Fast Track to Excellence: Halving Onboarding Time While Achieving Over 80 NPS

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So let's start right on time for the morning.

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Welcome. This is track two.

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How are we feeling?

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I think it's not here,

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so we don't have to say I'm fired up,

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but we are fired up. I'm guessing.

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I'm Georgia, Pedensini.

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Part of the customer success team at

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Gainsite based in London,

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and I'm really, really happy to be part of track two.

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Today, we'll see really great speakers,

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very practical insights throughout

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the day, today and tomorrow.

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And just a few housekeeping, just a second.

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So if you're not familiar with the Pulse app,

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we are going to do after the presentation some Q&A.

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So on the main page of the app,

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you'll have track one, two and all the tracks.

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So whenever you click on track two,

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you'll have a chance to put questions in there.

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So make sure if you have any questions during the presentation,

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if there's something that is not clear or you want to explore further

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with our presenters and speakers,

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put the questions in, we're going to read them all at the end and address them.

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Of course, be present during the presentation.

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Switch your phones off, that would be great.

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But definitely engage.

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We're here to learn to share to network,

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so I would encourage you to ask any questions.

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There's no silly question at all.

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Okay.

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So let's get to what we're really here for.

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We're here to listen to our first speaker.

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We have Albion Firstland,

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who's head of customer success at Signicat.

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And he's going to tell us how he looked around in the organization

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and found out that some things could use some optimizing.

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And he's going to tell us how he did that

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and the amazing results he achieved on onboarding time and NPS.

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So can you please ask to have a big round of applause and welcome on stage.

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Albin.

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[APPLAUSE]

1:55

Hello everyone.

1:57

Thank you very much for that.

1:59

And now I was sitting here watching the screen.

2:02

I saw my picture here.

2:04

And I realized I do not look like that anymore.

2:08

In the last couple of days, or days,

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the last couple of years I had two kids.

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And when they asked me, can you please send me pictures?

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I was like, let's send the last picture I used.

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And I was preparing for this, watching myself in the mirror now,

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in the morning, I was like, oh, I look fairly

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a lot more rough than that now.

2:26

So two kids make that to you.

2:28

So the next time I will change picture, I think.

2:32

Anyways, I will talk about a project that we've been running at Signica.

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It's something that I'm really proud of.

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When we started it off, I did not think I would going to be that successful,

2:44

actually.

2:45

We'll get into that.

2:47

And I will take you a little bit through the journey, kind of how we tackle the

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challenge

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and how we walk through it over about a year's project.

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And hopefully you get some insight on how you can think and hopefully

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take some good ideas into your own organizations.

3:02

And to set the stage here, very shortly, we are

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a company selling digital identity solutions.

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So what is that, really?

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Well, we help customers onboard their own customers.

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So that is digital identities, onboarding flows, KYB, KYC,

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anti-money laundering solutions, and so forth, and also signing solutions.

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We can talk a lot about that.

3:31

But in the end, what it means is that we're selling APIs.

3:35

And selling APIs to customers means that they are getting an API.

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It gives them certain types of data that they can introduce into their own

3:44

flows.

3:45

They have a development team using it to develop their own stuff.

3:50

So it's a quite interesting type of onboarding.

3:52

I think it's different type than many of you.

3:55

So understanding that can be a good idea.

3:57

But a lot of your companies, at least I have learned a lot in this journey.

4:05

So I started to talk about what's onboarding.

4:10

And we actually had a very long onboarding journey of our customers.

4:14

So we signed customers, and then it takes a lot of time for them to go live.

4:18

And that is a little bit of the background here.

4:21

So it was clear, right?

4:23

There was a lot of discussions here.

4:25

It takes a long time by why is that?

4:27

But we realized it's causing a lot of problems for us.

4:31

So obviously, long onboarding is challenging for everyone.

4:35

It means that we have to manage a project for a long time.

4:39

It means that the customers have to run a project for a long time.

4:43

So it takes a long time for them to actually get value from your products.

4:46

And that can end up in a lot of different problems.

4:50

And managing these projects creates a lot of friction,

4:53

and you get into frictions with customers.

4:57

Running customer success, you need to make sure our customers get up and

5:00

running quickly and get value.

5:02

So you don't want friction, and this is something we saw.

5:08

And in the end, right, we're a company trying to make money.

5:11

We were losing out on a lot of money here.

5:14

So we had a setup where we charge customers, first a subscription fee,

5:19

a fixed fee.

5:20

They pay that when they actually get access to single services.

5:23

So transactions revenue.

5:25

And with a long onboarding, it means that we postpone our revenue.

5:28

And we really want to make money.

5:30

So we just thought it's a lot of money is waiting on the table here.

5:33

And it's waiting on the table while people are frustrated,

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and then it takes a long time.

5:36

So we needed that.

5:38

It was kind of a truth in the company.

