A few years ago, the phone rang in the middle of summer.
It was Nextlane, formerly IMAWEB. An automotive software company out of Paris, about 800 people, building the stack that car dealers live in: Dealer Management, Lead Capture, Quote Configurators.
They needed a Salesforce integration PoC.
They needed it in six weeks.
In the peak of European summer, when half of any consultancy is on a beach.
The brief, and the blank spot
Nextlane’s platform sits at the heart of a dealer’s day. Inventory, leads, quotes, deals. A solid product with a clear audience.
The question they were trying to answer was different. Their customers were asking about Salesforce. Some had Sales Cloud. Some had Automotive Cloud, Salesforce’s purpose-built package for the industry. A few had both, with different parts of the business on different clouds.
Nextlane wanted to say yes to all of them. That meant showing dealers, in a live demo, how a lead or an opportunity could flow between Salesforce and the Nextlane platform without a human copy-pasting between two screens.
Here was the blank spot in the brief: the PoC spec did not commit to one cloud. Should the prototype target Automotive Cloud? Sales Cloud? Both?
We picked up the phone and said yes.
The diagnosis
We looked at the scope and ran the trade-off out loud.
A PoC built only for Automotive Cloud would give the tightest demo for the smaller, higher-value segment. Many big dealer groups run it. It also limits who the demo can impress.
A PoC built only for Sales Cloud covers the widest swath of prospects. Most sales teams on a Salesforce org are on Sales Cloud. It also leaves the Automotive-Cloud prospects wondering whether their specific setup is supported.
The room kept circling the same idea. What if the PoC did both.
A single demo, designed for Automotive Cloud users, engineered so every moving part worked cleanly against a plain Sales Cloud org as well. Same custom objects. Same REST API hooks. Same web-to-lead flow. Same dashboards. The only difference was whether the demo audience was looking at Automotive Cloud fields or Sales Cloud fields on the screen.
It was more work in a tight window. It was also the only version of the PoC that could be shown to any dealer in the room without a caveat.
We went with both.
The build
Six weeks, peak summer, dual-cloud scope. The plan had to be brutally concrete.
We locked the demo story before writing any Apex.
- A car buyer fills a form on a dealer’s website.
- The lead lands in Salesforce and is qualified.
- It becomes an opportunity.
- The opportunity is pushed to the Nextlane platform via REST API.
- From there, the dealer continues the deal in the system they already use every day.
That flow drove every technical decision.
On the Salesforce side we built the custom objects the story needed, kept them compatible with the Automotive Cloud data model, and hooked them up to the Nextlane platform through REST. We populated the org with demo data from scratch so the dashboards had something to show. We wrote dashboards and reports that a sales leader would actually want open on a Monday morning.
On the front end we stood up a small WordPress demo site. A realistic-looking dealer landing page, with a real form, that fired a web-to-lead straight into the Salesforce org. We used it to open every demo. Fill the form. Watch the lead appear. Convert to opportunity. Watch it pop up on the Nextlane side. Every stakeholder in the room could follow the thread end to end.
At the end of the engagement we ran training for the Nextlane team on the Salesforce intricacies, so the demo could walk without us holding its hand.
What actually shipped
A working, end-to-end PoC that Nextlane could take into customer conversations.
- A set of custom Salesforce objects built for the dealer flow.
- A custom integration wired through REST API to the Nextlane platform.
- Fresh demo data covering dealers, leads, opportunities and outcomes.
- Dashboards and reports to give the demo a believable back office.
- The WordPress dealer site that made the web-to-lead flow visible to non-technical stakeholders.
- A trained Nextlane team ready to run it.
The work became a sales and enablement asset. Nextlane could walk a prospect through a concrete picture of what a Salesforce and Nextlane setup looked like, on whichever flavor of Salesforce the prospect happened to have.
The part we tell other clients
A PoC is only as good as the demo it enables.
If a prospect has to squint through caveats about which cloud your prototype really supports, you lose the room in the first two minutes. If the demo covers both paths with the same moving parts, you get to spend the meeting talking about the outcome.
Two things held this project together. First, locking the demo narrative before touching any code. Second, saying yes to the dual-cloud version of the scope with clear eyes on the extra build.
Dealer software is a crowded space. The companies that win more of it are the ones whose sales motion can answer yes to the first question every prospect asks. Nextlane wanted that answer. We helped them ship it.
Thanks for reading. If you want help turning a tight-deadline integration story into a demo that sells, the form below is a good place to start.
– Jeff.