CLD Partners specializes in enterprise FinancialForce implementations and enterprise quote-to-cash solutions on Salesforce. The company guides its customers through their FinancialForce implementation, giving them the value they expect from a big investment. Whether a company is considering FinancialForce and Salesforce, just went live or has been using it for years, CLD Partners has solutions to help organizations get the most out of their investment. Additionally, CLD Partners offers PSQuote, a services quoting AppExchange app built natively on the Salesforce Platform.
About CLD Partners
CLD Partners has one goal: a genuine desire to help clients be successful in their quote-to-cash, services delivery, and financial operations. In 2010, a team of solution architects, business analysts, project managers, developers, and trainers with 20+ years of experience recognized a need for streamlined integration of Professional Services Automaton (PSA) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementations. CLD Partners was born and quickly became the first PSA partner of FinancialForce, a Salesforce-native cloud-based applications company offering customer-centric ERP, PSA, and customer success solutions.
In 2015, CLD Partners began offering concierge support services to answer their customers’ long-term FinancialForce support needs. Recently, the company launched PSQuote, a robust, on-platform solution that allows customers to create professional services quotes in Salesforce, automate the creation of SOWs, and more, all in one place.
Purposefully choosing to grow organically over these past years, CLD Partners has cultivated a unique and diverse workforce of top talent led by the four original partners. The CLD difference is its people, process, and dedication to delivery. Its skilled consultants understand and speak the language of business users from sales to operations to finance and have an unparalleled understanding of FinancialForce and Salesforce technology.
- Established: 2010
- Headquarters: Front Royal, Virginia
- Industry: IT Services and IT Consulting
- Provar tests: 30
- Environments tested with Provar: 3 Sandbox orgs and numerous scratch orgs
“We had heard horror stories over the years of customers trying Selenium-based solutions that never quite worked with Salesforce. When Provar came onto the scene, a solution that was more Salesforce-focused, we finally had tools that were substantial and helped during the Salesforce update experience.”
– John Schuler, General Manager, PSQuote
Challenges: Scaling Up from Manual to Automated Testing and Becoming an ISV
From CLD Partners’ beginning days as a FinancialForce implementer and Salesforce consulting partner, the team’s services and consulting work in the Salesforce space was plentiful. A common pain point for customers was building service estimation tools on the Salesforce platform, and over the years, the CLD team built many different versions of these tools. Eventually, the need became so great that they decided to productize this line of work into PSQuote, which was then launched on the Salesforce AppExchange.
The team understood the importance of testing its Salesforce ecosystem and decided to more heavily invest in tools and automations to help with regression testing, or re-running functional and non-functional tests to ensure that previously developed and tested software still performs after a change. They had a core development team that relied on manually testing the primary use cases and knew this was the perfect time to level up. They were familiar with Salesforce’s cadence of three major releases per year and wanted to time their own releases roughly on the same schedule.
“Testing our own product was essential for providing the best experience for our customers. We wanted to invest in tools and automation to help with our regression testing so we could answer two questions: One, how can I make sure I didn’t break anything with this major Salesforce release? And two, how can we automate this, make it repeatable, and streamline it so we can move faster in development and more forward confidently with releases?”
– John Schuler, General Manager, PSQuote
Not only was the team looking for an internal solution for PSQuote, but often CLD clients expressed interest in automated testing tools to ease their pain points around major Salesforce releases and upgrades to their Salesforce apps.
“We’ve seen customers who are one or two years behind on releases because they’re afraid of breaking something in their production environment. Large enterprise organizations tend to be risk-averse and change-resistant, which leaves them reluctant to upgrade unless extensive regression testing is performed. Regression testing anxiety causes the customer to fall behind on releases, and prevents them from taking advantage of the latest features.”
– John Schuler, General Manager, PSQuote
The Move to Provar: Onboarding and Upskilling with University of Provar
The team discovered Provar through word of mouth, supplemented by research on LinkedIn and industry sites like SalesforceBen.com. They set up a demo with the Provar team for Provar Automation and requested a proof of value exercise where they set up an org that used PSQuote, came up with a test case, and worked with Provar to build it. Their main test was making sure Provar Automation could interact with their app’s Lightning web components. When the demo proved successful, the rest fell into place. They did their due diligence by looking into other competitors, but by this point, they were comfortable with Provar Automation and knew the solutions were exactly what they were looking for.
For PSQuote Software Engineer, Sayeef Alam, his goal was taking all the team’s manual tests and automating them. During the onboarding process, he found it was much more valuable, and more intuitive, for him to go through the University of Provar trainings and use that as a basis for setting up their new Provar workflow.
“The University of Provar trainings were pretty much all I needed. At first, I started with simple use cases, like creating an opportunity. That was easy enough. I thought it might get more complicated, for example, when I started creating page objects. However, after I used the training to figure out everything worked, I picked it up quickly.”
– Sayeef Alam, Software Engineer, PSQuote
Shortly after onboarding, Sayeef built out the 30+ tests they had once done manually and transitioned to an automated testing process. It took under three weeks, and the rest was history.
Evolving and Growing with Provar Solutions
As the CLD Partners team got more comfortable with Provar Automation, they took a greater look at how it interacted with PSQuote’s custom capabilities. As the majority of the app involves managed package objects and UI features built with Lightning web components, the team relied heavily on Provar’s ability to easily create tests for LWCs. Provar Automation keeps up with the challenge, regardless of the custom components involved. In the near future, the CLD Partners team will be testing some larger custom features, such as task quoting and Gantt features, and they look forward to seeing how Provar Automation will streamline the process.
“Nothing has been broken during the Salesforce update process. The tests are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do.”
– Sayeef Alam, Software Engineer, PSQuote
Eventually, the team wants to get to the point where they automate nightly test runs against a scratch org (or QA sandbox) with all of the latest changes in a release. This will result in a quicker feedback loop and faster identification of where test scripts need to be changed. They anticipate that by using Provar’s solutions, they will uncover issues that they may not have found otherwise and will be able to resolve them right away.
The team enjoys using Provar’s solutions so much that they regularly mention it to some of their larger clients using Salesforce.
“If the organization is larger, they know the complexities of their environment. As such, we recommend they look at a testing automation tool, and we always mention Provar.”
– John Schuler, General Manager, PSQuote
What are CLD Partners’ favorite aspects of working with Provar? For Sayeef, it’s all about how easy the solutions are to use.
“The fact that I was able to use Provar Automation to recreate all our manual tests in just a few weeks is a testament to the usability of the app.”
– Sayeef Alam, Software Engineer, PSQuote
He also appreciates how supported he feels when he reaches out to Provar’s customer support team. The quick, immediately helpful responses make a big difference in the team’s experience.
CLD Partners is on a rapid growth trajectory and has a track record of happy, successful customers. Thanks to their proactivity in implementing an automated testing solution to safeguard their offerings, they will continue upscaling with confidence, no matter what their future innovations entail.
Key Success Metrics
- Built out 30+ previously manual tests to automated using Provar Automation in under 3 weeks
- Discovered and resolved testing issues earlier in the DevOps cycle
- Increased confidence in regression testing for releases
To learn more about how Provar’s solutions can meet your team at all stages of the quality journey, or to share your company’s success story, connect with us today.
