GSD Podcast - Everything you need to know about Implementation with Meg Lovell

Meg Lovell of Everbridge is a ninja when it comes to all things implementation. We chatted and had a fast-paced conversation about everything you need to know about implementation, including

- turning 9-month implementations into 3

- Customers not getting any value from your product and needing to renew

- Approaching implementations with a psychology standpoint and human behavior point of view

- Eliminating the status call

- Charging Professional Services for things the customer is asking you to do

- Using Project Managers to run Implementation Projects

Transcript:

Jeff  01:14

Hey just wanted to introduce you to this next podcast with Meg Lowell, who I met on a panel a few months ago, who just blew me away with not only just sort of passion for implementation, but just had some some ideas that maybe I thought about or been too scared to have we met before or had gotten pushed back. But she went right out and did some things and I'm just going to not spill the secrets. He wants you to listen to the podcast. But Meg's awesome. And also another caffeine junkie like myself, although I've been trying to wean off but um, so that's what the first part of the conversation, she just hit record, we're talking about caffeine levels and the milligrams and everything else. And then the conversation just kind of kept going from there. So really enjoyable. If you're doing anything involve implementation, if you've got projects that are going are going along, having problems getting them live, having problems getting your senior level people to accept some changes you're trying to do get implementations charged for and set durations. Definitely give this a listen and take notes because Meg is just chock full of information. So enjoy it. We were just talking about our caffeine junkie. Yes. And Meg is the first person I've met not on rennet that talked about caffeine and milligrams, which is what I used to do before I quit. I also thought when I quit that I would be very calm. Like that guy was like, What's he gonna say? But no, I'm still all fired up and everything. It's not the caffeine. So

Meg Lovell  02:58

900 milliliters a day keeps the Gremlins away.

Jeff  03:01

Oh my god. I know that's a that's a powerful dose. And what time is your last one? Is it to you have the two o'clock?

Meg Lovell  03:07

Oh, no. The for lunch? Definitely before lunch? Okay,

Jeff  03:11

so you get 900 him before lunch? That that is why you're able so makes pretty powerful from my interactions with that. Now I know how you just charged. That's amazing. So why don't you talk about your current role and current company? couldn't remember if we can, we can mention it or not. So I'm gonna leave it up to you.

Meg Lovell  03:30

Well, yeah, no, I'm currently employed at Everbridge. I've actually been with the company for about 10 years. And I originally joined up with the company and one of my first big projects there was working with our implementations organization. So I have, you know, 10 years of experience in implementation from building teams, building processes, working with customers. And now I'm actually working on the flipside, I am working with other vendors now to implement new products and business strategies.

Jeff  04:01

Yeah, this is great. I love that background, because we geeked out for quite a while when we got into implementation. So I wanted to get other people who were, you know, thrust into the role or wondering if they're doing it right and everything. So I'm just assuming when you took it over everything at Everbridge was just smooth sailing, and just had to go in and make a couple tweaks, right? Just easy day, and just a couple of PowerPoints. And you were done.

Meg Lovell  04:26

Exactly, exactly. It was actually a very interesting process because we were looking to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace. And we saw an opportunity to do that with our implementation process because you know, we 10 years ago, very common strategy with implementations is to throw bodies at it, and to, you know, basically make your people available for endless amounts of hours to handhold the customers through and while that, you know, as, as the SAS products really came into their own with remote implementations. It really worked to an extent but it's not really what customers want need. And it just really doesn't scale economically for a company.

Jeff  05:05

Absolutely. Because, you know, if you go down that model, implementations take a really long time that your company is trying to go like 2x in customers every year. And you can't just go to Exxon employees every year. Right? Yeah, so

Meg Lovell  05:20

Exactly, exactly. And actually, to go back to that statement, you said about implementations take a really long time. Do they have irrigations? How many implementations have you been through? And you've been through a nine month, you know, plus implementation? And you get to the end of that project? And you think, why did that take so long? I felt like I did three weeks worth of work. How did that get spread out over nine months? And that actually is a very good question. And that's really at the core of the way that I drive implementations. Because what are you doing in that white space? You know, what? There's a lot of time and implementation where both parties are doing nothing?

