Guest: Rupesh Rao – Managing Complexity during On-boarding and Implementation

[00:00:00] Jason Whitehead: Hi everyone, and thank you for joining us for another episode of the Jason’s take on podcast. I am Jason Whitehead, based in Washington, DC here with my partner in crime. Mr. Noble, say hello, Jason.

[00:00:09] Jason Noble: Hello, Jason. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good evening, everybody.

[00:00:14] Jason Whitehead: Well done. And we’re excited today to have a very special guest for us. Rupesh Rao who is the CEO and founder of CogniSaaS. CogniSaaS helps enterprise SaaS companies deliver customer centric onboarding and implementation and. And Rupesh has over 20 years’ experience in a wide range of roles, including software engineer, account manager, a couple roles as chief customer officer, and now as CEO.

[00:00:40] Jason Whitehead: So today Rupesh is going to share his experience and insights on how to best help companies manage complexity during the onboarding implementation process. And Rupesh, thank you so much for joining us today. If you could, just to get us started, please go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and how you came to be an expert on complexity and onboarding.

[00:00:59] Rupesh Rao: Great. First of all, thank you Jason and Jason for having me here. Very honored to be here and yeah, very excited. We’ve been talking for a while, so it’s great to finally be having a conversion with you both, so thank you for the opportunity. Absolutely. So yeah, so quickly about me. Obviously started cogs as three years back, early 2020 and before that, spent about two decades in the industry in various roles.

[00:01:19] Rupesh Rao: Had a chance to see the full customer journey, life cycle, so to speak, from all the way to acquiring the customer, delivering value and account management, customer success, and so forth. And yeah, so it’s been a great journey for me so far. All in all. And yeah, that’s good about myself.

[00:01:36] Jason Whitehead: Great. Thank you so much. And it was such a pleasure. We got to meet in person the other day when we were, all the three of us were at the conference and it was nice to, after all these years, put a face to a name and really just connect. It was great to see. So, let’s jump in. There, there are a wide range of application types out there and obviously a lot of us are very familiar where you can sign up on the fly and the freemium models and jump in and just get started instantly.

[00:01:58] Jason Whitehead: But that’s not really what you do and where you focus. You’re more the other extreme, if I understand correctly, where it’s a complex, either complex product or complex organization, may take weeks or months to actually. Get folks up and running and implement it. Yeah. What do you see as the biggest challenges when you do have a complex implementation that need to be managed and how is it different than more of the sign up and go?

[00:02:19] Rupesh Rao: Yeah, weird question. Great question Jason. And this is a challenge I think we are seeing a lot of companies face this is a challenge. I face myself before I started Cognos, and that was actually the motivation why Cognos came into being, right? So, the fundamental challenge, Jason, this whole notion of customers buys from you to achieve certain outcomes customer business outcomes, and then how does that translate to your product and your implementation process, onboarding and the way you get them live.

[00:02:47] Rupesh Rao: And we all have been there seeing that, hey, the moment you go live the next day, you have a bunch of escalations and tickets and expectation mismatch and all that reactive firefighting starts. I think that’s fundamentally a problem that we are seeing. And fundamentally the problem we are trying to solve for our customers is that how do you go back to the basics of truly customer success by tracking the customer outcomes, right from the sales and pre-sales side, all the way implementation and then, Go beyond go live as well, right?

[00:03:14] Rupesh Rao: So that’s the fundamental I would say the complexity and the challenge. It sounds very simple, but it’s really still a lot of companies are struggling with because, this is a phase where a lot of teams are involved, number one, right? So, you got the sales team closing the deal and handing it over to the implementation team, and you have the product team involved.

[00:03:32] Rupesh Rao: You have the solution team, you have engineering team, QA team, and so on, right? So, a lot of players, and then you also have the. We’re trying to collaborate with them as well. So, a lot of moving parts, a lot of themes and a lot of silos, right? You have the CRM system where the sales opportunity was tracked, and you have the implementation side.

[00:03:50] Rupesh Rao: You people are tracking it in JIRAs of the world, or Microsoft Project, or Asana or Excel trackers. Then you have the picketing system. Then you have the product roadmap tools. So many silos and it’s getting worse with the whole more SaaS tools coming into picture. I think that’s the fundamental complexity we are seeing across a lot of our customers and the industry that how do we alignment, right?

