Speaker 1 (00:00):

I am Lindsay Phillips and I am the co-founder of Sky Studios. So today we’re going to talk about unlocking the retention formula by really focusing on your stakeholders and understanding what they need in order to keep you as a partner in their business. I want to start out with a story. Has anyone here heard of Clairol’s Touch of Yogurt shampoo? You haven’t because it was not successful. So Clairol released this product in 1979 and immediately ran into two problems. The first problem was no one was buying it. They didn’t really understand why they’d want to put yogurt on their hair. Were widely disinterested in this product, but that wasn’t the worst thing that happened. The worst thing was that the people who did buy this product went home and drank it because they thought it was a beverage and people were getting horribly ill. Clairol was getting sued.

(00:53):

They had to pull the product. It was not successful. I think the story is interesting for two reasons. First, it shows how people interact with products when left to their own devices. Either they ignore it or they use it the way they think they should use it, which is often how, not how we want them to use it. And so if you don’t have that in mind as you’re launching your product and as you’re helping people adopt your solutions, you’re going to run into a similar situation as Clairol did. The second reason I like this story, and are there any engineers in the room? Okay, I’m sorry. This is the part you’re not going to like. The quality of this product had nothing to do with this outcome. I never mentioned if it worked. I never mentioned if yogurt was specifically designed to help fight oily hair.

(01:42):

It didn’t matter because the effectiveness of a product, it depends on how people are using it. It could be the best product in the world, and if people are not using it or not using it correctly, it doesn’t matter, it’s not going to be successful. So for the next hour, I have about 45 minutes worth of content prepped. So we can have q and A at the end. Please save questions for the end. I do want to try to get through all the slides if we can, but we’re really going to think through how do we understand what our stakeholders need, what our customers need in order to retain our services and want to continue working with us before we move on from Clairol, I was fascinated by this story. I was like, why would someone drink shampoo? I know people are not paying attention, but what would cause someone to do that?

(02:28):

And this is widely known as a huge marketing fail because they were running ads in 1979 that had a cookbook for yogurt next to the yogurt shampoo. And so people thought it was an ingredient that was necessary for these recipes and they were going home and drinking it. So confusing messaging is going to confuse your stakeholders. And a stakeholder is anyone who has the ability to influence your success. I want to encourage you to broaden your understanding of your stakeholders. It’s not just the person you’re signing contracts with within your customers. It’s not just executive leadership within your customers. Your stakeholders are also going to be the people who are using the products because if they’re not using your products correctly, it’s not going to be successful and the business will find no value from what you’re rolling out. So your stakeholders could be end users, it could be their managers, it could be vendors outside the system.

(03:22):

It really depends on what you’re building and what you’re offering. And we have to know where they’re coming from, how much they’re paying attention to your messaging and how they’ll interpret what you’re saying to them so that they’re not drinking your shampoo. We want them using your shampoo, not drinking it. So this is an interactive presentation, but there is no roleplaying because I couldn’t hate roleplaying more. If you all will do me a favor, we’re going to try this out. Get out your phone, scan the QR code, or if you don’t like doing that, just open a browser window. Go to menti.com and enter the code that is up on the screen. It’s 8 9 6 1 3 3 0 3 and you should be prompted to tell me where your startup is, what stage are you at? And there’s a couple of reasons I want to do this. One, you are my stakeholders. My definition of success today is you walk out of here in 45 minutes with a list of things you can start doing differently to make your company. Can you show the code again? Oh, yep. It’s right at the top of the screen. It’s 8 9 6 1 3 3 0 3.

(04:37):

As my stakeholders. I want to make sure that you can walk out of here with a firm understanding of things you can start to do differently to really incorporate your stakeholder perspectives. I also want to make sure that this tool, which I think is critical to my success today, is useful. I want to make sure the network’s working. I want to give us a little soft launch, make sure you guys will actually use it. I also want to get an understanding of where you are in the life cycle of startups because if you all were at pre-seed, that would be a different message I’d want to give you than if you’re all looking to exit right now. So it looks like the majority of the people who’ve responded are kind of early. So between pre-seed and early, that tells me you’re building processes. You’ve got your MVP, you’re starting to figure out how you’re going to target your customers.

