Helping SMBs return to growth using Power Apps

Posted on December 22, 2020 by Microsoft Corporation here

This year has led small and medium-sized companies (SMBs) to look for ways to adapt and stay resilient. Microsoft partners have acted on this opportunity, creating customizable Power Apps templates for social distancing, curbside pickup, and more. They’ve also built low-code Power Apps solutions to help customers transform and streamline business processes, get more from their data, and deliver engaging customer experiences.

We asked Zensa, a Microsoft gold competency partner, to share how they used Power Apps to create Prospur, an SMB business management and customer enablement solution that integrates with Microsoft 365 and Azure.

How did your journey to build Prospur begin?

Prerna Goja, President and CEO: It’s been an exciting journey. In fall of 2019, we identified a need in the SMB space for a business solution that brings together business systems, marketing outreach and customer acquisition into one platform to enable sales, growth, and customer engagement. Once COVID-19 hit, we accelerated development of Prospur. We wanted to help rebuild communities by rebuilding and recovering small businesses, helping them to stay open, and offering them a way to digitally transform, increase sales, and automate processes.

Why did you choose to build your solution on Power Apps?

Abhijeet Karagudri, Chief Revenue Officer: With a low-code, no-code strategy, we could offer a scalable, out-of-the-box solution that we could provide to SMBs. Power Apps was our best opportunity to achieve digital efficiency and bring tech intensity to SMB’s. We could build a solution that gives customers the flexibility to manage and grow their business from wherever they are, on any device.

Prerna: Power Apps made it easy to configure workflows quickly across industry verticals and for a wider customer base. We’ve been working closely with some of our customers to get feedback and to ensure our approach with Power Apps is efficient and creates success. The answer has been an absolute, “Yes.”

What was your experience working with Power Apps?

Abhijeet Karagudri: Our experience working with Power Apps and Microsoft has been fantastic. The beauty of Power Apps is, you can quickly put together a solution that looks highly professional and is usable. For the final product, we wanted to have a better user experience and numerous integrations. We also needed to balance the time to go-to-market against time to enable an amazing experience of the product. We worked on creating an extensive Power Apps experience that enhances the design. We developed a UI that works across multiple views, forms, and pages very quickly, providing a great experience for an SMB customer.

In addition to accelerating your timeline, you also created a “pay what you can” offer as a result of the pandemic. Can you tell us more about that?

Prerna: We created this offer to specifically support local businesses and SMBs during these challenging times. On our website, we list our regular pricing along with a “name your price” option. We’ll continue to launch similar offers every six months as an affordable value prop for our small business customers to help them recover, grow, and reimagine their businesses.

What advice would you give to partners for developing an idea for a Power Apps solution?

Prerna: The most important thing is to be a good listener. Listen to the market and to customers instead of just focusing on what you are going to sell. You can only come up with the solution if you know what the customer challenges are. You have to be agile and nimble in this fast-paced environment and Power Apps can help.

Before you even do market research, you should look at your current business. What are your customers dealing with? What are the different problems they face either with the product, a situation, a scenario, or a transaction?

You have to listen, innovate, reimagine, and deliver what the customer needs. We highly encourage other partners to build their solutions on Power Apps.

Ready to learn more about how to get started with Power Apps?

• Watch: Getting started with Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365 for SMBs
• Get readiness, sales, and marketing content for your Power Apps SMB practice: US SMB Business Applications page
• Learn more about Prospur: Website and App Source