMS or email or push or other items. Or even creating a custom flow element that can be used for consent checking based on the data within data cloud from your salesforce core org that can pull data using mulesoft and not needing to depend upon many synced data extensions and automations put together to run at a certain time.

I have been diving into learning Salesforce Core over the past few months instead of focusing on Agentic AI cause we know my feelings about it. So if you need me, I will and will continue diving into Salesforce Core cause if Salesforce pulls off this transition to Marketing Cloud Next. I suspect a lot of new ideas and creativity and builds will come out of it and I do like to stay ahead to the curve. But a lot of these new ideas will be based on how Salesforce approaches this new system cause it can not just be a quick slapped together idea or just another company that is purchased, it will need to be done with the precision that marketing requires. No more move fast break things, cause thats how you get TCPA and CAN-SPAM fines and that would make for a very awful year. In the future, as I get hands on time with Marketing Cloud Next you can expect me to post about it and my initial impressions on it.