(05:21):

This is great timing. Welcome. I’m so glad you’re here. The other reason I like this tool is it gives me a sense of how much engagement I’m going to get amongst you. You’re my stakeholders. I need you to buy in. If you all sat there with your arms crossed and refused to participate in this exercise, it would tell me there was some passive resistance in the room and I would need to do something pretty dramatic to try to get you back on board engaged with what I’m talking about. But we had 65 people participate. I feel like that’s pretty good. You all also have a good understanding of where you fit in the room. So I think we all have a good understanding of each other now. So for those of you who are MVP, you’re working on your retention. Retention is really the backbone of your revenue. I know your sales team loves to get those deals and close ’em, and that’s really exciting and there’s a lot of dopamine involved in that process. But retention is going to be the backbone of what’s actually your year over year annual revenue. There is research that if you increase your retention by 5%, your revenue will increase by 25%. So for every new customer you’re getting, it’s far more expensive

(06:38):

To replace one than it is just to keep one. The more that you can retain the people you already have, the more your reputation is going to grow and the more money you’re going to have that you can play with and decide how you want to spend throughout the year. All right, second mentee. Let me go push a button to get this started in 2019. KPMG did a study on customer loyalty and they ranked the top eight factors that go into a customer being loyal to a company they have a relationship with. These are in alphabetical order. These are the top three factors. I want to see where you guys think these rank in terms of the importance and then we’ll compare that with what KPMG thoughts. I’m going to give you a minute. We’ve had four people, five people, okay. The engineers are showing up. Quality’s up at the top right now. Oh, consistency. Yep. Okay. So it looks like, I mean honestly, y’all are ranking ’em pretty closely, which is what PPMG found as well. Yep. Value for the money. Okay. So the thing that I think is interesting about this exercise is it differentiates between quality and value.

(08:09):

And also value is not pricing by the way. Pricing was lower on the rink in terms of whether a company or a customer is going to be loyal to you.

(08:17):

So the ability of a product to do what it says to meet its requirements is its quality. The value that customers actually get out of it versus what they’re spending is the value. And that’s actually going to be driving decisions around spend much more than some of these other factors. The example I like to give is I signed up for Hulu somehow I got on an ad version, so I’m paying to watch ads. I called customer service. They told me too bad. I’ve been pretty disappointed by the quality. It wasn’t consistent with the experience I wanted, but I keep paying for it because it’s the only one that has only murders in the building and it’s worth the value for the money to me. I’m not going to leave. They’ve got me. So if you can consistently provide that value, your customers will keep coming back to you because they’ll think it’s worth the money that they’re spending on you.

(09:08):

Here’s how it broke out for KPMG. Product quality was top. At the end of the day, you can’t put lipstick on a pig if the product doesn’t work, no one’s going to keep paying for it, but you can’t just provide quality without thinking about that value. So the two of those are going to be very, very closely linked in your customer’s minds. So retention formula, we could think of it as quality meets value, meets consistency, and that’s what’s going to lead to retention for your customers. My argument and my theory is that all of these are actually about meeting stakeholder expectations because if we go back quality, it’s whose definition of quality. It’s not your definition of quality, it’s your customer’s definition of quality. It doesn’t matter if your sales team thinks it’s high value, it matters if their team thinks it’s high value and you could be consistently up 99% of the time always delivering the results you’ve promised, but if it’s not working the two times they try to use it, inconsistent tool doesn’t work. So you have to understand what your stakeholders are expecting in order to manage those expectations so that you can be safe about what you’re promising them and then meet or exceed those expectations when you actually go to deliver your products.

(10:25):

So what does this look like? We have a customer timeline along the bottom. I think a lot of companies think of it as they sign the contract, we deliver the product and then they renew and we make money. I’m going to encourage you to think through this from a customer perspective and for the salespeople in the room, this is not a different than anything you haven’t seen already, but they’re happy when they sign the contract, but they also have pretty high expectations. Your sales team has told ’em, oh yeah, yeah, that’s coming next quarter. We have that in enhancements that’s rolling out so they’re happy, they’re excited. The person who has signed the contract believes that their reputation will be improved within their company by bringing you in. That’s why people sign contracts. It’s not because they think, oh, this is really going to help the company.

