How do you present the Proposal in Customer Language

Disclaimer: I have been writing the blogs in the style of story telling based on real incidents but with some fiction added to emphasize the message. Hence I request not to make any conclusions to derive facts based on the posts in these blogs. 

I made many business development sessions and one of the challenges was to convince the Customer on why their organization must go for a ERP, a BI Solution or even an upgrade to better version. In a typical Presales mode, I used to present what are all the great features the software has and believed the customer would be convinced for sure.

I was doing a similar presentation to a matured Customer who is in top 10 of the Fortune 100 Conglomerates. The customer Organization was known to be the process oriented and organization full of knowledgeable stakeholders. My first challenge was there when the customer stopped my presentation and asked me a simple question.

Why should I upgrade my current ERP to the latest version? I just want the answer to this and I can convince my leadership for the rest.

I politely responded that this was exactly what I was trying to do through explaining the great features that are added to the new version

He said “we can hear this from any consulting organization. And in fact, I can go through the literature of this Product vendor in their web site to understand what are all new in the Software.”

I was confused. “Dear X, You will be having more user friendly screens, parameter based navigations, new functionalities to support some of your activities for which you might be doing customizations. They are all going to make your life much better”

“At what cost?” Now he came to the point.

“It costs …. USD but I am sure that helps you a lot”

‘This is English, can I have another session where you will explain me on what will be my investment and what will be my cost or Productivity benefits if I make this migration?”

“Sure Mr. X. I will come back next week”

“Thanks! But please remember. I don’t want any English text detailing the benefits in terms of excellent features, great performance, superb reports etc. I want to know the numbers against each of what you say as the benefit. And preferably in terms of dollars”Completely puzzled about what to present in the next week, I met Bholerao and explained the scenario.

“Dear Khaderao, let me give an example. I agree any model of BMW car has great features but it also costs a lot. If my job is to buy vegetables every day and carry them home,  will I buy BMW?”

Your customer is asking the same question. You need to understand what is the line of business for the customer, what are the major business transactions that they do. What is the volume of transactions. What are their major 3 pain areas that they don’t fulfill currently?

These are a few questions to which you must have the answer.

I asked ‘how do I get there? Can you please clarify?’

“Hmm. Ok, let me try. There are two approaches for you”

Approach 1:

1.       Understand the current business

2.       Identify the features that are already in use and the new features will help the customer at a Macro level

3.       Approximate the benefits to the customer when the features are adopted. This is to be done based on customer’s business metrics (CTQ) and the expected cost savings, increase of revenue, reduction of effort, space or speed up of business such as quick delivery

4.       Compute the fixed benefits as well as recurring benefits based on the analysis

5.       Compare the with fixed and recurring investments made by the customer

6.       The cost is not just licenses or the service costs of implementation / upgrade. They include:

a.       Purchase of Infra such as Hardware, upgrades of OS, Database, additional disk space etc

b.      Any Network costs or upgrade costs

c.       Recurring costs such as hiring new staff for maintenance. Examples are like Administrators, DBAs, Domain specialists

d.      The cost of business leaders involving in the Implementation / upgrade and the opportunity loss due to their reduced involvement in the Business

e.      Others

7.       Submit the substantial benefits in numbers to justify the upgrade / implementation

Approach 2;

1.       If you cant justify what is the business benefit by having new or upgraded version, analyze on the basis what we don’t get when you continue the same way

2.       For each additional feature look at what you cant do with the existing implementation

3.       Compute the loss in terms of time, cost savings, revenue increase, Productivity gains etc

4.       Present your analysis

I got some idea on what I need to do.

I also realized I cant just copy paste my proposal defense based on what my product ./ services are offered. I need to map to specific business requirements and make more value adding proposal.

Thanks a lot Bholerao.

Raise the Bar and Set Your Goals on any Pitch

Disclaimer: I have been writing the blogs in the style of story telling based on real incidents but with some fiction added to emphasize the message. Hence please do not conclude anything based on the blogs. 

ABC Bank is very special customer for me. We have been doing fine with the Bank through Application Support but I believed there is scope to do more. The guy leading the team is a senior and is a bit over qualified for the role. I however deliberately engaged him to make sure we do everything right for the customer.

When I visited the customer, she invited me with full smile and offered coffee. Linda is very friendly in nature and I know this smile doesnt necessarily mean the engagement is running fine. I quickly got in to the right topic after a few Hello How are you kind of conversation (I dont believe much in the sweet talk when I am not sure of the value add to the customer).

Linda said "I am quite happy with Kant Pai. He is excellent. He was doing whatever I wanted to do"

"I am glad to hear this Linda. I hope you are taking advantage of his experience and get more value from our presence ..."

"No Khaderao. He is perfect. Yesterday he did a data recovery and I was surprised he did this in 4 hours while I was thinking of it as a day long affair. He is quite efficient"

"Thanks Linda. Is there any scope for improvement or for any additional effort?"

"I dont think so."

However she hesitated and than said "Pai was asking for arrangement to work in a location close to his home. I am afraid to say ... he needs to manage on his own without my help"

"Oh, is it? My apologies. Your Bank can't move close to his house (I laughed). I am sure he knows about it. I will tell him right now"

"That will be great if you can explain him. He also had car parking issue and says the fee charged is high here.  You know I will not be able to facilitate any discount or other such support. All our staff are coming the same way"

"Oh God. He cant speak to you for this. I feel you are responsible for this." I again laughed. Linda laughed but asked "Why do you think I am responsible?"

