SaaS Customer Life cycle - Implementation

This is part of a series of posts focused on the life cycle of a SaaS customer. The first post is here, and the previous post about contracts here.

This post will focus on implementation. I won't delve into methodology this pass ( I have covered this in more detail here. It doesn't matter whether you have a 2 hour implementation or a 6 month implementation is dependent on a number of factors:

• The simplicity of the business problem being solved
  
• The maturity of the solution
  
• The input / decisions required by clients.
  
• Expectations of product that have been misunderstood during the sales cycle.
  

Nothing earth shattering or particularly revealing on that list, but I want to spend a couple of moments to go a bit deeper into each of those items.

The simplicity of the business problem being solved will impact the length of your deployment time. Note I did not say the simplicity of your solution. You may have a complex solution to a simple problem, however hopefully that complexity is all under the hood and doesn't need to be exposed to any implementation team. It is always easier to use examples, so for example if your software is geared to helping an enterprise simply track the number of hits to a specific page this is a fairly simple business problem. Now consider a suite of software that handles ERP. These two examples are vastly different in the scope of the problems they are solving. I would expect the implementation time for the ERP system to be significantly longer. As the trend is for software to become more and more feature laden it would stand to reason that software complexity will only continue to increase. This is not necessarily an encourage trend in terms of implementation times for SaaS solutions, however simplicity / complexity is not the only factor.

The maturity of any given product will impact deployment. In theory the more mature the product the more experienced the implementation teams and the more time the product and development teams have had to address any technology challenges related to implementations. There are some notable exceptions. As products mature they tend to add to the feature set, which again invokes the issues mentioned above. On the whole a more mature SaaS solution should be faster to implement than a less mature solution in the same space solving the same problems.

The input required by clients will most likely have the greatest impact on implementation times. As the focus of this blog is on the enterprise it needs to be acknowledged that many enterprise clients have a culture where people who make "bad" decisions are frequently punished. This leads to a culture where people are sometimes afraid of making decisions, or to a culture where there are multiple people are required to sign off any decisions. This is very likely to be the primary cause of delays in implementations. The best way to mitigate this challenge is to have the fewest number of client inputs as required and try to gather as much information as possible during the sales process.

The final item listed has the potential to be the biggest challenge to implementation. No matter how clear you think you are being during the sales cycle it is still possible that what a client hears isn't exactly what you meant (let's assume the best intentions for both the sales teams and the clients). When these sorts of mismatched expectations occur it will almost always require escalation to more senior resources on both sides. Once that has occurred it is highly likely that delays will occur but more importantly confidence will begin to erode. This is the most detrimental part for establishing a long term relationship. In a perfect world this would never happen, but alas sometimes it does. One strategy that seems to be effective at minimizing these sorts of issues is to have a member of the implementation team present at the appropriate point in the sales cycle. Ideally it would be the same implementation team member who will be responsible for that client's implementation. This helps avoid the he said she said that these kinds of miscommunications can sometimes turn into. Clearly if the implementation time for your solution is only a day it's less of an issue, but if it is longer it is worth considering integrating implementation with some part of the sales process.

While some or all of these may be factors in any given implementation process the faster an organization can implement their solution the better. This will allow you to get to the all important revenue recognition as soon as possible.