Jeff  05:58

Yeah, yeah, let's let's chat about that. Because I know we got into the details on this. And we both share similar thoughts on this. A couple of ways we can approach it. But I will say the usual problems, and I'd love to hear you address them is that no fixed duration, no fixed costs, customer feels like they can take as long as they want on the implementation.

Meg Lovell  06:20

Yeah, and I don't think it's a matter of, you know, the customer feels that they can take as long as they want. We're allowing that situation, we're enabling bad behavior. You know, a customer truly wants to get ROI out of the product right away. I mean, how embarrassing is it to buy a product, and all of a sudden, your accounting team tells you that your renewal has come in? And how is the product working? Are we renewing this, you're like, Well, I haven't implemented it yet. So that's not going to bode well as as a purchaser, right? You've just bought this product, your company's invested, but they're not getting any value at it. On the flip side, as a vendor delivering implementations, again, you have your people are engaged in a low value activity that you're spending a high amount of money on, because these days implementation specialists are paid very well. Yeah, for their skill set. And and you don't want to waste the high skill set on that sort of activity, if it's not going to be yielding results and value for the company.

Jeff  07:19

Absolutely. And on that note on the finance team, since the, you know, sends you the renewal over. The worst part about that is if it's not complete, and now you've got to pay for both vendors, right, you're deprecating one vendor? And then you're moving over to the next that that is, those are conversations that just never go over? Well.

Meg Lovell  07:37

Exactly, exactly. And you know, and if you work at a publicly traded company, you have a fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders to spend money wisely. And when those things come up. That's not being responsible.

Jeff  07:52

Absolutely. So what how did you go about addressing this and fixing it? I'm sure I knew it was a bunch of different ways. But if you don't mind sharing some of the big hitters?

Meg Lovell  08:03

Yeah, well, you know, think about it back in, you know, 10 years ago, when you know, there wasn't was a lot of software available other than the traditional big behemoth project management programs to manage. We had, you know, these smaller SAS base on boardings coming into focus. And, you know, I basically approached this not as a project manager, but really from a psychology standpoint and human behavior. And I looked at it, you know, what is going to drive successful behavior and our customer. So we, you know, when you position yourself with unlimited implementation services, you are actually making your customer, you're you're making yourself your lowest priority and your customers day, if you don't have like, perhaps limitations on your implementation service, that you get X number of hours to be consumed in X timeframe. That is the standard timeframe for onboarding services to be completed. You don't put those limitations in place, it's going to drag out and drag out, right. So you know, one of the first things that I always encourage people to do is, especially when you're working in a SaaS product, is eliminate the status call.

Jeff  09:09

Alright, this was the big one. I remember the first time I heard this, I kind of freaked out a little bit. So love to hear Yeah,

Meg Lovell  09:16

yeah. And why I say eliminate the status call. Because in a lot of cases, people think of the status call is we're going to show up and we're going to talk about we'll talk about stuff. Yeah. And when you say, I hate the word stuff, because it's so generic, because then you get on the call. The first thing you talk about is the weather. Here's the weather here, here's the weather there. Here's how the local sports teams go did you know go team, and then you have just blown a half hour of time. And when you think about the the the financial cost of that meeting, and what you just spent on talking about the weather in the sports, and there was no agenda items. There was no no one was held accountable to deliver anything to this meeting. Yep. So when I say eliminate the status call you're actually changing that to a meeting with an agenda. Never have a meeting without agenda, right? We're gonna have a call, where we traditionally have the status call. And we're going to review these open action items. And you know, everyone comes prepared meeting to talk through their items, what's blocking me what's been accomplished? Even better if you have a system to track a lot of that automatically, right? Yep. So what do you need some more productive meetings?

Jeff  10:27

What's your perspective? I never have, I always do the situation. So I just want to hear your feedback on this one, but the classic, hey, we're gonna meet Thursday at 11 o'clock. And then Wednesday, the customer says, Not sure if we should meet, we didn't get to do any of the stuff that we were supposed to go do. So you canceled the meeting? Do you shame them? Do you try and work through stuff during that meeting?

