Are you facing challenges onboarding your complex systems with clients? 

Join us for an insightful webinar where we break down a proven 4-phase strategy to streamline the customer onboarding process. From Configuration and Installation to Testing and Launch, we'll guide you through each phase, sharing best practices, tools, and real-world examples to ensure a smooth and successful system implementation. 

Learn how to avoid common pitfalls, involve key stakeholders, and set your system up for long-term success. Whether you're a project manager, onboarding specialist, or business leader, this webinar will equip you with the knowledge and actionable steps needed to manage complex onboardings with confidence. 

Key Takeaways:

  • Step-by-step breakdown of the 4 phases
  • Practical tips for avoiding installation and deployment challenges
  • How to ensure a successful system launches - repeatable

Gain specific strategies to enhance your onboarding process accountability and reduce the workload on your onboarding team.

Transcript:

00:00-02:04

Joseph Knecht: Mastering Complex System Onboardings-A 4-Phase Strategy for Success

Greetings, everybody. Joey Knecht again here, senior leader with Proteus. I'm out of Salt Lake City. That's why I got a jacket on. It's kind of a little chilly today. So we're going to jump into this. This is one of the areas I really enjoy the most, because, as you're probably here because you are complex and complex is hard. And so that's really why Proteus Engage was founded many years ago—it  was to help organizations solving this very unique problem of obviously onboarding in a complex ecosystem. And as I think, all of you know, this has just gotten a lot more complex with time here every year. It's getting more complex.

So to kind of frame today's conversation a little bit. I'm going to talk about the why a little bit like, why is it getting more complex? Then I will cover the 4 phase strategy, and then I also will provide 4 kind of key approaches you should be doing to help address and manage these risks, right? Because in onboarding, we're ultimately managing risk here, as everybody on this call is somehow associated with successfully onboarding a client, or people, and kind of leveraging that obviously, to mitigate risk and obviously generate as much revenue as possible, and little problems right? So that's how we're going to frame it here today. A little bit of the why the 4 phase strategy.

Because it is a general webinar, I'll talk about just a couple of different industries. We have a lot of clients that are in software. We have a lot of clients in construction or those kinds of things. We have a lot of Ag clients, government clients. So we have clients in all different fields and services. And so I'll allude to some of those as we kind of go through this process. Also, if you have any questions, since it's a 1-man show, I might see them or not. You can ask them inside the Zoom Meeting chat. I will address them either in the meeting or directly after. So I appreciate everybody's time. So let's get started.

[2:02] Slide showing: The Environment – Struggle

2:02 – 4:32

Joseph Knecht: The Environment-Struggle

How about I blow it up here for old people like me and get this thing started.

So let's talk about the trouble, and the environment. Right? Because why is this happening? Why is complex onboardings so challenging? Well, ultimately you need to reflect this. And again, a lot of times in our presentations. I'll kind of let everybody kind of think through on their own use case, of how this is going. So this environment here is just again, mind map for me here, on the left hand side is going to be your company, and the right hand side is going to be either the customer you're onboarding, or we have many like Franchise or multi-location clients, or like we sell into hospital systems and they have to do deployments across 10 different locations. Right? If you're a franchisee group, you have 400 locations, etcetera. So this is just one example of a 1-to-1, but obviously, if you on this call have multiple locations, this is then just…you got it, multiplied out. So this environment becomes really a challenge for many of our partners and that's why they come to us—is to really help solve this problem and the underlying challenges of it.

Because most of clients today are obviously managing everything there in the current way, which is email, which I like to call kind of camp-run-amuck, right? And so there's no consistent process, there's no visibility. You cannot manage the risk of anything. And so you just got a lot of people involved, and you're ultimately herding cats and chasing timelines, and people are letting you down, and things just aren't great, right?

And this is just getting worse and worse as years go on, as the number of individuals involved on both sides of it, right? So on the left hand side, if you're a software client, I'll just use that use case here. You're going to have the original sales rep, subject matter experts (SME’s) leadership teams, integration teams. You name it. There's going to be 7 to 10 people on the left side of the equation.

And then on the right side of the equation, depending on the industry, like we do a lot in financial services, healthcare, construction, or other kind of industries—just really any business that is acquiring something or onboarding something, you know, you're going to have at least 5, as it gets into more complex or the dollar amounts increase. You're going to have up…we have many deals that have 40 plus people, just in one location. And then again, multiply that by, if you have multiple locations. So you guys kind of understand.