5:41

It was a truth that the customer is the one.

5:44

They have their own development cycles.

5:46

They have their own QA.

5:47

They have their own decision trees.

5:49

So it's all up to the customer.

5:52

We can't do anything about it.

5:53

That was a lot of what people were saying, right?

5:55

Like, we can't do much.

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We can try to optimize, but in the end, it's all up to the customer.

6:00

So we don't think we can do much here.

6:02

But we wanted to challenge this.

6:05

Even though most of us actually thought this is probably the biggest factor.

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But we learned that it maybe wasn't.

6:14

So that was kind of the place where we got started.

6:19

And we have a way of working, you see, to get that I really appreciate.

6:25

And that is for the whole company, we decide on specific projects

6:31

that are essential.

6:33

So we only run a couple of main projects per year.

6:37

And these are deeply ingrained in the entire company.

6:41

So this is something that I believe in strongly.

6:44

Like, decide on a couple of projects for the entire company, focus on those.

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It's too often, and I think, especially in customer success, we want a lot.

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We start a lot of projects.

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We kind of do it whole-- like, half measure.

6:56

We never finish it.

6:58

We get stuck.

6:58

Product doesn't want to build that.

7:00

They don't want to do that.

7:02

We get stuck always.

7:04

And running it this way actually makes a lot of sense.

7:07

So we have this way.

7:09

So we can initiative.

7:10

So we run two to four strategic projects globally.

7:13

So we argued for this.

7:16

We pushed it in.

7:16

And it was one of the top projects.

7:18

So we decided to run with this.

7:21

And this means that we have a clear way of doing it.

7:24

So we have a governance structure.

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How we run this project.

7:27

We have spherical groups.

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So that means that we have a management team joining in on these calls.

7:33

So they can look a little bit different depending on the meetings.

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But we have a very strong ingrained way of working.

7:40

We have a recurring meetings.

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It's a lot of demands on these projects.

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Because of course, in our project, when you have the CEO and even some of the

7:48

owners

7:48

into these dare go meetings, there's a lot of pressure.

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You have to do it well.

7:52

And you will get the resources you need for these things.

7:58

So you need a project plan.

8:00

And with this, you'll see--

8:02

we always bring in these as company objectives.

8:05

And we always bring it in as key--

8:06

we always need key measurements.

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And this is a key measurement that we set up for the whole company then.

8:12

So this project is running to improve these things.

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If it's so important that we run as a main project, it also needs the KPIs.

8:18

That is so essential for the entire company.

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So we put them into the company objectives.

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And we make it really transparent.

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So we talk about it to the entire company.

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So everyone is aware of this.

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And I think this is really essential.

8:31

Because when you run a project like changing the onboarding,

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it doesn't come down to the M's or whatever team work on it.

8:38

They can only do so much.

8:40

But what do they do?

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Well, they get a customer.

8:43

The contract's all assigned.

8:44

Expectations is there.

8:46

They already have set the way of delivering.

8:48

And they already have a platform to deliver on.

8:50

So changing their way of doing it is like you can only do small, small,

8:54

incremental changes.

8:56

But what we thought is like we probably need to do something bigger.

8:58

So we have to get product in there.

9:00

We have to get commitments from them.

9:02

We have to get commitments from a sales organization.

9:05

And we need to probably make some large changes here.

9:08

So we knew this.

9:11

And for us, we had the CEO and so forth.

9:17

We also had product tech and the whole CS organization part of it.

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And we actually also got support from our owners who put in resources to help.

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So we got enough resources to actually make real changes to this.

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We also knew it's part of the onboarding journey.

9:34

So we have to think, understand this really well.

9:36

Because we had this truth, right?

9:39

And we had way too little knowledge.

9:40

So the start was really we have to figure out what can we do and where are we?

9:45

And we need to get the steering committee for this project.

9:50

And we have a lot of systems.

9:52

We are acquiring a lot of companies.

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So that means that we have a lot of systems and a lot of ways of doing things.

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And we are coordinating them.

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But it's really important that we get a more transparent overview of the

10:04

projects and

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the customers.

10:05

So we knew that was going to be part of this.

10:07

So jumping into this, we started to look at it.

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And we started to look at it from this simplest, most possible way, right?

10:14

What is the main, main, high level milestones?

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Well, we get a sign from a customer.

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So that is really the start of the customer journey, at least as a customer.

10:27

We have the kick off with the customer.

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We've kick started project.

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We have the cash date.

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That is when the customer have access to everything.

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So we can actually start shorting them for subscription revenue.

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And then value date is when the customer start using us and

10:39

getting any value from us.

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And that is also the time where we start making most of the money.

10:43

So these are really high level milestones.

10:45

But we really quickly understood that we are not measuring this well enough.

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We don't really know exactly what's going a good way.

10:54

And when we also start deep diving into it, we have a lot of metrics actually.