Meg Lovell  10:52

Personally, here's how I'd approach situation. Yes, that is an actual trend with our customers, I would put some sort of mechanism in place to get better leading indicators in place as to are they completing their activities. That's why, you know, I want my customers working on something that you know, a predefined set of tasks, so that I can check in on that and make sure they're making progress. If the customer is not ready to meet, have a meeting, absolutely don't have a meeting, if if they have not completed their tasks. I mean, of course, there could be a situation where they do need to meet, because they need to repeat the last meeting for whatever reason, but I also push my customers to that, you know, if, if we are going to cancel that meeting at the very last second. That's still gonna count against your billable hours, because we have to add in that motivation.

Jeff  11:38

Okay, I like that. That's, that's good. Because you do you do use the hour. So you're, you're selling these implementation hours on a billable basis? So my question to you on that on that point is, you have the meeting scheduled for Thursday, 11 o'clock. And suddenly the customers like, hey, we didn't get to any of these tasks that we're supposed to do? Can we just cancel the meeting? And I was curious what you do about that?

Meg Lovell  12:08

Yeah. So you know, it's a late cancel is a late cancel, and that's still a billable hour. Yeah. And that goes back to that whole motivating the customer to make your work the highest priority, you do have to take that out of their allocation. Now, it's important that the customer knows at the beginning of the implementation process that any meetings cancelled within 24 hours is still going to debit out of your bucket. And that helps motivate customers to complete things, or keeps those lines of communication open. So that if they are slipping, yeah, things happen, you know, a fire breaks out and the customer has to address it, they've got to pause their implementation for a few days. But it makes sure that they stay in contact with your team, because then your team can rebook with another customer. So you don't have an idle resource working and implementation for that hour.

Jeff  12:52

No, absolutely. That's, that's so you're Are you selling ours? Are you selling them as sort of fixed fee implementation projects?

Meg Lovell  13:00

Well, it really depends on on the product, you're there's a couple of ways you go about it. If you have a very, you know, a SaaS product that, you know, 90% of your customers should be able to set it up in a certain timeframe, you know, let's say, you know, takes 15 hours over the course of two months, and you put those services, you write them right into the contract. So there, they're plain as day. It also actually creates a great model that if you have customers with more complex needs, or there's something bespoke that needs to be crafted, that that is a great opportunity to build up your professional services business. Yes. So everybody should get a core implementation. But for those who want to take things further, professional services is is a, it's a great opportunity to sell those hours and get your customers to a next level.

Jeff  13:46

Absolutely. And I was just chatting about this week with somebody because a lot of SAS people, they don't want services. And they're like, No, we don't want professional services. It's kind of complicated, where a product lead growth and all this other stuff. But there's areas where your customers are just begging for help. Like I think about like data transformation, like ETL fun stuff. And then other things, your team has this expertise, and your customers are just trying to get off the ground and getting successful. And so they will pay extra to, you know, remove and demystify and just make things easier and for a smoother rollout.

Meg Lovell  14:21

Oh, absolutely. Because one of the things that I found customers expect when they come to a software company that sells a product, they expect you to not only be experts in your product, but experts in your industry, yes. And to be able to give them the best practices guidance for implementing your product in their industry. And that is a wonderful opportunity to sell professional services and I know people shy away from professional services because it's not recurring revenue. You know, Wall Street loves those SAS subscriptions because it's very predictable, repeatable revenue. Where's that professional services is one time but you can't write off professional services. completely, because that is something that is going to help you get your product more entrenched with your customers to secure that renewal. And furthermore, growth as you produce more products. Yeah, banding your footprint with your customer

Jeff  15:13

preaching to the choir, in what many services teams, and it was essential, especially when we had super complex stuff. And this was not our agenda, speaking of always having an agenda for me. So I hope you don't mind if I if I ask another question or two, because I know we're gonna go down this, how do you sniff out the services items? Do they are you allowed? Or was your team implementation allowed in the pre sales process to be able to feel that oh, wait, this is going to actually need some services involved, or it was sort of the implementation team, one or two weeks in is like, wow, this, this customer needs some help, and we should bring in services.

