Proving the value of Salesforce to grow start-up Digitribe

Providing advisory and consulting services to help companies realise projects to innovate, co-create and accelerate their digital journey, DigiTribe has grown rapidly over the past seven years with the support of a customised Salesforce tool designed by PwC. 

When it launched in 2017, DigiTribe already had a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, but, explains Benoit Carlier, COO and co-owner of DigiTribe, “it wasn’t flexible and wouldn’t have the capacity to accelerate and realise our growth ambitions. So, we started to investigate a CRM tool that would enable us to deal with whatever challenges we may face in the strategic expansion on our home turf at first, but eventually outside of Belgium too.”

“We were aware that PwC’s community of solvers had proven CRM expertise and talked to them about designing a tool specifically for our needs as a (then) small business,” recalls Francois Lecocq, CEO and founder of DigiTribe. He adds, “we’d had the idea that Salesforce was specifically for larger concerns and would be too wieldy a tool for us, but PwC assured us that it would be a good fit. Having analysed the market, it became clear that it can offer the capability to evolve that start-ups and scale-ups need and could be integrated with tools at DigiTribe already being used for daily work. We were looking for a tool to manage and streamline our internal operations, allowing us to scale as a company.”

Work started in 2022 and from the beginning DigiTribe was convinced that Salesforce and PwC were indeed the right solution. “From the beginning, we had a top-class implementation with high-quality service including monitoring via dashboards. We were made to feel like a large and important concern for PwC. Despite being such a large firm, we had very personal attention and a straightforward relationship. Indeed, the PwC team became a true part of our team. They tracked all actions and followed up with our internal staff to help make sure the project stayed on track. They understood our business model and our industry which made meetings very efficient and effective as we were speaking the same ‘language’ as it were,” enthuses Francois Lecocq.

The client believes that PwC is a true partner, challenging them daily and looking beyond the short term. “The team really co-created the solution with us, thinking alongside us to make sure that it would meet our requirements. There was a great deal of trust on both sides which was important in making sure we could work together well. We’d provide the strategic lines of what we were looking to achieve and the team were there to think with us how to make the tool work for that. They were really dedicated to meeting the challenges and on delivery,” he adds.

DigiTribe particularly appreciates that PwC offers the combination of business and technology. “Normally, you have to trade off one for the other, but with in-depth expertise and experience in both areas, we could find the right balance within the Salesforce solution with PwC”, says Francois Lecocq.

The tool comprises financial forecasting to enable DigiTribe to track all activities and has quickly become the backbone of the firm with additional functionality built in. “It really helps collaboration between different departments and helps us plan better as everything we do is linked to Salesforce, making us much more efficient,” notes Benoit Carlier.

Importantly, security of the tool was a high priority with the entire database having to operate in a fully secure way. Since its implementation the tool’s been expanded to incorporate other parts of the firm’s structure and helped change the way it operates, including and integrating business development, marketing, recruitment, the service catalogue, finance and more. “It’s had a huge positive impact on DigiTribe,” says Francois Lecocq.

Indeed, today, DigiTribe has more than 125 experts that work in three “Tribes”; security and risk management, cloud and architecture and transformation management. The company’s revenues have more than quadrupled to reach approximately 20 million euros (end 2023) since introducing its Tribe model in 2020. “Salesforce truly is our instrument of growth and is the central point that we build everything on and that’s thanks to PwC’s support,” Francois Lecocq concludes.