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hey guys today we're here to discuss how to optimize the productivity of your team by choosing the right customer success software there's a so many options out there which one should you even see a demo which one should you skip once you see the demos how many should you see how should you be scoring each application what are you thinking about when you're seeing each of you should you prepare some questions in advance should they do a customized demo for you like what's going on how do you do this i invited gemma a video of customer success at chili piper to talk about how she and her team went through the process of selecting a customer success tool or software solution for their team in the aspiration of actually instead of throwing more bodies into taking care of customers how can they scale the team and so that was the premise we'll talk to her about the process what was the outcome what are our plans [Music] [Applause] [Music] gemma thank you so much for joining us you're very welcome thank you for having me i love all the content that comes out of the csm practice by the way guys gemma was super generous she's actually shared with us the template that they used when they looked at different customer success software applications so check the description below and today we're actually going to unfold how that looks like and how to use that template before we continue don't forget subscribe to our youtube channel and smash that notification button so that you don't miss out on any new videos gemma you've used an rfp as a process of qualifying which customer success software should be in the run before you booked any demos can you tell the audience that might be just joining the profession what is an rfp just in case they have never heard of that before the acronym rfp is request for proposal i came to learn about rfps early on on the vendor side because my experience really started in customer success for enterprise software and what happens is as an enterprise vendor you often get sent these things called rfps which are usually excel templates or google sheet templates some kind of online template where you have to go in and answer a number of different questions to prove that you are the best vendor for the client if you are choosing vendors they're actually really useful to use as a tool because what they allow you to do is say hey this is what we need these are our specific needs these are not just the features that you might have these are the things that we really need you go and tell us now how you do that you end up with a view of all the ways that the vendor's going to try and help you and if you can get that across a number of different vendors you then have a very easy way to compare them against each other so that when you're making the decision on who to purchase you're not just making it based on cost you're making it based on their suitability for your specific company and your specific company's needs essentially the first step that many larger organizations sometimes use first of all a level of playing field instead of choosing five out of ten different software to request for a demo they have a preliminary step they're actually sending it to everybody in the magic quadrant or any software that they think is they heard of but send them all the same requests for proposal and essentially it's the first step to just qualify who should we actually spend more time with to get actually the demo or potentially a poc it really levels the playing field and allows the smaller vendors sometimes to compete in situations that they might not have potentially qualified or perceived to be qualified it definitely levels the playing field gives more opportunity to vendors who maybe are less well-known in the industry to compete and compete fairly because a lot of software companies out there don't have the market share but it doesn't mean that they don't have a great solution for you but the other side is you can save time as an executive choosing software by putting an rfp out there because instead of trying to collate everybody's demo responses and capture bits of information through emails and so on and so forth you say hey like i've got a template that you need to fill out and i'm going to be assessing you and your competitors against the same school card here it puts the onus of getting all the descriptions together on the person who's trying to sell to you and saves you a lot of time in the long term gemma you mentioned that you sometimes use rfp to choose tools and solutions and sometimes not yeah you decide when to use that as a tool for you to accelerate or make a more comprehensive decision-making process around selecting a software solution if i was talking to you from a corporation large corporation then i'm probably always going to need to put an rfp in place and that's where you know the enterprise requests come from because there are big procurement teams behind these big corporations you have to ensure that all of the purchasing decisions are in favor of the business and are also fair i set my rfps though for for two big reasons the first one would be when i'm bringing on a new piece of software that hasn't been used before because you want to avoid software from being purchased and then just sitting on the shelf the second scenario is when the subscription cost is over a certain amount so for me as a rule of thumb if you're spending more than 20 grand per year on something then you should probably think about doing an rfp so you mentioned a few criterias that you put in the rfp and so besides the customer onboarding and potential the product roadmap what other criterias are you looking to include in the rfp typically uh that you could share with us if you liked what you've heard so far that's awesome more coming in a second here but in the meantime i want you to click that like button so that youtube knows that this is great content and you can start sharing it with others you should be thinking about not just the features you should be thinking about the jobs that you want your team to start doing with this software we actually started out by assessing all of these different jobs that we wanted the team to start doing and then we started writing these down so for instance i want the team to start onboarding customers faster but