(11:11):

They’re thinking, my boss is going to think I’m doing a really good job at helping the company. When you go to deliver the product, you can either deliver that first value, they can have a positive experience, they can have a smooth delivery experience. You can train all their people on how to use your tool and they can start getting value as soon as you deliver the product or you cannot. And then you went to that churn space where there’s friction and conflict and just issues with your customers. The thing that you have to remember is you have to continue to drive that value. You have to increase the value, not decrease the value, because if you decrease the value from their perspective, not yours, they’re entering churn, they’re not excited and they’re not heading towards a, it’s only by consistently increasing their usage of the tool and the value they’re getting from it or product or database or whatever it is you’re selling. I keep saying tool, but I mean product. That’s how you’re going to get increased spend and renewal in the future. Otherwise you’re going to drop back down into that churn space.

(12:18):

So what is this perceived value? We’re talking a lot about what stakeholders think and it’s not what we think. So of course we think they’re wrong, but where are they getting these perceptions from? I would encourage you to think of perceived value as the proposition value. What did your sales team tell them? What happened? Why are they engaging with you? This could be increased retention, decreased cost easier, compliance with regulatory requirements. There’s some value that your customer is expecting to get from you and they hopefully have a dollar amount to it that’d be really convenient if they’ve done that amount of work to try to figure out the earned value that they’re going to get from your product. And then there’s the customer outcome. So the value from their perception is what happened compared to what I think would happen, how much value? If I thought I was going to save a million dollars and I only saved five, 500,000, saving 500 grand is pretty great, but not if I expected to save a million. So you have to be able to balance both of those expectations and make sure that they understand that they’re on track for the ultimate proposition value that you’ve initially sold them during sales.

(13:33):

90% of customers tell vendors their desired outcomes. That’s part of that negotiation during the RFP process. They try to be very clear about what they’re looking for while you’re signing statement. That’s work. They should be making it clear what they want. 90% of them do, 50% of them don’t achieve those outcomes. My background, I’m a project manager, don’t hold it against me. If you look up project management success rates, it’s something like 40% of projects are successful. If you actually look at the desired outcomes, 60% of ’em don’t meet desired outcomes. They’re late, they’re over budget, they don’t deliver scope. People aren’t using those solutions. So this is pretty typical across the board. We are not achieving the outcomes that we’re planning to where that hits you guys and where that’s going to impact you is in your retention. Ideally, you want to be in the 30, 35% retention rate. Most startups are at 20%. And again, if we think back, if you increased your retention by 5%, you would increase your revenue by 25%. That 15% gap is hugely impactful and that’s really going to drive whether or not you’re successful and in it for the long haul.

(14:48):

So let’s thinking about this from the stakeholder’s perspectives, the customer’s perspective, this is probably how a lot of you think of your lifecycle. We build the tool, we sell it, we deliver it, our customer support supports it and then they renew. Great. And this makes sense because this is probably how your organizations are set up. This is how you probably have a customer success manager if you’re far enough along in the process, you have a sales team, you have a delivery team, this makes sense, but you cannot forget that your customer is having a different experience right along the same timeline when you’re selling their buying and they’re buying in, they’re risking their reputations internally on your solution. When you’re delivering it, often it falls to the customer to launch it internally. So it’s up to them to figure out who are my users? What kind of training do they need?

(15:39):

Do they have the time for this right now? When should we launch this? If you’re not helping them with those plans and to really launch this successfully, you are left to their devices and you’re out of the control of that experience for your customers while you’re supporting the system. They’re using it. Are they drinking shampoo or are they putting it on their head? We don’t know. And you’re only real metric is going to be around your engagement metrics. And then if they call in with questions, but if someone gets so frustrated when they’re trying to use it, they can’t figure it out. They’re not even going to call, they’re over it, they’re not using it. And so the renewal process isn’t about delivery and support, it’s about use and evaluation based on the value that they’re getting from that use. So if they aren’t using it, they’re not getting any value, they’re not going to renew.