Meg Lovell  15:50

Hey, great scenario. And that is something that I think that, you know, companies should actually try and get in front of that, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to have your implementation specialists really involved in pre sales processes, because again, that's that's non billable time for a billable, you know, resource. And so I tried to really limit their interaction there. But you know, certainly there's times you know, when you know, to close the deal, we need to bring in someone from the implementation team to, you know, get a level of comfort with the, with the customer in order to get the final signatures on that deal. But for the most part, I really like to focus my team's on templatized. In the implementation, you have a basic service offering, and you make it very clear to your customer in the sales process. Yep. Customers want to know what they get in an implementation. And I really think to build out a successful project. Speaking from the customer side, I want to know what services I'm getting from the customer and what I'm responsible to bring to the table, so that I can resource my internal team as a customer correctly, right. Because if you come into the into the equation, and you land at the implementation as a customer, and you're expecting to get, you know, a full turnkey service, but that's not what that vendor offers, you're left with huge gaps in your skill set and a non successful implementation. So I actually worked with our sales team, and made sure that they could speak about the implementation process. So you know, as they were, they could coach the customers, you know, these are the kinds of people we need on this implementation. Here's the level of effort it's going to require. And you would think, at first salespeople were very bashful about that. And it's like, oh, I don't, I don't want to scare the customers. It had the absolute opposite effect. Customers grew in confidence, because they knew the resources they would need to bring to the table because there was no surprises. Yeah.

Jeff  17:42

Just come in as a salesperson with the easy button. You're basically people they'll see through, experienced buyers will see through it. They're like, Oh, you don't need anything like, no, no, it's turnkey, you just sign here and like, and then next thing, you know, it's like, I don't know, we need an IT person around for five to 10 hours for the first three weeks, and to do all this work. And these people are around and suddenly, and then as you say, three months turns into nine months in all these.

Meg Lovell  18:11

Exactly. And you know, it may be it made the sales reps feel more competent in their sales. Because they understood the basic implementation process when they were engaging with their customers, our sales reps, were absolutely empowered to understand what this customer needs cannot be accomplished in a basic package, I need to sell them an advanced package. And again, when you get to the professional services level, you can actually pre bundle a lot of that to make it very easy for the customer and the sales rep to sell it. And only then beyond that, do you need to go to a bespoke solution for a very significant and custom project. But you put all those triggers in with your sales team, because they're the ones engaging in the sales process. Keep the implementation specialist the billable resources doing the billable work?

Jeff  18:58

Yeah. We're just curious on your model, again, everybody's different based on the type of product that they have. Do your implementation specialists also do the project management aspect of things? Or are they more like deep into the guts of the system, and then you would have sort of a project manager, making sure that files are getting passed and agendas are getting written things like that?

Meg Lovell  19:18

You know, I think this completely depends on the product that you're implementing. So if you're working on a on a smaller SAS project, one of the things you do have to consider is is your customer working in a an environment where they have a project manager, right, so let's say you're working with, you know, a smaller company or a rural town government, you'll run into a situation where these people don't have project management experience and they don't have project managers on staff. So you need to ensure that your process is adaptable to guide your customers to make good decisions in the implementation, and that your materials and process are structured enough that it leads these people through the process without project man estimate. So with that being said, Now, if your customers buying an entire suite of products, you're working with a fortune 500 customer, absolutely, you're gonna need to bring in a project management resource, because there's far too many components. But you know, a lot of folks out there who are, you know, working in the SAS space products with shorter turn times, they can actually think about eliminating the project manager or management all together with a rope robust process.

Jeff  20:26

Absolutely, you've got that easy 30 day go in here, or in this get this set up and everything good to go. It's when I found is when you start getting into enterprise integrations, and all that fun stuff, especially the big enterprise sales, especially. And they'll ask, like, you know, Hey, okay, we're gonna have a call a pre sales call, and the pm group or the, you know, their whole pm process group wants to talk about, like, how you roll it out and everything. So suddenly, that's when everybody starts putting Gantt charts and all that fun stuff in the pre sales phase and everything. So yeah, that's what they expect.