i know that there are a number of tasks that have to happen for progress during onboarding and some of those tasks customer base so this is how you were thinking about it right this is the platform the url the cost right and then your jobs to be done this is exactly what you mentioned how you're thinking customer onboarding your team was doing that before i'm sure right example is like how do we do things that they're not doing very well or do them better so onboarding customers faster for instance or ensuring customers receive the right email guidance when there are multiple journeys or tracking progress for customers when i have multiple projects at once like these are things that we need to start doing or start doing better and then by collating all of these kind of jobs that you want to start doing or start doing better you can boil them down into impact areas so these are the areas that you expect to see an improvement when the tool is successfully launched across your team we did a lot of discovery with the team we surveyed the team you know i had interviews with different people in the team people who've been there for a long time and i said like what's really difficult what do you wish you could do better where are you spending all your time and we actually came down to nine impact areas and if you scroll across you're going to see them customer onboarding product adoption customer health customer growth and then you've got churn prevention advocacy and sentiment driving efficiencies which is a fancy way of saying doing things faster saving time whilst doing things partnership which is how the vendor is going to be a good partner to us and then compatibility and this one's less for you to assess with a team and more for you to assess with whoever has been responsible for the current crm or google sheet or excel sheet that you have in place to manage your customers so for me understanding compatibility with our own tool set which included salesforce and marketo for instance you've uncovered all these categories is this the sheet you were actually sending the software vendor what are you asking them to do here then you're saying okay i want to improve on customer onboarding here are some examples of how we're looking to improve with your solution what are they supposed to be filling out here what did you get back i got different lengths of responses for sure what i gave every vendor was the opportunity to do an hour and a half long demo going through everything and then after the demo fill out these subscription pieces as well any questions that we had or anything that we asked them to elaborate on they had the opportunity to do that i didn't share this as one sheet so i had an individual sheet going out to the three different ones that we shortlisted yeah it was interesting because you see sometimes the response shows the willingness to work with you as well and shows the strength of the partnership just to go back to the process so that everybody's clear how you use this first you send this out in an email to all these vendors and did you request them to fill this out even before you scheduled a demo i gave them the option i said look here's what we're assessing you on we're going to give you an hour and a half on demo and then you'll have the opportunity to complete the sheet you know they had the option to complete it early if they wanted to how many did you send this to five six ten we shortlisted three vendors we researched a ton more but we shortlisted three vendors they were plan hat gainsight and churn zero and we selected them based on very specific things for chili pipers so chili piper our solution helps make meeting happens we work with customers going from smb all the way up to enterprise we use salesforce very heavily we needed a holistic solution so we needed to service that full range of customer which again is quite unique not all cs tools can help with free smb going up to enterprise some focus on on one or the other so those were our specific kind of shortlist criteria and that's how we got to the the three that we ran through the rfp okay if i could make a recommendation so that was your world for those who are watching that you're a startup or even you know high-growth company if you don't have your heart set on three or even five i would recommend build this out to your specifications and then send it out to more than even five you can send it out to 10 and ask them to send it back to you and then select the top three or five that you want to see the demos based on the responses because you might get some surprises you're not in a hurry to select or you don't have like a large team member that's already you know half of them worked with tool a that they have like this preference or they had a great experience in their different job with tool x and so if there's not like a hard-pressed decision on who to select and just like not validating the other ones i would actually recommend opening this up a little bit more i really love your categories by the way i have seen though each sentence like actually the whole table sort of transposed each sentence was its own row so then they could say okay i'm sure customers receive the right email guidance when their journey maps now i have feature description then onboarding customers faster by completing tasks now i have another field that's what i'm usually seeing and then based on the response for each one of our outcomes for what we want to see in each category they have a little bit more space to actually create the description most companies will do this in a workbook is that your experience too gemma you've received a ton of these yes it really depends on the company we just wanted to ensure that we could like hit these areas the important thing is not to start with the features description and then do yes no because what you don't know you don't know so there could be many ways to ensure that email guidance gets to right people when there are multiple journeys as opposed to saying i need this feature called journey orchestrator or something like that so it's really about giving the ability to set that level playing for by saying like i want this outcome you show me how to do it you should have the best practice behind your solution to tell me the best way to do it like i've come from using different tools i didn't select the tool