Platinum River Innovations and Swantide

Platinum River Innovations is a Salesforce consulting partner with deep experience in insurance, banking, and wealth management. Their clients tend to run complex orgs, many of which have been around for 20+ years.

As AI tools started landing in the Salesforce ecosystem, Platinum River Innovations' leadership team began asking how those tools would impact their delivery model. They understood massive changes were coming to the consulting industry, and saw an opportunity to differentiate themselves by changing their methodology to win more business, get clients better outcomes, and protect the firm's margins at the same time.

Clients were pushing for more competitive pricing, and the pressure came from several directions at once: tighter budgets, more vendors to choose from, and a general sense that AI should be making this kind of work cheaper. Platinum River Innovations needed to maintain healthy margins across their projects, and to grow their practice by winning new business and expanding further within existing accounts. Their leadership team also recognized that the consulting industry and business model was going to evolve:

“We needed to assess the capabilities of the AI products and figure out how we can re-architect our business from the bottom up, so that we can drive more value to our clients. Otherwise, AI will drive our revenue down and will become a competitive threat.”

In an increasingly competitive sales environment, Platinum River Innovations needed a platform that could differentiate its offering and meet their clients where they were at. The Agentforce Transformation Projects Platinum River Innovations wanted were often blocked by the presence of technical debt. Many client orgs had years of accumulated customization, half-finished projects, and configuration nobody on the current team had built.

“We have a roadblock to doing AI transformation engagements because of the tech debt that first needs to be remediated. Fixing 10–15 years of technical debt could take a client’s internal team of 5 people 1–2 years to remediate through traditional means.”

Some clients felt frustrated and resistant to investing in new Salesforce capabilities when their current org wasn’t working as intended. Those that were willing to invest often had months of tech debt remediation work that needed to be done first, eating up the budget and pushing out the timeline for bigger initiatives. Facing a series of blockers to closing more deals and increasing the value-density within each account, Platinum River Innovations turned to Swantide.

With Swantide, Platinum River Innovations has been able to win more business by getting the same work done in less time, enabling them to solve budget challenges and accelerate time to value. The first client that Platinum River Innovations used Swantide on was an employee benefits provider who had spent 12 months going through a failed implementation with a different partner. They were more than 4x over budget and needed to get results quickly. Using Swantide to quickly understand the org, scope and deliver the work, the Platinum River Innovations team completed a full lift and shift to Financial Services Cloud.

“Swantide was instrumental across the project lifecycle. In less than a week from the SOW being signed, prior to project kick-off, we had completed a full FSC upgrade, adding new features and migrating the object model. This was effectively replacing the work performed over the previous year by the prior partner. The remainder of the project focused on new features like commissions, automation, and new reporting capabilities. Swantide helped shorten the project duration, speeding the client to value realization by 3 weeks. In total, this was a 6 week project.”

After this initial win, Platinum River Innovations connected Swantide to 4 other client orgs, with several other clients in active sales cycles. The additional capabilities from Swantide have changed their delivery motion, and it’s now an integral part of their GTM motion driving new business:

“Including Swantide’s capabilities, we’re able to quickly understand what had been done and generate an initial prototype prior to a standard discovery session. We made that offer during the sales process and it has helped secure multiple new clients. I can safely say having Swantide embedded in our value delivery process has won us multiple new clients.”

Additionally, Swantide’s fixed cost structure ensures that the better client outcomes turn into better margins for Platinum River Innovations. Swantide pricing is a fixed fee per org, and Platinum River Innovations can add as many users to the org and run as many tasks as they need without worrying about cost overruns. The support from Swantide’s customer success helped deliver value quickly and ensure they continue to see value as new consultants are onboarded across multiple clients.

“There’s a lot of discussion right now about token overruns, which we don’t have to worry about with this structure. Swantide is a predictable cost, we know what we’re spending, and we get higher value from using it. If we were to dive into these products with no enablement support, it would have been a failure from a roll-out standpoint. Swantide’s onboarding experience was huge.”

Within the first 2 months of becoming a Swantide customer, Platinum River Innovations has been able to win more deals, deliver better outcomes for their clients, and they have transformed their delivery and GTM motion to capitalize on the opportunity presented by AI.