How a Boutique Salesforce Partner Grew From an Apartment Startup to a Global Force
—and Why Its Best Work Is Still Ahead
When V2 Strategic Advisors opened its doors in 2005, “software-as-a-service” sounded more like a venture-capital pitch deck than the bedrock of enterprise IT. Founder John Tanner, a physics major-turned-sales rep, wagered that two concepts—velocity (speed with direction) and voltage (stored potential energy)—could do for consulting what Salesforce was about to do for software: make progress faster, more iterative, and ultimately more valuable. That gamble, launched from an apartment in New Hampshire with a single credit card, has proved prescient.
Two decades later, V2 has only sharpened its focus around ad sales optimization, management consulting, and helping clients navigate a new breed of technologies: AI, data clean rooms, CDPs, and more. We guide organizations to understand not only where and how to layer in these tools but how to maximize their impact to deliver the most revenue and overall efficiency.
It is tempting to mark an anniversary by tallying medals: more than 500 multi-cloud projects, a client roster that spans global broadcasters, Fortune-100 retailers, and enterprise disruptors, and accolades as one of the most experienced Salesforce Media Cloud partners in the ecosystem. But numbers alone do not explain why a boutique consultancy routinely goes toe-to-toe with global systems integrators ten times its size.
The deeper story is strategic, rooted in how V2 blends management-consulting rigor with hands-on platform expertise, and why that hybrid DNA is suddenly in higher demand than ever. Part of that is due to the rate of technology innovation we’ve seen in recent years. Part of that is due to the complexity of pairing new tech with old, and accounting for the change management that must follow—adjustments that are not always obvious or easy to make. Having an outside resource to guide this process can be critical. Even large organizations that are well-funded and full of brilliant teams need support from tactical partners like ours who can help shepherd new tech and process adoption, along with many other benefits.
From First-Mover to Framework Builder
The early V2 playbook was straightforward: replace spreadsheets with Sales Cloud or Service Cloud, train account executives, move on. It did not stay simple for long. Media clients soon asked V2 to stitch CRM data to ad servers and order-management systems so planners could see inventory in real time. That request forced the firm to cultivate integration talent, data-modeling chops, and an instinct for what actually moves the revenue needle.
By 2012, V2 was connecting half-a-dozen systems per engagement, expanding beyond pure-play CRM work, and developing critical firsthand experience across a wider spread of products, solutions, and advertising strategies. By 2021, because of our deep heritage in ad sales and middle office operations, we were invited to become an official launch partner for Salesforce’s Media Cloud product, a first-of-its-kind industry-focused solution for the Media & Entertainment industry. We impacted not only the final product but also helped create the examination materials used for qualifying other partners and technical resources.
These projects had a curious spill-over effect: they trained V2 consultants to think less about features and more about operating models. An ad-sales workflow is ultimately a chain of promises—from a salesperson’s pitch to an accountant’s invoice. Break any link and revenue leaks out. V2’s answer was a repeatable framework, later branded D3P—Data, People, Processes, Platforms—that begins nearly every engagement with a deep diagnosis of data integrity, team dynamics, and workflow friction before getting hands-on with the tech and thinking about licenses.
This formula still powers much of our firm’s success. Our clients don’t think about solutions through the lens of “which license will solve my problem,” as business is more complex than that. One change here has downstream impacts there, so it requires consultation and deep hands-on technical expertise.
Boutique by Design, Enterprise by Necessity
As Salesforce ballooned into a multi-cloud universe, many consultancies chased breadth: more partnerships, more logos, more bodies. V2 took the opposite tack: stay boutique, stay specialized, and outrun bigger firms on technical know-how, developing strong client relationships, and strategy and decision speed.
Internally, we sometimes refer to this as “a special-forces approach,” deploying smaller, more senior teams who can whiteboard strategy in the morning and deploy code that afternoon. That model resonates with clients who have endured the hand-off whiplash of large integrators—strategy deck from Team A, requirements gathering by Team B, offshore configuration by Team C.
