Successful enterprises in the modern age require a high level of customer-centricity backed by a well-functioning Sales, Service and Marketing organization and processes.
Only when these processes combine to form a cohesive entity can the business function to its full potential, achieving both, its short-term, and long-term goals. The role of a well architected IT platform is key to achieving these objectives.
Stetig Consulting is a Salesforce Gold Partner that provides Salesforce CRM consulting and implementation services.
Stetig has brought success to many enterprises in varied domains by adopting a business-centric approach while digitizing their customers’ systems using the Salesforce platform and products.
In the words of Lalitha Bhat, Chief Technology Officer, “Stetig Consulting has been helping organizations deliver success since 2014. Stetig is the preferred partner of many leading enterprises for their digital transformation journey. Stetig specializes in Salesforce CRM implementations for Marketing, Sales, and Service processes.
“We deliver process-consulting led Salesforce CRM implementations. With over 500 large Salesforce CRM implementations, we are one of the leading Salesforce partners.
“Within a short span, we have completed more than 500 salesforce projects for 300+ clients, including some of the biggest names in the country”.
According to Lalitha, their most significant traits are:
- Accelerator Driven approach for quick implementations.
- Process-first approach intended to solve business problems.
- Process orchestration for added efficiencies.
Process Consulting and implementation of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, Marketing Cloud, CRM Analytics, and Heroku are some of the key services offered by Stetig.
She adds, “We pride ourselves in understanding the customer domain and specific business processes. Our solutions are tailor-made by choosing the right mix of out-of-the-box features and coupling it with custom platform bespoke applications/modules.”
“Chief Technical Architect”
Lalitha has over 21 years of experience in the software industry and has held many roles and responsibilities during her tenure at TCS and Capgemini in UK, US, and India. In 2014, she joined hands with close friends Ankur Priyadarshan (CEO, Stetig) and Nishant Garg(COO, Stetig) to build Stetig. Lalitha operates as the Chief Technology Officer of Stetig.
Lalitha has been a tech enthusiast from the early days of her career. After having worked with multiple technologies, she found her calling in Salesforce.
As the CTO of Stetig, her work hours are spent constantly thinking, innovating, dreaming, and working on something Salesforcey. Force.com platform is her passion. She currently holds 16 salesforce.com certifications.
Few things that get her as excited as Salesforce are her love for animals, fitness, travel, and watching medical dramas.
Sharing her inspiration behind becoming a Salesforce implementation partner, Lalitha says, “Surprisingly, we realized that despite the enormous capabilities of the product and platform, most implementations did not wow the customer or did not give them the experience of adopting a world-leading CRM platform.
“CRM Implementations continued to fall into the rut of budget overruns, missed deadlines, unhappy end users, cumbersome UIs, rigid designs, flaky integrations, poor adoption, and frustrated stakeholders.”
Bridging the Gap
According to Lalitha, “We felt that this gap can only be addressed by thoroughly understanding the customer requirements, pain points, and unique business process and crafting an appropriate solution. We knew our strength lay in interacting with our customers and in jointly creating a salesforce roadmap that aligned with their company’s vision.”
She adds “Our Salesforce implementations not only meet our customers’ current business needs but also give them an edge over the competition by making their solutions robust and adaptive to changing market needs.”
Highlighting Stetig’s USPs as a leading name in this area, Lalitha reiterates that “…every implementation and customer is different. If you paint everything with a broad brush in mapping the customer solution to salesforce implementation, you will take away the uniqueness from their business process and end up putting the customer at a disadvantage.
“We always treat every implementation as a brand-new implementation and go with an open mind to understand the nuances of the customer’s process. We bring our expertise in asking the right questions, guiding them toward the best practices in the industry, and suggesting innovative ideas that build on their current goals and visions. Once we have created this joint vision with the customer, we draw from our vast experience working on similar projects/domains and drive the project to success by bringing in our accelerators, best practices, and reusable modules.”
Data-Driven Focus
An area that Stetig focuses on, is data. Though data is the star of any implementation, it gets less attention than it deserves. Key areas that are overlooked are migration of data from legacy systems, data integrity of the transactional and master data etc. You might have the best of the modules, but if the end-user loses the trust of the data driving these modules, it is a failed implementation.
Apart from the above, Integration with third-party systems, Analytics, Stakeholder management, change management, and User adoption are a few other places where Stetig excels.
“Be it a small implementation with a handful of end users or a multi-geography implementation with thousands of end users, our commitment and passion for getting the right solution for every customer is what drives us. Sticking to our core value has been fueling our success, and I believe this is what sets us apart,” she says, adding, “Above all, we are lucky to have a wonderful team who are truly committed to delivering customer delight daily. Every employee has contributed in making us who we are. They truly represent ‘Brand Stetig.”
Lalitha says that when they started in 2014, Salesforce was a relatively new name in India. Explaining that cloud is the future and that Salesforce is leading the way in CRM in the cloud space wasn’t easy.
Focusing efforts on demonstrating the value and showcasing the numerous success stories across the world have helped overcome that obstacle. Salesforce’s growth story is remarkable – the product is ever-evolving, new features, functionalities, and acquisitions continue to make the product landscape bigger.
Keeping up with the demand for talent for various skills has been challenging during 2021 and early 2022. “Taking cognizance of the supply gap, we have developed alternate skilling strategies through cross-training and partnerships with academia. As they say, these are good problems to have!”
The Success Perspective
Being an experienced leader, Lalitha shares her opinion on how salesforce is crucial today and what advancements can be expected in the future. She says Salesforce is growing at a rapid pace. The extent of possibilities it offers is unparalleled. Salesforce service partners provide consulting and implementation services, ensuring that the product is being used to its full potential.
Salesforce is now powering more business processes than ever. While the skeletal framework for business processes across organizations has similarities, understanding the nuances of every business process and then tailoring Salesforce solutions that meet the current and future requirements best in a scalable and interoperable manner is what service providers excel at.
Service partners are gradually moving towards becoming strategic advisors to their customers. “In the days to come, we will see a deeper partnership between clients and service providers, leading to better planning and delivery,” she believes.
In her advice to the aspirants willing to venture into the field of Salesforce services, Lalitha recommends, “Salesforce is vast, and it continues to grow. I think finding a small area within Salesforce and focusing on that to achieve stability would be the right thing to do for someone just starting out.”
Describing their future goals and plans to embrace the changes happening in the industry, Lalitha reveals that they would like to establish themselves as the go-to brand for digital transformations. “We endeavor to merge our practices for mobile apps, web apps, and Salesforce CRM and deliver a holistic experience to our customers,” she says, concluding, “We are scaling up our leadership team to help foster the growth plans we have in India and abroad.
