At Dreamforce 2024, I sat down with Yanick Abraham, CEO of Klient to discuss the PSA vendor he had led since 2020 when Drakya acquired the company. He rebranded the combined organisation to Klient in 2022. I asked him for the elevator pitch for Klient today.
Yanick replied, “Klient PSA is a complete project management suite, 100% Salesforce native, with a kick-ass advisory team. We help organisations structure their tasks, optimize resource utilization, accelerate cash flow and get your employees on board a lot faster.”
While Klient is still branded as a PSA solution, the messaging seems to have changed to become more project management-focused. With Gartner not recognising the PSA sector, this is not surprising; Mission Control, another PSA on the Salesforce platform, has taken a similar approach.
Abraham views Klient as a project management tool with PSA capacity. He believes that for organisations that use Salesforce, project management should be run within the Salesforce platform as well because of the synergies. Firms should not use solutions such as Monday.com and Asana because they are not on the same business operating system.
What has happened to Klient
For the first three years after the acquisition, Yanick oversaw strong growth, significantly increasing customer numbers. In the last year, growth has slowed, and the firm is focussing on its existing customers. One aspect of that has been creating more content for customers, Yanick said.
The reasoning behind this is that Klient has a ton of features, not all of which are being used by customers. The aim is to increase that usage. To achieve that, the Klient team has been creating tips, insights into features and thought leadership content to expose customers to the features and their benefits.
Yanick added, “It’s about increasing the usage of all our features across our six modules and really focusing on empowering our users to deliver successful projects every time.”
Klient moves forward as a business.
In 2024, it has formalised its partner program. Yanick revealed that Klient has added eight client implementation partners in the US and Canada. It has not yet added a European partner, but Klient is working on adding one, according to Yanick.
Yanick also revealed that Klient had taken back control of the entire marketing stack and turned to a more content-driven approach. A lot of time has also been spent developing the product. Yanick added, “There are a lot of features that have been developed around the project workspace. We’re now focussing on the resource planner.“
I asked Yanick what he hopes to achieve by the end of 2025.
He replied, “We have a published roadmap in terms of the resource planner, but it’s really the ease of use and the simplicity of the usage of that planner. I want the software to be slick and to be very efficient. We’re going against Monday. We want your project to be in Salesforce with Klient PSA, so the software needs to be fast and friendly.”
Klient is fully Lightning experience enabled, which means it can take advantage of the latest Salesforce user interface to achieve its aim.
Klient differentiation
While Klient began its life as a PSA solution, the modern Klient company, under Yanick’s leadership, is more than just a PSA product. Yanick was the founder and CEO of Drakya, a Salesforce consultancy, and the firm still retains what Yanick describes as a “kickass advisory” team.
He believes that Klient is now much more than a PSA. It has refocused on billable and internal projects, such as restructuring or onboarding. The new Klient offers a solution that delivers control coupled with an advisory service that can provide guidance for projects.
He summarised this by saying, “So we’re more business and technical experts. We have a tool, but we have advisors that are going to guide you to use it properly.“
Dreamforce and Agentforce
Dreamforce 2024 was very much about Agentforce, Salesforce’s new Agentic AI system. While Klient was not one of the launch partners, Yanick already has thoughts about how to implement agents within Klient.
He sees the dev team building what he calls project manager agents. He envisions customer watchdog agents and time agents. Time agents are the ones that most excite him.
He believes that an Agent will be able to populate a timesheet without human assistance, obtaining information from various sources to populate it. Yanick said, “You never have to enter a timesheet ever, ever again.”
The assumption is that this could draw data, where available, from phone logs, email, calendar, Salesforce, Klient and even Slack to provide an accurate account of where each contractor spent their time. Yanick has several ideas about Agentforce agents.
How will Gen AI solutions impact jobs?
“It’s going to make some of the jobs a lot easier. This being said ChatGPT is not magical. You still have a lot of work to do. It traps things very well, but it doesn’t give the direction to the idea. So you will always need people around it. If the job can be made easier, like filling my time sheet automatically for me, I have no problem with AI, as long as the agents are working for me.”
The Book Questions
What was the latest book you have read?
“I’m reading both books of (Marc) Benioff on audible. I’m listening to “Behind the Cloud” (Amazon Aus, Can, UK, US). Since I started, I’ve listened to 70-something books on Audible. Usually, I listen to them at 100% speed or on 125. This one, I put it at 85% as there’s a lot of good content in it. There are a lot of plays that I want to address, and that book inspired me “thank god it’s not Monday”.
What was your takeout for business from that book?
“You have to try things, push the limits, and think outside the box. It’s customer-first. So for us, it’s all about coming back to those roots of making sure that our customers are happy, and the rest will follow.”
