SC Corner E1: The secrets to solutioning success

Becca.

I'm Becca Smith, a solution architect at NetGain. I'm a CPA and started my career at Deloitte in their business Tax Service Group. My legendary co host, Chris Miller is our VP of Product Strategy at netgain. He was at netsuite for over six years solutioning with some of their largest enterprise clients. He's a CPA and has served in roles such as controller, director of finance and cfo. So let's jump in and tackle today's topic. Okay, well, hi Chris.

Hey, Becca.

I think we are getting together today to talk about solutioning and just kind of general NetSuite solutioning. Kind of getting into the details, different problems people may face, but really the traits that you exemplify throughout your entire career. And then also what I've been trying to exemplify as I've moved into this role and really kind of taken it on here at Net Gain and what is most valuable like in that role?

I would say, yeah, okay, that, yeah, that'd be great. That's a good topic. We used to talk about all the time, like when I was at Net Suite in different places. So, you know, I'd love to hear from you first. You know, as you've come into this and kind of came from public accounting and somewhat of a change sometimes when people think of the stereotypical personality.

Yeah.

What have you found that you really like about pre sales and solution consulting and what have you found has made you successful so far and kind of. What do you see as the kind of the future things?

Yeah, all right, I'll go first then. So with solutioning, I would say what makes me successful and actually like not even be successful, but feel successful when I'm on a call with client is when I'm able to connect with them and their actual problem. It always feels really good when they start describing a problem. And I can already tell them, oh, I've seen it with this client and I have an idea of like how we can approach that. It actually happened to me today on a call and I was like, I've seen this one before. And so I would say getting as much exposure as you can up front to different types of problems is really helpful as I've continued and are in this position as far as asking good questions, listening, being able to remember what clients are telling you, being able to make connections, I mean, I don't know, trying to think of like something actionable. Right. Maybe having like a list and going through and writing myself of like everything that NetSuite offers everything that our products offer as far as, like, actual features go, and then looking at what is most important or usually typically most relevant to them, and then kind of making those connections in the system, even if they're not even directly related, like, just the actual functionality, how it works.

That's great. You know, it's funny, when I first started out, it was kind of like the exact same thing. I approached a lot of it from being, like, coming from accounting. Like, I have to be the. The answer man, like, right away. But as I went through it, I found kind of just like, you're. You're funny actually a lot quicker than me is like, the ability. Well, no, but the ability to, like, listen and hear what it is, that is really the problem and then say, oh, yeah, I have done this or done that, because I would sometimes jump to conclusions or do that. So I think that's. I think that's a really, really good trait. When I would mentor a lot of the scs or people would ask me for advice, that was always the first thing I would tell them is, it's funny. But solution consulting, a lot of it is not. You have to have, like, really good technical skills. You have to have, like, really good presentation skills. But, like, the most important thing is that first thing. You mentioned this curiosity and, like, loving to learn, but wanting to be curious about what people are doing and. And really understanding it. Because so many times we have had a few projects, and that's where we would. I would even be with the executive team, and sometimes we'd be like, I don't know how we're here or why they want to talk to us or, we belong here. But what came from that almost always was that they thought we understood them better than everybody else, than the other systems. We listened. They felt like, you've got it. You know, it's kind of this, aha, that's right. You. You get what we're trying to do and why we want to do it. And that was really, I think, the trait that makes the most difference. So that's great that you've already noticed that and seen that, because that'll serve you really well.

Well, thank you. It helps that I sat with you when I started this job and said, what do I need to focus on? But I definitely think it's true. Like, I've definitely seen it as I've been working in this position now, that it's when those clients say, yeah, that's exactly it. That's when you know you're on, like, a good track with them.

Yeah. Yep. That's exactly. Exactly it. And it's funny because it's not so much your presentation. You'll have some things where you feel like you're motoring through things, and that's what they want to do. Other times, it feels like you got through a quarter of the stuff, and it's like, quote unquote, getting through the material is not near as important as, like, just that understanding that we. You understand what I'm looking to do, why and how. And so, yeah, you know, that that kind of becomes. Because even people don't see every screen. As soon as they figure out you really know what you're talking about and you understand what they're doing, they will. People will actually just. They will make assumptions in your favor. Well, they showed me this. That was Right. So I am sure they're fine with this even if you didn't do it. And so that's. That's always really helpful, you know, being able to help people relax, let their guard down, so to speak, and really talk with you.

