How Platform Security Became the Secret to Success for This SaaS Company

Pushing the boundaries of technological possibility is something that comes naturally to Cloud Coach. For the project management software company, innovation means constantly seeking new ways to solve challenges for customers. But how exactly is Cloud Coach — a company built on the Salesforce Platform — able to consistently deliver technology that goes so far beyond what a typical project management software is capable of?

Enabling the ability to visualize projects and automate tasks are only part of the reason why the Cloud Coach solutions have been so well received by customers across industries. We caught up with Peter Lee, CEO, to learn more about the company’s innovative software, and to find out how building on the Salesforce Platform unlocked a new world of possibilities for the SaaS company.

Peter Lee, CEO at Cloud Coach

​​​​​​Take us back to the beginning. How did your journey of building Cloud Coach on the Salesforce Platform begin?
Peter: We were consulting for Salesforce before there was an official Salesforce Platform. Back then, Salesforce was purely a CRM software. I remember we had one particular consulting client, a paid TV company that rivaled names like DirecTV, and we had built their whole system — everything from their website to provisioning what was going through the satellite — all on Salesforce.

Shortly after, we showed up at a Salesforce event, and the Salesforce team couldn’t believe it was possible that all of that was built on Salesforce. From then, we knew we would always be able to push the boundaries with Salesforce, so we set out on our journey to build valuable solutions. When we were initially deciding what sort of solutions we wanted to build, we knew we wanted them to have longevity and address the long-term needs of our customers. That was one of the beauties of the Salesforce Platform — knowing that we could scale effectively.

How has the Salesforce Platform enabled your ability to scale?
Peter: A major benefit of building on the Platform is that we don’t need to buy or worry about servers. We also don’t need database or network skills in-house. These things, which can seem minor, allow us to focus our efforts and resources on building the best, most functional product possible.

Allowing us to focus strictly on what we do, and doing it as well as we possibly can, makes growth so much more manageable. We also don’t need a large number of people in the organization thanks to the scalability of the Platform, which means that as we grow as a company, our staff can stay relatively consistent in size. All of this helps our customers as well because it means that we don’t have the extra overhead that we would have to charge them for.

What was the main reason you decided to build Cloud Coach on the Salesforce Platform?
Peter: It really came down to our security at the time, we didn’t want to have to manage servers of our own, deal with backups etc, so Salesforce gave us the perfect option to use their secure servers to run our application and store our customers data.

Did that added security translate into acquiring new customers?
Peter: Absolutely, security was a huge benefit in regards to acquiring customers. Since a lot of our customers are large enterprise organizations, we do a lot of RFPs (requests for proposals) and there are always a lot of IT and security questions in that process. Being built on the Salesforce Platform allows us to reference things like trust.salesforce.com and the Salesforce certifications in that space. If customers know that our products are secure enough to earn Salesforce security certifications, then they can feel confident in deploying our solutions within their organization.

There’s also the fact that Salesforce is the one storing our customer’s data. As a mid sized company, that’s really beneficial for us because it helps us earn trust with a lot of the larger enterprises we work with. Those larger companies might be less willing to deal with us if we weren’t on a platform like Salesforce.

What impact has AppExchange made for Cloud Coach?
Peter: We love the AppExchange. When a company is seeking a solution on AppExchange to extend their Salesforce org, they take comfort in knowing that all the apps have to meet a certain standard of security. By listing our solutions on AppExchange, we gain a certain level of trust from organizations by connecting our brand with the Salesforce brand. Potential customers, even if they aren’t completely familiar with us, trust our technology.

AppExchange brings a high level of comfort to the decision-makers who are seeking solutions for their business challenges; they know they can try our tools and that there is very little risk involved.

How has Salesforce helped you sell?
Peter: Beyond the visibility on the AppExchange obviously, one of the biggest benefits of being built on the Platform has been leveraging the Salesforce team. If there is a Salesforce AE who’s got a 1,000-seat deal with large company X, and large company X needs a CRM with Project Management, then the Salesforce team and our team will work jointly in the process, be it demo’s, objection handling, selling the overall platform value to try and bring the deal home for both parties, which is the ultimate win-win scenario.

Become a Salesforce partner today to experience the security, support, and opportunities that come with building on the Salesforce Platform.

This article originally appeared on AppExchange and the Salesforce Ecosystem.