Expanding Salesforce with a custom portal

Anyone I know who uses Salesforce never seems to fully enjoy the CRM. The platform of choice for millions of businesses across SMB and SME is amazing. But it often limits users in their most basic needs.

Luckily for us, Blackstar Capital was willing to take a risk stepping outside the Salesforce ecosystem to solve a common issue with the platform. While powereful, it's not very user-friendly. Branding a SFDC interface is almost impossible. And data easily be made available for use by external stakeholders. But what you may not know, is that you can build whatever you need outside SFDC and connect it securely through API.

Blackstar Capital is a factoring company. I had to Google what that means. Essentially, they help subcontractors working on multi-year projects for large companies or governments maintain a healthy cash flow. In most cases, these projects have a long payout cycle that squeezes these companies as they deal with ongoing cost in the form of material and labor. To keep cashflow, companies like Blackstar fund their invoices and help them get their invoices paid. All at a fee of course. But in a lot of scenario's this is the only way these companies can take on working in such big projects. So ultimately, it's a win-win. And Blackstar does this so well, they secured $1 billion in funding to support US government contractors at the end of 2023.

Blackstar contacted us because they wanted to do more than what Salesforce allows them. While their setup works well for them, SFDC lacks a custom and branded customer experience. They had two immediate needs:

1. Build a lead funnel with an automated onboarding.

2. Offer a customer portal for their existing clients.

Let's start with their first need.

For scaled growth, Blackstar needed a mechanism to reach out to potential clients in large volumes and facilitate an automated onboarding. As Blackstar has a lot of data available on clients, they decided to create tailor-made landing pages for each lead. These landing pages have detailed financial information and projections that add value beyond the normal sales pitch.

Additionally, a fully automated onboarding sequence leads new clients through the entire phase of connecting bank accounts, doing Know Your Customer (KYC) background checks, listing shareholders, directors and beneficiary owners. The entire sequence ends with the drafting of a contract and an electronic signature request.

This all happens outside Salesforce but is fully synced through API. Blackstar employees do not have to leave SFDC as they offer manual support during the onboarding process. On top, relevant events are sent to SFDC as Tasks for the support team to follow up. A user getting stuck in the sequence? SFDC receives an update and customer support can pick up the phone and call the prospect.

Blackstar's second need is a logical next step after onboarding a new client. SFDC holds all information for each client in terms of outstanding project invoices and their respective payments. This information sits safely and securely in Salesforce but the team has no way to share this easily with their customers. But customers want to know which of their invoices have been paid and what their cashflow looks like. Not on a monthly basis, but daily. In realtime.

We built a custom customer portal that securely connects with Salesforce via API. It fetches all their data and presents it in a user-friendly interface. Blackstar creates user accounts through Salesforce. Clients activate their accounts and access a dashboard filled with relevant, real-time data about their business.

We're currently working with the Blackstar team to roll out the lead generation workflow. We also started beta testing the customer portal with a select group of clients to gain valuable user feedback to improve the portal.

The collaboration with Blackstar has been very smooth. There is the usual corporate red-tape to navigate and the SFDC integration has had its ups and downs. A simple example of that would be how you as a company deal with fields in SFDC. As fields and labels are used in the external app integration, you have to be careful in removing, updating and renaming fields. A change can easily disrupt the service so it's crucial to keep clear logs and communication about changes made in SFDC.

Another key learning that we're working on with our clients is the idea of roadmapping. Hardly new, but often misused.

The way we build is very powerful and often too fast for clients to keep up. But it also encourages you to build more than you may need. And building an app as complex as the one for Blackstar, creates complexity quickly. So it is crucial to be ambitious in the roadmap but pragmatic in building it out. Build and test small parts, gather feedback and continue. This is hard for most teams as they have the full picture in front of them and managers or the board to push them. But ultimately, this will build a better product faster.

I'm really looking forward to the next chapter in our collaboration with the Blackstar team!