And I hope that reflects in your world, that you just got to—you're herding the cats, right? Just a lot of people. So it's just ultimately a struggle and an ultimate guessing game. All right. So to summarize that, this is kind of how we look at the world.

[04:32] Screen showing slide: Common Challenges

4:32 – 7:29

Joseph Knecht: Common Challenges

And I'm going to reference—it’s not today's webinar, so I'm not going to address it too much. But for a lot of our clients, the actual onboarding process is literally starting in the last 25% of the sale. I'll say that again, the onboarding process is actually happening in the last 25% of the sale. And why that is, is during a complex sale—which typically leads to a complex onboarding—usually their cousins right? And so when that happens, there's a lot of things discussed during that last 25% of the sale and deal alignment that really is reflective and needed for the onboarding experience to go well.

So for a lot of clients, I sometimes say, let's look a little bit north than maybe you're used to. Of how these deals are getting to you, cause our platform, of course Engage, helps with that. But also just sometimes a lot of the bleeding points or red dot items that are happening in onboarding and complex onboarding is just exacerbated by the last part of the sales process not being corrected like, you know, the definition of what was going to be delivered, the client's environment, just all sorts of things that can lead to when you start to get into that onboarding process, there's just a lot of misinformation or missed expectations. I think if you're on this call, you know where I'm getting at.

So sometimes, you know, you’ve got to look a little bit before where you would naturally think onboarding begins, because everybody thinks, Oh, it's during the handoff, and it's, game on—that's onboarding—yay! Actually, for many, many of our clients, they're injecting leaders of onboarding and other people, into…higher into the actual process. Okay, so just think through that on yourself. Obviously, everybody on this call is a little bit different. But that really is a missed area, a lot.

And then also, a lot of leaders, like you guys, are obviously just trying to look to do the consistent engagement and create a repeatable way to get clients launched and have all the visibility and management that you need to obviously do this repeatedly and scale it. And a lot of clients also come to us with that STV, slow time to value, or time to value. There's a lot of different math kind of things that obviously, a lot of our clients, we help them with—from a measurement perspective—not only justifying the onboarding team, but proving that as you're onboarding more clients, you're adding more and more value to the organization. You're doing it faster, it's more consistent. The clients are happy, and that promoter score—all these kinds of things—again, not today's presentation, but our infrastructure, Engage—if you want to do a demo, or you can do a live walkthrough off of the site, you can kind of consume all this information on your own, but basically, we help with that end-to-end experience from the last 25% of the sale, the handoff, than the actual onboarding and beyond.

So all of this, obviously, is you want that kind of connected end-to-end experience which, of course, allows you to measure everything. And obviously, what is measured improves, right? I think everybody knows that. So just…these are a lot of the common challenges…digest…obviously, everybody might have a favorite one for their different firms. So let's have a little fun here now, and kind of break into kind of the 4 phases of complex.

[07:29]  Screen showing slide: Phase 1 – Alignment and Configuration

7:29 – 16:13

Joseph Knecht: Phase 1 – Alignment and Configuration

Now, clearly you might be saying to yourself, “Joe, that's preposterous—there’s no way there’s just 4!” No, you're right. There's a lot more, and everybody's organization is a little different. But I do want to showcase here, kind of, in onboarding. there's some obvious pay-for-play like, “Ah, no, no, no joke, Joey, of course we need to be doing that.” But there's a lot of things that people are  missing on, or the devil is in the details. And so a lot of these key points for these 4 phases I'm kind of bringing to you. Obviously, years of experience, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of successful handoffs and clients, and so kind of bringing this just to kind of give you some nuggets of knowledge.

And then I'm also going to give you 4 approaches to these. So there's the 4 phases I'm going to talk about. I'm going to give you 4 approaches, and I will coordinate this also with some additional resources on our site, like I said, that all can be self-consumed. So I've already talked about the last 25% of the sale. If you go to our webinar library, there's a great webinar about that.

Also in our insights there's multiple insights with tips and tricks and ways to optimize that for your group, and how to introduce that conversation into your organization, Okay? So I will do that frequently here—is kind of introduce you to additional resources because you can't solve everything, obviously, in a 30 minute webinar here.

So with that, said, let's get into phase 1, which is alignment and configuration, right? And again, this is all about setting the right expectations. I always joke with folks that you know, this is the difference, like in sales. Sales is like dating. Then when it gets to that last 25%, it's starting to get real like we're thinking about getting married. And when you're thinking about getting married, a whole lot of other people come out of the woodwork and want to be involved, right?

