Concrete is Poured Differently with Titan and Salesforce Industries

How would you create a new model of customer interaction with an old rigid manufacturing industry?

Marius Swart, a seasoned CEO with experience in the IT and software industry started with Salesforce. In the world of CRM nothing compares to Salesforce’s flexibility and customization for handling customer data. Salesforce has also been expanding in the manufacturing industry in recent years so there are lots of opportunities for innovation.

However, this was not a straightforward project. Marius was brought in by the founders to create a new model for ordering, dispatching, manufacturing and delivering concrete. The main difference between this new venture and a traditional concrete company was the use of Volumetric Concrete Mixers. This is a type of truck that is fairly popular in Europe. It can mix and pour concrete on-site. This eliminates the need for the concrete to be mixed before leaving the dispatcher and also makes small batches of concrete more accessible for the one-off customer.

Marius Discovers Titan

In his quest to create a new model for interaction between the customer, dispatcher, and the driver of a truck, Marius found Titan. I interviewed him about the process and it was exciting to get a glimpse into his process. Check out an excerpt of the interview here:

Interview with Marius Swart, Concrete on Demand (edited for readability)

Ben (Account Executive at TITAN): How long was this period of time when the founder of the company asked you to join the project until you found Titan? How long were you looking for the solution?

Marius (CEO of CODOPS LLC) : That’s a good question. We dabbled around with options for about a year, and I’ve tried all the other form builders out there as well. So we probably experimented for a year with alternative options. And it wasn’t that we didn’t want to use one or another, it was just what was the best one? So we took about a year and started with everything at Salesforce that didn’t work out, work[ed] with a couple of the forms and so on.

And then I discovered Titan, maybe six months ago, in that time working with Titan, not only did we complete the project, but we took longer time researching options than it took to put in the work and get it to do what we needed to do.

“And when we saw Titan and looked at
a couple of your videos, we thought
this is too good to be true.”

So yeah, it was a comprehensive search. I know Salesforce reasonably well, we have deep developer expertise in our business and these guys are full of ideas. And when we saw Titan and looked at a couple of your videos, we thought this is too good to be true.

And before we know it, you know, we’re like “how did we miss this?” How can we not have this from the start? But it’s fast, it’s secure, it’s safe. I mean, it’s so intuitive to connect Salesforce to users that are not inside the organization.

Ben: So with all that, were there any concerns that you had about using the product before you pulled the trigger and started building?

Marius: Yeah, you know, you always notice when you introduce a non-Salesforce entity purely because of the carousel for stakes with the cloud. Salesforce is defined by the cloud. So they took a lot of care in terms of uptime, and availability, and authentication and security and so on.

So, there were those typical concerns, you know, am I introducing a weaker area? And so far, no. In fact, Salesforce was down more than Titan. Titan wasn’t down, once in the project, and Salesforce went down twice, once was a glitch, and once was just an error that they made on one of their servers.

 So, it’s a very secure partner, that authentications stay strong, there aren’t security loopholes or anything like that, and then we bombarded it with those inquiries. And so, no, we were concerned about that. But none of those concerns were really valid.

Ben: Okay, so just to dive in a little bit deeper into your particular solution, what would you say was the most difficult part of your problem that you were looking to solve?

Marius: I think keeping the user experience for somebody that’s encountering concrete for the first time, keeping that experience, keeping their attention through that experience was important because buyers of concrete have options.

 They can go and buy a ready mix bucket somewhere, they can bring a little trailer and put stuff in there. So they’ve got options. And what we wanted to do is that when they come to concrete on demand, they have to feel that this is it. This is how I’m going to get my concrete and so yeah, that was the single biggest area that we had to solve. And we did.

Watch the Full Interview:

Check Out Concrete On Demand: https://www.concreteondemand.com/