How to Build an Implementation Experience That's Actually Engaging | @guidecx VP Operations

hand icon. You can also drop any questions into the chat. These sessions will be recorded and available on demand after the event. So that's it for me, and I will now turn it back over to Harris to begin. All right, thank you so much, Charlotte. Um, I want to say, uh, yeah, thank you to, to SASTR for putting all this together. It's exciting to have, uh, you know, these, these digital engagements with everything that's going on. And typically it's, you know, a presentation, maybe with a few minutes at the end. But the design here is really to be as interactive as we can. So thanks everyone for joining. Sastre, thank you for hosting. And let's hop in and talk about creating a great implementation experience. While everybody's finding their seats, if you want to hop in the chat and say where you're from, where you're dialing in from, where you're located, and what your role is, you know, how long you've been involved in implementations. That, that would be great just to give us some good background for, for what we're about to talk about. I'm also going to have my email address in the chat as well. So if there are any questions that we don't get to or any thoughts you have after this, or if you want to engage on anything else, I'd be happy to do that on a one-on-one basis. All right, so let's hop in and just talk about why, why we think implementation and onboarding is critical to your success. In, in the SaaS world, we, we talk about scale, right? We want to scale efficiently, and the whole SaaS business model is predicated on having a really successful customer experience, right? If our customer is happy and engaged, if their business stays and we're able to grow that business, then our, you know, our business is going to continue to rise. So as we're scaling, we look at this moment of implementation and we see that, you know, sometimes it can be termed a danger zone, like in this graph here, the blue part might be the sales process, then you sign this customer up and that green leg of the journey is a successful customer, a customer who knows what they're doing and is excitedly moving forward. The implementation, though, it should be a celebration of the new partnership. It should be an exciting period where everybody's getting everything set up. And so we want to talk through how to make it engaging, how to make sure that we de-risk what can be a risky situation there. And so the goals for today are going to be to talk a little bit about the science behind customer experience. There's a lot that I've learned over, you know, kind of a decade working on this, and then I've learned a lot from other people as well. I want to talk about kind of the neuroscience behind implementation and onboarding a brand new customer. And then we're going to deliver 3 takeaways that you can act on today and make sure that you implement and have a big impact on your organization. And of course, we want to answer any questions. As Charlotte mentioned, for anyone who's still joining, if you have a question as we go, please feel free to unmute yourself and chime in, or leave it in the chat, and we'll take it there. Okay, so let's talk about what is on your customer's mind as they come to you. So you have a brand new customer, and they have gone through a successful sales process. And now it's really important— you've heard the expression of putting yourself in your customer's shoes. We're going to talk a little bit about putting yourself in their brain or in their mind. And you may or may not have heard of it, but there is a whole field of neuromarketing, you know, kind of these marketing efforts that study what's happening in the brain and use those learnings to determine, you you know, how best to market to us. Not here to discuss whether that's right or wrong, but to talk about some things that we know about how the brain works and how we can apply those to an implementation experience specifically. So one big thing that we know is that when you buy something new, especially in the B2B space, there are two big areas of the brain that are elevated, and that's this fear center and value center. So in fear, uh, you may have people wondering, hey, how is this going to go? There's a fear of the unknown. You think about somebody who's just gone through a sales experience, that sales experience has ended, and now a new experience is going to begin, but they may not know exactly what to expect. So there could be a fear of that unknown, a fear of when things are going to happen. There's a lot of potential for anxiety, fear, and implementation. And then that other center of the brain that gets elevated is value. Is what I'm ordering— is, or is what I'm getting going to be worth what I paid for it? Is this really going to work? This is my first true experience with it since we've paid for it, so let me make sure that I'm getting all the value I can out of it. So these things are really highly elevated, and I want to talk about what we can do to provide an antidote to the fears that may be on people's mind and a reinforcement to the value that people are are thinking about. So who, who recognizes this map? What are we looking at here? What's this a map of? I see we've got someone from New Zealand. All right, Amber, Amber answered first. This is Disneyland. Yep. And I want to use just a really brief example