How This Program Manager Anticipated Unseen Customer Needs to Save Clients from Switching to Competitors

Uh, absolutely. So, I was working as a, uh, a lead performance engineer and also a lead support person for an e-discovery product. So, uh, there was a time when, uh, one of our customers had a serious issue with the product in, in setting up there, a lot of, uh, uh, setup issues with the product. So, a field agent asked me if I could take a look into it. So I went in and checked. Uh, I found that, uh, uh, the Uh, the field engineers had proposed an inadequate hardware configurations for our customers, uh, by misunderstanding a metric. So, uh, this was causing them to move away from a product, raising issues, and then move away to a competitor. So what I did is I actually, uh, came back and, and, uh, uh, I, I told them that we can resolve this easily and, and I just did sort of did some tactical work and, and enabling the customer to move on with their work, and then came back and, and told my product directors and everyone, see, our, our customers are having problems with, with the product setup, uh, because we were not providing, we, we are, we have a misunderstanding of the metric, and even our customers had. Uh, no idea what they want to invest, what, what are they going to invest in our product for the 1st and 2nd year when they buy our product. So this is actually making them more nervous and uh making them go away from our products. So, uh, uh, so I understood that, uh, uh, what, what our customer needed was, uh, a very strong uh analytical solution in which, through which they can understand what is the cost they're going to pay when buying our product. And also, uh, this product involved a heavy setup, uh, and a lot of data needed to be taken in into the product to actually, uh, create data sets that, uh, uh, lawyers or someone can review later. So they needed to understand how long would it take for every, uh, discovery cases that they get, how long would it take for an admin person at their site to set up the data so they can finish their cases in time. So they need product written off investment on the user experience metrics very clearly. So, uh, after, uh, discussing things with the product manager, what it did is. I came up and drove a team to uh create an analytical solutions, solution, which uh actually uh uh had a questionnaire which based on our customers, uh, custom requirements predicted, uh, what is the cost of the solution that they needed, and, uh, very accurately, and which, so, which made them realize that this is the cost that they're going to see if they, if they buy our product against a market competitor. And also, which also provided what would be the turnaround time, uh, every time they use our product and uh they had to set up the data for, for their lawyers or reviewers to work on a case, what would be the turnaround time they, they would see if they use our product. So, this tool gave all those user. End user experience metrics and also the uh the amount of cost they're going to invest in the product for the 1st 2 years. So after building out this tool, uh, every time I, I closed out the next 11 business deals by working with the sales team, uh, in, in supporting our end users understand. What would be the exact cost they would be putting in our product whenever they buy it for the 1st year and the 2nd year, and also how soon they will finish up the cases every time they get a new case and use our product, how soon they will finish all the cases. So that was the time I had to build a, uh, by easing out our customer pain points in product planning, product, product purchase planning, and also understanding, uh. Um, uh, how they can use our product, tell them how, how they can use our product.

Absolutely. I mean, uh, someone could have asked for it directly, uh, sooner or later, but, uh, there was at, at one specific instance when I was on that sales call, one of the customers asked, uh, hey. Uh, so, your tool has actually, uh, I'm, I'm thinking, because we were earlier, we had this small, medium, and large sizes for our tool instead of providing an exact configuration, we had this different bucket sizes. So I thought, hey, I'm, uh, it looks like I'm going to spend so much money on your product. How's it, uh, I'm, I'm not sure if this is going to even work because we have a new product in the market. We already have a market leader who is actually very good, and your cost is about the same as whatever the market leader is charging. So I'm not sure what, what I'm gonna do. If, if I buy it, I know I, my, my life will be pleasant, and I'm not gonna see any issues because they are all already established. So that conversation with the customer actually made me realize that we need to uh save their pain points in, in, in the cost, as well as, uh, they also need to know when they use our product, how long. Uh, what, what are, what are the pain points or what are the, uh, reverse, uh, return of investment they're going to see with our products. That, that's the condition that made me realize we need to build out a solution.

Absolutely. So, uh, there were, uh, multiple impacts. One, every time the sales had a new customer, it came to the support and it came to the performance engineering. So we had about 2 weeks to finish off, uh, charting out all the requirements and then get it out. But my tool actually, uh, automated a lot of the process on it. It just put analyst in the low process. So we, we finished off sales cycle from 2 weeks to reduce the sales cycle from 2 weeks to about 3 days. And, uh, uh, 2, we also be able, we, we were able to penetrate, uh, more in, in our market. Uh, I, I closed, as I told, I closed 11 customer deals after building out these tools and all the 111 customers had no, no big issues in, in setting up the product, and they were able to see whatever, uh, user experience that our tool predicted in, in there. In their own system, were,

Oh yes, absolutely. I, I was closing in a shorter duration and also at a higher rate. Earlier it was like small, medium, and large were like what's, let's say 50% success rate because most of the time we were missing off, uh, recommending the right. Cost, recommending the right tools and everything. So, my success rate improved, including, uh, improved, improved from 50% to 91% uh after uh getting this tool, and also the negotiation times reduced from 2 weeks to 3 days after this tool was created.

Yes, absolutely, yeah.