[00:04:11] Rupesh Rao: Internal alignment between different cross-functional teams that hey, this is what not metric, and then how do we drive that alignment using technology because our technology sometimes is, becomes a roadblock. We have so many silos of tools, so that’s in the complexity we are seeing in the.

[00:04:27] Jason Whitehead: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:04:28] Jason Whitehead: It’s out there. I spent many years of my career doing CRM, enterprise-wide CRM implementations, and, most of them were multi-year efforts. And remember one client, I was there for a few years. And they were doing a 10-year program. That was everything from redefining all their stuff, moving their systems in, consolidating 72 call centers in the amount of effort it took to just manage that internal complexity and to get all the different teams that were, hundreds of people over, a 10-year period.

[00:04:56] Jason Whitehead: It, the struggle was real. It’s, it can be real in there. And I think most folks who have never experienced something like that really can’t even fathom just how many moving parts there are. And the stress. You need to keep it all together.

[00:05:08] Jason Noble: Absolutely. It’s an area that I don’t think people are investing the right amounts in.

[00:05:12] Jason Noble: This is why you guys are doing what you’re doing there, Rupesh. But it is something that organizations struggle with. They don’t understand what investment they need to make in this and how they do this. One, one way that we always like to work and Jason and I have spoken about this, is you take a.

[00:05:26] Jason Noble: Step into your customer’s shoes and then work backwards to, to your own shoes there. But what are some of the things that you are seeing most customers doing that, that go wrong? That mean that they need help? When they’re managing these complex implementations, onboarding these complex change programs, transformation programs internally what are the common things that you’re seeing them, them doing wrong and what makes them reach out for external?

[00:05:51] Rupesh Rao: Yeah, so fundamentally the problem statement is still the same using that we had 20 years back, that companies struggle to take their customers to value, time to value successfully. At scale, right? So that’s the fundamental challenge. And there’s a lot of things going underneath the surface that how do you track what was promised in the sales cycle, what outcomes and then how do you translate that to your internal different cross-functional teams right from your SOW document to a bunch of tickets in Jira that your product team needs to close.

[00:06:24] Rupesh Rao: How do you keep the connection between all these. Your kickoff meeting, your implementation process, your Jira tickets, your document. And these are all things disconnected in a lot of companies, right? And that is where a lot of companies and our customers struggle, where essentially things fall through the cracks, so to speak, right?

[00:06:44] Rupesh Rao: Either fraud team missed the context of the customer requirement or an outcome, and they build the feature. They go live with the feature and straight away there is a meat defects or expectation mismatch. Prioritization is a big problem. We are saying where a lot of companies are not getting the prioritization right, because you may have 20 customers who are asking for certain things from your product, and obviously every customer has got their own timeline when they want to go live.

[00:07:09] Rupesh Rao: Yeah. How do you keep track of all these timelines at scale in a meaningful manner? So, your product team might decide to release a feature next month, but that might be good news for some customers. It might be bad news for some other customers who wanted this earlier. So how do you keep this, what we call this whole customer centric prioritization is a very common and legacy problem companies are struggling with.

[00:07:31] Rupesh Rao: So those are the few examples I would say we see very often.

[00:07:34] Jason Noble: you see, are you seeing organizations change? Are they getting better at this or is it a problem that’s growing and getting worse with the level of complexity, the number of implementations? Is this a problem that you see growing and growing?

[00:07:48] Rupesh Rao: So interestingly, I think people have now started to realize that there is, this is an important problem because if you look at customer success as a sort of board level metrics, everybody now clearly knows [00:08:00] what they need to track. So, they know clearly that they need to track three things. Primary in customer success.

[00:08:04] Rupesh Rao: First is your NPS, right? And second is your attention. And third might be your upsell cross sell expansion. Now that’s very clear to a lot of companies, and they are now put the tools and process in place for these three metrics. Now, the challenges, these three metrics are actually lagging indicators of customer success.

