I was so pissed

The following is an excerpt from the upcoming book “Retention starts in Implementation.”

I was so pissed.

2 weeks into a new job, and I felt that I had made a terrible mistake.

I was sitting in a conference room, on a zoom call. I can’t forget the meeting

It was incredibly tense.

A bad zoom call.

A really bad zoom call.

This was my 3rd meeting of the week where we kept hearing the same themes:

• Overselling of future features during the sales phase

• Vague requirements that were open-ended, which resulted in features never being agreed as being complete.

• Customers are super frustrated as they are paying for their previous vendor while waiting to launch.

• The customer was rude to the CSM and the implementation resources.

To make matters worse, the development team refused to build many of the sales promised features, as they were very complex requests that went against what they were trying to build as a product.

So how did we fix this?

• First, an Internal Stakeholder meeting to align all teams - you can’t fix the external situation if the internal team does not agree on how to proceed. Getting buy-in from the CEO here was crucial to align all teams.

• Development team allocated to work on features - The development team was upset about the features sold because they were understaffed and still needed to build some crucial features. Contractors were brought in until open reqs were filled to close the gap on the oversold features.

• Hired a Project Manager to decouple CSM from feature development - The model used at the company was that a CSM would run strategy, and an implementation resource would be doing all of the configuration work. A project manager was hired to orchestrate the work to get what the customer and the internal product team needed.

  This also took the CSM out of the “bad news” role, which is not good for someone needing to get renewals.

• Stakeholder meetings with Customers once we knew conservative timelines - We could start talking to customers now that the internal teams were aligned. This was actually a roadshow, and the CEO was involved to show how serious the company was about fixing the issues.

• Dear Customer- Rudeness will not be tolerated. I explained to the offending parties that we knew how frustrating this situation was. That being said, if they wanted to vent, they had an open line to myself or the CEO. We would not tolerate the customer being rude to our employees.

• At these meetings, we agreed to a tightly defined set of MVP features that would be needed for launching and shutting down old vendor. This removed all the vague laundry lists of features and left us with what was necessary to transition to our product.

• Once the features were agreed to, the product team could estimate (and buffer) the amount of time needed to build the requested items. The customer then agreed to a Launch date that all could be comfortable with and allow for the proper transition from their previous vendor.

• Very important point - we agreed to no more talking about the past. Every previous meeting was littered with “you said this in presales!” We all had to agree that we were at a new point in the relationship and could only focus on moving forward.

I want to say that the above worked for every customer and that we had amazing launch parties with champagne, DJ’s and confetti. But, there were still many more tense meetings, a few missed deadlines, and very stressful conversations with one of the customers. But they all went live, the customers were never again rude to the team, and they eventually became case studies.

The CEO told me after the road trip that Implementation was the most challenging job at a startup. Being between the customer and a product being built while you are flying is not for everybody.

This book is about how to make it a little more manageable.

Note from Jeff:
I hope you enjoyed my first newsletter! I plan to have links from the week of things that caught my eye. I was traveling on vacation this week, so be on the lookout next week.