So maybe that relates to some of you, and so you got a lot of people now, all on this process, right? And so how do we set clear expectations and manage all this? So key points in alignment and configuration—because these are 2 different things, but I kind of wrapped them together in phase 1—that's for you to think about. So alignment clearly is, you know, really the first 2 bullet points here, which is proper sales handoff, which I already alluded to a little bit here. Analyzing how is your handoff process internally and expectation management working there, from sales? Whatever sales is to your world again, there's other resources. If you want to penetrate that more and learn more, you can go there. The other one, another big thing which we identify a lot of our partners during this alignment and configuration phase is the process to reduce GIGO, and GIGO is, “garbage-in garbage-out,” all right?

So we see a lot of partners, it's kind of crazy that there's that much bad data or bad expectations kind of coming out of the mishandling of basically the onboarding process. And it really stagnates the onboarding, creates a lot of frustration, miscommunication, you might even experience yourself—when you've been onboarding a product into your company—and you're getting random emails that make no sense or just the expectations are really wrong. So for you to look back at these things. Again, sometimes you just kind of analyze the entire experience there. So think of those 2 right out the gate.

And then something that, this puts a little more pressure on you and your teams, but kind of setting the right expectations and accountability at the beginning of the project, and the beginning of the onboarding, is very, very critical for our clients when they're getting into relationship. Obviously, you're building a relationship. But then, also, you're configuring them, okay?

So the next 2 bullet points are a little bit more about our clients see success when they promote a spirit of accountability. And that's mutual accountability. That's both sides of the equation. And so it’s how you're able to do this is aligning with the business goals. So okay, your product, obviously, or service, or whatever it is, anything you have, is being sold to somebody else. Well, obviously, there needs to be some sort of commitment of value, return on investment, new services, new offering, whatever it is. And so when you have an environment like that, you want to establish that ROI and commitment with the customer side right?

And then from there it's not only showing them, Hey we've been tasked to help you with X or Y, we're deploying this, we're putting this in, whatever it is, installing stuff—which we're going to get to, that whole process—you want to establish that ROI and commitment from their end, and that's from candid conversations and then taking those and putting them into mutual plans.

And you might have heard of mutual plans. Now we have a…in our platform Engage…we have a checklist system which runs all of our mutual plans and onboarding plans and everything. But mutual plans really, it's not only the technology to run mutual plans, it's how mutual plans are introduced to the client during that initial phase of the onboarding experience—which I mean by that is—you're setting the expectations of who's going to be involved. What are the roles of the different individuals?

And then walking through what the mutual plan is, and getting what is called verbal contracts. Right? And so let's just say, for argument's sake, you're onboarding. And one of the leaders is Tiffany on the other side. You know, if I was running that, it'd be like, “All right, Tiffany, I see here in our deployment plan with you, I need you to own these things and these dates are all related to this, this and this. Tiffany, does that seem reasonable for you and your team or any additional resources you need in order to make this possible?” And Tiffany says yes, and so those are going to be assigned out here. So the act of doing a mutual plan, which, of course, is mutual. So typically, there are things for you and your team to be doing and then, of course, timing that all out to time to value, which is, of course, time to value means getting the customer to success as fast as possible.

Whether that's deploying a software, installing something, hardware, whatever it is, anything. Right? So that's getting them faster to time to value, because then they're seeing the ROI and/or their commitment to it so very, very important. You don't want to skip over some of these things, and there's great resources on our side about mutual plans. You could download samples, etcetera. Our system obviously runs mutual plans. But ultimately about mutual plans is  it's creating that visibility and commitment that people are using—in essence, peer pressure to help guide across these things and keeping projects way more on schedule and way more visibility and consistency of that gauge. Okay? Real important—think through those. Obviously, those are big concepts just in themselves. But just kind of sharing. There's incremental little things you can do that probably can move the needle in your ecosystem really, really, quickly.

The other important thing is expert coaching. I think this is heavily missed. We know it is not, think, I know and I can…I was in Chicago last week…we have a lot of clients in the Chicago…we have clients everywhere, but we have a lot of clients in Chicago, and I was meeting with a VP of an organization, and we were just talking about where so much, especially like in software and some other technology related services, it's not just about selling your product. It's about coaching the client on how to use the product and coaching them on the settings, and how it should be used and how it should be leveraged, just like I'm obviously doing with you guys today. But this is obviously during the deployment.