[00:08:24] Rupesh Rao: The customer has, let’s say, gone live. And for whatever reason, the adoption is not happening, which happens to all of us, right? Adoption is a big challenge now is if you are a CSM, the next question you will ask is that, Hey, why is the adoption not happening? And that is a point where the post smart kind of thing opens up, and then you start to go figure out, okay, what did we do wrong?

[00:08:42] Rupesh Rao: Is it on the customer side? Is it on our side? Did we miss any ball or did we drop any outcome they wanted? What went wrong? Then you have to travel backwards into the customer journey all the way to the sales and presales stage. Okay, what was it that we jointly agreed on the success plan or the outcomes, and then did we deliver all those [00:09:00] outcomes or not?

[00:09:00] Rupesh Rao: So that tracking becomes very critical. So, this is a realization we are seeing now. A lot of companies are going through and it’s a kind of early stages were. They recognize that unless they nail the leading indicators, these lagging indicators will be always out of their control.

[00:09:17] Rupesh Rao: So now companies are putting, starting to put investments and, metrics and process and everything around it to make sure right on the sales and pre-sales, the handover and the implementation is taken care in a structured way so that when you have gone live, then NPS adoption and retention, these are all taken care, you have set the state success.

[00:09:37] Rupesh Rao: For these three metrics to happen. Yes. So that’s the change we are starting between the industry. We’re

[00:09:40] Jason Whitehead: seeing a lot of that as well too, cause you know, my business partner, Sue ABT Moore she developed what we call AM and PM metrics and the AM or the activity metrics or adoption metrics pm those performance metrics, the logging indicators.

[00:09:52] Jason Whitehead: And we’re doing a lot more with customers up front saying, we know there’s a period between now and go live in between go live. And when you see those outcomes, [00:10:00] here’s how we track the activity and know we’re on the right path and the right trajectory to. And here’s what that should look like along the way.

[00:10:06] Jason Whitehead: And that’s been very powerful for a lot of folks. Keep the faith while until you get see those lagging indicators that you want, that we’re doing the right things and moving forward. Absolutely. One of, one of the things I’m curious about making the distinction between onboarding and implementation when you have these long-term, multi-year projects, how did, how do you see most clients deciding that onboarding is over even before the implementation is live or, guess I’m wondering, with that complexity, what constitutes the end of onboarding when there’s still, a lot of things going on to, to get system?

[00:10:33] Rupesh Rao: The way we look at this one, Jason, is implementation is really a subset of onboarding.

[00:10:38] Rupesh Rao: It’s part of your broader onboarding, right? You’re trying to onboard the customer and all their users onto your platform. And implementation is. Step in that journey, right? So, you close the deal with the customer, you go through the implementation, then you have the go live, then you onboard the users, you train them and then you make sure they realize the value.

[00:10:57] Rupesh Rao: So there are three parts of the value proposition, so to [00:11:00] speak. So in the sales cycle, you are promising the value. In the liberation cycle, you are delivering the value. And then post go live, you have the value realization. So the value promise, the value delivery, and the value realization post go live is, that’s what essentially becomes your onboarding, so to speak, the full circle of onboarding.

[00:11:19] Rupesh Rao: Okay, great.

[00:11:20] Jason Whitehead: We’ve talked about a lot of things here with complexity in different areas. What is it that you think vendors need to start doing differently to help their customers? Where do you think vendors are still getting it?

[00:11:31] Rupesh Rao: Yeah, so I think what I mentioned earlier, the fundamentally it’s the.

[00:11:34] Rupesh Rao: The internal alignment we see is the biggest problem. , the alignment or the disconnect between the classic disconnect between what we call sales, customer success and product. Yeah. They typically have different priorities. Sales has got their own priority. Customer success has got their own priority, and product has got their own priority with their own roadmap and stuff.

[00:11:51] Rupesh Rao: I think this alignment and bringing all these teams together on what really is the key metric we are trying to achieve for the customer is still a challenge. I [00:12:00] think a lot of companies go wrong. Simple things like, for example, retention right now. Retention in many companies is a metric or KPI for customer success teams.