10:58

But the metrics have kind of crumbled.

11:01

So Celica is a very quick growth company.

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So we're growing about 40% a year.

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And when you do that, everyone's just holding on, right?

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You're just trying to survive growth, do what you do.

11:11

And then you're, so that is what happened here.

11:13

And the metrics really show that, like we introduced metrics,

11:16

then everything changed in the company.

11:18

And the metrics actually didn't make much sense anymore.

11:21

So when we analyzed it, we thought, well, we have to rethink all the metrics as

11:26

well.

11:27

So this was a big challenge for us, but we had one metric, right?

11:30

And that was from signing to getting value, 108 days.

11:35

That's not very good.

11:37

And we thought, well, it is complex solutions.

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We deliver APIs to big companies.

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They have to run a development project and so on.

11:47

So yeah, it will probably take a while, right?

11:49

But it still felt this is a long time.

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And it's like almost a half a year where we don't making a lot of money.

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And a lot of things can happen in a half a year.

12:00

Well, you all know that working with customer success.

12:02

You have a project.

12:03

Someone leaves at the customer.

12:04

And then everything is just falling apart, right?

12:07

You don't want that being the case.

12:09

So this was kind of the outlook.

12:12

We jumped into it.

12:12

We started to dig into this.

12:14

And we started to do a lot of analysis manually.

12:18

Because we didn't feel like the metrics were showing manually and analyze them.

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So we didn't use all these smart tools,

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APIs, or optimization of the data from the start.

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I think this is actually a really good lesson before you decide on exact

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definitions.

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Do a lot of work with the data manually.

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You sit in that excel sheet and each one go through the milestone,

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look at the data, deep dive and outliers.

12:44

And for me, especially to really understand what do we want to measure,

12:48

how are we supposed to measure it, and how can we then introduce something that

12:51

actually makes sense in where we are today.

12:54

So we brought it down to a little bit deeper than the previous picture, right?

13:00

There is that we have this big chunk, which is the onboarding.

13:03

There's a lot of things going on there.

13:04

We don't want to deep dive in that yet.

13:06

There's so much in what actually happens from kick off with the whole project

13:10

and so on.

13:12

But we knew a few things, right?

13:14

We knew that there is this gap between signing and kicking off.

13:19

What is going on there?

13:21

That is an obvious waste of time, right?

13:23

And then we had waiting on customers to go live.

13:28

And here we, this was really, everything is done because if we can get us play

13:34

go,

13:34

they don't do it, they're wait.

13:36

So that is an interesting period.

13:37

But the first thing was obvious here is the waiting time for the kick off,

13:43

the middle of the onboarding.

13:46

So this was kind of the first idea.

13:48

And what do we realize here?

13:50

Well, it's not.

13:53

Our real truth is not the full truth, right?

13:55

That the customer is the sole thing.

13:57

It was completely obvious to us that we are causing some delays.

14:02

How much?

14:03

All that can be argued and we'll see some of that moving forward.

14:06

But it was clear, right, that we are causing delays because we have this

14:09

waiting times.

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The customer signs, they're waiting on administrative tasks on our end,

14:15

and then the onboarding teams looks at us as always.

14:17

They say, oh, we didn't know about this.

14:19

Well, now we have to plan for this.

14:21

And we were causing delays by just not giving them clear clarity.

14:25

So that was obvious.

14:27

We still didn't understand the full picture and average.

14:31

And what we saw was average time is very long.

14:35

Medium is much better, actually.

14:37

And why was that?

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Well, there was a lot of really big outliers pulling up the average.

14:41

So we knew that there is areas where it's good and the areas that are worse.

14:45

Often, we caused them to have low urgency because we couldn't give them clarity

14:52

We had to find the resources.

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We all set a contract to say, well, you pay when you actually have access,

14:57

and then you pay when you go live.

14:58

So they had no real urgency to go live either.

15:02

They could postpone it, and they could postpone pay.

15:05

So the first thing we wanted to do, the first step of this project was,

15:08

OK, we need to get revenue in earlier.

15:10

That was the whole idea.

15:12

But how do you do that?

15:13

And revenue earlier here, we're focusing solely on the subscription revenue,

15:16

the fixed get more urgency.

15:20

So we really wanted-- and you can understand this, right?

15:24

You cannot have a fixed fee that is not paying early

15:27

if you can't give them clarity.

15:30

That doesn't work.

15:31

So we have to change that.

15:33

So that was one of the main things.

15:34

And we wanted clear, contracted cash dates so that they start paying from a set

15:42

date.

15:42

And this was reasonable because we didn't have any onboarding fee.

15:45

We didn't want to charge them anything onboarding.

15:47

We will help them do the whole thing.

15:49

But we need you to start paying when you sign the contract.

15:52

So we actually wanted them to sign the contract, start paying subscription fee

15:56

immediately.