So I guess that actually brings up another question that I've actually hit in my own job. If I don't know how their job works or how their processes work. Right. And I'm sitting on the call with them and they're describing something, and I'm having a hard time explaining a lot of the times I'll ask them, can you show me your process in your own software currently? Is there, like, a good way to go about that? I mean, I've heard some people call it, like, reverse demos, where you have the client demo to you, what they're currently doing. Have you, like, done those and had success with that?

Yeah, so there have been several times when we've had to do that. So kind of if we back up, when you get into that position, sometimes the first thing you do and it. And it's funny because many times, like, I think I would, they would say, chris, you come in here and cover if there's anything. And sometimes I won't know, and sometimes I'll read the room and realize, I know, but, like, everybody else doesn't know, but they're scared to ask, so almost always will stop and say, all right, I have to ask you guys a really stupid question. But when you phrase it as, like, I'm gonna ask you something dumb, or this may be the dumbest thing you hear all today, but sometimes you have to ask those very basic things. Not even so much as, like, sometimes, you know, sometimes you don't know, but Even just to help people feel comfortable and explain. And sometimes I'll look around and think the people around me may not know what's going on, but they're worried about asking. So if I do, I give them permission to. Then they feel like they can ask questions and do that. So that would be my first thing, is never be afraid to ask a really dumb question because, you know, you may be like, I'm just not getting this. And that doesn't make people think less of you. They actually, you know, helps validate that you really want to understand. You want to make sure you didn't miss anything. And then.

So you've seen clients tend to, like, appreciate those types of, like, questions and approaches.

Yeah, yeah. So it's like. It's one thing if you come in and you're like, so do you guys do, like, accounting and stuff? You know, like, that.

That part's not gonna go over well.

That won't go over. It takes people about one minute to two minutes after you're talking to realize, you know what you're talking about, that you have skills. So if you stop and say, guys, I have a question. I'm just not getting. Can we go back to this? They don't look at that as, oh, what's wrong with Becca? She's not getting it. They really. Most universally, people say, oh, I must not have explained it right. Or I didn't. You need extra clarification.

I think that when I'm on a demo and then they ask me questions.

And then that's exactly. Then most time people will go back and they will spend the time to help you understand it. Because there's a lot of foundational things, like, you got to get right before you worry about, oh, we have this or this. The other thing that comes with that. When you want to do a reverse. Like a reverse demo, I do those. I actually do those quite a bit. So when you got it, when you got into some of these enterprise deals, we would be like, okay, let me see how you're doing it. And I always will ask for, like, documents or journal entries or could we walk through, like, what the journal entries or even the T accounts are?

I find journal entries so helpful because at the end of the day, like, NetSuite is a financial platform, I feel like. And so knowing what journal entries they want is so helpful to be able to figure out, like, what processes I can put in place to get that end result. Because at the end of the day, that's what matters is that, like, your Gls mat Your, your GL is correct, but your, your journal entries are correct. And then your income statement, balance sheet.

That you're exactly right. So like literally in my mind, I always follow. And sometimes it varies, but for the most part, I always start with let's talk about the reports. And those could be the journals, the reports. And you work backwards from there. So many people want to start like at, like at the front of this. But if you start like what I need to see in a report, then you walk back to what kind of data do I need to capture to generate that report. Then you go back one more step and say, what does the process or the workflow look like to get that information?

You actually make the workflows a lot of the times.