[00:12:10] Rupesh Rao: Right now, I’m gonna make a segment here, which might be very this thing. Product teams also should be, measured on retention because to large extent we all know that uhlin or churn can happen because the customer did not get value from the product. And so today a lot of companies obviously are not organized like that.

[00:12:25] Rupesh Rao: They’re not incentivizing those teams like that, right? So that creates a disconnect between your objectives and your in. So unless you incentivize different teams in a harmonic way, your objectives will be always a challenge. So I think that’s the fundamental way. I think companies are still figuring it out.

[00:12:43] Rupesh Rao: What’s the best way

[00:12:44] Jason Noble: where do you see vendors struggling most with building out their own processes around onboarding, implementation? And then secondly, what, why do you think it is so difficult for these organizations.

[00:12:56] Rupesh Rao: So, the reason why it is so difficult [00:13:00] is if you really think about the simplistic three things that people, companies want to track and doing, onboarding, implementation is, Who is the customer?

[00:13:08] Rupesh Rao: What have we promised to them? What are the outcomes we want to achieve with them? And then how are we gonna deliver those outcomes? So this who, what, and how is what they’re trying to figure it out right now, if you see the way they operate today is who is the customer? Is all tracked in your CRM system, opportunity, customer context, and all of that.

[00:13:28] Rupesh Rao: Then what are the business outcomes we are trying to deliver for this customer is again, track in. Various tools. Some companies track it in CRM, some companies track it on a piece of paper SOW document or a BRD document, which is an unstructured piece of data, right? Anything in pt PS unstructured data.

[00:13:46] Rupesh Rao: Now, the how it, the how I gonna deliver these outcomes is again, tracked in different set of tools, right? So the how will typically have two tracks to. One is your product track. You have dependencies on the [00:14:00] product. The customer might have asked you for a new feature request or announcement or an integration or a configuration, all those tech stuff.

[00:14:07] Rupesh Rao: So, for that, typically companies will go create a bunch of Jira tickets, right? So typically, they a document will get hashed out into a sort of a document where they do their solutioning of for each outcome, what product outcomes or product dependencies we need from our product team, which will go into a bunch of.

[00:14:25] Rupesh Rao: And then there is a implementation task that the implementation team needs to do, right from the handover to kickoff meeting, then B Rd, then, and then all those steps. Now, all these tools, as we all know, don’t talk to each other very well. Your project management tool, which tracks your implementation task, is not very well much aware of what’s going on in the genetic tickets.

[00:14:47] Rupesh Rao: Yeah. If your product team has released or not released, a feature is unknown to your project management. The IT has to travel back via human loop. That product team will say, Hey, we have done this, or We have not [00:15:00] done this. It’ll come to the CSM, our implementation team, then needs to figure it out.

[00:15:04] Rupesh Rao: Okay, so what does it mean for my, that customer who asked for that feature? So they have to connect all these dots manually. Juggling around these different tools, right? Yeah. So it’s a combination of silos, of tools to answer your question, Jason, and the mix of unstructured data and structured data. So you have some document information in some documents and Jira tickets, and then tasks in the project management tools.

[00:15:28] Rupesh Rao: So that is what makes it very complex.

[00:15:30] Jason Whitehead: I’m working with a client now and has the exact situation that you’ve just described where multiple teams, different incentives, multiple tools, things not coming back and forth, and it’s a huge challenge for them. And I think you’re right that you know the tools.

[00:15:43] Jason Whitehead: They may not talk to each other as well as they do, but the amount of time it takes to organize your internal organization as a vendor to get everything humming nicely and get the handovers done and the process and the incentives, I think it’s massive and many organizations I think, still struggle with that quite a bit.

[00:15:56] Jason Whitehead: It’s really interesting.

[00:15:57] Rupesh Rao: Very true. Yeah.

[00:15:58] Jason Noble: I think if you are a customer as well, I mean [00:16:00] you’re potentially going through more than one of these at the same time. Yes. Or going through implementation. And maybe you’ve just gone live with another one. You said there’s lots going on at the same time.

[00:16:09] Jason Noble: And that kind of perspective, how do they all work together? What’s the integration like? But then how do they all compare to each other? Is implementation onboarding, working for one? Is it not working? It puts you as a customer in a very difficult position. You’ve go through all this big change and all of these different systems at different stages and different levels of maturity,

[00:16:29] Rupesh Rao: I think.