i never used plan hat before i selected them this time around though because i felt they were the best fit for the specific needs of chili piper see how she writes these they're not about a feature or a function it's about an outcome that she wants to help drive for her team i want to call out something that gemma said that was also very very smart there's two ways to use rfps one your budget is not huge you're just trying to make sure that when they come into the demo they're actually showing you stuff that you want to see rfp is a great tool to just call it your thoughts have this brainstorming with your team ahead of time and then give the vendor a way to focus on things that are important for you or if you're a large enterprise you know you're gonna spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on this it's a big budget big to-do or a big risk you may want to do this rfp use it a little bit differently where you're actually sending this out to get more maybe like five or six seven software companies and then filter out who's gonna move towards the next step to your demo so there's two ways of using it filter it out to who would graduate to a demo just pick and choose ahead of time if you already have an inclination of who do you want to see a demo with and just give it to the vendor so they have a better sense of what to demo and be can be more successful yeah definitely and i think you need to approach the purchasing decision as a partnership decision you're not trying to catch out any vendors you're not trying to find things that they say they do and then realize that they don't do them you're just trying to give them the best opportunity to put themselves in the best light and only focus on the things that you care about before you send this out to all these three vendors did you have somebody else review the rfp and the categories you chose beyond your customer success team yes definitely i find that the earlier that you can involve stakeholders the better and you know not everybody is in the fortunate position like i am at chili piper where the whole company is really invested in customer success and when i was bored on we got products involved we got sales involved we got operations involved we got marketing involved those were the main ones and i also look after customer support so they were involved we have someone who works on advocacy and partnerships and and they were involved as well those were our main stakeholders i would say to anyone who is maybe at a smaller startup or one with less an understanding of customer success and the impact that it can have you really need to spend a lot of your time in explaining the benefits of proactive customer success and what that means so you had the rfp written had it validated and really leveraged the process to educate across functionally why this tool is important and make sure you got all the information you needed before you actually met with the vendors and then you sent it out to the vendors some of them returned it back to use ahead of the demo some of them just basically showed up and showed you the demo how they answered your rfp how did you score did you use a likert scale how did you use that on the template we just used like a simple out of five score for each impact area and then we ran a total across all the impact areas so we have nine impact areas we were marking each impact area out of five for each vendor so the maximum score that they could get was 45 and again this score is not taking into account the cost we did capture the cost in this sheet as well so that we could see a comparison but for us the school was more about the actual value that we were going to be seeing in these impact areas as opposed to the the upfront cost got it so you collated the sheet that came back from the vendor into one central spreadsheet five versus two if they're just written stuff up who makes that decision i brought in two people from my team two of my directors from my team i have one director who manages the csms and another director who manages all of our digital um customer success which is you know all of our programs non-human side of things and the three of us sat down and gave everything a rating we had some follow-up questions we had to get on another call but it became very apparent where each vendor was slightly stronger it was pretty close between between the three vendors gemma in summary can you give us the main do's and don'ts reflecting back on that process a couple of things i haven't mentioned i guess in the dues you know the rfp is great use the template you don't have to reinvent the wheel do your googles talk to your network go on g2 do your own reviews and then when you combine that with the needs of your team you'll get a much better understanding of how the template that i used will work better for you on the don'ts don't forget to involve your stakeholders as early as possible don't get tied up in a budget discussion don't base it on features alone focus on the jobs that you want the team to do it's actually good to have a variety in the market because it gives a lot of different companies with different business models different options so do take a moment to check out what's available consider leveraging the rfe not just to make sure that the demo session is effective but potentially opening it up to additional vendors that you may have not considered if you are nowhere near selecting a cs tool sign up for all of the the news feeds and and blogs that you can of all the cs tools out there like catalysts are amazing they're putting some amazing content out there inside it amazing content like get out there and see what is out there i would mention another source which is the customer success association's website they have a very comprehensive list of all the customer success software solutions another place to find out almost all the customer success solutions is maybe g2 crowd and then the final resource i wanted to recommend besides the template you guys are gonna download is uh we're gonna include a link to a blog that you wrote about this topic brilliant session today thank you so much gemma for sharing your experience and expertise around how to select a customer success software show solution and thank you for being so generous with your template all right guys i'll see you at the next video [Music] you