(16:33):

One thing I try to hold in my mind throughout my day, I do this all day every day, manage stakeholders. We live in an attention commodity market. In 2015, Matthew Crawford wrote an article in New York Times, the cost of paying attention and attention is a resource. Everyone’s multitasking all the time. We choose what we want to pay attention to. If we don’t care enough about something, we’re not going to pay attention to it. And for those of us who are in the product development space, we really want to believe that people care about what we’re doing. And I am here to tell you, no one cares about your baby. It’s your baby very excited for you. No one’s going to tell you it’s ugly. They’re just not going to interact with it. And I would argue we probably all do the same. So here’s another mentee. How closely do you follow instructions when putting together a piece of furniture from ikea? And your options are, I read all instructions front to back, including all safety warnings always. Two would be I always skim the instructions before I start. Three is I look at ’em if I can’t figure it out on my own. And four is, I didn’t know IKEA came with instructions. Never needed to know that information.

(17:55):

Alright. Oh, you guys are great.

(18:04):

Yeah, a lot of people skimming the instructions. Good for you. I don’t don’t read ’em unless I have to. I’m someone who for a living, I create training materials, I create communications materials. My inbox has 2000 unread emails in it. I don’t read emails and I do not read a key instructions if I can get away with it. I just don’t care to use my intention in that way. Not saying that’s the right way. I’m sure I would be more successful in some things if I actually did read all the instructions and I would certainly learn tools quicker, but I’m not going to do it unless I absolutely have to. So as you’re thinking about how you’re launching your product within your customer’s organizations, really think through who’s going to have to use this tool? Who’s going to have to use this product? Who’s going to have to change, wake up in the morning, get their cup of coffee and change how they live their lives in order for me to be successful and for their company to get value out of this solution. Alright, A lot of rule followers. You guys are so great.

(19:08):

This idea of perfect versus typical use is not just co consultants speak, by the way, this is well known in the medical field. If you ever talk about diabetes interventions, if you’re pre-diabetic, you go to the doctor and they say you need to eat better and work out. You’re like, thanks doc, and you do none of that.

(19:27):

I think a more useful analogy would be birth control And the physical qualities of all of these methods of birth control are extremely high over 96%. And so your sales team is going in and saying, Ooh, 99% effective. The problem is, it is well documented in the medical space what happens with typical use and the effectiveness of these products when used by actual human beings. We are not robots. It’s really disappointing, but it’s not going to be perfect. No one’s going to use your product perfectly. In the case of some of these methods, there’s a 16% delta. So that’s a 16% difference in the value delivered than what people are expecting to get when they use this product. We all think we’re perfect but we’re not. So really think through and if you’re far enough along in your product development lifecycle, you’ve probably seen this, your customer success manager is like God grief, we keep getting the stupidest questions and if they would just read our emails, they would see what they should do. And you can’t assume that people are going to do any more than the bare minimum to learn how to use your products.

(20:36):

And even when they do use your products, it’s not going to be perfect.

(20:41):

Lemme give an example that’s maybe a little more relevant. I assume most of you’re not selling birth control. I’m often brought in after the fact when things haven’t gone well for IT. Service management tools. So let’s say your company A, you’ve purchased a tool, IT department’s getting all new processes and you’re going to create a self-service portal and people are going to be able to go create their own tickets. They’re not going to have to call the help desk anymore. They’re not going to have to email anybody. Just go here. We’re going to channel everything. We’re going to save so much time. We’re going to be able to reduce our help desk staff by 50%. We’re going to save millions. Great. So you spend the money, you build your solution, you launch your portal, you train all of it. The ones who are using the tool, get ’em on board, get the CIO on board, wonderful. And no one uses the self-service portal. How much money did someone actually save or how much value did they get out of this entire project if the whole premise was that they would be able to direct traffic to this self-service model? Not very much.