[00:16:30] Rupesh Rao: Yeah, Absolut.

[00:16:31] Jason Whitehead: Yeah. So rap, one of the things I’m wondering, cause you work with a lot of teams SAS teams and CSMs and all those things, how do you actually see your customers, like the SAS vendors organizing their internal teams to help manage this complexity? So for example, do you see, or do you recommend that they have dedicated onboarding teams or do you typically see be more like, CSM generals that do the full life cycle of a customer.

[00:16:52] Jason Whitehead: And do you have a, any recommendations on how to make those decisions of how to organize? Yeah,

[00:16:58] Rupesh Rao: absolutely. So we have seen the full spectrum. Typically it’s in the early stages. The CS team does everything. They will be involved right from the pre-sale stage in the, scoping discussions.

[00:17:08] Rupesh Rao: In the solutioning discussion. They will do the implementation, they will do the post life support, and so they will do the full life cycle, right? But as the company scale to more number of customers, they raise an external funding, they ABC and so on. So, they start to segregate different teams.

[00:17:24] Rupesh Rao: And that is really the best practice I’ve seen where you’ll have a dedicated onboarding. And then you’ll have a customer success team, which typically will come into the picture after the customer has gone live. And then you might also have an, what they call account management team whose job is really to work closely with the customer success team to drive the upsell cross sell.

[00:17:44] Rupesh Rao: So a lot of companies don’t want to see US teams to be sales targets incentivized team. They want them to really focus on the value for customers. They separate out the account management team from the customer success team. So then you on the other team, you then have these [00:18:00] three teams, the onboarding team, customer success team, and an account management team will take care of different KPIs.

[00:18:05] Rupesh Rao: So account management team will take care of your upsell cross sell customer success team will take care of your adoption and NPS metrics and onboarding team will take care of your time to value, right? Kpi. So that’s how the KPIs get manage.

[00:18:20] Jason Noble: Refresh. What are the typical kind of organizations that are looking for help with this?

[00:18:24] Jason Noble: Are they across all industries, all levels of maturity, or are you guys seeing a pattern in terms of the types of organization that say we are looking for help in managing our onboarding processes? Yeah, I think

[00:18:37] Rupesh Rao: so far obviously we are focusing, talking to a lot of companies in b2b software world.

[00:18:41] Rupesh Rao: So they are definitely any company who. Targeting mid-market to enterprise customers, it is not a plug and play solution. Requires a lot of handhold of the customers. Specific requirements that require a lot of API integration work or configuration, or they may [00:19:00] ask for module specific work or roadmap items to be prioritized as a new feature.

[00:19:04] Rupesh Rao: So those are the kind of, companies who are scaling very rapidly. They might have already had 50 plus enterprise customers. They might have raised their cities a round and cities B round and they’re looking to, double, triple their customer base in the next six to nine months. And that is where they feel this pain quite badly.

[00:19:21] Rupesh Rao: And that’s where they realize they need help. Yeah, because Excel sheets. Start to fall apart at some stage and anywhere you have any human intervention leads to think falling through the cracks. And in a lot of cases we see customers having customer churn and I’m, I’ve seen this myself in my experiences where customer has churned right during onboarding itself, even before because it took too long.

[00:19:43] Rupesh Rao: They did not get the value during onboarding and all that. So super critical for a lot of companies and that’s where they are starting to put their.

[00:19:49] Jason Whitehead: One of the things you said earlier that really made me think as well too is making the distinction between onboarding the new customer, the new organization versus onboarding the end users.

[00:19:56] Jason Whitehead: And I think there’s a lot of that, that where I’ve seen a lot of [00:20:00] organizations get into trouble is they really view the initial, go live as the focus of end all and be all, but then they don’t really think through how they’re gonna onboard new employees that may come in six months or a year or two years down the road, or they don’t really think through how are we going to onboard existing customers to.