here and talk about kind of your culture around implementation and what you do how you look at implementation. This is a— again, we talked about such a critical moment of the customer experience. So, you know, how do you handle this? And you can ask yourself this, ask your teams as you go back, what is our culture of implementation? You know, at Disneyland, every square inch is designed to be something great for you. And think about your own product in that way. I'm sure that every part of what you're offering your service, your product is designed to be great for your customer. But there's probably a lot to it, and it's really important that you understand what is most exciting to your customer in order to really delight them. So you have to know what's going on in their mind. If I book a trip to Disneyland and I come back and, you know, my travel agent says, hey, how was your trip? And I maybe I say, oh, you know, it was okay. My favorite ride, you know, maybe my favorite ride is Space Mountain. And it was closed that week. Now, if my travel agent had known that that was my favorite ride, they could have booked me for a different week, and making sure that I'm there when that ride is open would have made for a much better experience for me. We can also take that to the next level where knowing that— and another reason to use the Disneyland example is there's a lot of lore and legend behind Disneyland, right? So maybe knowing that this is something I really like, they can look up facts about it, set up a behind-the-scenes tour, do things like that. So I want to drive home the point, one, that you have something phenomenal that you're offering and every part of it is exciting, but you have to know what's happening in your customer's mind and maybe in different people's mind of the team in order to really blow that person away, to really make this an engaging implementation experience for them. And as you design an implementation culture and approach that really seeks to understand what's going on in someone's mind you know, what their Space Mountain is, for example, then you're going to be off on, on a much better foot. So there is a science to good customer experience, and today we're going to go into 3 things that really make an immediate difference, and these are going to be the 3 takeaways. We'll re-summarize at the end, but I'm going to talk through how we do a casual call that sets the right tone for the implementation, how you provide a guide for every team that's involved in the implementation, and how you templatize your process And that'll be a really critical one, even if you have a very custom process or a really, you know, repeatable process. We're going to talk about an approach you can take and some homework you can do to make sure that you do templatize it well. And the kind of difference that, that we hope to achieve here is a faster implementation, more bandwidth on your team, and higher satisfaction scores. That's what we've seen. That's why we're talking about this today. We want to help make sure, you know, if you think about why you want your implementation to go so well. A lot of us focus on speed, you know, time to value or time to finish that implementation. And really, you don't just want it to go as fast as possible, right? At the end of it, you want happy customer who is ready to be successful with your software and service. So that's the goal, and these 3 things are really going to help drive that. Okay, so the casual call. This is one of these great ideas that our team had, and The idea of it was, hey, wouldn't it be cool if right when the contract gets signed, we hop on the phone with the customer and just celebrate, you know, the new partnership and we give them a little glimpse as to what's coming. So the idea here is as soon as you can, and you know, obviously it may not be right when the DocuSign comes through or right when ink hits the paper, but as soon as possible, you get two people on the phone, the sales rep and whoever's leading the implementation, they call the customer. And this is supposed to be less than a 5-minute call, less than a 3-minute call, where the idea is just to introduce from the sales side to the implementation side in a casual way. And we call this a casual call because in the B2B world, almost everything is scheduled, right? We have a scheduled, you know, closing meeting on the sales side, a scheduled kickoff call on the implementation side. But here, what we want to do, going back to the neuroscience of what's happening, is that fear center of the brain, it can be acting on this customer and saying, hey, you know, what's going to happen next? I signed this contract. When am I going to hear something? You know, who's going to be involved? How's this going to go? And there is this prospection that your customer does where they're imagining what it should— what the experience should be like. And then the longer they're imagining that, then, you know, rumination starts to set in and you want to do something again to provide an antidote to that fear. So you give some cognitive closure to the sales process here, and you give big confidence and kind of take away the mystery of the unknown with this casual call by really briefly again celebrating the new partnership and then having that implementation lead And I guess one thing I want to emphasize here is some companies will introduce a long-term relationship