(21:47):

So the question ask yourself, this is one of those takeaways. How much value can your customers realize if they have poor adoption? I held back on overwhelming y’all with some change management metrics. I assume you probably didn’t want to see it, but there is research that if you effectively manage organizational change, you will achieve 80% more of your project outcomes than if you don’t. Well, how much value is in that 80%? If you’re just putting out a self-service portal and assuming people want to use it, you’re misunderstanding how human beings work. Because the thing is Sue in accounting has her friend Ted Na, and she’s just going to, IM him. She likes Ted Ted’s very helpful. He’s always going to answer her. Im, that relationship exists, that process exists and you saying, hi, would you like to go create a ticket that no one’s going to look at for a little bit and not get a response? And no Sue’s not interested in participating in that. And so you have to really think through what does Sue need to make that change and what does TED need to make that change? How can we back up Ted to say, actually Sue, I can’t help you with that. You really need to go create a ticket for this without getting completely eviscerated, right? It is there to support and serve. So as you’re thinking about your product, realistically, how much value would your customers get if they don’t have adoption? 

(23:17):

What I do? So the work that is in change management is understanding that change impact initiate mitigations, which is very much like that medical terminology, but really figuring out what you have to do to drive preferred behavior and then tracking metrics. Just like I was looking at my engagement for the first mentee we did, I was like, okay, warm audience, we got some engagement going on. Being able to track those metrics throughout your delivery process can help if this audience is warmed up and they’re ready to go or if you have some work to do to get them on board with your solution. Okay, so what can we do about this? Top five things to do now to increase retention? One, align your sales messaging with realistic expected outcomes. Now if you go back to the previous slide and you’re like, Ooh, these guys aren’t going to get value if they don’t adopt, then you need to incorporate that adoption plan and the resources you need to get them successfully adopted into your sales messaging and into your statements of work so that they know, hey, we can help with this. But you need to be able to do these things to make sure that your organization is using this tool effectively.

(24:34):

So sorry, sales guys rein it in a little bit. Make sure your entire team knows what your customers expect. 90% of our customers are telling us what they want and we’re not delivering. So someone in your team probably knows making sure that they communicate that with the rest of the team and that you are tracking towards it.

(24:54):

The other thing that I would point out is often vendors will say, oh yeah, that timeline’s not effective. We’re not going to make that timeline. They’ll figure it out Eventually once they figure it out, it’s too late. They’re pretty disappointed and you are now not meeting their expectations. So even if there’s an area of friction or difference where you’re not going to meet their expectations, you need to raise that and escalate it as quickly as possible so that they view you as a partner towards success. Not somebody who’s just trying to pull one over on them so that you can get money out of ’em. Make sure that your team knows what your customers expect and partner on delivering that.

(25:32):

Help your customers build solutions that encourage adoption. This isn’t field of dreams. If we build it, they will not come. We have to set up processes and guardrails to make sure that people are using our solutions. I was at a client a couple years ago and the woman who I was reporting up through had never put in a time off request because she tried once, couldn’t figure it out, just didn’t bother. So HR thinks they’re tracking time off, she’s just not recording it. She’s getting paid as though she’s there all the time and there was no mechanism in place to stop that from happening. So even when you’re like, yeah, it’s a time off tool, of course you’ll use it, will I? We’ll see, make sure that the tools you’re building will actually be used and that they know why they should use it. And sometimes that’s a carrot and sometimes that’s a stick

(26:29):

Supported option by all stakeholders, not just admins. For those of you who are developing apps and tools and you’re going to have a technical team that’s administering it within your organizations. If you only train your sweet little IT team on how to manage this tool and you don’t think about the end users, they will not be engaged. It is not going to do that. You have to be driving that conversation of, great, what are we going to do for the end users? Where is this data coming from? What do they need to do to get this started? If you are not forcing that conversation, it’s unlikely the admins are because they’re really not trained to do that. That’s not what they do. They administer solutions.

(27:09):

And then number five, for those of you who do have large organizational change required, bring in a partner. So that could be someone like a Sky Fi. You could also just hire, there’s plenty of contractors out there that you can embed in your teams to say, Hey, what do we got to do to get people on board? What do we need to do to get these organizations using this tool quickly? We need value delivered quickly. We need all the stakeholders to understand the value that’s being delivered. Even if you’re doing everything you said you would would’ve, they don’t know it. They’re not going to continue to use your product. Okay, top five things to do.