So a lot of times onboarding teams, they're doing it so much they know everything. They know your product. But what they forget is that the customer knows nothing. And so there's a tremendous amount of presumption that floats out there, and that is hard for the client, because when you're trying to get configuration, information, or other things, the client really doesn't even know how your product and/or service works yet. There's nomenclature that they don't understand, right?  All sorts of things that can really derail and make them feel a little bit like, I don't even know what they're talking about. Right?

So don't lose the fact that you know everything about your product offering or service, but more than likely the people on the other side, don't, and that's a GIGO thing, again, “Garbage-in garbage-out,” because they don't know what they don't know, so they might keep it too simple. And then that's obviously damaging your value. So don't forget about that as you're looking at your own onboarding process, if you're auditing your own onboard process, or you're building out an onboarding process.

That's a very important thing for you and your teams to make sure that clients are not only just looking for X. They're also looking for guidance on how to maximize the value of whatever they're getting from you, right? Whether it…maybe it's hardware, or a physical item. Maybe it's the best maintenance schedule or other things like that. So it's not just software—anything. It's just how do they get more value out of what you're onboarding them into? I'm assuming this makes sense. Little details into that, again, think about for your product and our offering how that might help.

So phase 1, alignment and configuration—things not to miss, and that's why I like to bring those out.

[16:13] Screen Showing slide: Phase 2 – Installation

16:13 – 21:35

Joseph Knecht: Phase 2 - Installation

Let me kind of bring up…Phase 2 is Installation.

So, I'm taking a deep breath only because…this is, it's kind of amazing. We have clients obviously all over the country. Many, many, many locations, doing this and installation is a real camp-run-amuck. And so because it's just, a whole other layer of people, processes and investment for your firm right? Because now you got boots on the ground, butts in planes, whatever you want to call it, the risk here gets very, very high. And this…yeah, this…we know of millions and millions and millions of dollars of losses because of inappropriate installation approaches and everything. And again, installation is part of onboarding right? But a lot of times it's like this thing out there that people really don't follow up too much on. And so that's why for our clients, it's fully integrated into that experience. So this is doubly complex for some of our partners because they sell stuff through either like a franchise or partner or a channel—it's not even them. Or it's just a third party Installation group. They're putting in an HVAC system, or whatever, right?

And so it might just be just completely a third party. And so how do you bring them into the onboarding experience, and also make sure that everything is proper? So that second bullet point, the first two are kind of again, coordinated, correlated. How about that? Yep, we'll go with correlated. So you got the team which I just mentioned could be a whole other group of individuals coming into the equation. And then you have kind of the pre-travel processes. Like many of our clients, tickets for planes won't even be booked until certain things are done inside our infrastructure. Right? Like, literally, it has to be approved before we're even booking travel. Some of our clients are waiting on city regulations, or, you know, or code changes, or I mean, like, literally, there's a lot of factors to determine that.

And are the right resources going to be on-prem when you're there. Right? So it's not only you that’s being prepared, we've seen clients, you know, before they get into our product infrastructure that they forget that the other side of the equation also has to be prepared. Are they the right people? Are they on vacation? Can they get access to the building? You know all these. Where do I Park? We're bringing a trailer truck full of stuff. By the way, we can't have a trailer truck in our—we can't even get it in our driveway, right? Like those kinds of things. There's a lot of details (sorry) in kind of this ecosystem to make that happen. And so the pre-travel process is very, very important for a lot of our clients.

Of course, we leverage a lot of checklists. I'm assuming, if you are doing these kinds of things, you should be doing kind of a checklist process and a whole…and there might be different checklists for different types of people to make sure all of these things are dotted i’s and crossing t's before again, a huge amount of investment kind of goes out there.

So then, let's just pretend you've done the top 2 correctly. Third, you got kind of a process in place, which again, we can coach on. Then you get a lot of our clients want to do post-install processes, because again, the installation itself is very critical to the performance of whatever they're doing. So we see this in software deployments that are on-prem, hardware, anything that's obviously being deployed. So there's post setup processes which could be capturing all the warranty information of the machines and units that have been deployed, right? Photos of this, taking of the environment pre and post, right? Testing results, meaning you've tested the environment. I mean, it can go on and on. Right?