15:57

How do you get there from-- you need a clear timeline.

16:01

You need a very transparent setup with the customer to be able to get this

16:05

without having a lot of new friction.

16:09

And we can't have any queue.

16:11

So we have to really be able to prepare, actually before sign,

16:15

and have the customers be prepared before sign

16:17

so that we can kick-start it immediately.

16:19

We can't have waiting times.

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So if it's going to pay subscription, we have to start the project immediately.

16:24

Otherwise, it will not work.

16:26

And to be able to get there, we need to rethink how we work.

16:30

And we need to coordinate our efforts much, much more.

16:33

So this was really the action plan for the beginning.

16:36

How do we do this?

16:37

And a few things we did.

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So we reorganized the onboarding function.

16:43

This was a team that was grouped into another team from the beginning.

16:47

So there was a large customer success team with onboarding managers,

16:51

customer success managers, and so on.

16:52

The leader, Valentine, my best, and he's doing a great job.

16:55

So shout out to him.

16:57

And he's been really focusing on the onboarding.

17:00

How can we get the onboarding to run smoothly and not have to focus

17:04

on all the other customer success parts?

17:08

And we also staffed up.

17:10

We need more people so we don't have any way in life.

17:12

We have to get started.

17:13

It's worth investing in to get going, especially if we can get them to pay.

17:18

We also have much better communication with finance

17:22

and administrative parts because we do really large complex deals.

17:27

That needs a lot of administration around it.

17:29

But instead of having that as a linger way of working,

17:32

we want to do a circular or at least doing things at the same time, right?

17:37

They don't have to do the admin before we start.

17:39

We can start while they do it.

17:41

And we really want to do that to reduce the date.

17:46

Then when we are there, we have to update the contract.

17:48

So the contract has to change.

17:49

The definition of when they pay at the change.

17:52

So we changed that.

17:53

But subscription will be charged as soon as you sign.

17:56

So that is a change that we did.

17:59

And we, of course, had to try to give the customer to be prepared much earlier

18:05

so that they can start scheduling their work from the start.

18:09

And we had to guarantee you start date, right?

18:12

They have to be picked up instantly.

18:14

And yeah, that's what it says.

18:18

So we did all these things and we actually managed to get all these down to

18:23

zero.

18:24

So we got versus no waiting on administrative tasks.

18:29

So that was completely gone.

18:31

And we were then able to really kick things up immediately when they signed.

18:37

So this opened up the door for this to make this possible.

18:42

And our time to cash quickly went to zero.

18:45

So this is really, really cool to see.

18:47

I'm going to be happy about it.

18:49

Is it reasonable that we pay before we can use it and so on?

18:52

But we actually haven't run into a lot of challenges.

18:55

They actually prefer this many overcast.

18:57

And instead of paying a big onboarding fee, they start paying for the solution.

19:01

And it's a lot up to them how quickly they can go live because we are there and

19:05

ready.

19:07

Cool.

19:07

And we saw this in the metrics, right?

19:09

So it went to zero very quickly.

19:12

And of course, this made us quite a lot more money.

19:16

And you will see that some of the other kind of initiatives that were impacted

19:21

by this

19:22

in itself.

19:23

Why is it minus two?

19:24

You may have a question.

19:26

Making money before design, that sounds pretty good.

19:28

Well, we have certain types of contract that I will pull it down.

19:33

So we actually have negative plan to cash, which is fairly good.

19:39

So the trend here was really good.

19:40

And there was a good, strictly forward.

19:43

And at this point, we really started to learn about and understand what's going

19:48

on.

19:48

We actually understand our metrics.

19:50

We understand what's going on.

19:51

We understand where the problem is.

19:53

And we also, during this early stage, improved our onboarding service.

19:59

So we get much more input from customers after the onboard, so we can get

20:02

actually

20:02

their perspective of it.

20:04

And I think customers, if they're done a big onboarding project, that's

20:07

probably the best

20:10

place to survey them.

20:14

They're a new customer.

20:15

They just have this huge interaction with you.

20:18

They are new.

20:19

Now they're probably open to your answer survey.

20:21

And so they're much more likely to give you more input early.

20:24

And then in the future, they will say, like, we don't want this MPS service.

20:27

Every quarter can please stop sending them, right?

20:29

But getting a little bit more in the early stage is good.

20:32

And if a customer loves you early, it's much easier to keep them.

20:37

Cool.

20:39

We did a lot of interviews, actually, with outliers.

20:41

The ones that are actually really long that we don't understand.

20:44

Spent a lot of time in understanding them.

20:46

And we felt now that we're ready for stage two of the project, which is getting

20:50

the customers

20:51

live faster.

20:52

So to move over to how can we get transactions to run early, getting the

20:56

customers finished

20:57

early, because this will really make the biggest shift.

