How and Why PROLIFIQ is Trading App Infrastructure for Innovation
By: Miriam Kahn
Tags: Startup, Isvs, SaaS, Development, Salesforce

Trade Your App’s Infrastructure for Innovation; Learn How This Company is Doing it Miriam Kahn Follow Jan 22 · 4 min read

Time is money. Whether your company is big or small, every hour and resource counts when you’re trying to innovate and grow your business. That’s what Vrahram Kadkhodaian, President & CEO of sales enablement suite, PROLIFIQ, focused on when looking at his team of developers 4+ years ago. He realized that they could optimize front-end development and innovation if their app’s infrastructure was taken care of via a third-party platform. That’s when he decided to leverage the power of the Salesforce Platform.

We sat down with Vrahram to learn more about PROLIFIQ’s journey to build on the Platform and how it’s impacting their business today.

PROLIFIQ wasn’t always built on Salesforce. When did you decide it was necessary to move PROLIFIQ onto a singular platform?

Vrahram: When I joined PROLIFIQ 4+ years ago, I saw that they were driving the most valuable selling motions — everything from relationship-mapping to key account management to digital content. That’s when I thought, “Wait a second. This company is doing what every customer wants. But they’re not doing it natively inside of a CRM.”

Why did you choose to build on the Salesforce Platform over others?

Vrahram: When it comes to product and technology, the declarative nature of the Salesforce Platform allows us to do so much when it comes to innovation. We don’t need a manual for the manual. You get certified. You become part of the family. You become part of the community. Then, you’re off to the races to begin developing and innovating.

Lastly, I think one of the most attractive parts is the economics behind it. We don’t pay Salesforce anything to develop — and we are 100% native on the front end and back end. We obviously invest in our developers, but there’s no cost for the technology.

What did that journey look like when you started building on Salesforce?

Vrahram: When I joined PROLIFIQ, I realized that we have some of the most amazing technologists in the space — but they spent their entire careers in dot-net. So it was pretty amazing when we made the decision to move forward with Salesforce. Everyone got certified on the Platform in less than 90 days! So not only did we make pivots when it came to the technology and getting people certified, but we also leaned heavily on the guidance of our Salesforce partner team. They helped shape and mold what our strategy was going to be, not only for that first year, but for years to come.

Before launching on AppExchange, all apps must go through Salesforce’s security review process. What was your experience?

Vrahram: It was a seamless process from start to finish. I think we were out of security review in six weeks and off to the races selling into the Salesforce ecosystem. Security review is like a badge of honor. When your app has passed security review, it’s like saying, “My solution has been certified by Salesforce.”

It also provides relief to our customers. The typical customer IT review process from a large enterprise customer can take anywhere from four to eight weeks. But it gets condensed to a day or two because several of the questions that they’re asking have already been validated via security review.

How did this move allow PROLIFIQ to work more efficiently?

Vrahram: Salesforce lent us this amazing platform that allowed us to take all of our capabilities and build it from the ground up without having to worry about mobility, metadata, multitenancy, or infrastructure. If you think about ten developers working on our product, I’d rather have nine of them working on delivering the actual value that the customer receives, versus ten of them working on getting the most up-to-date security in place. We don’t have to worry about that with Salesforce.

What core features of the Salesforce Platform do you utilize the most?

Vrahram: We leverage almost every aspect of Salesforce as an extension to our products. We’re bringing everything that sales reps and customer success teams are doing externally into the Salesforce Platform. We’re bringing visualization of their contacts inside Salesforce so they can quickly and easily identify stakeholders, blockers, champions, and more.

We’re also building hooks into applications that enable them to communicate with Salesforce. So when a contact is changed, augmented, or moved inside a particular application, it is now bi-directionally synching back to Salesforce. We no longer have to worry about disparate customer data because it’s all in one place. One of our customers said it the best. They said that we unlock the investments that they’ve made in Salesforce. We can only do that by being native, leveraging core objects, being lightning ready, and utilizing all that Salesforce has to offer.

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