5 minute read
Elements.cloud
Enterprise apps like Salesforce need enterprise tooling like Elements.
Many companies are utilizing the power of Salesforce to build apps to manage their customer relationships. That is why Salesforce is seeing such growth. But customers have to balance the desire to deliver a huge vision with the practicalities of growth. The challenge is balancing agility with trust. Even the best solutions built on the best CRM platform have to grapple with legacy metadata, technical debt and the challenges of user adoption.
Established in 2014, Elements.cloud is consistently helping businesses to accelerate and increase adoption of Salesforce implementations. Its state-of-the-art app effectively connects the dots between business requirements and Salesforce use. Starting with the business analysis tools which link to a metadata dictionary delivering automated documentation and analytics with its nightly sync. This increases the speed and trust of making changes, and enables impact analysis and team access to linked documentation.
Apart from being a go-to platform for metadata analytics and documentation, it also supports the implementation of any transformational change, particularly in highly regulated industries. Included in the Elements.cloud app are business process mapping and requirements capture as well as pop-up help and feedback to drive user understanding and adoption.
Multi-faceted Personality at the Helm
With eighteen years of experience across Salesforce, Ian Gotts is the Founderand CEO of Elements.cloud. His passion for providing the tools that help customers reduce risk and improve adoption of their Salesforce implementations is tremendous. Ian started his career at Accenture, where he ran high-risk technology transformation programs for 12 years. His largest project had a project team of 500 in central UK Government - which is as challenging as it sounds.
Before establishing Elements.cloud, Ian was the Co-founder and CEO of NimbusPartners – a BPM software company - for 15 years. Under his aegis, the company took a successful journey from startup to exit, selling to TIBCO.
Filled with enthusiasm, Ian has been a regular speaker at Dreamforce, World Tours and Dreamin’ events. He is a prolific blogger and speaker with the ability to make the complex seem simple. He challenges the audience to see things differently. He is the author of 10 books and is working on his next book ‘Tilt Marketing: a sidelong glance at business’. Another fun fact is that he was on Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Advisory Council for 4 years during their transition to the cloud.
Ian is now well-known for OrgConfessions.com - a consistently growing site with anonymous Salesforce implementation horror stories that has over 800 confessions. The site perfectly exemplifies his love for edgy, guerrilla marketing.
Apart from all this, he also plays the bass guitar in a cover band called JaneBlonde.band.
Witnessed | Developed | Delivered
Elements.cloud’s market analysis revealed that there is a need for tools to support the implementation lifecycle of enterprise applications. But building an app that will support the largest enterprises across the full scope of the
implementation lifecycle and performs powerful analysis was not trivial. They’ve had a large development team working on the product for four years, adding functionality and honing the UI.
Phases of Consistency and Intelligence
The company had been through four distinct phases which have now made it a go to product for Salesforce customers. These phases are:
Design –Building the product road map, architecture and development approach.
Free Offering –Elements made its process mapping a free offering, which proved a great success in comparison with other tools.
First Paid Offering –They then added the first paid (PRO) offering to its list, which was the governance of process maps and the Salesforce metadata sync and analysis, which pulled in a more compelling ROI. Despite driven by low
touch marketing and sales, the company witnessed 10% growth month-over-month.
Enterprise Offering –The Company introduced more sophisticated analysis, single signon (SSO), policy management and in-app feedback and help. This is a higher ACV and Elements has hired an enterprise sales team which is accelerating sales.
Meet the Cornerstones of Success
Ian and the other two founders Adrian King and Richard Parker have one thing in common– 20+ years of experience of building enterprise application companies together. There is a shared vision, trust, and direction alongside providing a hassle-free work environment so the teams to thrive.
The company is well-equipped with a pool of professionals that share the same interests and convert every challenge into an opportunity. These professionals are committed to their tasks and focus on delivering tangible results. They just roll up our sleeves and get stuff done. Besides, Elements.cloud is open and candid, and is politicsfree.
Talking about the company’s success the founders state that “We have a long-term product vision; we’ve listened to customers who have helped shape the product roadmap. We have been very focused on the Salesforce market so that we have been able to establish ourselves as thought leaders, supportive and responsive to the ecosystem.”
Comprehensive Range of Products & Services
The company supports the Salesforce implementation lifecycle across all the phases - Analysis, Build, Deliver, and Operate - with ease. Be it a small nonprofit or a Fortune500 corporation, competitive solutions are there to help customers run a successful Org.
In this digital world flooded with competitors and a wide range of disparate utilities, Elements.cloud stands tall as a one-stop-shop. Aggregating all the implementation data across the lifecycle in a single UI, the app provides a single source of truth and ensures the levels of security and governance demanded by CIOs.
To support compliance with GDPR, CCPA and other data protection regulatory governance, Elements developed a product that provides privacy and consent management to Salesforce data. Launched in 2018, Elements.cloud is now seeing a renewed interest as companies who are starting to put in place the proper technology to support regulatory requirements.
Discussing the long-term vision, Ian says that Elements.cloud can provide the implementation tooling for the CIO across all the apps in their IT estate: Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, Oracle, SAP, GoogleApps etc. “We have already architected our app to do this. The limiting factor is only our go-to-market bandwidth, not the technology. Salesforce has over 200,000 customers, all of whom need our solution. That is a huge initial market.”
ANY APP NEEDS TO BE AFFORDABLE FOR THE SMALLEST NONPROFIT.
