Maximize your Time-To-Value
While working at a previous employer, our Professional Services team ran into a problem: there were too many customers who needed deployment, and not enough Professional Services team members to do it promptly. Tier 1 customers were prioritized, and the smaller customers were constantly pushed down the schedule until, in many cases, it took 6 weeks from Closed/Won to realize value.
Everyone agreed that this was a problem, yet not enough to warrant bringing on more people. We had to come up with a more efficient way to get smaller customers up and running without engaging more people. The solution was simple: organize some pre-launch steps that would simplify the deployment process for these customers, so the product could be turned on without the need for a Professional Services team.
Now, depending on your experience, you can choose any number of possible solutions:
- Organize a series of tasks that you assign to your customer through a CRM platform: This becomes hairy because it requires programming and difficult management. Plus, assigning tasks to your customer? Really?
- Provide a white paper to customers to guide their experience. The white paper can be either a download PDF, knowledge articles, etc, and provide the steps the customer needs to take. I’m not a big fan of this process because reading documentation is not a clean process: not everyone enjoys reading content.
- Build a wizard into the product. This seems the most obvious solution, but we had a problem: Development wasn’t going to deviate from their development schedule. Our solution needed to be resolved without their help.
- Develop training to guide the customer through the self-guided deployment steps. Now, the beauty of this solution was the reporting through the LMS on training completion. Customers could complete the training and, when done, the deployment team would get a notification through Salesforce, check the settings on the customer’s account, turn things on, and all without the need to engage Development.
The Training Solution
Not everyone was onboard at first, and the solution was kind of out-of-the-box. It required some clear steps to make it work:
- Reporting to Salesforce so completion could be tracked. This meant that the LMS needed to have an integration with Salesforce.
- Access to the LMS needed to be easy. Most LMS solutions require a login created, OR some complex SSO solution that can be a beast to integrate. There are a few, though, that have instance access solutions (Workramp is one of them), which makes things easier. Customers can log into the platform with their existing login solution and instantly access the LMS with key identifiers passed based on their login.
- The tasks that the customers needed to complete had to be identified, with detailed step-by-step examples provided (with videos or other interactive examples). For this solution, because of the limited content development technology, we used videos, which were very successful. We also built out a clear Task Analysis for the process with the skills, examples, and steps needed at the Task, Subtask, Skill, Knowledge, and Attitude level (SKAs are needed to complete the Subtask, the Subtasks are needed to complete each Task).
All this in place, we were ready to get it built and deploy.
CRM Integration
Our LMS had an integration with Salesforce, it just needed to be deployed. This was harder than you would think: The Sales Operations team was as reluctant to deviate from their plans as the Development team. Fortunately, we had a high-ranking champion for the team: The Chief Review Officer wanted this to happen. Because he was on board, we had the support of Sales Ops. And it took all of 20 minutes to deploy.
Instant Log-In for Customers
This was a beast as well, because it still required engagement with Deployment. For context, I had requested this feature be added to the platform a full year before this project was launched. Yes, a full year. Each quarter, it would be considered and rejected.
What changed this time? The framing for the problem: now it was less about customer convenience and more about time-to-value. C-Suite champions greased some wheels, and I had a very heated discussion with the head of Development on getting this done. Once implemented, it went live in a week (the process was really easy), with a week for testing.
Task Analysis and Content Development
The easiest and least stress-inducing part of the process, I had this built within a week. The process was simple, the tasks straightforward, and clear discussion points and questionnaires were built into the process, with quizzes, with quiz results shared through the Salesforce integration for variable configuration settings to be communicated to the deployment team.
Having already been embedded into the Customer Success team, our L&D team had a good relationship with the Deployment team, making training development and content sign-off easy.
Did it work?
Yes! So much so that the first customers who ran through the beta version of the training went live with their newly purchased platform within a week, instead of 6 weeks. As we refined the process, we tightened up the time-to-value to 2 business days.
Think about that. Two business days instead of 6 weeks of paying for a product you couldn’t use, and a deployment team that was snowed under with hundreds of customers in need of help, and a limited amount of time and number of team members to help. Everyone wins in this scenario.