“You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.”
- Daniel Keys Moran
Today more than ever, accurate data is fundamental to success. Industries require good data (and therefore good data management practice) since businesses and organisations are only as good as the data behind them.
Good data management is extremely important because it minimizes the chance of data loss, reduces security risk, and smooths operations. Not only is it cost-effective, but it also increases productivity and enables better decision-making.
Understanding this escalating demand for the importance of correct data and its management, ProvenWorks has developed unique solutions for Salesforce CRM. Situated in the heart of the UK’s Silicon Valley, ProvenWorks is one of the longest-established British Salesforce ISV Partners.
ProvenWorks empowers Salesforce users to be their own data heroes through time-saving automation and guided user experience. They work with clients, large and small, across a huge range of industries. For ProvenWorks, customer success is everything and they are trusted by 3,000+ teams around the world.
ProvenWorks’ industry expertise and agility towards evolving customer requirements help them to deliver some of the most popular, highest-rated applications on the Salesforce AppExchange – the leading enterprise cloud marketplace.
In an exclusive interview with Insights Success, Joel Mansford, Founder and Managing Director, sheds light on the company’s journey, its services, and his vision for the future.
Please brief our audience about ProvenWorks, its USPs, and how it is currently positioned as one of the leading Salesforce solution companies in the world?
ProvenWorks is one of the longest-established British Salesforce ISV Partners. We’ve expanded into a global market across ten time zones and 3000 customers. As an Independent Software Vendor, we build applications that optimise your Salesforce CRM experience with the goal of saving you time.
What makes us unique is our experience and deep understanding of the Salesforce ecosystem. We mean it when we say we’re Salesforce experts. For over 14 years, we’ve worked exclusively in the Salesforce ecosystem, and our products are built 100% for Salesforce. We’ve seen every kind of org, worked with customers in every industry, and completed every kind of implementation!
Tell us more about your offerings and what aspects make it stand out in the industry.
You can find our eight solutions on the Salesforce AppExchange. Out of those eight, we offer two that are completely free.
What are our most popular solutions? ‘AddressTools’ is a suite of functionality to manage and harness the power of your address data, and ‘SimpleImport’ is designed to be the most intuitive and straightforward import solution for both business users and admins.
Our solutions solve different business problems around data quality management and automation, but they’re designed with the same purpose in mind: to save you time. Every industry needs good data management practice, and we deliberately design our solutions for use across sectors – just read our success stories.
Saying that we do see interesting industry-specific use cases, like fast point-of-entry data verification for Service Cloud implementations and partner portal (now known as Digital Experiences) import requirements for government organisations. In 2021, we won the Salesforce Partner Innovation Award in the Nonprofit category for our work with Malala Fund. The variety is endless!
Being an experienced leader, share your opinion on how the adoption of modern technologies like AI, ML, and XR are impacting the salesforce solutions industry you are catering to and how has your company incorporated such technologies in its business operations?
With the prominence of such technologies evolving in today’s world, we’re enjoying seeing what works and what doesn’t as products adapt and companies try new things.
Since our solutions are native to Salesforce, we’re already building on a world-leading platform which means we can be early adopters of ground-breaking new functionality. With our primary focus of saving users time, leveraging the power of AI and ML is going to be a big win in our solutions.
To dive into one specific feature, we’ve been exploring the capabilities of machine learning in our import solution. This will make the configuration process as quick and easy as possible for end-users. Relying on real usage data allows us to make sensible predictions and therefore, we can remove responsibilities from the users and ultimately trim time off repeat tasks.
Users are still able to interact with the predictions so we can use this data to gauge how reliable the predictions are. Whether it’s good or bad news, it’s all beneficial because we can learn from it and improve our user experience.
Exploring more opportunities in this direction is at the forefront of our product roadmap, and we’re excited to see where the future takes us!
The COVID-19 pandemic has proved to be the most disruptive catalyst to businesses and industries since the Dot-com bubble. How has this pandemic affected your enterprise?
FY21 was our most successful year until we exceeded ourselves in FY22. Of course, for FY23, we’re aiming to exceed ourselves again. We all recognise how fortunate we are not to have been adversely affected by the pandemic.
When the business world was shaken up by COVID-19 in early Spring 2020, many of our clients, particularly in sectors such as hospitality and retail, were understandably struggling with cash flow.
We were able to alter our renewals approach for our clients in struggling industries, understanding that their purchasing processes may have been impacted by the pandemic. By giving these customers longer notice before their licenses expired, we were able to keep our renewal rate high and maintain our commitment to customer success.
If anything, we’ve been able to have more candid conversations with our customers and build deeper relationships since we have all lived this shared experience.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the Salesforce solutions industry?
Start with your audience. What’s their problem? How will you solve it? Your audience is ultimately going to be your potential customers, and it’s your customers who grow a successful business.
You could have the most ingenious and best-executed idea in the world, but if it’s not solving a real-world problem, you won’t find an audience. If you don’t find your audience, you won’t have customers. If you don’t have customers, you don’t have a successful business.
The Salesforce solutions market is vast – spending 30 seconds on the AppExchange will show you that! Some ISV Partners have huge budgets and loud voices. Equally, there are one-person businesses who have found a problem and fixed it. You can learn from both ends of the spectrum.
The Salesforce ecosystem is unique in that it’s an incredibly friendly industry to be part of – so make the most of that! Talk to people, consultants, end-users, to other ISVs. People are happy to share their experiences, and this is invaluable if you’re just starting out.
How do you envision scaling ProvenWorks’ operations and offerings in 2022 and beyond?
As with any company intent on growing, recruitment remains a big focus as we look to expand our team and ProvenWorks’ potential. Right now, we’re investigating avenues for new partnerships and the opportunities that they will bring.
We have one of the most experienced teams in the Salesforce ISV space, and we’re excited to share our knowledge with younger ISVs and collaborate on new ideas and potentially even new products together. Watch this space!