At V2, the same architects who draw the blueprint own the build and shepherd change management all the way through. There is no bait and switch; our teams are all A-players who bring years of industry experience to the table—and that has profound impacts on the results we are able to cultivate and deliver. The result is accountability, velocity, and ultimately trust. Small project teams delivering high-impact results.
The Inflection: Advertising Everywhere
If the first decade of V2 was about mastering media, the second was about exporting that mastery. In the last 4-5 years, retailers, travel brands, and even financial institutions have discovered they are sitting on monetizable first-party data—and they all want ad-operations plumbing that works and is scalable.
V2’s deep background in CRM-based ad sales optimization has given us a particular pedigree that has become highly valuable to clients and our partners alike. The common denominator for us has always been that intersection where CRM meets ad revenue, and the common bottleneck is operational or technological complexity. This is the intersection where we help fix problems and drive value for our clients.
V2’s ability to merge CRM, OMS, Ad Server, ERP, Integrations, and Analytics into a single revenue engine has become our sharpest competitive edge. It is also why the firm’s most recent wins involve Data Cloud architectures and AI experiments that aim to embed Agentforce assistants into seller workflows. The lesson: once you solve the data quality and plumbing, AI is no longer a science project—it is a repeatable and accessible feature.
Why AI Needs D3P
Talk of AI is everywhere, yet most organizations are still quarreling with the basics: siloed metrics, partial customer views, manual hand-offs that turn quarter-close into an endurance sport. V2’s consultants argue that AI without operational hygiene is like a self-driving car on pothole roads: the tech may be brilliant, but the ride will be bumpy. That is why the firm’s next chapter doubles down on data architecture and process discipline as prerequisites for AI value capture.
Picture a planner who simply asks, “Which premium video slots can we package for CPG advertisers next quarter?” and receives an answer grounded in live CRM opportunity data, ad-server availability, and finance’s margin constraints. That scenario—trivial to describe, devilishly hard to engineer—is exactly the type of outcome V2 is building towards.
It explains the firm’s investments in partnerships with MuleSoft integration patterns, Snowflake data modeling, Einstein GPT prompts for ad-sales scenarios, and Tableau Pulse dashboards that surface KPIs at the point of decision making.
Culture as an Operating System
Tools and frameworks matter, but they rest on culture. V2’s internal mantra—”people are our product”—is not marketing fluff; it is a talent filter. The firm hires consultants with at least a decade of prior industry experience and often a second act: creative writers, former COOs, data scientists.
The diversity of backgrounds fuels what clients describe as “lateral insight,” the ability to see how a revenue challenge in streaming might illuminate a sponsorship model in grocery. Our teams carry a quantitative rigor, respect for process artistry, and a passion for global business dynamics. Those virtues sound lofty, but they translate into practical advantages: questions that cut to the root cause, deliverables that survive executive turnover, and solutions that scale.
The Road to 2030
So where does velocity and voltage take V2 next? Three vectors stand out:
- Enterprise-grade data foundations. Clean, connected data is the ticket to AI. V2 will continue refining ingestion pipelines, data models, and governance rules that let machine learning sit on rock-solid ground.
- AI in the flow of work. Agent-driven forecasting, yield optimization, and conversational analytics are no longer demos—they are Q3 roadmap items. V2’s role is to translate capability into adoption.
- Cross-industry ad-sales excellence. Whether a client is a streaming giant or a seed-stage loyalty app, the mechanics of ad revenue rhyme. V2 intends to keep exporting best practices across verticals, proving that boutique size can deliver enterprise impact.
Building Trust Starts With A Conversation.
A Note of Thanks—and an Invitation
Twenty years on, V2 remains animated by the same two physics ideas that sparked its founding: move fast but choose your vector; harness potential energy, but convert it into measurable work.
To the clients who placed their trust in our boutique consulting firm, against other shops, the partners who pushed us to broaden our horizons, and the teammates past and present who keep velocity and voltage alive—thank you.
If your organization is ready to evolve its ad-sales engine—launch or scale a retail-media network, rationalize a patchwork tech stack, or embed AI where it counts—we would love to talk. Drop us a line here or explore our thinking at our blog. The next twenty years promise more complexity, more opportunity, and, if we have anything to say about it, a lot more voltage!
