Putting the Client First. How we turned raging clients into raving fans.

Hello LinkedIn friends.  This is my first post in over 3 years.  I frankly didn’t have much to say during that time.  Like many people reading this article, we have been swimming through a sea of change at Evosus Software in Vancouver, WA.  Recently, I was encouraged to tell the story of what has happened at our small company with big dreams. We have 32 very cool employees and 500 fantastic clients who we are thankful for.  Over the past few years, we’ve had ups & downs as we prepared for our next phase of growth. I’m happy to say that we made it through that time and we’ve come out on top with a debt free, profitable and growing company.

Over the past few years, we have stabilized, grown and increased the profitability of the Evosus business all based on one premise: putting the client first in all that we do.

The Camel’s Back Broke in Reno

In the winter of 2017, we had upset software clients – lots of them. The tipping point was a trade show in Reno, Nevada where I made the mistake of attending the show by myself.  I was VP of Sales at the time and thought – this event will be easy! I’ll have conversations with some of our existing clients, pick up some new leads and give some product demonstrations. Maybe I’ll even have time to play blackjack in the evenings. I could not have been more wrong.

I spent the next 2 days getting screamed at by clients.  I had to pull people away from our booth and have conversations outside the showroom floor.  Phrases like, “You guys don’t answer your phones.” and “I no longer think about when, but if, you’ll ever get back to me on my question.” stick with me to this day.  I was flabbergasted. We had just come off of our biggest sales year EVER! Things were going great in my mind. And yet, my eyes were opened to the truth when I stood on the front lines.

I was so affected by this exhausting experience that I went back to my hotel room at the end of each day and slept.  Having fun seemed inappropriate. No blackjack.

Ever Had A Client Throw Something At You?

A repeat performance occurred a few weeks later at a buying group event.  During a presentation, a client got so upset that they were preparing to throw something at me.  I have no idea what was in their hand, but I was prepared to stop, drop and roll. Dozens of clients were there to see our company criticized in a very public environment.  It got personal.

I did what I could in that moment – stood strong and promised to fix the problem.  I figured … well at least they care. No one throws an object at someone else unless they’re passionate.  We just had to find a way to take that passion and turn it into something positive.

At the core of the problem was our lackluster support. We often refer to our software as the central nervous system for our clients.  They rely on it to look up customer history, manage inventory, process invoices and hundreds of other daily activities. And when someone gets stuck, and has no idea what to do, they look for help.  We made them feel stranded.

Taking Action & Making It Visible

We had to fix things quickly.  It had to be something dramatic and provide a clear, visible sign to our clients that we cared.  The first thing we did was move from a “black box ticketing system” to an assigned account manager model.  In other words, instead of clients submitting a ticket to our system and waiting to hear back from the next support person, each client now has a primary point of contact for anything they may need.  While this concept is not new in the b-to-b software industry, it was new to our clients, and provided a clear sign that things were changing. It empowered our clients and they liked having someone they could communicate directly with for questions.  While we’ve since changed the title of this role to Client Success Manager, the core function remains the same. We put the client relationship at the center of our world, and the healing began.

Establishing Clear Parameters

When you make changes, you have a window of opportunity to re-establish the ground rules, and that’s exactly what we did next.  We did obvious things, like change our hours of operation from 7AM to 4PM pacific, which aligned better with our client base on the east coast.  We established clear lines between support and paid consulting. We also put boots on the ground and sent our employees onsite at client locations.  In time, we were able to help our clients understand that we are all in this together. A vendor / client relationship is a 2-way road and everyone has to drive on the right side of the road to make things work.  I knew we were making progress when a client, who went out of their way to send me several emails each day, mentioned, “Things are far from perfect, but now that I know who my contact is over there, they’re much better than they were.”  Progress.

Cloud = Better Support and the Ability to Scale

The next set of decisions was related to our core product.  Our software was built on a Microsoft stack. The underlying database, tables and code base was highly functional, but outdated. The world is headed to the cloud, and we had to get there too.  Our clients have been burdened with on-premise servers and operating system support for far too long. This also creates a situation where clients are all running in different systems, and different versions of our software.  Talk about tough to support! The first 10 minutes of most client calls was trying to understand what sort of system they were running on.

The solution was obvious.  We needed to grow up and create software where users can log in from any device with a browser and an internet connection.  We established a goal of replicating our legacy product in the cloud, in 24 months or less. In the summer of 2018, we carefully identified the world-class technologies that were available, honed in on the best solution for our clients and got to work.  I’m happy to say that our cloud software will launch in November 2019.

The advantages of cloud technology are many.  The 2 greatest benefits out of the gate are:

1. Better Support – By eliminating the first 10 minutes of client calls (“OK – let’s see what you’re running on here.”) we can hone in on solutions and help our clients faster.

2. Scale – It took us 18 years to take on 500 clients.  We expect to take on several thousand clients within the next few years.  The cloud allows us to scale up quickly. In fact, everything is faster in the cloud including sales, onboarding and support.

Oh Yeah … We Fired Our Sales Team

On March 31, 2019 (about 2 weeks ago as of the writing of this article) we stopped selling the legacy version of our software product.

Yup.  We shut down sales.  And at the same time, we will continue to provide patch releases and support for existing clients for years to come.

By creating a strong financial base and through careful planning, we realized that shutting down sales was what was best for our clients, even though it meant passing up at least $300K in revenue this year.  Here’s why we did it:

-        April – let’s say we closed a client this month

-        August – after several months of training and data conversion, the client goes live

-        November – 90 days after going live, we launch our cloud software.  How would that make you feel as a new client? The conversations would have sounded something like this:

“Are you kidding me?  You mean that if I had waited a few more months to buy, I wouldn’t have had to buy a server and I could have been running on cloud-based software?  Thanks a lot!”

So we did what was best for our clients.  We stopped selling.

Gutsy?  Kinda.

Client first?  Absolutely.

Looking Ahead

At this point, we have 500 generally happy clients.  We know this because we proactively call them and speak with them each month.  They know that we are here when they need us. For the next 7 months, we are preparing both our internal and client-facing systems for the relaunch of our company.  Building on all that we’ve learned, we’ll continue to keep our company debt free and profitable, while always putting the client first.

We believe that the cloud based software we’ll launch this November will be a positive disruption in the industries we serve.  It sure will be fun finding out if we’re right.