You guys know, there's a lot of things that you want to nip and tuck, because sometimes it's done through third parties. This could affect the value of the deployment, or if something is wrong, there could be issues. And a lot of our clients even kind of…are testing some of the stuff while they're on-prem. And again, you have assets in place. If anything's wrong, you need to get that done and fixed that day, or obviously, right away.  So very, very important on these complex client deployments this whole on-prem and or virtual, and many of our clients. It's a blend that some resources are going in field, but then there's resources at home base that are working with those individuals. Again, all of that needs to be kind of organized. Don't forget that customer sign off also. While they're on-prem, and approving the installation is a very important thing for a lot of our clients, and sometimes there's checklist for the customer to sign off on, too, so that there's no miscommunication or expectation gaps, because again, later on that day people are getting on planes, or they're up, up and away.

Many of our clients also, you need to think about this, this is your net promoter score. Now you might be saying, “Well, Joe, they're not even live yet, why are we doing an NPS?” Well, a lot of our clients also do satisfactions of just their install process. Because a lot of times, it's done through a third party channel or somebody else that has less control by the main corporation. So they're trying to get feedback on that element of the onboarding experience also. So that's why I call it a feedback cycle there. So again, think through how that might affect your organization or your processes there.

 Of course, you guys know, if you signed up for this, you've been on our website. This is what our platform does. Our platform runs these processes and infrastructure, all through secure workspaces, for all of our clients. So I'm just sharing with you a lot of the things that we see really help elevate the experience and obviously generate more revenue opportunities for the clients.

[21:35] Screen Showing Slide: Phase 3 – Testing – Pilots – Phases

21:35 – 26:13

Joseph Knecht: Phase 3 – Testing – Pilots – Phases

So phase 3—couple of important things here because we have a broader audience, I will kind of keep this at a 30,000 foot of ecosystem. But a lot of our clients, if there is an on-prem install or not, if it's just software, or whatever, many of our clients are nowadays doing some sort of testing phase, piloting phase. Everybody's got different name for phases of deployment, especially if you're a software company or certain kinds of companies, there's a ton of these pilots or small team phases, etcetera. And/or this is being done in a pilot program where you're deploying something into locations, multiple locations. You're not going to launch to all, whatever, let’s say, you know, your organization has 50 or a 1,000 locations. No way you're deploying to all 1,000 right away. You're going to create a pilot group, a benchmarking group. You're going to deploy to that benchmarking group. You're then going to test and validate, within that benchmarking group. Gather that feedback. We call it building the recipe. You see it down there. And then once you build that recipe, then you deploy that to another segment of the population, and then you're going to roll it out to the entire population by benchmarking, right? And so this is very, very important to a lot of our clients.

And so even if it's just to a single location or multi-location, it's managing your risk of your deployment as much as humanly possible—because you only get a (What is it? One chance? First chance? Make a second?) Whatever, the heck, you guys know. But ultimately, that's what we're talking about here. So for many of our clients in a complex onboarding, there's no flip the switch and everything's good to go.

There's actually sub-tier of the deployments that the feedback cycle—I call it “Crawl walk, run.” I also call it, “Kia, Camry, Cadillac.” You know, different kind of methodologies like that, but ultimately it's a phase, discipline, approach of benchmarking it with top talent on the client side. Rinse. Repeat. There's going to be some failures, some problems, great nip and tuck, fix that. Build the recipe and then start taking the recipe to the larger group. You have way too much risk trying to do everything, you know, all at once, and so phase 3, for all of our clients, is some combination of these kind of concepts, whether it's a testing phase, a pilot, phased approaches.

If you're a software company listening, I mean half of the software companies—their first contract isn't even enough to cover the customer acquisition costs. It's only into year 2 they start making money, because maybe the client is only buying certain types of modules or features from them…and not the whole thing—that's also relevant, for we have a lot of clients that make no money until the client is live, and they're using whatever the element is. So there's a lot of risk. And again, you got to kind of map it to your organization, but ultimately to manage the risk and to guarantee customer success as much as humanly possible.

A lot of our clients, whether it's physical product they're delivering or digital product they're delivering, AKA software or other things. They're wanting to kind of stage that onboarding to protect the house and make sure that the customer is successful. So again, single location, multi-location, software, hardware, anything like that, making sure that you have these iterative cycles. Now, if you have these iterative cycles that I'm talking about, obviously, how do you create an environment to manage all the processes, the people, the documentation, the integrations needed, etcetera?

Again, of course, that's something our platform does. But for many clients, just from a coaching perspective. These are things you need to be thinking about, because one or 2 of these things could really help transform the success of your onboarding. And most importantly, when I say this, success is not only your team executing, it's the client being happier, and they come back around.

