In March 2026, Salesforce quietly deleted roughly 170 partner badges and replaced them with 28 competencies. Four consulting tiers became two. And the metric that decides whether a firm reaches the top tier changed from "how many certifications do your people hold" to something harder to fake: verified customer outcomes.

If you are a consultant — or want to become one — this restructure matters more than most of the certification news this year. It changes what employers and clients can see about you, and which credentials actually move the needle for the firm you work for.

The new structure in one table

Before (FY26 and earlier) After (FY27)
Four tiers: Base, Ridge, Crest, Summit Two tiers: Select and Summit
~170 Navigator distinctions and legacy badges 28 outcome-based competencies, each at Accredited or Expert level
Points tied to certification counts and deal registration Measured on certifications, verified completed projects, and customer satisfaction (CSAT)
Pre-sales incentives Full-lifecycle incentives, including active consumption

Summit — the top tier — is now explicitly weighted toward demonstrated Agentforce and Data Cloud delivery with verified customer outcomes. Salesforce's own framing, from SVP Nick Johnston: "Specialization is the new currency of the agentic era."

What a competency actually requires

A competency is not a personal badge — it is firm-level proof that the partner has delivered successfully in a specific area, earned independently per product or industry. Within each one, there are two levels: Accredited (demonstrated capability) and Expert (scaled delivery excellence — more completed projects, higher and thoroughly sampled CSAT, more certified individuals).

The definitions behind it are strict in ways that matter to you personally:

Only registered, verified projects count. Internal work, pro-bono builds, and unregistered projects do not. CSAT needs returned surveys — at least one for Accredited, at least five for Expert, on a five-point scale. Everything is measured on a rolling two-year window (current plus previous Salesforce fiscal year), so yesterday's project portfolio stops counting surprisingly fast. And you can check any firm's current standing on AgentExchange, where the data is maintained by Salesforce rather than self-reported.

What this means for your career

If you are… The practical takeaway
A consultant at a partner firm Your certification is no longer just your résumé line — it feeds your firm's competency metrics. Agentforce and Data 360 certifications are the ones Summit standing leans on, so expect your employer to actively fund and push those exams
An independent or in-house admin eyeing consulting Verified delivery is the new currency. Register your projects, chase the CSAT survey, and document outcomes — unregistered work builds your skills but not the record that gets you hired
A client choosing between firms Use tier as a first filter, then check which competencies a firm holds and at what level. Two Summit partners can have completely different strengths — one may be Expert in Service Cloud with zero Marketing Cloud depth
Anyone reading a consultant's website Still seeing "Gold" or "Platinum" partner in 2026? Those levels no longer exist. A firm marketing them has not updated its own story in years

The uncomfortable detail nobody markets

Salesforce now measures partner success partly on active consumption rather than seats provisioned. Translation: your implementation partner's standing is quietly linked to how much AI capacity your org actually burns. That aligns incentives toward adopting agents — which is great for Salesforce and not automatically great for your budget. When a partner recommends an agent for everything, the question "does this workflow actually need one?" is now yours to ask harder, not theirs.

There is a broader pattern here worth naming. In the same year, HubSpot moved to pay-to-play partner tiers, and Microsoft retired a stack of Dynamics 365 consultant certifications in favor of agentic-AI credentials. Every major vendor is converging on the same trade: fewer badges, more verified outcomes, heavier AI weighting. The professionals who win in that world are the ones who can show a delivered project, a measured result, and a current credential — in that order.

So here is this quarter's version of the question that used to be "which cert next?": if a client looked up your work the way Salesforce now looks up partners — verified projects, CSAT, current certifications, two-year window — what would the record say? If the answer is "nothing registered," that is not a credentials problem. It is a documentation habit, and it is fixable starting with your next project.