Sonar
Optimizing Change Management with Visibility

Sonar is a Change Intelligence platform geared toward the Salesforce operations and consulting ecosystem. By providing clients with a clear view into their tech stack, the Sonar platform enables them to seamlessly redesign processes and release new automations faster. “We understand how changes impact systems and stakeholders to help clients’ teams work smarter and faster by simplifying the complex changes to their Salesforce tech stack,” says Brad Smith, the Co-founder, and CEO of Sonar.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Smith shares his insights on how Sonar optimizes their clients’ change management operations and enhances ROI.

What spurred the inception of Sonar?

My experience in the Salesforce ecosystem and revenue operations space helped me realize the complexities associated with change management and its impact on other systems and departments. It all started during my tenure at one of Atlanta’s biggest venture-backed SaaS companies, Gather Technologies. When I joined, they already had their tech stack configured with Salesforce, HubSpot, SalesLoft, ChurnZero, and other leading systems. Unfortunately, no one in the company knew how the systems were configured. In many instances, the changes I make on one of the systems would significantly impact its integration or mapping with other systems.

Later on, during an event at Gather Technologies, I ran into Jack McGlinchey, who was on the product and engineering side of the business. After sharing my concerns, Jack suggested I check out tools like GitHub, Datadog, or PagerDuty that provide visibility into the integration patterns of the systems to make these changes confidently. However, these tools were not ideal for the tech stack we had at Gather Technologies. This was a realization that catalyzed the inception of Sonar.

A few years later, we both joined another Atlanta-based company that had over 300 employees. The issue was no different there. I inherited a new tech stack with no previous documentation on its configuration. I continued to make changes, not realizing that these changes could even wipe out our critical data. After this incident, Jack and I joined hands to build a new system that could mitigate these challenges and founded Sonar in 2018.

It started as a night and weekend passion project. The two-member company went full time in January 2020 and has, since then, expanded into a leading provider of change intelligence solutions with over 60 employees and a handful of clients. At Sonar, we always tell our teams to do the best within their control, a philosophy that helped us achieve tremendous growth in a short span.

What are some of the key challenges that organizations face when leveraging their go-to-market tech stack?

Most of our customers have Salesforce at the center of their go-to-market tech stack. Their sales operation managers, directors of revenue operations, and Salesforce admins often struggle to understand the system dependencies and how data is driven between each platform.

For instance, one of the highly leveraged fields in Salesforce is the opportunity stage, a picklist field in Salesforce that describes the high-level phases within the clients’ sales processes. This field is mapped to several systems and the underlying automation layers. Identifying how the opportunity stage is updated, who is using it, and which system it’s mapped to has always been a challenge for organizations. The inability to access this data will leave organizations in a tough spot when it comes to making critical business decisions.

Could you elaborate on how the Sonar platform mitigates these challenges?

The Sonar platform serves as a single pane of glass to see how all the metadata is being used between the go-to-market systems. It keeps track of how data and its flow changes over the days, weeks, months, and even years. What gives the platform a competitive edge is its increased level of visibility and accessibility that provides all the team members with easy and seamless access to data, helping them understand how things are changing during different time spans.

Earlier, if a Salesforce admin created new fields and added them to new levels of automation, he needed to bring it to the team’s notice through in-person communication. Sonar builds a world of difference in instances like this by tracking changes within clients’ systems and automating the process of informing the rest of the team about these changes.

Our solution not only alerts them of the changes but also provides them with a holistic view of how the changes can impact their workflows and the other pieces of technology they own. Having this understanding of the downstream impacts enables admins to make the changes to their tech stack with confidence.

Could you cite a case study on how Sonar has enabled a client to overcome the hurdles and attain desired outcomes?

We recently collaborated with LendingTree, an online lending marketplace that was going through a massive tech debt cleanup exercise. Like many others, LendingTree was also facing challenges associated with inheriting an already customized and modified Salesforce tech stack. The Sonar platform helped the client’s Salesforce team to quickly understand the historical configurations. They were able to easily identify how different Salesforce fields were used and remove them from the existing levels of automation or integrations.

With our platform, the client reduced the cleanup time by 40 percent and gained greater visibility into their data to execute their project with more confidence and clarity.

How is the client onboarding process at Sonar?

With our business operations built around clients’ success, we adopt a comprehensive customer-first onboarding approach. Under this unique model, we allow businesses to use the Sonar platform for free, allowing them to understand its capabilities before they purchase it. During this trial period, we typically follow a white-glove methodology. Most of the times, clients implement our self-service platform themselves. Our team also assists clients in setting up the platform, which usually takes less than 15 minutes, regardless of the company’s size.

Sonar caters to a wide range of customers—from small startups to large enterprises—that leverage go-to-market technology and systems to streamline their operations, including sales, marketing, customer success, and finance.

What does the future hold for Sonar?

One of the many ideas in our pipeline is to expand horizontally to solve the challenges pertaining to other applications —like what we did in the Salesforce ecosystem. We plan to explore the uncharted territories in the vast MarTech space and continue to integrate with more platforms by the end of 2022.

Later this year, we are releasing a new, fully self-serve product that will be available on the Salesforce AppExchange. It will provide customers context and clarity on how they’re making changes in their organization, allowing them to do their jobs in a faster, more efficient, and safer way.