manager right away. Some companies will introduce an implementation lead right away. Some companies won't introduce a person right away. But the idea here is that, yeah, whether it's a phone call or a message that's sent, that somebody gets this celebratory outreach that then tells them what's on the final bullet point here. So if it's an in-person, if it's somebody in person, they can say, hey, you know, I'm going to be taking great care of you, or someone on my team will, and here's just a bite-sized plan of what you need to know and do before, you know, a kickoff call, if that's your next step or anything like that. And there are 3 kind of critical components to lay out to them in this quick casual call. One is who to contact if they need anything. So, hey, now that you're done with the sales process, Who should I contact? Again, if it's not a who, it should be a where, where should I go if I need help? And then what's the first thing that needs to happen? And I want to give a little hint or a little kind of pro tip here where you may have some first things that you're doing on your side, right? And as you think about templatizing your process, when we get into number 3, once you think about what's the first thing that happens when you sign a contract, But you're— what you can do that will really help your customer and their brain, kind of the neuroscience of how this is working, is you give them a bite-sized task, something that is, you know, relatively easy to complete, but something that's meaningful, something that you really need, whether it's a list of contact information of other people or a document that you need to gather, whatever the case may be. On this casual call, all you do is give them that first bite-sized piece of it. And then let them know that, you know, they'll be getting more later. But what happens here is it really delights the customer. It provides good closure to that sales experience, neutralizing the fear of the unknown and instills confidence. Wow. You know, I'm, I'm in good hands here. And, uh, you know, if I'm 8 out of 10 times, 9 out of 10 times, the call's going to last 3 minutes or less. Be very quick, and your customer will just have a big smile on their face. They'll be really happy. They'll be excited to move forward. You're going to, you know, manage the neuroscience of this really well and help them move forward properly. But 10% of the time, 20% of the time, what's going to happen is really going to surprise you and help to reduce that time to value or the time that the implementation takes. And what's going to happen is that person on the phone, the customer, is going to be so excited by your phone call and kind of the bite-sized chunk that you've given them that they may hop right in. And we've seen this a lot where a customer will say, hey, this is awesome. Yeah, let me grab my email right now. I'm sitting here. Oh, I see you need contact information for these people, or I see that you need, you know, this document. Let me grab that right now. And what that does is now it really adds this compounding effect to how quickly the implementation is going to go. This person's excited to get working on it, really helps speed things up. So next thing we're going to talk about is providing a guide to everyone. So we want to make sure that everyone who is involved understands what they bought, where they are now, and when and where the finish line is. So this will change over time, But we want to provide that guide so that people see who's in charge of what, uh, and everybody's got a copy of it. This could be something, uh, that you update as you go, but really critical that from the person who signed for the agreement to the salesperson at your own company, to your team, uh, the other team who's executing the work on the customer side, that everybody has this guide that shows them those 3 things: what they bought, where they are now, and what the finish line looks like. That's going to give a lot of optimism for what the process looks like, um, trust in what the process is going to be, and really shared accountability so, so that the work does move faster. And the last thing that we want to touch on is how to make a template. So you've got a process for your implementation. It's really critical that you standardize and document that process that you take to implementation. So you may have different engagement types that you're involved in. You know, this customer purchased this product, or we're, you know, deploying this engagement in this example. But what I want to highlight here is that you delineate out 3 things for both parties every time. So the idea is that you're going to look at the durations the dependencies and the descriptions for each thing that needs to take place. So, uh, you know, name a task, hey, this is the first thing that we're going to be doing, and then give it a dependency, what has to happen before this, and then a description. And Vince Lombardi has a great quote, uh, that, you know, you shouldn't speak to be understood, but you should speak so that you cannot be misunderstood. That's the goal in the descriptions here. If you've got that well mapped out and templatized, from, for your internal teams, as well as your customer responsibilities, you're going to be in great shape and again, really help to speed things up. So I want to, I want to break and pause there and open it up for questions and