(27:53):

So some of the things that these change management partners can do, support your response to RFPs and sales meetings. You want to start managing these expectations as soon as possible. Even if you just ask who’s doing OCM for this? Your client will be like, oh, they know OCM. And it could be that they have structures in place internally to do that work. If not, then you can start to negotiate with them about, well, here’s what we can do, but we need you to do X, Y, and Z to make sure that we get this across the line. You really want to reinforce effective kickoff and stakeholder identification. It’s not the contract signer, it’s not the CIO who actually needs to change their life in order for you to be successful. Understanding those change impacts and creating training. And when I say training, I don’t mean training. That’s a UI tool where it’s like, here’s how you use this tool. No, it’s when in the process do I do this?

(28:45):

Who is giving me the input that I need? How often do I do it? How does this fit into my life overall? That’s the kind of training you’re going to want to develop so they understand why they should be using it and and then communication and hypercare plans, if you look at delivery as the day they go live and you walk out, you’re really missing that critical two to four week period after go live to drive successful use of the tool. At that point, you still have some leniency, right? You’re like, oh, we’re getting up to speed. We’re really assessing metrics and you have time to divert what’s happening and change direction after that. If you’ve already rolled off the project, you’re up to whatever they can do on their own. Okay. All right. Alright. Pretty good questions.

Speaker 2 (29:39):

So Micah, first of all, thank you. It was very enlightening. Oh good.

(29:44):

And then so my company, we offer our customers are like HR managers, but the users are the employees. We have technology for self-care and the things like oftentimes we make all the planning with the HR department and then we have trouble to actually make the users know the latest features and so on. So we thought about mailing, they don’t open it. Then how can we train or actually getting to the end user, which are the ones that are going to adopt our product and use it and keep on coming to the app. And then when they use it, then the HR will be convinced. But sometimes the HR is kind of protective of how much interaction can we have with their end user, which doesn’t make sense because it’s an app. So of course they will use it. So I’m having trouble to see how can I improve that adoption specifically when the HR has no idea of how to do that. So I have to get involved deeply, but sometimes they don’t allow this to do

Speaker 1 (30:50):

That. Yeah. So what I’m hearing you say is how do I get to the end users if the people we’re working with don’t want to give us access and they don’t have the ability themselves to work with the end users? So what we tend to do is we say, we really want to align with your standards and we want to understand your culture. Is there an internal communications person we can work with to make sure our templates match your templates and our guidelines match your guidelines? And those people are the ones who are actually going to be doing the comms. And so if you can build that relationship with the communications person and then you can almost partner with them. So you’re not circumventing hr, in this case you’re partnering with comms to support HR and successfully rolling out their tool.

Speaker 2 (31:34):

Thanks.

Speaker 1 (31:34):

And same thing with training. So if you’re in HR training is often in the HR organization. So you could say we really want to understand what’s your LMS, what are your training standards so that we can give you tools that’ll fit into that. Can we meet with that person? And then that person can help you roll out training to end users.

Speaker 2 (31:50):

Wonderful. Thanks.

Speaker 1 (31:53):

Yeah, it’s so much of what we do because it’s the ability to influence people we have no authority over and actually they might not even like us. They might actively see us as a pain in the rear. And so finding people you can partner with and elevate. So you’re like hr, we want to help you look really organized and fit in with the overall organization. Help me do that.

Speaker 3 (32:21):

Hi. So my company’s building medical software and I’ve noticed that Epic, which holds most of the market share for a p HR systems, has an insanely good adoption model. Any hospital they go into, they make them hire somebody from Epic to be full-time and their staff for integration and they have it built into their contract. But I think that’s really hard to do as a startup to require that level of commitment. How do you encourage that?

Speaker 1 (32:51):

So this is going to be a shameless plug. What our model would be, oh, we’ll bring in Sky Fi, they’re negotiating with you separately. If you want to do this yourself, hospitals, great. You don’t have to eat the cost with the partnership model. It’s a completely separate contract and it’s just you identifying the issue and saying, Hey, here’s a potential way to resolve this issue hospital without you having to hire somebody and put in the infrastructure and figure out how to train them and who’s going to manage them and then how do they integrate with the delivery teams. So that would be one way. And there’s other companies out there that do that as well.