Meg Lovell  21:01

Yeah. Yeah. Gotta be very careful, though, because some customers are going to be scared by the Gantt charts. That's not their thing.

Jeff  21:09

Absolutely. That's, it's so funny. Yeah, certain want to see it and you know, have that slide tucked in an appendix somewhere if it comes up, but otherwise, I like to have that, you know, three slides that I give the sales team to present on, like, here's some faces that show that we've got some real people, here's are some logos that shows that we've done it and maybe a lightweight bar process thing or day one through 30. This, you know, but just a very lightweight process thing, just so they're like, Okay, great. You guys done it, you have a team, you've done it before, and you've got a process and everything.

Meg Lovell  21:40

Yeah, that's actually a really great technique. And, you know, it's, it's something that companies should even consider, including that in like, the closing packet of documents that goes over the customer is that, you know, here's here's what your implementation includes. It's, you know, like a week by week rundown of here are the major things you're going to accomplish week by week or month by month in this implementation. And then you tack that onto your Esso w if you've got custom services on top of that.

Jeff  22:07

Absolutely. Curious, did you ever do anything like, like a customer readiness customer homework packet to get them started off the bat? Or?

Meg Lovell  22:18

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that is, is when you're working with a SAS projects, a lot of the products, you know, a lot of them start billing from day one. Some people have milestones in place where you know, once the products fully implemented, you can start that that revenue recognition clock depends on your model, both models, you want to get rolling really quickly. So as soon as that paperwork is signed, you know, we've got so many tools in our CRM these days that you should be firing out a welcome packet right away, because the customers bought it. People want to get to work, give them resources, and an electronic orientation to get them started. So when they come into their first meeting, everyone is ready to work. And more importantly, when they come into that first implementation meeting, you want all the right people to sit at that table to be present at that meeting, because you get onto an orientation call. And you go through the roll call, and you're missing two thirds of the key roles, you're not going to get off to a good start, and you're not going to accomplish things. So you really want to make sure that that welcome packet includes things about building your stakeholder team. Yep. So when you kick off and you go through that live overview of the project oriented resources, everybody's there. Yeah,

Jeff  23:30

no, I love that. And it's so true. Sometimes the buyer just says, Okay, here's the person who's gonna take over and they're like, wait, what's the product again, and you get to work them through, a lot of that stuff can be in that packet that we talked about, right? Like, hey, here's our here's our standard Excel format for getting your data, right, like, go work on that for a little bit. You know, all these little things that can accelerate the thing, and they might not even I've seen these packets go out and people are like, Hey, can I know we said we wanted the kickoff day, like the day the contract signs, but I just saw the homework packet, we can you really use a week to kind of absorb this and put things stuff together. And that sort of urgency on having that immediate phone call kind of goes down? Yeah.

Meg Lovell  24:12

Well, I think I think you also want to be careful about those homework packets. When you send a customer a very large quantity of homework to be done. They freak out, it's not going to get done. Yeah. By sending things in smaller manageable chunks. Think about it like your inbox when you sit down to your inbox in the morning. Are you going to write the email that takes an hour to research and put together or are you going to go through your inbox and look for all of the quick wins? So the things that take two to three minutes to respond to you're going to clear those out before you get to those major items. By sending smaller chunks to your customer. You're keeping them working on something every single day. Yep. And you're keeping them moving. And you're getting them in a habit of using your project of your product rather than slam them with a giant packet of homework.

Jeff  24:59

Absolutely. That's that's the smarter approach. And I'm glad you brought that up. Usually, I like using the idea of almost like a marketing campaign like day one. Here you go. Here's your data spreadsheet here. You know, that's not day one, but you exactly what you're saying. But if you send them, hey, here's 15 things to go do. People were like, oh, yeah, I'm not this is not happening and everything. That was a lot of information. Yeah,

Meg Lovell  25:22

yeah. And you've got to show your customer, what's important for them to do because they're new to the product, as implementers you're working with the product every single day. And I think even the best implementation specialists start to forget a key concept. One, at one point, you were new at this company, and you didn't know how to implement this product. Remember your journey? How long did it take you to ramp up? Yeah, you cannot expect that of your customer, you need to help them through the onboarding, just like your co workers help you learn the product here at the company you work at?