Oh yeah. If you see, when I get on there, I will use my terrible PowerPoint skills, but I will draw boxes and say, let's talk through this and walk through this. And the reason why that's helpful is suddenly now people connect the report to the data to like what I have to do to capture that. And you can use that for sales, procurement, procure, to pay order to cash, record, report. Every process should be able to be if you can break it down to a series of boxes, then we can talk about what's in each box. And then that's usually where I go into if we need to, to say we either need, you know, show me what an invoice looks like or show me what the journals look like so we can figure out this box. Or for example, we have a great customer right now that does is in the oil and gas industry and they have a homegrown maintenance system that they built. And that one was, we could talk about it all day, but literally it took sitting with them 8, 9 hours having their people show me, walk through so that I could draw my little boxes, but understand exactly how everything goes through. And when you get that, that's usually really, really helpful. And after you've built kind of confidence with them, that's when they will be more than happy to share because they'll be like, okay, you probably need to see how we're doing this. But almost always kind of like on a pre sales, if you can understand the get the journals, that's like a great thing. And then there's usually two other things. Before I would do a reverse demo do that. I always ask people like, kind of what's, what's. What are your segments look like? Because while it seems boring, what's your account subsidiary? I always ask for more than that. Because I tell them the whole way you organize your reportings is typically in these segments. So then we say, okay, well, what are we looking at? Why do we have this one and what do we do with it? And you kind of get back to that. And then I want to understand a couple of things. You want to make sure you, you understand kind of how they break out their general ledger, because that controls, like, reporting. Who gets, you know, what are the incentives, how to commissions work. You can almost. You can derive like, all of that from a lot of that. And then I always tell people, and sometimes they don't think about it, but most people understand in an industry, everything runs off of three or four key ratios. There's three or four KPIs break out. All the others, there's these three or four big ones. Whether, like, at Net Gain, we're doing, we're a SaaS company, we've got the few. But like, when I was at clearchoice and we did healthcare and dental, it was. There were three or four. It was how many people came in, were literally sitting in the dentist chair on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, how many people did we talk to about doing a procedure? Because that ultimately translated in, you know, kind of flowed through. And so if you. When I know those too, now we can kind of see why they're doing everything. But one of the great things now, when you're ready to move from there, move in a reverse demo. What I think it, it gives people, it gives you two or three things that you wouldn't get otherwise. First is you learn their language. Like, one of the most important things is using the words that people are used to using. So being old and around way too much. But I've had to see, like, all these different Systems, Great Plains, JD Edwards, QuickBooks intact. And then a lot of them I've even. That I'd never even heard of, I've learned about and taught myself. So when I find out someone's coming from, like a J.D. edwards world or they're coming from, from Great Plains, I will shift how I talk about things. To one customer, we're talking about dimensions of the general ledger. The next one, we're talking about the code block, you know, and that helps you enter their world. So when you see the reverse demo, first thing you want to do is be like, how do I enter their world? And I can start using the names of their processes because I think it's.

Important to, like, almost write those down if you're not, like, familiar with them. Like, sometimes I Literally write down like they call this, this because that makes it helpful for me to be able to remember. Like, don't call it a segment, call it a code block, because that's going to be what their brain processes so much faster.

Yep, that's exactly it. And then they have a hook in their brain to say that, now I know what you're doing and it creates clarity. And you're smart to write those down because normally I go, I forgot what you guys called that. And you have to tell me.

I also make comments like that plenty often, like, oh, that word that starts with a W that you just used.

But yeah, but that's, that's really good. And, and so what you come away with on these is, is kind of a seeing of like, what is, what does their process look like in clicks, what is the result and then what is the language they use? You know, not every customer or prospect or person will, you know, be willing to sit down and kind of do that much. But when they are, they, it becomes really especially kind of like in some things we do that's, you know, a leasing system that's very specialized. The other thing you'll find, and I would tell the scs, is there's a, there's a continuum. So if you're running netsuite, things that are like back office, like accounting, the main thing you want to do is figure is ultimately we want to figure out how to make the cost per transaction the least possible. Like, we're looking for efficiency. And so a lot of what we do back here is standardization. So you can almost become prescriptive like, this is how we should do it for a best practice. And you want to do it like you don't necessarily, if have someone be like, I need you to reverse demo, like entering your journal, because that would be that. But on the front, as you get closer to the customer, that's your secret sauce. And that's where things are going to have a lot of variability. Because how one company and another in the same industry wants to interact with the customer, what they want to do, there's going to be a lot of differences. And that's where your customization comes in. And so the other thing I would do is if you want to see like the system, you'd be amazed what you can glean from saying, show me how things look in Salesforce, that very front end and what you're capturing about your customers and your orders than saying, let me go see what your purchase order looks like. Because you can many times you'll say, okay, that's great how you guys do purchase orders, but the truth, you need to do it the netsuite way if you want to get the most return out of your investment. Over here, we're going to do it. We need to do it exactly how you guys want to do it because that's what makes you guys unique.