Speaker 3 (33:35):

So I’m looking at this from a service model and not more from a products model. So I was thinking, I remember the slide you shared where you spoke about effectiveness with perfect use and effectiveness with typical use of the data is limited six at least. And in my head I’m thinking, okay, so do I need to internally have my sales team connect with my QA team? How do you think? So you have lots of teams internally when you’re building a software for a customer and then the sales teams make these commitments to the customer. Whereas when the product hits the market, then it’s not always perfect use. And a lot of the times, like you said, it’s a 30 40% retention lot more than that. So do you think a good idea would be to connect internally the sales team with the QA team at that point and at what stage?

Speaker 1 (34:29):

Yeah, I would say as early as possible. So similar for OCM, if I were working at another company, there would be salespeople selling my services and I would have to deliver on what they sold and it might not match what I actually deliver. So you want to get arm your sales team with RFP questions that are specific to what your team’s delivering. You might also want to nominate somebody from the QA team or whatever services team you’re working with to sit in sales calls where they can say, oh, what a great question. Let me answer that. Lemme take that one and start to get some of that agreement and also maybe find a different word than training, but some education for the sales team of what’s actually happening so that they’re not using words or making promises that aren’t actually matching what you’re able to deliver. Yeah,

Speaker 4 (35:20):

So for me, I have a startup and we could go D two C, but that gets expensive with marketing dollars. The issue that we’re running into is we’re trying to infiltrate dealerships, insurance companies where the sales cycles are really long and really hard to get through the bureaucracy that they have set up. Do you have any thoughts on how to mitigate getting into their processes?

Speaker 1 (35:52):

It’s a good question. I think as much as you can build relationships with them and help them understand the value of what you’re delivering, that’s probably going to be a lot of what you need to do. I’m not a salesperson, so I have a salesperson, but making sure that they understand the value and coming up with use cases or maybe case studies of, hey, if this is happening to you, I can help solve that problem and it needs to be relevant and something that might be timely. So depending on where they are with their sales cycles, helping them understand why they really need the product.

Speaker 5 (36:35):

All right. How would you recommend building out your pricing model? Would you recommend making OCMA add-on or incorporated in all tiers for enterprise? Kind of.

Speaker 1 (36:48):

So the question was how do you price OCM if you integrate it or have it be its own line item? Yeah, the benefits of having it be its own line item is there’s a lot of research out there for the value of OCM. And so the overall project budget, if you’re rolling out a project OCM should be 10 to 20% of that budget. And so there’s research to back that up. The problem with having its own line item is as soon as you run into your first snag, it’s going to be the line item that the customers going to want to cut. And they’re like, we’ll do it ourselves. We don’t need to pay for that. So I think having somebody who understands, I would have it separate so that they’re clear about what’s happening. You might integrate it into any MSP work you’re doing after the fact if you’re in that hypercare period just so it’s five hours a week or whatever. And then if they try to cut that budget once, they’re like, oh, scope’s changing cut OCM, which is always the first answer, you have somebody who can tell them why they don’t want to do that and the risks, that’s fine, we can do that. But you’re going to run into these issues down the line

Speaker 5 (37:47):

And you still, if they cut it, then do you still step in and help for the rest of that? Let’s say you have tier where people aren’t part, you still want them to renew, but they haven’t paid for it.

Speaker 1 (38:03):

Yeah, that’s one. The problem with OCM is it’s for them, but it’s actually for us, right? We need them to want it and we need them to do it. If you have an effective OCM consultant, they can help sell it and can help protect that from happening. OCM is also scalable. There’s no one right size model. And so you can kind tailor it to be like, great, well if this is how much money we have for this, then we’re going to be cutting X, Y, and Z and we’re really going to focus on the stuff that’s high value to try to make sure that still getting the value you need.

Speaker 6 (38:38):

So my question would be how do you deal with dealing with stakeholders where you have, so we’re creating a social networking platform for startups where we have the founders as the main core audience and you have the secondary stakeholders that would be mentors, vc, stuff like that. Then there’s a third level of that obviously would be the teams that operate with them, two main stakeholders, the on platform using it. How do you keep the third level gate of them actually using it away? Otherwise we’ll get feel like we’ll get well,

Speaker 1 (39:12):

Did you say they wouldn’t be using it right away?

Speaker 6 (39:15):

They wouldn’t probably be using it directly, but they’d be taking that data information and sending it over to their teams to use that information without actually being direct users.

