Make-Sense was established to help organizations implement digital accessibility in a way that is compliant with laws and guidelines while mitigating the significant complexity and high costs typically involved.
In the past three decades, governments around the world have passed laws that focus on making electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. Some of these regulations are Section 508 and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in the United States and the European Union Directive on the Accessibility of Websites and Mobile Applications (based on regulation EN 301 549), which goes into effect in September 2018. These acts and regulations seek to make the Internet accessible, as intended, to the 1.3 billion people worldwide who are impacted by a disability or limitation that affects how they experience digital content and media.
Founded in Israel in 2016 by David Adi, Make-Sense provides companies and organizations with a streamlined, easy-to-use platform equipped with the tools to make digital content accessible and compliant. Adi, who serves as the CEO of Make-Sense, was inspired by his own hearing disability, which limits his ability to experience certain types of digital content.
Make-Sense’s solutions reduce the cost and complexity associated with digital accessibility by facilitating quick compliance with Section 508, ADA, AACT, and EN 301 549 regulations and avoiding unnecessary violations. Its tool, the A-WEB Digital Accessibility Platform, scans static and dynamic content continuously to provide comprehensive accessibility. Make-Sense supplements that by identifying violations and automatically fixing thesein real time, as well as maintaining and improving SEO rankings and educating, guiding, and supporting development teams.
Make-Sense is driven by a desire to make the internet more accessible to all who use it and want to use it.
In just two years, Make-Sense’s business and team have grown tremendously. In this early phase, Make-Sense was focused primarily on meeting demand and catering to a growing client list. However, this startup mentality meant that the team was not operating systematically. Instead, each team member, especially in sales, was managing processes in his or her own way. It was clear to the company’s management that this was not strategic, nor was it sustainable in the long run or scalable and adaptable to company growth.
It became clear to Make-Sense CEO David Adi that enterprise resource planning (ERP) was necessary to better streamline processes and understand the status of leads. He reached out to AllCloud with the objective of putting ERP into place, with a cloud-based solution at its core. AllCloud proposed dividing the project into two phases, with the first phase focusing on “lead to quote” and/or “lead to order” and the second phase (still in progress) focusing on client management through the cloud-based platform. The platform in question would be a customer relationship management (CRM) system, as discussed below.
With a distributed team and client roster, along with lax processes, Make-Sense found itself in a position in which leads were not always handled or handed off efficiently and thus at risk of being missed in the appropriate window of opportunity. Given growing demand for its services, Excel spreadsheets were no longer going to cut it for Make-Sense.
AllCloud determined that the newest Salesforce solution, the Salesforce Lightning Platform, would offer the best fit, given the composition of Make-Sense’s team and its processes, timeline, and budget. The Lightning Platform, which offers both out-of-the-box tools and customizations, was tailored to meet Make-Sense’s needs, particularly with regard to the lead-to-quote period. Furthermore (and very importantly), Salesforce offers an accessible system and platform. Among the functionalities that were set up in Salesforce for Make-Sense were notifications about the status of leads, notes about follow-ups, and other features to make sure that leads were being handled in a timely, strategic way and that handoffs were smooth.
Additional benefits of Salesforce include its ability to integrate seamlessly with Microsoft Outlook, which the Make-Sense team uses, and the fact that it can accommodate growth and be adapted accordingly, thus growing alongside Make-Sense. Of course, the cloud-based nature of Salesforce ensures that no matter where they are, Make-Sense team members can stay on top of leads and actions required.
ERP and CRM implementations often comprise huge financial commitments. CEO David Adi recognized that a cloud-based solution was necessary, but expressed concern about prohibitive costs, particularly because Make-Sense is a startup and its sales team is relatively small. As a young player, the company could not afford to invest heavily in CRM development and implementation. Adi was also concerned that as the company grew, it would have to go through this process again to adapt its systems, thus incurring additional prohibitive costs or, in a sense, paying twice.
Because the Salesforce Lightning Platform couples tremendous out-of-the-box functionality with customization that is relatively straightforward, it represented an attractive solution in terms of cost as well as time to implementation. Furthermore, it offers flexibility such that it could be set up for a small team; at the same time, it can be upgraded and expanded easily as Make-Sense grows.
Given that Salesforce is one of the most widely used CRMs and sales platforms, even as Make-Sense grows and requires additional functionality, it is likely to save costs in the long run due to the fact that many systems are compatible with Salesforce and will not necessitate unusual, specialized development.
With demand for its tools and services growing on a daily basis, time was of the essence in order to ensure that leads were handled in an adequate amount of time, to move leads to orders quickly, and to keep the entire company moving forward.
In just three months, AllCloud was able to customize and deploy the Salesforce Lightning Platform for Make-Sense. Given the straightforward nature of the platform, training and onboarding for all the users (seven in total, including the CEO) was very rapid, taking three weeks. Before long, the Make-Sense team was off to the races with its customized solution and streamlined processes, therefore enabling it to serve greater numbers of organizations, and serve them better.