anything that's on anyone's mind as they're going. Kind of first thing that we could ask is, hey, tell me about a map or a guide, you know, experience that you've received that you've really enjoyed working with, whether it's your navigation app or whatnot. But let's talk through your implementation experience here. Let me open it up to everybody. I'll jump in. Hey, Eris, it's Poya. I was curious, when you first get started, if you don't have historical data, Um, what are like, I guess, lagging indicators or things that you can see to ensure that you're on the right process of putting together good implementation? Like, what I'm trying to say is like, when you're in sales, right, and you don't have historical data and you don't know how sales are doing, you track activities. How does that translate for like, I guess, implementation of customers or onboarding of customers? Like, what's the anecdotes or insights? Like, how do you ensure that you're moving in the right in the right path in improving that implementation experience. Exactly, exactly. Yep, yep, yeah. I think you want to triangulate. You want to be measuring everything from time to value, you know, how long does it take to complete the implementation process, to satisfaction scores as you're surveying your customers, and then really look at usage data. So, so we use those three as a triangulation to say, hey, is usage where we want it from the customers? Was the time that it took them to get up and running in line with what we're seeing? And if you don't have historical data, just really critical to set a baseline there for what you think or what you hope for. And then what's the, you know, qualitative data we're getting back in terms of satisfaction scores and comments like that that we're seeing about the implementation process? All right. How do you help to hold the client accountable for steps in the implementation? Mark, this is a really good question, and this is something that the slide that I've got up right now really, really helps to do. So you want to be able to, as the last point of kind of providing that guide to everyone, that guide needs to be based on this template. So what I'd say is take time, and we can even do it right now if, I think we're close to time, but we can, I'm being told we can go over a few minutes here. Start, let's start by mapping out, if you've got a sheet of paper nearby, map out the very first step post-contract signature. So are you spinning up an account, uh, building infrastructure for your customer? Um, you know, there, there's definitely a first step on your side, but map that out until you get to what the very first thing you need the customer to do is. Uh, I see Samantha seconded that question. And as you map that out, you want to put descriptions in there that really help make it clear. Like if you were to send somebody an email, on exactly how to do this thing, attachments, videos, screenshots, um, make it really accessible to them for how to do it. And then make sure that that is well distributed in the guide that you send to everyone. So as I go back a couple of slides here, so this guide should be based on that template you built so that everybody involved, all stakeholders, whether it's boots on the ground, getting the work done, or the executives who have signed it, or again, your sales team, 'Cause what you wanna avoid is that phone call that says, "Hey, where are we at? What's going on here?" And you can avoid that by making sure that it's really clear that everybody knows what they need to do and when, and then you can refer to that guide. And one thing that can be tough in the implementation space is feeling like the bad guy if you have to call someone out for, especially if it's your customer, "Hey, Mrs. Customer, Mr. Customer, we're still waiting on this or that." If you use this kind of guide methodology there, where everybody has that guide in hand, and it's based on that template that shows the dependencies and how long things should take, then you can just use that as the, you know, faceless, uh, bad guy or reality of where we stand. Um, that way you're not calling anybody out specifically. It's just, hey, here's the stage we're at. Here's what we're still waiting on. Uh, let's make sure that we can help. Get everything moving. Victor, I see you chatted in, said you've got a question, but you can't unmute. If you want to— Can you hear me? I can hear you now. Yep.

Sorry. So just really quick, I wanted to ask you, you know, sometimes post-signing a deal, oftentimes post-signing a deal, you have contacts in the customer that don't spread far. Like, you know, you have an internal advocate, somebody that's, you know, championed the deal and wants you to be successful in the organization. But what you really want is to be able to have the implementation sort of pull in other people and support from other people within the organization. I wonder if you have any advice about how to effectively, you know, sort of leverage the folks that you know to have a broader implementation and a successful implementation beyond sort of that small core group of advocates, if that makes sense.

It does make sense. And is this, I guess, to make sure I understand, is this, hey, we almost land and expand? We've got 2 or 3 people here who are excited and passionate about what we're doing, but we need their whole team to be bought in, or we need their whole department?

