How real-world Salesforce operations shaped a consulting company.
Most consulting firms start as consulting firms. Our team started on the other side of the table, implementing and running Salesforce inside a growing operating business before advising anyone else.
It started inside Abstrakt Marketing Group.
The people who founded Abstrakt Solutions first did this work at Abstrakt Marketing Group, a St. Louis B2B sales and marketing company. The goal was to run the whole business on Salesforce: not just sales and marketing, but every function that touched a customer, a deliverable or a dollar. Service. Finance. Operations. HR.
At the time, that was an unusual move. Most companies that size ran three or four disconnected systems and called it a strategy. The team had to solve the problems clients still face today: messy data, competing processes, integrations, reporting leaders could trust, and getting people to actually use the system.
Then the questions started.
Once the implementation was live and humming, something unexpected started happening. People kept asking how it was done, from peers to leaders across the country. CFOs wanted to know how the finance team got real-time visibility into pipeline. Heads of service wanted to know how case management had been standardized. Sales leaders asked how the team built forecasting they could actually trust.
The questions weren't theoretical. These were leaders who had bought the same software 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 Abstrakt Marketing Group's offices to see what the team 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.
The team wasn't selling anything. It was just showing people how the business worked. But every visit ended the same way: "How could you help us do this?"
So the team built a practice around it.
That practice became Abstrakt Solutions (formerly Abstrakt Cloud Solutions): a team focused on helping other companies do what had been done at Abstrakt Marketing Group, not from theory, but from lived experience. Real implementations. Real adoption challenges. Lessons learned while operating Salesforce, not just configuring it.
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: practices that work as one team.
Today, Abstrakt Solutions operates as its own company: a Salesforce consulting, implementation and integration partner. Systems integration, custom development, technology consulting, AI implementation, and revenue operations, 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 work the way the team learned to in chapter one: test what works in a real operation before recommending it to a client. We have sat in the customer's seat, and that shapes every engagement.