In this episode of Implementation Stories, Alex Laverty, the Director of CS at People.ai, talks about a tool called the discovery scorecard and how it has helped their customer onboarding and implementation teams document essential information and how they use it to ensure high user adoption and advocacy later in the customer journey.
Alex discussed the following topics:
Before we jump in, let us break down the challenge into three categories:
Discovery is never one and done! It's never just one meeting, even if it's one meeting on your timeline or implementation checklist. We know that we're always learning things about our customers that are critical for providing a stellar experience for them.
The second is redundancy. We all have had that experience interacting with customers of a service or a product, and we keep having to answer the same questions. What if someone on the team has to be away for a bit? It is like going in for surgery and having to re-explain and provide all the context to all the medical professionals you are recommended to take opinions from. Imagine having to repeat this! It creates a frustrating experience where you're the person who's carrying that information between the different steps in the process.
We all face a challenge with unstructured data when capturing customer information. How do we report on this crucial concept of discovery? And then make it easy for future teams to find that data later.
What inspired People.ai to create a tool for post-sales to capture essential information?
People.ai uses the sales process MEDDIC. An acronym that stands for Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, and Champion. These six concurrent steps emphasize selling to the right people to ensure better closing rates for sales.
MEDDIC allows People.ai to capture essential information pre-sale. Simply put, MEDDIC is a collection of different areas that a salesperson is meant to quantify or qualify.
The discovery scorecard is inspired by some of the aspects of this framework, such as:
In today's business environment, time-to-value is a critical indicator of the performance of the customer onboarding and implementation team, as well as the overall strength of the organization's processes. People.ai prioritizes reducing the time it takes to onboard customers by shaving off days, minutes, and even seconds. Every customer onboarding manager is aware of their defined deliverables on specific dates and must meet them. They know that customers are most excited to be successful with a product at the very beginning, which is why they focus on reducing their TTV. The discovery scorecard is a valuable tool that can help reduce the time it takes to deliver value to customers, ensuring they achieve success quickly.
Every week, the People.ai team has a discovery forecast call. They walk through the discovery scorecard for an account. They dive into the specifics, and review it together. Alex insisted that when it comes to cadence regarding reporting, it's really about customizing it for the team. You'll know the heartbeat or the operating rhythm of how your team works. The most important part is that you tailor the use of the discovery scorecard to your organization's or your team's unique heartbeat, whether it is to run it by the customers or something internally.
One of the accessories to make the adoption of the Discover Scorecard successful was creating a facilitation guide. Alex says that the time they get to do a deep-dive discovery with their customers is precious. Alex usually prefers a 90-minute meeting with the customers, but having that leeway for an elaborate call might not always be possible. Some customers bristle at the fact of giving 90 minutes of their day away. So sometimes the team gets just 60, and sometimes 30! Making the most of this time is crucial for them.
When they’re running a discovery, they recommend facilitating it as an open conversation. They then transfer that information into the scorecard. An important point Alex calls out is that the discovery scorecard is not meant to be how you interact or talk about it with the customer directly. It’s just a checklist of what you need to collect from them in the order that onboarding and implementation consultants think is the best way to approach it.
Everyone in the industry is focused on reducing churn.
Now, Alex says, their team has the ability and are equipped with the right tools because they’re quantifying discovery to understand how discovery and implementation directly impact churn.
With their ongoing deployments, they’ve seen a 35% decrease in the time spent on discovery. One-eighth of their customer base now has the scorecard. They’re able to create more precise upsell opportunities for the customer success team. This unified approach to discovery is proving to be helpful for them downstream.
Everyone across the company must be on the same page about why the discovery scorecard was built. From the beginning, People.ai was clear that the discovery scorecard was not meant to be about how they interacted with the customer directly.
The scorecard is on Salesforce. It's a native Salesforce application that they install. It has tracking mechanisms within it. They can see who modified the scorecard and track it at a granular level within each of the questions. There are ways to annotate it with notes.
Make sure that the tools you build on the platforms have these capabilities, or in cases where they don’t make sure that there is a workaround to figure out how to keep logs.
Documenting learning and information is an effort that needs to be recognized internally. While it depends on your company and the culture you prioritize, at People.ai, we’re given goals, and are trusted and enabled to figure out a way to get to those goals. So, we build, iterate, and believe in the solutions we’ve built. While we do, we’re also extremely open to feedback. Feedback significantly contributes to the results that the discovery scorecard shows.
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