And that's what that last bullet point is: momentum for future opportunities. Every client is an opportunity to generate more revenue from, right? Always you can upsell, cross sell, or referrals into other peer organizations, those types of things. So really making sure that we're…it might feel like an overkill. But it's not when properly executed, because it makes the clients happier. You're more consistent on your deliveries, and of course you also are generating net new revenue with the current client and/or future clients, because churn will kill every company software, hardware, whatever it is. Right? And so bad experiences very quickly can diminish future revenue opportunities for you. Okay? So pretty important stuff here. Think about how that might correlate or relate to your environment.

[26:13] Screen Showing slide:  Phase 4 - Launch + 120 Days

26:13 – 31:20

Joseph Knecht: Phase 4 – Launch + 120 Days

Phase 4 is the launch in 120 days. So let's assume the first 3 phases you've done a pretty good job on, right. This is kind of that last piece of the puzzle that is equally as important. And maybe you've had your own poor experiences when you've been onboarding, a hardware or service, or whatever it is to your environment. Again, thinking about this phase launches, we talked about that already, right? Which is very, very key, and then does your company have a tiger team? Or is your team in the tiger team? Tiger team in that essence is a group of individuals when there's a super high risk of basically going full live. Who owns that? And who is going to help resolve any additional problems that might come out in the full launch sequence? So you want to really identify your tiger team or your primary team. That's going to help do this. And then do you have another handoff?

So this is this is kind of interesting because depending on the size of your organization and the matrix structure of your organization, and/or you might be complaining that you have huge silos in your organization. Sometimes our enterprise clients, obviously, you have a sales team last 25% of the sale. The handoff, then you have an implementation team or onboarding team here and then sometimes you have a CS team—which is different than the implementation team or onboarding team—and CS is a whole other group.

And so you might have another handoff now. And so how do you properly do that handoff to make sure the customer who has now brutally been through sales, onboarding, now a CS team—how to make sure that they feel comfortable in all the different people, and not having to tell their story over and over again or repeat all of their stuff.

Obviously, that's a huge risk area and frustration point for clients. So that's the critical period of going live, and then the first 120 days, because the first 120 days make it or break it for most deployments. Right? After that it's hard to resuscitate a relationship, because probably it's so far off the rails by that time. It's just tough, right? And again, this depends on your onboarding cycle. Some clients we have onboarding that takes a year. Some, it's 40 days, so every one of our clients is a little bit different—not for us to onboard you, but meaning their clients, because again, depending on how complex they are.

But ultimately you got to understand the structure of your organization from that sales implementation and CS. Some of our clients—it's blended, some of our clients—it's very separated. And that's a very important consideration for you guys to look at, not only from integrity and perspective, but then also, obviously just making sure that the client feels real good, right? And again, depending on some of our clients onboarding and CS’s combined. That means many of our CS teams are responsible for identifying cross selling and basically going through this entire cycle all over again. Right?

So we have many hardware clients that are selling hardware, doing things, and they deploy it within one store. And then the next thing is “Okay. Great. It was good there.” And then they're just going to keep reselling into different stores. But there is an onboarding process every single time there, right? So you can kind of start to see how the recipe starts to kind of align with everything. There's little details here. Obviously, you can do your customer SAT surveys. You can do other things in this post 120. But this is very much part of the responsibility of many implementation teams we see now—is that they are coming into that first 120 days, whether you're a member of the Tiger team, and/or you're just literally owning it. But again, as you can imagine, this is just more people brought into the client relationship. And that's, obviously, what our platform does extremely well to navigate this stuff.

So from a 4-phase perspective, I knew I threw a lot at you there. I am going to get into some…very quickly, I'm going to go through just some high level concepts to help bring all this together. But these are the 4 phases that we have seen consistently in our complex offering clients, because we have clients that are like light grade, medium grade, and then super complex. The super complex ecosystem—it is the devil in the details in these little elements because they bring in so many people, and the expectations and risk are so high in these deployments.

These are very important pieces not to miss. But ultimately, obviously you need a way to do it, and of course that's what our company does. But I don't care if you use this or not, like the point is making sure hopefully, you're successful. These things you can take away. There's additional resources again on our site that you can kind of take a look at and rip off and duplicate. Now, I do know we're world class at our delivery, and we really help organization, not anti-selling. But the point is, is a lot of companies are at different phases of their growth, size, complexity. Some, of you might just be building out your first process ever. And so yeah, just…I love to share all the knowledge we've gained over the years and really helping clients.