21:01

And what we then realized was that what we've already done here made a huge

21:06

difference,

21:07

right?

21:09

And we already saw that the average time to value were now 100 days.

21:14

So we went from 188 to 100 days just by all these other stuff.

21:20

So already, just kind of lag in the beginning, being more clear, getting the

21:24

customers to

21:24

pay early, made a huge improvement.

21:29

So it was more than 40% improvement of time to value already.

21:33

But at a certain part of this, so let's continue with this.

21:37

We saw that there is still a lot of confusion.

21:42

So there was like, we have a lot of products.

21:44

They're very techy.

21:45

There's quite a lot of prerequisites, actually.

21:47

So what the customer have to be prepared to do before they can use it.

21:51

So that was a problem.

21:52

Many customers didn't understand what they should have prepared long ago, right

21:56

Or should have prepared already when they signed.

22:00

And we were lacking real-time insights.

22:04

We didn't see what was going on by some administ stuff that forces us to wait

22:08

with pushing

22:09

live.

22:10

And we have to do something about this.

22:14

And yeah, we were lacking follow-up.

22:17

Like we were.

22:18

It was off, then we just did onboarding.

22:20

Customers are waiting to go live.

22:22

And then we just, yeah, we didn't follow up closely enough.

22:24

So sometimes we even forgot.

22:27

Customers forgot to go live.

22:28

That's not good.

22:31

And yeah, we saw these things.

22:33

So let's continue this project.

22:35

Let's run into the next part of it.

22:38

And now we saw, we're still lacking some understanding.

22:40

We are lacking insight.

22:41

We need now to do doing all manual stuff.

22:43

We need to get real-time.

22:45

We need to get even higher urgency.

22:48

Even though we saw that this is already partially sold because they're paying

22:52

and now they

22:53

are more incentives to move.

22:57

But we also saw we have scope creeps in the project so this changey scope while

23:03

you onboard

23:04

them.

23:05

It just becomes planning even though that was also much better now when we had

23:07

set dates

23:08

already with the sign.

23:10

Cool.

23:11

So we knew that there were key areas for this second part.

23:14

So onboarding your new product documentation and getting real-time data.

23:18

And we want to start using automation much more.

23:22

And so, yeah, and we changed the scope of it and we did something like this.

23:30

We were actually very hesitant.

23:32

We already made some big improvements.

23:34

We're scared of setting it really.

23:37

That was a little bit weak target now looking back because we managed a bit

23:42

more.

23:43

And this was just an example.

23:45

Okay, we're going to start this new project.

23:47

This is a scope for this second phase of the project.

23:50

We'll do it like this, right?

23:51

We have a scope, main things.

23:53

And then we have delivering, reviewing how everything was going, what are

23:57

delivered.

23:58

And we have different owners for the different parts.

24:00

And then we changed it, of course.

24:01

But this was just one way of just every week checking in, right?

24:06

So one thing we built was dashboards.

24:10

So we actually created two dashboards with two different purposes.

24:15

But we wanted everyone to get real-time data on our own boards.

24:20

We're really making it transparent because then we can also get commitments and

24:25

get other

24:25

people to start thinking about this.

24:27

If you show a metric enough times, people start thinking about improvements and

24:30

they

24:31

will run into stuff that can give you improvements.

24:34

So we really made a kind of deep dive dashboard in Gainsite where onboarding

24:38

managers, CSAMs,

24:39

and everyone can really deep dive into the metrics and understand much more.

24:43

And then we added it to our company, Y Dashboard.

24:46

So everyone in the company could track the goals and track the--

24:49

Yeah, I mean, if anyone is really interested about this, I'm more than happy to

24:54

show you

24:54

the dashboards afterwards to someone and discuss it.

24:57

But what you want to show and who you're showing it to.

25:01

But this was something that for us made a lot of sense, right?

25:03

We wanted to be able to filter all the graphs with what peer is, what sales

25:09

team it is,

25:10

because we saw that there's discrepancies right?

25:12

Certain countries, well, expectations is completely off with the customers,

25:15

maybe.

25:16

Well, we saw that Y is onboarding much longer in these markets than others.

25:20

These salespeople actually closed deals that are much longer.

25:23

We saw those things, segments, different types of segments, big customers,

25:26

small customers,

25:27

and so on.

25:28

So we tried to be able to filter it, and we wanted to highlight main metrics to

25:33

see how

25:34

it's progressing.

25:35

And we had some graphs and some tables to deep dive in this.

25:39

So I will not go into more detail on that.

25:42

What we also did was now we are deep, realized, well, we have 16,000 customers,

25:48

we have different

25:48

types of onboarding journeys for different types of customers and different

25:52

types of

25:53

products.

25:54

But we wanted to make a kind of deep dives into this.

25:56

So what we did, and it's not an idea that you're going to read all of this.

26:00

That's not the purpose of it, because that is too small.