[00:20:15] Jason Whitehead: Modules or new key functionality that’s just been developed or released and those sort of things. What have, what are your experiences or recommendations around that ongoing onboarding, whether it’s new employees or new modules that are coming out to existing users, and how can things be improved there or are there any unique challenges around that as opposed to the initial implementation?

[00:20:34] Rupesh Rao: Yeah, very interesting question. That’s actually a very different kind of challenge we see a lot of companies struggle with where this information of. Your case studies, right? We, you might have a hundred customers who you have implemented in the last five years. At different points of time and those details of what modules, what use cases, what outcomes we have implemented for which customer.

[00:20:57] Rupesh Rao: This data you can imagine is [00:21:00] all over the place. It’s in some bits and bobs in CRM or Jira or some documents and PDF documents and all over the place. So there is no one single intelligent repository which can tell the. That, Hey, this customer we have done these three things in the last three years, and these seven things are our logical upsell cross, opportunities from a product or a module or more outcomes that we can see other customers have already taken right from the same industry.

[00:21:29] Rupesh Rao: And customers love to know, what are you doing with my peers, right? Am I missing out on something? So those kind of information exchange becomes extremely challenging, which I tried again in my earlier career manually, and it doesn’t work, right? So one of the use cases we help with other customers is having that single sort of, digitized repository of all the implementations.

[00:21:47] Rupesh Rao: And then how can you, Cross the dots and make sense of all this data to deliver more value for your customers. And then, expand as part of that as well.

[00:21:56] Jason Noble: I love that idea cuz it gives you that consistency as well. How do you do good and [00:22:00] repeat what good looks like.

[00:22:02] Rupesh Rao: True.

[00:22:02] Rupesh Rao: Absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:22:04] Jason Whitehead: Great. Rap, thank you so much. And before we go, we always like to throw out a bold challenge question to all of our guests. So your question. What is the single most impactful action a SaaS vendor can take to ensure fast effective onboarding and implementation of a complex product?

[00:22:19] Jason Whitehead: So if there’s one thing that they could really do, what’s the most impactful thing you’d like to see SaaS vendors doing

[00:22:25] Rupesh Rao: consistently? So I think the one most important thing is, as I mentioned earlier, touch up earlier, is this whole internal cross-functional alignment aligning different teams, your sales, customer success, onboarding, product engineering.

[00:22:40] Rupesh Rao: Because a lot of times these teams, especially the product tech teams, don’t really have the context of why, right? Why are we building this feature? What outcome is it going to deliver for our customers? What is the revenue impact for us? Why should we prioritize it? All these data is just in flowing in emails and excels and different silos of tools.

[00:22:58] Rupesh Rao: So I think if that’s one [00:23:00] thing they can sort out the internal cross-functional alignment I think that will take care of a lot of problems. Not

[00:23:06] Jason Noble: a not, not a small task there, not a small

[00:23:08] Rupesh Rao: office . It’s extremely challenging and

[00:23:11] Jason Whitehead: yeah, absolutely, it is indeed. Again, before we go thank you so much.

[00:23:15] Jason Whitehead: We’ve loved having you share your insights. We wanna invite you to do a shameless plug for anything CogniSaaS how can people find you and anything else you’d like to add?

[00:23:23] Rupesh Rao: Thank you Jason again for the opportunity. So yeah Cognis is a customer onboarding tool for enterprise mid-market SaaS focused companies.

[00:23:30] Rupesh Rao: You can reach out to us. Our website is cogs.com. I leave my LinkedIn profile link in the notes here. So yeah. Happy to chat. The companies who are looking at customer onboarding is a strategic objective and priority and looking to streamline and faster time to value. So happy to have a chat and see if we can add value.

[00:23:47] Rupesh Rao: Great.

[00:23:48] Jason Noble: Awesome. Super conversation. I think this is not, every organization is looking for this, so this is just huge. This is really good. And as you said at the beginning, so good to actually meet in person before we did the [00:24:00] recording. It’s really good to see you last week. A huge thank you from.

[00:24:03] Rupesh Rao: Great. Likewise super honored to be here, Jason. And Jason and thanks for having me. And yeah look forward to future releases and look forward to speaking soon again. Fantastic. Thanks .

[00:24:12] Jason Noble: Thank you.