Speaker 1 (39:25):

So in the comms space and even in business process, right, there’s pushing and there’s pulling. And so trying to figure out who wants this to happen, who actually benefits from this? If it’s not the person who’s responsible for pulling the data and sharing it, then you need to create mechanisms in the organization to get them to do it. And so you would go to those people who would be the receivers and say, oh, maybe monthly you could reach out and have a meeting monthly to discuss so that they have to pull the results of this before your meeting figuring out. So often we think if the CEO says something that’s going to happen and you really have to find where the energy is starting in the organization.

Speaker 7 (40:11):

So how do you engage with your clients? Do you just initiate a conversation with the potential customers and then your role is done or over the years you carry them, are you partner with them or you walk along with them? What’s the pattern

Speaker 1 (40:31):

For SkyPhi? Yeah, so yeah, we really see ourselves as a strategic partner and the people we partner with basically call us up anytime they have a contract that needs OCM and they send it over and say, Hey, we’ve got this coming up. Can you sit in on the call? Can you help us negotiate this? We also do, we call it sales enablement, which is such like a consultant. I was like, those words don’t mean anything, but sales enablement would be training the sales team for what needs to set up their little spidey senses to say, Ooh, this feels like it needs OCM. And we almost arm them with a choose your own adventure questions of ask these three questions and if they seem at all interested, bring us in. And so it’s a great model. We don’t get paid until our partners get paid and we’re in it with them. It’s not so much where they’re absorbing all the risk. We’re really partnering with them on that solution.

Speaker 3 (41:27):

Hi, going back to the healthcare question. I’m is the catalog of electronic health records and they’ve been around for a long time and they use Deloitte and Accenture for implementation of the software, but as a startup you don’t have the resources. So at what point should you engage with partners such as system innovators and whatnot that actually we can do that. And I wanted to ask you also, how effective are the train the trainer type programs for companies that want to help ease the implementation internally?

Speaker 1 (42:13):

I can’t tell you when it’s right to bring in A-K-P-M-G or an IBM to be your partner. I think that’s really going to depend on when the cost of delivery is no longer worth it and you really just want to focus on the product development. I think ServiceNow is similar, right? They were implementation partners for a while for this ITSM world and they finally said, we only want to be product y’all deliver and we’ll help you deliver. But we’re not doing that anymore. We’re out of that game. So I think it’s really nailing the strategy your business wants to take In terms of the train the trainer, that’s a great question and I find it very effective. One of the ways that you can drive, we didn’t really get into the tactics and the tools of OCM, but what we would call a change champion or a train the trainer model puts representatives for your product on the ground level and people are more likely to trust your solution if their coworker who they respect was part of the solution. And then they can go to that coworker and ask them questions about it. And if you’re able to, you can have that coworker have a goal around success of your tool. If they have an annual goal that this is successful and that they’re integrating and working with their teams, they’re going to be really passionate and supporting their team and adopting it.

Speaker 6 (43:31):

Thank you. So we have talked before about the connected to sales and how sales set soft expectations and how those expectations need to be sometimes to down so that the implementation team actually follow through with them. What happens when it, it’s kind of the same situation, but sales team is having the contact with the market and they see that the implementation needs to change to meet new demands from the market. How can do you think OCM can bridge that gap of actually helping the organization understand that there’s something that needs to change in the

Speaker 1 (44:08):

Process? It’s funny you say that because when we launched Sky Fi, we were like, the delivery teams are going to love this. Oh, we’re going to make their lives so much easier. They don’t love it. They’re like, it’s more work, more things to track. I don’t want to go to these meetings, I don’t want to do this work. I want to give a technical solution. And what we’re finding is it’s the sales teams that are bringing us in because they’re like, everyone’s offering this except us. We have to offer this. Get on board. And I don’t know about the model at your company, but sales teams often have more leverage politically in the organization than delivery does because they’re the ones bringing in the money. And so OCM can help bridge that gap and if you have a good change, consultant will do it in a very gentle, sensitive way to make sure that everybody’s on board with why they should want to do this and make this change.

Speaker 8 (44:59):

Alright, is that the last question?

Speaker 1 (45:02):

Thank you. Alright, thanks y’all.