26:03

But this is how we started to map things, right?

26:05

We just had all the stakeholders for these types of phone warnings, and what do

26:08

everyone

26:09

do and what order do we do it and how can we improve this.

26:12

This was extremely helpful, actually, because what we quickly realized when we

26:16

're doing

26:17

this is many of the stakeholders have no idea what the others stakeholders are

26:21

doing, and

26:22

that can easily run into problems, right?

26:24

So nobody managed to work on the project, but they don't know maybe what the

26:27

sales people

26:28

are doing on their side, on the same customer.

26:31

So we tried to map this with all the stakeholders and also introduced the lane

26:36

only for automation.

26:37

So what is the automation?

26:39

This was actually really, really useful.

26:43

And we did a lot of changes here, but we really wanted to get rid of this, as I

26:51

said,

26:52

before, like this path where you do everything in order, right?

26:57

Why are you doing it?

26:58

Very often you have a process like this is doing, this needs to be done, then

27:02

this,

27:03

then this, and then this, and then you hand it over to that person who does

27:06

that.

27:07

And very often that's really inefficient.

27:10

You can actually do many of these a lot in this process.

27:13

We exchanged on boarding and made better material for customers so they could

27:16

actually be really

27:17

prepared when they were in their sales process.

27:20

We introduced them to it.

27:21

We showed them how to, how we will do it, what will be the path for them.

27:26

So they were really in tune with what's going on.

27:29

So this was, and who is responsible for what things.

27:34

So this was something that actually helped a lot and helped sales a lot.

27:39

We introduced much better documentation.

27:40

So we did this with product and we actually introduced new parts of the

27:44

documentation.

27:45

We want customers to be, to the extent possible, self-serviceable.

27:49

We want them to do most of their work.

27:51

They want to do their work.

27:52

I mean, they are developers sitting there coding really try to avoid that.

27:56

So you need to give them tools and instructions that are clear.

27:59

So we introduced a lot of new things here to make it crystal clear so we can't

28:05

get around

28:06

it.

28:07

Another huge thing was we actually changed the way we work with our customers.

28:13

So before we did, they had all their expectations, they had their plans on how

28:19

they are going

28:20

to use these APIs and so on.

28:22

And they waited a little bit.

28:23

We get a kick off with them and we run a project with them.

28:26

And we're doing testing with them.

28:28

They realized, oh, this is not what we expected.

28:30

That's really bad.

28:31

So what we changed was you should do all the testing before sign.

28:35

So here is access, test it.

28:38

We almost mandate all customers doing the sales process to test all their stuff

28:42

So half of the onboarding was done.

28:43

Their developer already coded the test that it, run it, then they buy it, then

28:48

the onboarding

28:48

jumps in, just fixes a few things.

28:51

And then it's done way better.

28:53

And their expectations were never off because they tested it.

28:56

So they couldn't have the wrong expectations.

28:58

So this was a huge, huge change.

29:00

And another thing here is, of course, transparency.

29:08

I mean, we have a lot of systems.

29:10

A lot of teams, some parties are large.

29:12

We have project management tools.

29:14

We have Slack.

29:16

We have our data platforms.

29:18

We have the CRMs and so on.

29:21

And this is hard, right?

29:22

Because these customers, many of them have run projects while being a customer.

29:26

So they have an onboarding project.

29:28

Then they have already established products that they do support on.

29:31

There's a sales process at the same time.

29:34

Because we work with global customers.

29:35

So often, there's many things going on.

29:38

And we need to get people to understand what is going on here and who will--

29:43

so you don't run into the wrong problem.

29:44

Because customers are confused often, especially if you don't make it easy for

29:48

them.

29:49

But you run an onboarding project.

29:50

And suddenly, they start emailing support.

29:53

And the support team don't know that there's an onboarding going.

29:55

So they start helping them with an integration.

29:58

And then the onboarding is completely confused, right?

30:00

So giving everyone access to just look at the customer.

30:03

These are the projects ongoing.

30:05

This is what's going on.

30:06

It's helped a lot here to ensure that we are transparent and under CSAMs, sales

30:10

knows.

30:11

Everyone knows what are the projects.

30:14

Because otherwise, you can get into a real haystack.

30:17

So we did this.

30:17

And we really used the game site in the center, pulled all the data from all

30:21

systems in there,

30:22

get an overview, see what's going on in one place, really have made a huge

30:26

difference

30:27

for us.

30:28

Yeah.

30:29

So that's kind of what I talk about, right?

30:33

So we got it all into the game site.

30:35

We made custom roles for the right people.

30:39

So they saw the right things.

30:42

Made metrics and data available.

30:46

We-- let's see.

30:50

Yeah, we trained people and really got the projects clarified in the bottom

30:56

place.

30:56

So this was-- yeah, really how we thought about it at this point.

