How a CRM rollout became a Salesforce and AI consulting firm.
Most consulting firms can tell you what they think you should do. We can tell you because we did it ourselves first.
It started with a bet on ourselves.
Years ago, we made a decision that changed the trajectory of our company: we were going to roll out Salesforce across our entire organization, not just sales, not just marketing, but every function that touched a customer, a deliverable, or a dollar. Service. Finance. Operations. HR. The whole business, running on one platform.
At the time, that was an unusual move. Most companies our size were running three or four disconnected systems and calling it a strategy. We weren't trying to make a statement. We just believed that if we could get our own house in order, we could grow faster, hire smarter, and serve our clients better.
Then the questions started.
Once the implementation was live and humming, something we didn't expect started happening. People kept asking us how we did it, from peers to leaders across the country. CFOs wanted to know how our finance team got real-time visibility into pipeline. Heads of service wanted to know how we had standardized case management across our team. Sales leaders asked how we built forecasting they could actually trust.
The questions weren't theoretical. These were leaders who had bought the same software we had and weren't getting nearly the same value out of it.
Salesforce noticed.
It got to the point where Salesforce's own account executives started bringing prospects to our offices to see what we had built. They wanted clients to witness, in person, what a real end-to-end Salesforce implementation could look like, and what was possible when the platform actually ran the business instead of sitting on top of it.
We weren't selling anything. We were just showing people how we worked. But every visit ended the same way: "How could you help us do this?"
So we built a practice around it.
We launched a division specifically focused on helping other companies do what we had done, not from theory, but from lived experience. Real implementations. Real adoption challenges. Real ROI numbers we could point to in our own P&L.
The first engagements went well. So did the next ones. And the ones after that. Word spread, the team grew, and what started as a side practice quickly became something much larger.
And then technology kept changing.
As we worked with more companies, a pattern emerged. Salesforce was rarely the only platform that mattered. Clients needed it integrated with their ERP, their billing system, their data warehouse. They needed custom applications when off-the-shelf software hit its limits. They needed help thinking through their technology strategy as a whole, not one platform at a time. And then AI arrived, and suddenly every conversation included a question about agents, automation, and where this is all heading.
We could have stayed a Salesforce-only firm. A lot of consultancies make that choice. But our clients didn't have Salesforce-only problems, and we didn't have Salesforce-only expertise. So we built around what businesses actually needed.
Today: five practices, one integrated team.
Abstrakt Solutions is now a Salesforce and AI consulting firm. Systems integration, custom development, technology consulting, AI implementation, and revenue operations, five practice areas that operate as one team because, in our clients' businesses, the lines between them don't actually exist. A modern CRM implementation is a data integration project. An AI deployment is a revenue operations project. A custom application is a system design project.
We still run the same way we did in chapter one: on our own technology, eating our own cooking, learning what works and what doesn't before we ever recommend it to a client. The bet on ourselves keeps paying off, and now we get to make that same bet on the companies we serve.