Jeff  25:56

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. Such great points, and you only get those from from going through this. Did you ever wind up going like any of the low tech approaches with you know, getting, like an LMS technical approach, instead of having using implementers? Or things like that or not? Not everybody's product, as we said is good for that. But there's a model that people are using these days?

Meg Lovell  26:22

Oh, I think all those tools are absolutely wonderful. I haven't been brave enough to go the no touch model, because I think without a human being in there. And I still haven't overcome that accountability, very

Jeff  26:34

same way. Low touches where I stand in maybe some office hours to get there once a week. Yeah,

Meg Lovell  26:42

yeah, but I think you know, LMS tools are incredibly helpful to the process. You cannot scale as an organization unless you are fully investing in customer support centers, knowledgebase articles, templatized items for your customers refer to and most importantly, an LMS. If you are an organization, and you are using your implementation specialists to deliver a training on your product, you were throwing money out the window, when you look at the price of what you pay for those implementation specialists to do that, you could put that into an LMS. And it would actually be a far more effective training. Because when people are learning, in these systems, especially these new platforms, there's a couple of things you have to keep in mind that some people are visual learners, they like to see text written or they like to see demonstrations, some people like to hear Yeah, and a lot of people like to stop, pause, replay and play along in their own platform. And really, the only way you can do that is with an LMS. You cannot do that very effectively with an implementation specialist talking at

Jeff  27:47

the worst. Yeah, and not only that, but some customers we work with on bringing them into the the low touch models, sort of like what's create, instead of throwing every single feature at them, let's start creating a base level user that everybody's got to go through. And maybe they need to get their little certification before they have their you know, kickoff call or think, Oh, well, you know, there's all again, it's all situation dependent, and everything like that. And then maybe there's an advanced class again, but as you said,

Meg Lovell  28:18

you have to look at this, I have, you know, I call it, it's what Maslow has this hierarchy of needs, you know, you've got food, clothing, shelter, and I have one for the implementations organization, because you you have to the basic your pyramid is so critical, because that is where you have to get the basics right, if you don't have the basics installed, and people using just simple core features, they're never going to progress. Because as you get up at that particular pyramid, unless they can use the base effectively, they're not going to be able to integrate, you know, they're not going to be able to use advanced features, they're not going to be able to understand how to expand it throughout their organizations. And you know, I like to get closer to the Nirvana features when they start doing API integrations with other products. That's where you want to get your customers, because it makes them so sticky. It makes it Newel so much easier. And you know, and you get to the Nirvana that that peak of the pyramid is features like, you know, the AI functionality. But I think if your experience has been like mine, those AI functionalities don't work unless you've gone up the pyramid correctly and filled out the base in order. So you really can't leverage the Nirvana features unless you have got a robust base to your program.

Jeff  29:32

Put the time in. Absolutely. One last question, and then we'll move on to the non work stuff, but a lot of people that wasn't as podcaster you know, they've just been handed a department, you know, like, I've never, now I own implementation to Okay, right. So if you had to give sort of your like top three tips, it can be one, two, if you feel it's ultimate, like make sure you do x, y and z if you know that you experience when you sort of took over the implementation system. What would Your recommendations Bing.

