Elements.cloud: Drive Change Faster With Confidence

The Silicon Review

Organizations all over the world use Salesforce to manage their customer data. This is increasingly important now, with rapid digital transformation, as they typically engage with their customers through multiple channels. Over the years, Salesforce has become the single source of customer data, i.e., tightly integrated into the enterprise IT landscape. But to deliver ROI on customers’ Salesforce investment enterprises still need to understand the impact of changing a Salesforce org. Elements.cloud is the platform that has capability to deliver this knowledge to you.

Elements’ Change Intelligence Platform provides an enterprise-scale, aggregated, connected view of all automated and manually created documentation and processes within the org. Whatever the source and wherever a change occurs, it can be recorded, tracked, and analyzed within Elements.cloud. This is how the San Francisco-headquartered company helps you to accelerate time to value for Salesforce.

Founded by Ian Gotts, Adrian King, and Richard Parker, Elements.cloud is today helping enterprises get from Org Heroics to Org Excellence. Prior to founding Elements. Cloud, the co-founding trio, worked together as part of the executive team at Nimbus, which they helped grow from a startup in a bedroom in a small fishing village in the UK in 1997 to a global software company that had an enviable client list including 10% of the Fortune 500. In 2011, Nimbus was acquired by TIBCO, and the executive team disbanded. The team got back in 2014 with the aim of making work faster, easier, and more valuable for millions of people. And Elements.cloud was born.

Elements.cloud has over 300 paying customers, from small businesses to global blue-chips. Owing to its massive growth potential, the company secured $20 million through a funding round that was led by Anker AG.

We recently interviewed Ian Gotts, Founder and CEO of Elements.cloud, to know more about the company and its splendid work. Read on for the excerpts from the interview.

Q. Could you tell us a bit about Change Intelligence platform (CIP)?

Elements.cloud’s Change Intelligence Platform is the only solution that supports the entire change cycle on a single platform. But it starts with automatically creating a view of a customer’s Salesforce configuration.

A Change Intelligence Platform is the single connected source of all change documentation; user feedback, business requirements, business process maps, entity relationship diagrams, user stories (sometimes called work items), app metadata dictionaries, metadata impact analysis, metadata dependency analysis, and in-app help.

The power is having everything hosted and connected on a single platform rather than in disparate spreadsheets or drives.

Q. What markets do you cater to?

Today, we are solving a big problem – getting value from your Salesforce investment. Any platform only really gives a significant value to the customers when it has all the capabilities in place and is able to scale to support the largest customer implementations. So, it required a vision, investment and super bright engineers to build it.

Whilst we have architected the platform to support any application, we focused on Salesforce as the first GTM.

You might say that the Salesforce market is not small. It has 300,000 customers. You are right, but our current sweet spot is a customer that is spending over $1 million on Salesforce and has had Salesforce for 2-3 years and is committed to exploiting the platform.

The other market is Salesforce consulting firms. We have a specific license for them, which is super-affordable; $500 per year. It enables them to do Org discovery – the analysis of what has been configured – in a fraction of the time it would take manually. Buying an Elements license is the easiest decision they will make that day. And that includes the decision about what coffee to have in Starbucks.

Q. A Change Intelligence Platform must provide competitive edge to the customers. How do you gain insights to keep your clients ahead of the curve?

If customers are going to be agile, then they need their Salesforce org to be changed quickly and reliably. They need the changes to be what they actually need, not what they thought they wanted.

A Change Intelligence Platform gives our clients the tools to do the rigorous business analysis upfront - “build the right thing” but then, it provides the impact and risk analysis that enables them to make the changes quickly with confidence - “build the thing right”. As it is all hosted on a single platform and kept constantly up-to-date, there is no time wasted looking for the latest information. There are no mistakes because decisions are made with incomplete information. We help customers accelerate time-to-value for Salesforce. We unlock the power of Salesforce.

Q. How do you recruit the right talents for maintaining the quality of your service?

We are in a very lucky position. We have three things in place that means people come to us.

The three of us (Me, Adrian King, and Richard Parker) as founders have worked together for 20 years. We love working together. We have a shared vision. We have complementary skills. There are no politics. The investors are super supportive and are not setting wildly unrealistic expectations. There is no drama. That makes for a calm, stable company that is fun to work in.

We have a kick-ass product that everyone loves and that absolutely works. Therefore, we can focus on finding new customers and consultants, and on their success. We don’t burn cycles on covering up problems or trying to sell a future vision.

Finally, we have a massive market opportunity to grow into. Salesforce has 300,000 customers, but also we can address the other enterprise applications. So, as the company grows there is space for everyone to follow their passion and find their place. We don’t care about a person’s background or education. We want bright, inquisitive, passionate people. That is who will thrive in Elements. And who will make it a place others want to be.

Q. What would you say are the top three skills needed to be a successful CEO?

Passion; Building a B2B enterprise company takes time. You need to be passionate about the problem and solving it. You cannot fake it. You cannot be focused on the revenue or the valuation or what you will make on exit. Solve the customer’s problems. Build a culture that attracts the top talent. And then the revenue will take care of itself.

Focus; It is easy to build a solution that solves a problem for too broad an audience. But that makes it super hard when you are getting started. Your marketing is too generic. Your demand gen has no clear target. Your product strategy is all over the map. Your customer success teams are working across too many use cases. Be clear what your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is.

Humility / humor; you can only build a business if you put a talented team around you who want to work together for the long term. You need to build a culture where people can thrive and have fun. Yes, we have a business to run. But that doesn’t mean we should take ourselves too seriously. BTW there is strong evidence that humor builds trust.

Q. If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?

Find great founders. It is very hard and lonely if you are a solo founder.

Q. How do you market your services?

We are very active in the Salesforce ecosystem providing thought leadership and training. We can be found speaking and sponsoring at events of every level; Salesforce, User Conferences and User Groups. We work with complementary technology partners.

About the Leader

Ian Gotts, Founder and CEO

As CEO of Elements.cloud, he is passionate about providing the tools and training to help customers reduce the risk and improve the adoption of their Salesforce implementations. He’s been a Salesforce customer over the last 20 years and a regular speaker at Dreamforce, World Tour and Dreamin’ events.

He was co-founder and CEO of NimbusPartners, a BPM software company for 15 years that was a Salesforce reference customer. He guided the company from a start up to a successful exit into TIBCO. He was on Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Advisory Council for 4 years and spoke in their World Partner Conference keynote. At TIBCO he was Chief Evangelist reporting to the COO. Prior to that he ran major high risk client programs for Accenture for 12 years. His largest program had a team of 500 in central UK Government which is as challenging as it sounds.

Ian is the author of 10 books and a prolific blogger with a rare ability to make the complex seem simple. This makes him a popular and entertaining speaker who challenges his audience to see things differently.