31:03

We did a lot of automation.

31:05

So I'll not mention all of it.

31:07

But if you think about it in your own work, you can do quite a lot of alerts.

31:12

So we started to alert everyone internally.

31:14

When things are creeping away from the goals, when we are delayed, we start to

31:19

doing alerts.

31:20

And also, we actually start to do alerts to customers.

31:23

Now you are delayed.

31:24

Or you are delayed.

31:26

Just keep them up to date.

31:28

Very often, the customer's decision-makers don't know what the products go on.

31:32

So when the customer is delaying everything, we just sent a quick alert to the

31:36

owners at

31:37

the customer side and said, well, you are delayed.

31:39

You are postponing this due to these things.

31:41

Yeah, so you're aware of it.

31:43

And then, soundly, the customer's coming back.

31:45

What are we delaying it?

31:46

I can't happen, right?

31:47

And then we get to a place where you can actually move forward.

31:51

We also-- it's now leveraging our own KVAB process.

31:55

So when you get a customer, you kind of-- who the customer is, the data about

31:59

the customer,

32:00

you verify their data and so on.

32:02

So that's part of what we're selling, right?

32:04

Pulling the right data and the right time to verify the customer who's date.

32:07

Say they are the addresses are correct.

32:09

This is the contact information.

32:10

These are the signatory, right people and so on.

32:13

All this data we have in our own products.

32:16

So pulling that data and adding it into our CRM is really useful.

32:19

So we always keep our data updated, automatic, our own data.

32:23

So when a customer leaves, our contact leaves, we automatically know about it

32:28

and we get

32:28

a notice that this person I left our customer and they are then deactivated in

32:34

the CRM and

32:34

we get a task to find a new contact.

32:37

You can do that by just pinging someone's email.

32:39

You don't send them email, you just ping them and see if the email is-- a

32:42

simple mundane

32:42

task, doing a lot of things here and I am more than happy to talk about it but

32:46

I think

32:46

it's very specific for us.

32:51

And yeah, we really want to create deep insights to our stakeholders.

32:57

We did automatic reporting.

32:59

So reporting is to the sales teams, to the CSMs.

33:02

This is like where we are with all our customers.

33:04

This is where you are with your customers as sales reps.

33:07

They can see their own customers progress.

33:10

And we just automated this and all the conchraming where we expect sales to do

33:14

things and so

33:15

on.

33:16

So that was really useful.

33:17

But we also did it for our QBRs and so on.

33:19

So we automated a report from GainSight to be able to run presentation smoothly

33:24

Cool.

33:25

I need to speed up here.

33:26

I realize I talked too much, sorry for that.

33:29

But end results then.

33:30

So where are we now?

33:32

Zero still is.

33:33

We have time to value now 42 days.

33:36

So we moved from hundreds to the day, the day and everything was not really the

33:41

case,

33:41

right?

33:42

And if we look at the time to value development, we can see that the average

33:47

over the years

33:48

here has, by the average is higher than medium but that's expected, right?

33:51

A huge international bank will need a little bit of time to go live.

33:55

Onboarding net promoter score.

33:58

This is, I mean, presentation is at 80.

34:00

It's fluctuating sadly.

34:01

So it's 73 last week.

34:04

Now it's 76.

34:05

So we're almost at 80.

34:08

But it really has.

34:09

So it really is a successful case where we're not charging them sooner.

34:14

They're paying much more and they're much, much more happy.

34:18

And you can understand it, right?

34:19

If you buy something, you want to use it and you want it to be simple.

34:22

If it takes a hundred 88 days, it's not simple, right?

34:28

And this is something I'm mostly proud of.

34:32

We are really seeing that there's initiatives at all times here.

34:35

New things popping up from all the teams.

34:37

Product teams are reaching out.

34:38

We introduced this new solution.

34:40

Can't you use it?

34:42

Essential because in our growth rate, we have to do iterative changes all the

34:48

time.

34:49

And yeah, we're doing a lot of cool things at the moment.

34:52

We're trying to introduce AI.

34:54

As they talked about this morning, right, that's a new thing.

34:56

I think that's, now we're now in a place where we can use AI.

34:59

We understand the metrics.

35:00

We understand a year ago, we were not there because we didn't even understand

35:04

our own metrics,

35:04

right?

35:05

Well enough.

35:06

Now we are in a place where we can do that.

35:07

So that's pretty cool.

35:09

And the old truth in the company is that no one ever blames the customer

35:12

anymore.

35:13

So that's it.

35:14

Thank you very much.

35:15

And let's go to the questions.

35:16

Thank you so much.

35:17

I loved how you put both revenue generation and customer centric cost.

35:24

I loved how you put both revenue generation and customer centric perspective to

35:31

the project.

35:32

I loved how you challenged the status quo internally.

35:35

Now, I know we have five minutes or so.