Meg Lovell  30:01

Yeah, I think that implementations should not be some mystical thing. You have to follow your gut. Because these are just normal business problems. So, you know, if your sales org is coming to you and saying, Hey, I've got this renewal coming up, and these guys aren't implemented, you know, you have a problem. You've got to reduce the time for the implementation. You need to talk to your implementation team, and figure out what are the core things that are taking so long in the implementation? Then you've got your shortlist, you can stack rank and prioritize it, and you can start whittling things down. I mean, like, you know, a common one is, well, we do status meetings every week, what happens on the status quo? Well, not a whole lot. Well, there goes the status call, let's say, you know, no meetings without agendas, you know, work with your legal organization to incorporate implementation limits start working on in the in the sales process. So a lot of this stuff, it's, it's actually just a giant logic problem. Yeah. And I would just break it down, there is no magic bullet to implementations. If you have a an organization that you've inherited, I would say just, if it's troubled, if there's challenges, just break the challenges down into smaller components and start solving them one at a time. And think about what you can do to scale it. Another key thing I would say, to look at people look at anything your team is doing that's repeatable. Can that be templatized? And automated? Because you know, automation? Sure. It does take a little bit of elbow grease to get running. But it pays dividends in the long time.

Jeff  31:30

Yeah, that there's just scalability questions. Yeah. How do you scale the team without, you know, as you said, 2x sales to x people like that does not.

Meg Lovell  31:38

It's scary. It actually is scary. When when you know, especially when you're working so fast, though, the work queues are full. Yeah, to actually say, I'm gonna take time out of every single day to do something that's not going to afford a customer implementation right now. But I can reuse this object on every implementation going forward. I tell my team, it's like, it's like making an investment. We each have to take an hour to invest in our future because it's gonna pay dividends.

Jeff  32:05

Yeah, just like his classic example. Those emails that will go out sequentially to go work on X, Y, and Z. It's classic example. Like, who wants to sit down and write there's a lot of people get addicted to the busy stress work, and because like, I'm completing stuff, everything, but those are, those are great tips. Yeah,

Meg Lovell  32:21

you just be bailing the boat your whole life. Don't bail it out. failings? Easy, you know, but it's tiring. It'll burn you out. Just fix the boat.

Jeff  32:31

Yeah, I've seen the the, the biggest pushback I get when I try and do this accompanies is the sales team saying that's going to make this more complicated. We're like, we just want to basically make this experience just super great and happy and easy. So we don't want to slap them with all these legal terms, and the Esso W and everything like that. That's the pushback I usually get with this stuff. So yeah.

Meg Lovell  32:57

You know, and that's actually an easy thing to overcome. It's very common, you know, most software mshs have limitations on the implementation services. Yeah. And, you know, it is very common that the sales team is going to react negatively, because they do see it as a roadblock. But if you resource them with the appropriate tools and knowledge, all of a sudden your implementation process can go from being you know, just something that has to get done to making your company and making it a market differentiator. That if you're apples to apples with the next product, if you have the amazing implementation process that helps your customer get real value very quickly. If you go on those review sites, and you compare your old apple to apple competitor, you're going to find people are talking about more value coming from your product than the other guy because you're implementing better, stronger and faster. Yep, yep.

Jeff  33:53

I don't think we could say another word. But like, that's a great cherry on the top. So I'll say just to wrap things up, I usually ask people what their their newfound hobby was during the COVID season. bread baking or the ukulele?

Meg Lovell  34:12

I know I considered the ukulele I did not get a sourdough starter. I have none of that.

Jeff  34:19

Salty Bostonians for people to know. So we're

Meg Lovell  34:22

so I, I actually moved back to the United States at the beginning of the pandemic, I had been working in Norway. I was great, very grateful because for pandemic isolation. Norwegians left me with some really great work life balance skill. So working from home actually became very easy for me because I was able to separate working life and home life. So I have to say that I think Mike my quarantine activity or superpower was Well, first I didn't get executive platinum flying status. I could only make platinum throw on my own and spending all this time here at home. I think I really just became an expert on you know, living my best life in quarantine. So if the apocalypse truly does happen, I am. I'm rock solid.

Jeff  35:11

I'm the same way I'm good. I'll nap god. I'm good.

Meg Lovell  35:18

Yeah. And like really on the topic of foods, it's I moved back to Norway, I finally have access to a lot more ingredients. So in this pandemic, I have been cooking like crazy. I've been cooking my way through South Asia and I think I am reaching expert level with a walk. So there you go. There's my quarantine activity.

Jeff  35:38

I look forward to your your your ebook with recipes. Absolutely. All right. Pleasure. Thanks for geeking out on implementation. Below one quick second. Yep.