Ahead of the Agentforce World Tour London, Enterprise Times caught up with Rick Berger, CEO of Rootstock, to discuss the leading ERP vendor for product companies. Rootstock aims to empower manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors to run their operations.
Natively built on the Salesforce platform, it has been steadily moving into the Enterprise sector. It sits alongside Salesforce CRM and, interestingly, Workday HCM and Finance to provide a modern manufacturing ERP solution.
The firm has nearly 200 customers, most of whom are in North America. However, its presence at the London event is not a one-off, as it has had UK and Irish customers for some time. Berger also confirmed he wants to expand its footprint in continental Europe this year. Its customer base in Japan continues to grow, and new customers are supported by its partners, Nagarro and Salesforce.
Customer retention is over 100%, and year-over-year growth has been roughly 25%. The company hopes to help accelerate that at the Agentforce World Tour Event on June 11th.
I asked Berger about Rootstock’s vision. He replied, “I would like Rootstock to be the ERP of choice for modern manufacturers, where we deliver flexibility, visibility, and actionable insights across their business.
“We want our customers to love us and have an amazing experience where we continue to be at the forefront of technology and improvements that they need to run their business. “
To move forward on that vision in 2025, Berger has three priorities: increasing sales velocity, continuing to improve customer satisfaction to an industry leader from above average, and accelerating the engineering team’s innovation.
Addressing the market
While Rootstock has an opportunity to address organisations of all sizes, Berger has a clear approach. Rootstock itself will focus on mid-size customers. In the future, customers with revenue above $1 billion will be left to Rootstock Scion, a new venture led by ex-CEO David Stephens, focused on the Enterprise market. Rootstock already has four clients of this size.
Smaller customers will be supported by its reseller operation, which it is currently building out. One of these is Alto Consultants. It has found a very prescriptive way to deploy Rootstock in a box.
Berger commented, “That’s shaping up to go really well. Since it’s been in place, we’ve got maybe 30 active opportunities in the pipeline. They’ve closed three deals in the last couple of months, which is impressive. I think we will close another deal in the next couple of weeks through that reseller model.”
Rootstock is looking to replicate its success in North America across Japan and Europe. It will be driven by resellers where it doesn’t have a direct sales team. The Alto deployment model is built on the Rootstock QuickStart methodology, which helps it deploy the solution rapidly. Alto has evolved its suitability for even smaller customers.
Berger aims to attract Salesforce partners with customers wanting to pivot to a modern ERP solution. He also believes that technology firms working with manufacturers outside the Salesforce ecosystem will find the combination of Salesforce and Rootstock compelling.
The Emergence of the Workday Partnership and Future Growth
Recently, Rootstock revealed that it is working with Structural Technologies alongside a Workday HR and Finance project. Aneel Bhusri previously said he might invest in a manufacturing ERP solution, making this an interesting partnership.
Berger revealed that several mid-market customers are working with both Rootstock and Workday. He remarked, “We see them as a really strong partner that can help us fill a gap when our financial capabilities aren’t as strong at that enterprise level.”
I asked Berger whether an acquisition was likely. He replied,”Right now, our focus isn’t on that. Our focus is on continuing to grow the business and adding value to our customers.”
Talking about investors, how are Gryphon and other investors helping to accelerate growth? Berger commented, ” Gryphon has been a fantastic partner. They play an active role in supporting the leadership team at Rootstock. They invest dollars in Rootstock. They’ve helped us with the investments that we’ve made in our product.”
Gryphon has also assisted with international expansion and has helped with exercises to identify how the firm can accelerate its sales motion. They meet regularly and show that as an investor, it is doing more than just sitting in board meetings.
Accelerated Product Development
Berger also wants to see more innovation from the engineering teams. Engineering has already improved financials and the grid experience. With four releases a year, in Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter, he expects even more innovation.
The company is releasing more product updates. Recently, it announced Tariff Management Central, a solution that assists manufacturers with the operational and financial challenges of tariffs. The solution is still in beta but has been well-received. It is an indication of how Rootstock, under Berger, is pushing cutting-edge solutions out to clients.
I asked Berger which industries are suffering the most from tariffs. He mentioned medical device manufacturers, equipment manufacturers, and some industrial manufacturers. However, anyone with complex supply chains is likely to be suffering.
Customer Experience
Berger appears to be focusing on customer experience the most. Customer satisfaction is already strong, and Berger claims retention is market-leading.
Berger inherited a strong culture when he took over at Rootstock, and he wants to build on that. He commented, “Rootstock is a fantastic place. Our attrition is well below the industry average. Rootstock is a great place to work. That’s well above the industry average. I’d love to make sure that Rootstock is a fantastic place for people to continue their careers, too.”
Gryphon Investors bought Rootstock about two and a half years ago with a strategic horizon of 5-6 years. Berger talked about a 3-year strategic horizon. His initiatives are all working towards those three years. He noted, “I want to have world-class revenue retention, ARR to be considerably larger than it is today, and I want our global presence to be really strong.”
Berger also wants Rootstock to be what people think of when they think of ERP on the Salesforce platform. He believes that he is delivering against that strategy on all four fronts.
Rick Berger as CEO
Berger has made several positive changes at Rootstock. He highlighted three ongoing priorities:
- More pipeline. Since joining, he has built a world-class sales team that is increasing win rates and improving sales velocity. He wants the pipeline to continue to grow.
- Product Focus. He wants to continue developing even more customer requirements and add AI-enabled technology to the platform.
- Improve customer success metrics. Berger stated, “Our customer success metrics are really, really, really good, but I want to make sure that every day, as a SaaS solution, we have to earn that right for our customers to get value and build that relationship with us. That’s something that I encourage the team to do every single day, everything we do, making sure that our customers know how much we appreciate and care for them.”
Berger is now over a year into the role, and I asked him what his biggest learning is to date. He picked out manufacturing. His previous role was selling to enterprise retail customers. With Rootstock, many mid-sized manufacturers are family firms that are just looking for a partner to work with.
Berger added, “It’s not just selling software. You’re selling a relationship. You’re selling a partnership. They want to know that they can look somebody in the eye, shake their hand and know that this is going to be the partner that’s going to continue with them on the journey. They don’t make ERP decisions very often, maybe once or twice in a lifetime, because it’s a very sticky application.”
The Book Question
What was the latest book you read?
“I am reading My Next Breath by Jeremy Renner (Amazon Aus, UK, US). He’s an actor, and it’s a personal account of his accident.
“On New Year’s Day, 2023, he was at his ski house with his family, and a snow plough ran over him as he was trying to save his nephew. He jumped in to try to move this 14,000-pound Snowcat that he had to clear his driveway. He saved his nephew, but he broke 38 bones. They thought he was going to die. It chronicles the moment of the accident and what happened in his recovery.
“The book is really about the love and support of family and how you embrace somebody on a journey of recovery. He talks a lot about the impact that this experience had on everyone else, and not just him. Everyone was impacted by that day, not just him, obviously breaking all of his bones and nearly dying. It was about how it impacted his loved ones.
“On a personal note, when I was very young, I was in a very severe automobile accident, and I was in a coma on life support. The book resonates with me because when you’re the victim of that, it’s not really about you. It’s about everyone else.
“It’s like living in this pain, but you’re oblivious to it. You have no idea, but everyone around you has this bonding moment about trying to support you through a near-death experience. My family, my siblings and my parents still talk about this amazing bonding experience, although I feel like I had no part in it.
“I was in the silence. I don’t even remember any of it. It was completely oblivious to me, but there’s this amazing bond that they have, and I think this is why the book resonates with me so much. “
