Plus91Labs has grown from a startup in Gwalior to a global Salesforce-focused digital transformation company. What were the defining moments that helped the company earn client trust and build a 100% success rate in digital transformation projects?
When we started Plus91Labs in Gwalior, one of our strongest beliefs was that geography should not determine the quality of technology a company can deliver. In the early years, our priority was to prove ourselves through every client engagement and demonstrate that a team from a tier 2 city could deliver to global standards.
Saloni Jain, Co – Founder, Plus91Labs
That meant understanding the client’s business before recommending technology. We have always believed that digital transformation is not about implementing a platform, but about solving a business problem and creating measurable value.
That approach has taken us through more than 250 digital transformation projects across industries and markets. Becoming a Salesforce Platinum Consulting Partner and receiving the 2023 Salesforce Partner Innovation Award for our work with Vega were important milestones in that journey.
For us, the strongest measure of success is the trust clients place in us to address their next transformation challenge. That trust comes from taking ownership of outcomes, rather than simply completing an implementation.
As someone who started as Plus91Labs’ first employee and later became its Co-Founder, how has your leadership style evolved while scaling the company to a team of over 100 professionals across global markets?
Starting with a small team meant that everyone was involved in multiple aspects of the business. There were no clearly defined roles in the beginning. People had to take ownership, learn quickly and solve whatever problem was in front of them. That culture of ownership continues to be an important part of Plus91Labs.
As the organisation grew, it became clear that the approach required to build a small team could not remain the same at scale. Leadership gradually moved from being closely involved in execution to creating capable teams that could take decisions and solve problems independently.
One of our strongest beliefs is that an organisation cannot scale if its growth depends on a few individuals. We have therefore focused on developing people, creating leadership opportunities and enabling talent from Gwalior and other emerging cities to work on global assignments.
Ultimately, leadership is about creating an organisation where people have the confidence and ownership to build beyond what the founders could build themselves.
Many organizations invest heavily in CRM but struggle to achieve business impact. From your experience leading Salesforce implementations across multiple countries, what separates successful digital transformation initiatives from those that fail?
The biggest difference is whether an organisation sees digital transformation as a technology project or as a business transformation exercise.
A CRM can provide tremendous capabilities, but technology alone does not create business value. Transformation has to begin with understanding the business problem, the processes that need to change and the outcomes the organisation wants to achieve.
Adoption is equally important. Even a technically strong solution will struggle if employees do not understand its value or find it difficult to integrate into their daily work. Data has also become increasingly important as organisations bring AI into their operations. Poor data can limit the effectiveness of even the most advanced AI systems.
The next phase of transformation will be about moving from systems that simply capture information to systems that help people make better decisions. At Plus91Labs, the focus is increasingly on making technology intelligent, contextual and embedded within everyday business workflows.
TrueSales reflects Plus91Labs’ move beyond consulting into building its own SaaS product. What market gap did you identify, and how do you see proprietary products shaping the company’s long-term growth strategy alongside Salesforce services?
TrueSales emerged from a problem we repeatedly saw while working with businesses. Sales teams were spending significant time on manual processes, managing information across different systems and often lacked timely intelligence to make decisions.
This led to a simple question. If the same problem is being solved repeatedly for different businesses, can it be addressed through a product that can scale?
Our consulting experience gave us a deep understanding of these challenges and became the foundation for TrueSales. The product brings together CRM, automation and AI to help sales organisations improve productivity and decision making.
We see products and consulting as complementary. Consulting keeps us close to real customer problems, while products allow us to convert those insights into intellectual property that can address a much larger market.
This represents an important long term vision where we wanted to combine our Salesforce expertise, AI capabilities and proprietary technology to move beyond implementing solutions to building technology that can solve recurring business problems at scale.
Beyond business growth, you’ve also been actively involved in mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs through the Gurukul Dream Foundation. What advice would you give to founders building technology companies from emerging cities while aiming for global markets?
The biggest lesson from the Plus91Labs journey is that geography should not determine ambition. We started in Gwalior and have built a business that now works with clients across markets. That experience has shown us that talent is distributed much more widely than opportunity.
There is tremendous potential in tier 2 and tier 3 cities, but that talent needs exposure, access to global opportunities and the confidence to compete at international standards.
For founders, the focus should be on building for a global customer from the beginning. Quality, security, customer experience and execution cannot be compromised simply because the company is based outside a traditional technology hub.
At the same time, founders should remain focused on the problem rather than becoming overly attached to a particular technology. AI will continue to evolve, but the businesses that create lasting value will be those that use technology to solve meaningful customer problems.
Most importantly, companies need to build people alongside the business. The success of a technology company should not only be measured by its growth, but also by the number of people it enables to grow into leaders.
Our journey reinforces one simple belief that talent exists everywhere, but opportunity does not. Emerging cities can play a much larger role in India’s next technology story if we create the right opportunities for that talent to compete globally.
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