Sisvel

One of the core things Sisvel does sounds simple: find companies using patented technology without a licence, reach out, and get to a fair deal. In practice, it runs across teams working in six different countries across the globe, involves months of technical and commercial conversations across dozens of active negotiations, and depends on reliable data at every step.

The data wasn't reliable. It had accumulated across legacy software, Excel files, Outlook inboxes, and people's heads as the business grew faster than its systems. Tasks got duplicated. Deals slowed. Teams were working from different versions of the truth.

Before any tools were touched, the focus was on people. We ran cross-border interviews to understand how the licensing process actually worked. Not how it was supposed to work, but how it worked in practice, day to day, across departments and time zones. What came out of those conversations was a clear, agreed picture of how the operation should run. That's what the build was designed around.

Delivering that vision would take more than one phase. The first tackled the foundation: one system for all global teams, with automation built into the workflow wherever things slowed down the most. Salesforce was the clear choice. It could hold the weight of a global licensing operation, connect cleanly with the existing stack, and grow alongside the business rather than against it.

The first release covers the full licensing journey, from first contact to signed deal.

Target identification. Company, contact, and market data now lives in Salesforce rather than scattered across files and inboxes. Everything gets logged as the work happens, and emails attach to the right records without anyone having to think about it. When someone picks up a deal mid-conversation, the context is already there.

Notification. Formal notice letters used to be written one by one. Now they're produced in a fraction of the time, from data that's already there. Outreach goes out faster and it's consistent, which matters, because every week of delay is a week a rights holder isn't being paid.

Negotiation. Teams running deals across multiple countries used to rely on manual follow-ups and their own memory to keep things moving. Now automated reminders flag what needs attention and approval workflows keep sign-off from becoming a bottleneck. Anyone can see exactly where a deal stands at any moment. Nothing falls through the cracks just because one person was busy or out of office.

A system nobody uses solves nothing. Before launch, we built a training programme that worked across time zones: group sessions, open Q&As, and short videos people could actually find when they needed a reminder. On go-live day, we were in Barcelona working alongside the teams until everything was live, stable, and theirs.

Sisvel now runs its global licensing operation from one connected system instead of fragmented tools, inboxes and local workarounds. The next phase is already underway, building the second part of the picture of how the operation should run.

The hard part is still coming up with the invention. Everything after that just got a lot simpler.