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With climate change on the rise, consumers and companies are wondering what they can do about it.  

For smaller companies that want to make a change and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and gain carbon credits for their efforts, it can be difficult due to resources, cost, and competition with larger organizations that are more equipped in these areas.  

Enter Will Solutions. 

Founded in 1997 in Montreal, Quebec, this privately owned Canadian company is active in the voluntary carbon markets, helping its clients—small and midsize businesses, municipalities, and nonprofit organizations—carry out their carbon footprint reduction goals and take measurable, voluntary and innovative (beyond standard practices) decarbonization actions through the Sustainable Community project. With Will Solutions’ assistance, the clients, or members, then get carbon credits back at the end of the process. To date, $3.8M Canadian dollars have been paid to these smaller companies that reduce their carbon emissions. 

François Beaubien, chief technology officer at Will Solutions, explains how the system works: “Let’s say you have a 10-story building, and you want to reduce your carbon emissions, so you develop a project to change your oil furnace to a geothermic heat pump. Over the next years, you gain thousands of carbon credits that we sell to the market to finance the implementation and operation of the project. At the end of the process, a percentage of that money goes back to you.” 

Today, Will Solutions has approximately 150 members and its reduction volume is about a million tons, or a million credits per year.  

For these projects, Will Solutions’ team members were completing critical business processes such as calculating carbon emissions in Microsoft Excel (often punctuated with phone calls and emails). But they needed to find a solution that would scale with the company’s aggressive goal to move to global expansion and to meet an immense growth target based on a 2022 investment: 100-fold growth of clients in the near future. 

Slalom answered the call, performed an on-site workshop, and delivered an innovative solution that married Salesforce Net Zero Cloud with Experience Cloud and Sales Cloud. This solution allows Will Solutions to calculate carbon baselines and reductions and aggregate that data into a portfolio of projects for disclosure reporting for carbon credit creation. 

The Net Zero Cloud solution automates critical processes such as emission factors (the amount of emissions produced per unit of energy/fuel used), leaving little need for manual calculations.  

Members can view self-service updates on their carbon reductions in a Salesforce Experience Cloud portal that provides real-time data dashboards.  

Will Solutions’ sales team is also reaping the rewards of the Salesforce solution, using Salesforce Sales Cloud to sell the inventory of credits to the market. 

The partnership was next-level, with trust at the forefront and a focus on knowledge transfer. Slalom’s deep expertise in sustainability and Salesforce augmented Will Solutions’ development team and helped with the advancement of a cross-cloud solution. “Slalom is a Salesforce expert, especially with Net Zero Cloud; there are only a few companies that can implement that,” Beaubien says. “We can sense the people working at Slalom are dedicated—they understand our needs and anticipate any problems we may encounter.” 

Change management was also a critical part of the solution. The team started with a communication plan, impact assessment, and persona definition to understand the needs and readiness of each team. All this work led to creating a training plan with multiple learning paths for Will Solutions’ teams. 

With aggressive growth and global expansion goals, scalability was necessary for Will Solutions to sustain its upcoming client load. “We need to grow from five people to a thousand within 10 years,“ Beaubien says. “To do that, a cloud solution like Salesforce is the only way to go.“  

Beaubien adds that Slalom’s understanding of the hypergrowth goal and the help building a solution has allowed maximum flexibility for the company and enabled the scale Will Solutions needs to achieve its goal. “For me, one of the reasons I chose a cloud platform from Salesforce was the go-to-market, or rapid implementation. Slalom was able to deliver that with us.” 

In addition to increasing its employees from five to 1,000, Will Solutions is looking to go from 100 members to more than 10,000—and from one million to 150 million tons of carbon credits sold. 

Today, Will Solutions’ clients can log in to an experience (member) portal (BETA version) and see all their projects and messages in a single place, a solution that is exponentially more efficient than sending and receiving numerous emails or phone calls. While the portal is still in development, the ability for clients to see their emissions and other data in one consolidated dashboard is critical to Will Solutions’ success as it evolves. “With the new portal, we now have the ability to have a constant conversation with our members,” Beaubien says.  

With the standardized process and Net Zero Cloud’s proven calculation and methodology, clients can count on consistent quantification. The Net Zero Cloud solution enables a single source of truth. 

Beyond these advantages, and thanks to its automated, scalable, and transparent nature, the portal is also a platform for demonstrating application of the Core Carbon Principles of the ICVCM (Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market) and therefore complying with the industry’s most demanding quality and traceability standards.

And the time savings? They’re undeniable on both sides—for the members and Will Solutions. 

Thanks to the forward thinking of Will Solutions, there’s now a new market for smaller and midsize companies that couldn’t otherwise do carbon credit reductions on their own.  

“Our plan is to have a consolidated volume of 50 million tons by 2030—that’s an important date in the world of carbon emissions and this is an aggressive goal. We’ll need Slalom to do other projects with us; we’ll never be able to hire enough employees to meet our goals if we don’t automate and use generative AI and other modern tools to help us get there.” 

As the first Net Zero Cloud client for Slalom in Canada, Will Solutions is profoundly changing the future of carbon reductions with a next-generation model that will soon be making an impact across the globe.