To most people, “the built environment” is a term used to describe the places we live and work, from houses and office buildings to restaurants and shops. To Derek Lim Soo and his team, however, the built environment is also where Peak Power has an opportunity to transform the energy sector and pave the way to a more sustainable future.
Founded in 2015 and based in Toronto, Peak Power is on a mission to end our reliance on centralized power plants that can contribute to climate change when powered by dirty fossil fuels. Its platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced software to support decarbonization, allowing commercial buildings and industrial facilities to become hubs in a clean energy system.
According to Lim Soo, the built environment intersects with the other two industries – energy and transportation – that contribute up to 70% of all global emissions of carbon dioxide.
“We’re basically trying to convert those people into part of the solution, as opposed to being the ones that are contributing to the problem,” Lim Soo explained in an interview with Salesforce Canada.
Translating The Conversation Across Multiple Sectors
Part of what inspired Lim Soo to co-found Peak Power was the fact that the built environment was already undergoing incredible change, from the rise of smart buildings to electric vehicles. As promising as those opportunities are, he noted they require a lot more collaboration between an owner of a commercial or industrial building, financiers and utility companies.
“The issue is that all three stakeholders speak very different languages,” he explained. “You’ve got a building that speaks in terms of energy efficiency and dollars. You've got a financier that understands internal rates of return and payback periods. And you've got utilities that are talking about aggregation and reliability.”
Peak Power’s platform is designed to act as a translator between those entities, improving the way they communicate their energy needs and the value they can create together.
“All these large gas plants solve the (energy) problem for a period of time, but they're really dirty [and] now we've got a huge climate problem,” he said.
Peak Power’s Vision Of Customer Experience Excellence
For Peak Power, an outstanding customer experience is one where that communication across the ecosystem of stakeholders is constant and reliable, Lim Soo said.
It’s also critical to proactively check in with stakeholders about their evolving needs as the clean energy revolution unfolds.
“I want a customer to know that they're being supported from the time we’re trying to land a lead, all the way to the time where they’re trying to renew a contract and to when we're actually installing things,” he said. “I want our customers to feel like they're being listened to.”
This starts with developing a strong customer relationship from the very beginning, which led Peak Power to adopt Salesforce’s Sales Cloud as its CRM of choice.
Leading A Clean Energy Revolution With Help From Sales Cloud
Lim Soo said Sales Cloud has helped his sales team identify what customer opportunities are emerging and how fast they’re turning into closed deals. Lim Soo also credits Sales Cloud centralizing Peak Power’s data for reporting to its board, which in turn leads to greater trust with its investors.
“I think Salesforce got our salespeople to be a lot more regimented in terms of tracking pipeline,” he said. “You can try to use a CRM platform that does just the bare-bones, or attempt to manage through spreadsheets, but that’s not really scalable for a business like ours. A single source of truth makes a lot more sense for us.”
When Peak Power is bidding on a request for proposal, for example, Salesforce brings greater visibility into every stage, from negotiating a deal to the moment it’s awarded and when the company begins to execute.
“Having that granularity allows me to understand much more than just win and lose,” he said. “I can understand where we're stuck. And if we're stuck on the negotiation stage, is it a factor of the customer? Is it due to our external legal counsel? We can figure out what the problem is and unblock it.”
Cloud-Based CRM As A Long-Term Growth Engine
Salesforce doesn’t simply support Peak Power in running its business in real time, but to strategize its long-term path to growth. The company has an internal risk committee, for instance, that needs to go back to deals the company lost and analyze what might have been done differently. Lim Soo said Sales Cloud organizes all the data that team requires in a concise fashion on a deal-by-deal and region-by-region basis.
“It just makes life a lot easier for managing the day to day and also planning for the future,” he said.
Peak Power also uses Salesforce to report on the size of battery installations for projects. That’s important because battery size links to the annual recurring revenue the company will generate from a project, the resources it will need to read battery information, how many batteries it will have to procure and more. This all affects how installation experiences are planned and improved.
Lim Soo said he believes Peak Power is only beginning to realize the potential of Salesforce to further its efforts to decentralize and decarbonize the energy sector. He sees Canadian companies of any size as being capable of advancing sustainability, though. All it takes is using the resources available to educate yourself, hire those with the right skills, and commit to making lasting change.
“It's a cone of opportunity that's going to be really stable for many years, probably for the rest of our lives -- because it's the most important problem to solve in the world,” he said. “But if we can get a lot of these people in the built environment working collaboratively with some of the energy companies, we can make a much bigger difference, much faster.”