35:38

So let's go through the Q&A because I know we do have a few questions and I'm

35:41

going to

35:42

pull it up here as well.

35:47

Perfect.

35:50

So all these questions, feel free to also connect with Alvin later, find him,

35:58

ask all

35:58

the questions you want.

36:00

But let's start from the first one then.

36:02

By preparing everything, like making sure the customer is 100% ready, did you

36:06

not negatively

36:07

impact the length of the sales cycle?

36:10

Good question.

36:11

I mean, that was, I mean, it's actually completely opposite because before

36:16

there was a lot of

36:17

uncertainty.

36:18

The selling you don't want uncertainty.

36:20

The customers don't want any uncertainty.

36:21

They want to know what happens when we sign.

36:24

And it was a lot of uncertainty before.

36:26

So with all this clarity, it's actually been easier to sell.

36:30

The customers now know the onboarding.

36:32

They know exactly what's going to happen.

36:33

It's no unclear.

36:34

They know the dates.

36:35

So if they're so much easier to sell.

36:37

Also training the salespeople in what happens on the sign made them better at

36:41

arguing what's

36:42

going to happen.

36:43

So we've seen a lot of improvements in selling.

36:45

It's actually, yeah, it's really easy.

36:49

And we don't have to do much because what we have done is better documentation.

36:54

Telling the customer, test yourself.

36:57

You have your developers.

36:59

Let them test it.

37:00

It's better if they test it before you sign because then you know that you're

37:02

buying what

37:02

you actually don't understand.

37:03

The API is trying to buy.

37:05

So let them test it and then sell it.

37:08

And it's been actually really smooth and faster.

37:12

So we haven't measured.

37:16

We have another question on the onboarding team.

37:19

To what extent does the onboarding team get involved in the pre-sills process?

37:23

And I think you just touched on it.

37:25

And what impact does it have on, for example, clarity of scope, preparedness of

37:28

customers

37:29

when they sign?

37:32

Also good question.

37:33

I mean, for, I would say, like 90% of all the deals we sell, the onboarding

37:39

team is not

37:40

involved at all, actually.

37:42

So we have a clear process.

37:43

It's outlined.

37:44

The customer can test it.

37:46

We have some pre-sills people that can help them with some technical questions

37:48

so they

37:49

can really test it well.

37:50

But the onboarding people doesn't have to be there.

37:53

So they actually jump in and sign.

37:55

They pop up the project for them.

37:57

They take it and they start running with it.

37:59

Then we have some areas with certain projects that's quite complex where we

38:03

have a professional

38:05

service team and also some of the senior onboarding managers sometimes joining

38:09

into the last

38:09

phases, especially that really calls for the customers deep dive into it.

38:13

So we also understand the full scope of it and so on.

38:15

So it depends on what types of customer group, but it's only, I would say, top

38:20

10% or even

38:21

5% where we really do that.

38:24

Good.

38:25

Thank you.

38:26

Time for one last question.

38:29

And let's go on the CS teams now.

38:30

And I think this is a question that everybody has on their mind.

38:34

So we're talking about onboarding and CS teams.

38:37

So how have you managed to hand off from onboarding to CS?

38:41

Did you need to do anything to smooth handovers in process?

38:45

What was the pull?

38:46

Really good question as well.

38:47

So when it comes to having over things, that's always a really big problem.

38:54

So what we do is that we want to, so it's even more likely that the CSM

38:58

actually join

38:59

in the sales process than the onboarding team.

39:01

So the CSM starts to build a little bit of relationship and the end of the

39:04

sales process,

39:05

and what's going on, understand the grander scope of it.

39:09

And they are also the ones that knows relationships really well.

39:12

Technical side, well CSM build relationships.

39:14

In relationships you should build from the start if you can, right?

39:17

So we get the CSM in Earth.

39:19

So they are part of the kickoff meeting.

39:21

They follow along on some of the emails.

39:23

And then there is not really any big handover because they always been kind of

39:29

in the group

39:29

from the start, even if their onboarding manager runs it.

39:32

So we try to not have any real handovers there.

39:36

We just want to see CSM's to know what's going on all the way through the

39:38

project from

39:39

the start.

39:40

So that's how we think about it.

39:42

Lovely.

39:43

So all these questions, we're going to ask Albin to jump in the community and

39:47

see if

39:47

we can tackle a few of them.

39:49

It's a very interesting one on time to value, time to cash, time to order and

39:53

all those

39:54

sort of things.

39:55

So also note that this presentation in slides and the audio of the presentation

40:00

, plus all

40:01

the other questions in the community.

40:03

So make sure you're connecting to the community and please let's have another

40:07

round of applause

40:08

for this wonderful presentation.

40:09

Thank you everyone.

40:10

Thank you.

40:11

[Applause]

40:12

Thank you.

40:13

(applause)

40:15

(audience clapping)