So just basically being able to recognize what you should encourage the customer to conform inside of NetSuite versus customizing NetSuite to match their current process.

Yes. Yeah.

And so I guess so you would say the conform to netsuite is going to be the back end accounting processes because that's when that suite does well and then the kind of customization side is going to be more as you get closer to the customer interface that the client is having with their customers.

Yeah, that's exactly right. Exactly right. And that's where if you're saying got limited 30 minutes with them to do a reverse demo or see that's where you really want to spend your time is like, let's focus on the front end because it's easy for people to think, oh, I'd really love to see what your income statement looks like. You know, truthfully, they all look the same at the end of the day. And so, you know, no one's going to be like, man, that's a killer 12 point type you've used with the Helvecta font on the.

Really glad, you know, on your S9.

Yeah, exactly. So. So versus the other piece. And so anytime there's like, yeah, kind of especially that's what really gets you, where you'll get the most bang for your buck.

So I guess like, because I've had some demos where I get on and like prepping more always leads to a better demo. But where do you draw the line between spending nine hours going through like the customers specific processes versus spending like one hour and building out a small piece of the customization that like they said mattered, but not going through the whole thing.

Got it. You know, that's a great question, Becca, because it's easy to like want to boil the ocean, you know, Like, I.

Know this is my job now, I'm gonna spend 40 weeks and I'm building your whole thing in that day and it's gonna be beautiful. It's the easiest 30 minute demo you've ever been on.

Yeah, that's exactly. And I've had both, you know, and you'll run into this too, and I know you already have, but like there was a time we had Demos with William Sonoma and then another one's with Spotify. And the boss, you know, Harish, who was head of social, he basically said, chris, I'm clearing your schedule for a month. And each of those, he's like, I want you to just work on the. Create exactly that. Build whatever it is you think they need. And so I would literally end to end as deep as you could go. That's. But that's rare because so many other, you know, people listening to this and I know you have to do this many times. You might have two or three demonstrations a day because you're, you're carrying so many and nobody can, can do that intense. And then it'll burn you out too because it'll do that. So what, you know, obviously size, importance of the logo, those will, those are always your judgment calls. But if I. What I think you want to do. One of the things that I love about NetSuite when I, you know, I've been at two other software companies now and one of the things that I love about netsuite is actually the way the demo accounts work. When you don't know any different, it's very easy to complain about the demo accounts. I did that for many, many years. However, you know, Dave and Marina deserve a real shout out here because you can keep things. So I have had, I have, you know, a demo account I kept for seven years and it became kind of like my bag of tricks. So I would remember, oh, I did this, I did this. So one thing is over the time we kind of, you kind of build like that. But that wasn't the best for sustainable things because it was always like locked up. It was only Chris knew what it was and then I would have to do that. But so a really well made demo account is. They've done that. That has a lot of examples, is like your first, first really thing that you can go and be like, okay, I know this example is in here, this example and do that. I always think that the most important thing in a demo is kind of that sense of resonance and that's like, how do things look? So it seems silly, but on the first hand you think it would be the functionality. But when people look at a demo and it kind of looks and feels like their stuff, their industry, a customer that they might expect. Now when they throw if your loop, you can't do that. So then I say, okay guys, I'm going to take you over here and it's going to look nothing like your stuff. You know, I kind of put that, but then they expect it. But when I look at the front, what I would do is, is, like, have really good examples, and then what I would do is.