Yeah, that's right. I think that makes sense.

Yeah, so I just bring it back to the top. You've got to understand what, what is most exciting to them. You've got to understand the neuroscience behind kind of what they're thinking and feeling and Fear and value are going to be on their mind. They're going to want to know, they're going to want to demystify the unknown and feel like they, they know what's coming and what they're going to get out of it. And then value, they're going to want to see like, like what is their, what are they most excited about? Everything you offer in your park, everything you offer in your software is designed to be good for them. But if you can understand what really means a successful experience for them. You can make champions out of all of those, and then you can do, you know, great things like, uh, ask those almost internal networking questions. Hey, who else can use this? How else can we set this up? But it's about— it's interesting because in the B2B space, we're working with businesses, but we shouldn't forget that they're all made up of individuals. So you help that one person win and try to spread it out from there. Then you can do tactical things like, hey, let's get on a larger conversation with the rest of your team, get them involved, and things like that. Got it.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. Samantha, piggybacking on the last question, tips for corralling customers. You're working with a board or committee and you have a lot of opinions flying around. That tends to cause a bottleneck for us. Samantha, that's a Phenomenal question. So this, you know, again, I would go back to this guide, right? Help make sure that there is a really good delineation between the implementation guide and the process that you need to follow in order to get from where you are to where you're going to go. And then that everybody feels like there's a safe place for, you know, parking lot questions or other things that we're going to cover, especially when you have a lot of you know, leaders in a room, you can get a ton of great ideas that don't necessarily help you get to the next milestone or to the finish line that you need to get to. So make sure that if people have this guide and they see the dependencies and how long things should take, you can then, instead of spending your time in status updates and making sure people have their task assignments, you can spend your time doing kind of exception handling and making sure to reinforce the value center of their brain that's really heightened right now and say, hey, as we move through this and this, we're gonna get to this value really soon. So let me take these questions and save them and follow up for you on those. And then that'll help kind of keep the train on the tracks. Response time is also huge there. It's not something I mentioned in one of the three, but the quicker you can be in terms of responding and helping people know what's going to happen next or get an answer to their question, the much more at ease they will be. If you think about the experience they have in their consumer lives, at any moment they can see where their package is, or they can see where their food is as it's being delivered to them. So they're working with those companies and having those experiences on the nights and weekends. They're working with you during the day. Help make sure that they feel that same level of confidence and trust in what you're doing for them. A lot of questions coming in. Okay, do you have any data that shows if clients are willing and are wanting to do work in a client workbook format? Okay, so the question here from Amber, you know, are clients willing or do they want to do work in a client workbook format? By client workbook, I assume you're kind of mentioning something that you'd send over to them and say, hey, we need this, this, and this. Yeah, I absolutely— people want to self-serve. They want to know what they can do. You know, again, these, these parts of the brain that are elevated, and I can share, I guess, some, some podcasts and articles with you that go deeper into the neuroscience of it. But this— the fear center of the brain is all around the unknown. Hey, what's going to happen next? Is it going to be as good as I thought it would be? The value center of the brain is all centered around, am I going to get out of this, what I should be getting out of this. So a client workbook or something you can give somebody to say, hey, this is exactly what you need to do, is a great antidote to that fear because now they've got their checklist, which is a powerful, uh, you know, cognitive tool. And they've got, uh, if you can add into that workbook, um, kind of little treats or, uh, hey, you're going to get this out of completing this, you'll be closer to this. Once you do this, you'll be able to get this value and this value, then yeah, that really helps, goes a long way. All right. Oh, this is great. So, uh, Tito chatted in and said, um, I onboard to Greenhouse ATS and their workbook was so amazing that I copied that process for my company. So yeah, and another thing back to the implementation culture, you know, make this instead of a danger zone, make this a celebration. This implementation is where you're cementing the partnership, helping make sure that you make a great first impression, that your customer knows you're there with them. We've, we've got studies that show that, you know,