Who is OpFocus? Our Journey to Salesforce Consulting Firm for SaaS Companies

When you’re part of a fast-growing company, there’s a tendency to continually look forward: to the next milestone, the next target, the next goal. 

But reflection has an important role to play for companies as well. From time to time, companies must take a moment to step back and ask the question, “Who are we as an organization?” 

For OpFocus, the answer to that question has morphed in the last 15+ years of doing business. Today, we’re extremely clear on who we are and who we serve: we are a Salesforce consulting firm that exclusively supports high-growth SaaS companies, helping them achieve operational excellence at scale. 

Choosing to work in a single vertical wasn’t an inevitable decision: there are many Salesforce consulting firms that serve clients across industries. A combination of luck, skill, and conscious decision-making uniquely positioned OpFocus to help SaaS organizations with their Salesforce ecosystems. 

Keep reading to learn how (and why) we went from Salesforce generalists to SaaS-focused Salesforce RevOps experts. 

The humble beginnings of a Salesforce consulting firm

After our founding in 2006, we acquired our very first client: Orchestria (since acquired by CA Technologies), a SaaS company in New York that was connected to OpFocus Chairman (then President) David Carnes. At the time, OpFocus was a five-member team working out of a small condo in Winchester, MA. But our size didn’t stop us from providing excellent service to clients. 

As the company grew, we took the traditional route of most Salesforce consulting firms, working with clients across many industries and relying closely on Salesforce connections for new business. We continued to grow and build our reputation, but we knew that we had the potential to help our clients achieve even greater success. 

To do that, we needed to narrow our focus to a single market and go all in on one vertical that would make the best use of our team’s knowledge and experience.

OpFocus pivots to Salesforce consulting for SaaS companies

Once we decided to pivot, we engaged a management consultancy for a deep dive into our data from the previous years (yes, consulting firms hire consultants, too!) “Software publishing” was one of the top recommendations and was a great fit for our firm across several dimensions:

Geography

Greater Boston is a stronghold for venture capital and private equity-backed startups. A strong educational system and start-up friendly culture allow hundreds of SaaS companies to flourish, and our Boston-based team continues to build a strong local and regional network in the area.

Ability to Specialize

As generalists in Salesforce consulting, there was too much variety in our client base to deeply understand the market and business needs of every company, even though there were surprising amounts of similarity across our clients. We wanted to focus on a single vertical to deepen our expertise and maximize our clients’ results from each engagement. 

When we work with a SaaS company today, we have hundreds of client use cases in their growth trajectory to draw from and can offer the best possible recommendations to meet their needs.

Insider Experience

While we worked with many types of clients, some team members already had a background in the SaaS industry. Several members of our Growth Advisory team have decades of experience leading operations for high-growth SaaS companies.

Market Cap

One of the best indicators of a consultant’s expertise is how well they manage their own company. Part of our decision for pivoting to SaaS came from recognizing that the market cap in the SaaS space was high and gave OpFocus significant room for growth. 

We’re all in on Salesforce RevOps consulting for SaaS companies

OpFocus pivoted to an all-SaaS client base in 2018, and we haven’t looked back since. We love the challenge of supporting companies seeking to double or triple in revenue year over year. Our clients push us to do our best work every day, and we bring that value right back to them.

We’ve grown a team of SaaS growth advisors, operational consultants, data specialists, and Salesforce architects who can provide end-to-end services for our clients. 

We’ve established key relationships with private equity companies who choose OpFocus to work with their portfolio.

We’ve stretched beyond Salesforce development to help companies manage their entire Salesforce ecosystems, including the people, processes, systems, data, and governance that drive them. [link to blog: Why do I need a Salesforce consulting firm?]

We’ve got the experience in the SaaS space to make prescriptive recommendations for our clients to ensure their success rather than learning as we go. 

If you’d like to see the kind of results our SaaS clients get from working with OpFocus, check out our case studies.

Ready to engage with a Salesforce consultant who understands your industry? Reach out to get the conversation started.  

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May 3, 2022

Jack Campbell, Strategic Sales Manager

about the author

Jack Campbell

Jack’s been selling Salesforce solutions in one capacity or another since 2014, spanning a breadth of different organizations. He was attracted to OpFocus because of their specialization in SaaS, and his 3 years here have allowed him to extend that specialization to product knowledge across the Salesforce tech stack.

His favorite Salesforce features are CPQ, and more generally, the platform’s ability to integrate with 3rd party platforms and applications. CPQ speaks for itself in SaaS — they need it to grow and scale. Salesforce’s dominance of the CRM space has brought along with it an enormous 3rd party ecosystem, and required other large software companies such as Oracle to easily integrate and play nicely. Jack believes that’s a powerful position to be in, as it allows SaaS companies to be flexible in how they approach their broader revenue operations tech stack.