6. Accelerating Launches and Adoption in Beta Deals
- Yamini Bhat Co-founder & CEO, Vymo
At an early stage, everyone thinks giving your business is like giving you opportunity. So there are many things you need to negotiate.
In all likelihood, you will have to give out beta customer discounts at this stage, especially for important logos. You need to tell them that if they are a beta customer in the order form, they can get access to some features for free for the next couple of years.
This helps you co-build the product with the customer. But do not forget about this discount. In large enterprises, procurement teams change many times over. Remember, you will also scale, and you don’t want to be blindsided if someone refers to this discount in the future.
But just securing the deal is only half the challenge. There is usually a lot of launch inertia in large organizations, and you must work around it. This is also important for you in the early stages because it helps you assess how urgent your solution is for that buyer. People only buy tech and use it if the need's urgent.
You have to coach the buyer to set a fixed launch day during the buying process. Large enterprises can afford to delay launches, but you’ll have to point out the ROI they are missing out. Why buy a tool if you can live without it for six months?
Take the launch initiative. Call your champion in the account beforehand and get them in the same mindset. Tell them this is the date you need to be live by and ask them to drive the urgency in their team.
I’ve made clients say that in that meeting many times. They will come on a call without knowing it’s a conference, but they’ll show up for five minutes, say the word, and go away.
When decision-makers on the customer side set a date, everything works backward. Then, we keep sending them weekly updates.
You need to make sure that there is no product limitation. They should be able to configure it themselves, have all your APIs ready, open it, etc.
Nudge your tech and product teams for this, even if they say this is not the most important because it will give you three to six months of additional billing. Launching late also means you start billing late. You have to make launching as easy as possible and reduce the friction.
It may not seem like the most urgent problem, but that additional billing is hugely important when you’re growing. Maybe you won’t be able to do it for the first five customers, but start focusing on it soon.
So, there will be nervousness about going live on your customer’s end. Your answer to that is that you can actually go live today.
You can start billing from day zero as you grow heft in your category. The moment you have day zero billing, customers start losing money by delaying the launch. Microsoft does this. Salesforce does this. You can't escape it. But in the early days, it can be challenging when your customers are much bigger than you. You need to train your Sales team to do this. Give them bonuses for this.
They will struggle for a year, but when they start seeing wins, it will become a way of life. It is the way of life now in Vymo. An exception requires approval internally.
Now that your deal is done and the product is live with your customers, the number one thing your customer success manager should be doing is driving adoption.
You have to have a definition of what you want your end users to do. What is the adoption you expect? Do you expect it every single day, or do you expect it every week?
In the early days, if those actions are not happening, the founder or the customer success team should sit in the customer’s office and figure it out.
By definition, that is adoption, and getting it done is non-negotiable. If that fails, there’s a fundamental challenge in the product’s usability.