[31:20] Screen showing slide: Approach to WIN

31:20 - 34:52

Joseph Knecht: Approach to WIN

So with that, said. I'm going to give you kind of a quick approach to win right? Because at the end of the day, we're all here to win. I hope nobody woke up today, said,” I'm ready to lose.”

[31:24] Screen showing slide: Establishing Accountability from the Start

So ultimately, there's kind of again, keeping with the spirit of 4. I kind of narrowed down 4 key elements that are important to all of our clients. And this one has nothing to do with software, really. This one is really about establishing accountability from the start. And so there's always this fun part where you ring the bell. We sold somebody new, and everybody's excited because we're bringing in revenue and revenue is good, and revenue keeps business open, gives everybody jobs—awesome—get it.

But also when you start to take people through an onboarding process at the front side, and I mentioned this earlier, it’s really clearly identifying role assignment, and who's going to own what. And again, a recipe we have seen great success with is using a mutual action plan to establish this, and then to hold people accountable in a gracious way. Of course our platform does automatic reminders and responsibility, and giving you alerts when things are behind. Like obviously, we have an infrastructure to do this to the whole next level, but ultimately holding people accountable, and then putting that into a framework. AKA, a mutual plan, which really, really helps you have the visibility on where everything is at, all right? Really, really critical. I don't care if you're not using anything. You just got to establish the relationship and expectations with the client right out the gate, including timelines. Again, a great vehicle to do that as a mutual action plan, and then guiding all that stuff off of that and holding the people accountable.

And I think if many of you on this call, and my guess is it’s not your first rodeo, if at the beginning of the relationship you clearly set out the goal of the relationship, and why we need to get it done by Y, and leadership wants it done by Y, and these are the things, and this is going to be the benefit to your organization by getting it out by Y. In general, people really try to follow them. It's just natural because you set the clear expectation. What we see as many clients kind of are weaving in and out of expectation management. And it really starts to create a lot of problems, all right? So accountability from the start, you know, just again, for many of you it might be real simple. There's only 3 different types of people in it, great, or maybe for you, there's 12. Just figure it out and figure out who commonly does what things, when you are deploying, and make sure that you're covering your butt, related to that. All right. Just accountability—good old school accountability.

Second, one of this, of course, relates a little bit more to our platform is, obviously creating a centralized environment to manage all this activity information and get a lot of visibility as to where things are at in every single deployment. So of course, that's what our platform does. But sans the platform, you understand why there needs to be a ton of communication and collaboration, document sharing, stuff going back and forth all the time. How do you do that in a centralized environment? Not through email in a structured way, so that you're getting better data, cleaner data, so that your configuration, expectation management is all better. So you got to really bring this all under one roof so that you clearly have visibility and optimizing, obviously, the experience of both sides of the equation. This helps your team to be way more efficient. And this also allows, obviously, the group you're onboarding, to have just one centralized environment. They're not lost guiding them through. Okay? So a centralized ecosystem. Again, you can check out our site.

[34:52] Screen showing slide: Checklists: Keeping Track of Every Detail

34:52 – 37:14

Joseph Knecht: Checklists-Keeping Track of Every Detail

Another layer of tools—I mentioned it—mutual action plans we extensively leverage with our clients. What we have is a checklist system. But it's used again for the mutual plan, installation plans, travel plans, any of these processes. Think of it as an automation tool set, that allows us to create workflows to kind of guide these micro experiences. Right? So there's the overarching, onboarding or configuration, like we need to do all this.

But you obviously have identified in my presentation today that there are tons of these splinter micro experiences. And that's what we also leverage our checklist and automation systems for—for these intelligent automations to help you be more effective. And so think about your own environment from that perspective because things are correlated. You want things to happen at certain times, a simple equate—a simple use case here. I always share this because it's like, it makes complete sense to everybody.

So let's say I go back to the use case I talked about earlier, where Tiffany…so Tiffany is deploying with your company, and Tiffany needs to provide you an Excel spreadsheet. Think of it as like a template that she has to fill out to give you guys some configuration information. Well, obviously, in our checklist system that's assigned out to Tiffany, Tiffany would have mutual planned and said, “Yeah, I can get that to you guys. What are we in then? Yeah, we're in the end of September.” So she says, “Okay, I can get that to you by October 4th.” Awesome. Well, what you know is that it typically takes a customer 3 to 4 days to fill that out because they got to work with additional people internally, etcetera.