"He is approaching you more than approaching me and it is because you are so nice Customer. But we cant abuse that. Once again my apologies and we can't take your hospitality as an undue advantage. I will fix the issues"

I gave her the sweets I prepared. She liked those Indian sweets last time, when she had dinner at my home. 

I rushed to meet Pai. I was in reality quite furious. 

Pai greeted me but quickly I had to explain him. 

"My dear friend. Linda is quite friendly it doesn't mean she has to go beyond and accommodate you for all personal issues"

"But what is the solution to this? This office is too far for me to drive" Pai continued. It is quite expensive to travel this long. 

"There is a solution. Please shift to a place close to this bank"

"Than I need to do Lease break"

"Yes. If you want to travel less distance you need to do this right?"

I have this problem with many of my team members. Once they travel to overseas they get more greedy than they used to be. They want everything to be managed by the Organization. The projects can be anywhere and members need to manage. This is a long term project and it is easy to adopt. I told him the same. 

"Ok my dear Pai. Good news is that Linda is happy with your work."

"Thanks Khaderao"

But I feel we should do much better.

"Boss, I am doing all she asked and there is lot of work load"

"Doing what customer is asking is just meeting the expectations. Can we exceed the expectations?"

"Khaderao! I am offended. This is application support. what can I do other than support at the application level? there is no access to source code if I develop a few accelerators. There is not even access to database to write triggers. All I can do is screen level support. And you want me to do miracles"

I heard patiently and once he is finished I asked. 

"How many tickets do you get on average per person per day?"

"Lot of tickets and lot work"

This is another issue. Lot of tickets, lot of work! Means he doesnt know what "Lot" means. 

"Pai, We need to get to details to understand. If there is more workload I will speak to Linda for adding more members. Can I get the view of all the tickets made in the last 6 months?"

***

After 1 hour of data collation and analysis we reached a conclusion that peak ticketing is at 1.5 tickets per day. 

The max time that a ticket takes is 2 hours. Means the max time a person is loaded every day is 3.5 hours. 

Pai felt a bit defeated but I tried to motivate him "Pai, dont you think we got more clarity on the work load? This is average but on a day we may get 5 tickets and the other day none. So we need not think we are under utilized"

There is some glow and relief in Pai's face. "Yes, thats why we are still loaded on many days!"

"Now we have an opportunity to do some value add in making the support more effective, what do you say?"

"Yes we may. But Khaderao. I need to make a few points clear. This is application support. I cant to any optimization on Product as the product vendor needs to be consulted for any such cases."

"How about some automations?"

"We dont have access to source code and we are not expected to do coding.... for all coding requirements, product vendor needs to be contracted and our job will be coordinating with them"

"Hmm. Ok can we get more alerts etc to act well before something goes wrong and some one reports the issue?"

Pai is annoyed. "I have been saying that we cant do coding"

I kept quiet and went through the report of all support tickets raised. 

There is one category of tickets which were taking as much as 4 hours for closure.

"What is this and why is it taking 4 hours time?"

"Whenever there is a maintenance activity by the vendor, I need to bring the Instance down. before bringing it down other team needs to do Database locking.It is another team and my team needs to coordinate"

"But why it takes so long even if the tasks are done in two places?"

"The database team needs to inform when the Database is unlocked. thats when the my team will bring the instance up. similar communications are required when Instance is getting down"

"I see. this means it is a manual process. The team needs to wait for confirmation from other teams. Cant we automate this?"

"How sir. I dont have access to Database code or Instance code."

"Sorry. I am not a technical guy but we run script to bring the instance up and down right?"

"Yes"

"we do the same for Database as well and there may be a state which tells the database is locked or not?"

"Yes and yes, I got it. I can write a script which checks the datacase state and runs the script to up or down the instance"

Pai said with excitement. 

"You made my life sir. This is going to reduce the waiting time by around 50%?"

"It will be much more"

"Thanks Pai. I am happy that you are thinking right. I am sure you can find many more such possible improvements. As long as my team doesnt do extra hours we must do this. Do you agree?"

"Yes Khaderao, also my team will be quite motivated as they do some coding apart from doing routine application support"

"Excellent! this is what I want. team should be happy and the customer should be happy"

After a couple of weeks Pai called me and told.

"Khaderao. This is quite exciting. I found a few more areas where we can simplify our monitoring process and identify the issues well in advance. For example, I used a freeware test automation tool and just wrote a text to login to the application. If the login fails there is a possibility that the application is not accessible for any reasons including database down, Network failure or wrong password. But it helps me to act well before the users tell me and escalate"

From the phone I was hearing the beaming voice of Pai.

He continued. "

There was another case where the integration happens between two applications and whenever they fail one log file will be filled. I wrote a script to check every 10 seconds on whether the log file is not empty. I get alert when the log file is not empty which means the integration is failed for some transaction. It doesn't need any access to source code of the integration script but I get to know before some one logs the ticket after several hours."

"Great my dear Pai. I understand you can do this. Did you realize that there is always scope to do well in any condition. A cricketer like Sachin tendulkar will not lose interest even if he is playing a Club team. Probably he would raise the bar and set targets to score 500 runs in a day against such weak teams. We should get such mindset"

Great! Pai is on right track and he do the best for the customer and also to our organization.