So what the system can detect is whether or not Tiffany has gotten in and even downloaded the template. If Tiffany hasn't even downloaded the template there, and it's October first, or whatever, like, you know that now the system knows that, and that's going to help you follow up with Tiffany to say, “Tiffany, hey—is there anything I can do here? Because it's getting close to when this is going to be due. This is a mission critical piece of our deployment,” right? Stopping problems before they become problems.

And so when you have everything centralized, you create that visibility and automation and follow ups to help keep things on time, on task. So there's these little things that by doing all of this in one environment can pay massive dividends as far as time to value and obviously, cutting costs of deploying people. So we're very big on not only the overarching experience, but then also these micro experiences to keep everybody time on task. All right, that's the 3rd one.

[37:14] Screen showing slide: Collaboration-Ensuring Everyone is on the Same Page

37:14 – 39:00

Joseph Knecht: Collaboration-Ensuring Everyone is on the Same Page

 And the last one, is collaboration. So again, what we have seen is a big change in over the last 3 to 4 years, especially is, that there's a tremendous amount of people involved in this. And they're really struggling—keeping up to date documentation and assets inside the environment. So again, in our ecosystem, we leverage checklists to do that, we also have complete document and file sharing, and actual real time document collaboration. So the newest versions of things are always in front of everybody during that process.

We're also integrated with your email, your Slack, your Teams, all of these elements to help streamline communication, collaboration, commenting, everything all within the environment, with everything else that we're doing also with our with our tasks, our checklists, and more. And so really integrating into making it very simple. And then we're also deeply integrated with Salesforce and HubSpot and others. To make this data also going back into your system of record. Many of our clients use those platforms and others. And so we really are making sure that no matter what you're doing. All of that information is getting in front of the right people to make the right decisions, ultimately.

(I think hit back on the slide. Thank you. Somebody binged me, so appreciate that.)

So collaboration here is really the document store and version control, making sure everybody's looking at the most effective stuff. And again, when you got a long, complex ecosystem, there's going to be 15 to 20 individuals like, I said at the beginning. So very, very important again, these are all key core elements of our infrastructure. But also this is just to help you mind map as you're trying to work on your processes…what's going on there? Okay.

[39:00} Screen Showing slide: Brainstorm and Resources for Alignment

39:00 – 41:47

Joseph Knecht: Brainstorm and Resources for Alignment

So last, but not least—couple of things to part with here, because I typically try to keep these right around 40 min. As I mentioned at the beginning, I'm Joey. There's my email address, and I know all of you don't want a sales rep calling you. If you want a sales rep calling, you just schedule their Proteus slash schedule, and we can get you in front of an obviously—a seasoned consultant and walk you through a deep demo. You also can do interactive Demos on your own off of our website. But if literally, you just want to brainstorm. And you're like, “Hey, I have this kind of company, or my team is structured like this. And we're doing this. Joey, can you kind of just brainstorm with me? Some ideas of how you know we can be better at doing X,Y or Z.” or “I'm a startup, and we're just looking for ways to, you know, come across way more professional than maybe our size looks like right now”…those kinds of things, right?

Very, very open to doing that. I've worked with hundreds of our clients over the years in doing that. And that's literally my personal email. And then we can just schedule something on my calendar and brainstorm with you for a half hour. I throw that out there only because we know that everybody watching these webinars over time—obviously they're recorded. We send this out to a lot of people. Everybody's in just a different phase of their business and their growth. Ultimately we do work with a ton of startups. We work with a ton of enterprise—everywhere in between—and all different industries. But understand, you don't necessarily want to be in an active sales process right now. So I throw that out there, from a consultation perspective.

I will throw out—also, we have additional webinars to go check out. Related to a lot more of those topics, GIGO, some other things, obviously, that we were talking about—last 25% of the sale, to help you kind of wrap around those things. And we also have really good insights, that are across all areas of what we do for our customers nationwide.

So again, appreciate the time, appreciate your interest in improving your complex ecosystem. I will say, just the benefits to you and your team…I don't typically get into the sales side of it. But for most of our clients and onboarding, we're creating 30% more engagement or more, and also reduction in effort and time of the onboarding team by 25%, because we're able to create a lot of automations, templating of the checklists, email templating, all sorts of things that really help there to be consistency of the engagement, and really hitting for your bottom line, and of efficiency, and, most importantly, engagement with customers and faster rollouts, and love to get into all of that when it makes sense. But again, Joey Knecht. Really appreciate the time, and we'll hope to talk to you guys soon. Thanks.

Dive in to Engage