The end of 2018 grows near. Now’s the time to both reflect on the last year and the successes and failures you experienced at your company. As a CEO or executive team (e-team) member, our psychology unfortunately tilts to the failures — the goals we didn’t achieve or things we just didn’t do as well as we would have liked. Thankfully, with the right mindset and team ethos, you discover over time that you indeed can (and do) learn from both your successes and your failures. Consistently asking the same “why did that happen and how can we do better moving forward” question when you have a great outcome as well as a not-so-great outcome is what great companies do. It’s through this approach to learning that a company continues to grow and stay resilient through everything they have to navigate.
This is also the time of year to look ahead. What are our goals — and priorities to achieve those goals — for 2019? How do we keep it simple, or said differently: “How do we do less better?” Anchoring to a single goal i.e. user growth, revenue growth, profit margin, helps create simplicity and alignment for everyone. Underpinning that single goal with the shortest list of imperative priorities is a great next step.
One major stepping stone for a company is the moment when everyone recognizes that the organization is ready to partner with the biggest customers in its industry. Said differently, this is the time when everyone must ask: “What does it mean for us to be enterprise ready?”
For Remind that means being able to support and serve the biggest public school districts in the country. This is both exciting and nerve racking. Each day now at Remind, in every meeting any of us attend, we implicitly — and explicitly — ask each other “what does it mean to really succeed with the biggest customers in K-12 education?” In a more general sense, every company aspires to get to this critical stage — the moment that this question becomes vital to every team member every day. Here are three succinct ways to think about being enterprise ready no matter what those enterprise customers look like to you and your company:
1. Build the product that can close enterprise customers
This is where every company starts. What are the core customer benefits that we need to deliver in order to even be considered a viable option for an enterprise customer. Questions abound here. What are the true “needs” that must be met i.e. what are “table stakes” for us to get a deal? How quickly can we reshuffle our product roadmap to have that product definition built and ready to ship to an enterprise customer? What do we need to do to ensure that our product or platform can work at the scale at which the enterprise customer operates?
When your company must shift gears to support enterprise customers, the days of building minimal viable products (MVPs) — the mantra in the early years for Silicon Valley startups —fade away rapidly in your rearview mirror. It’s time to dramatically up level your effort to build EVPs — “enterprise viable products”. For many companies this cognitive leap is daunting. For every company it’s a major cultural shift from a mindset that says “stuff might break, or not work, but it’s okay, because that’s how we’ll fix things and get better” to a mindset that says “that big customer expects big-time service level agreements (SLAs) and a platform that works better than their current solution.”
The sooner you and your e-team can begin down the road of building towards an enterprise ready product, the better. The reality is it will take longer than you think to build it; that it will take your marketing and sales team longer to sell it; and that your financial plan will only come into full view once these bigger enterprises become part of your customer set.
2. Develop the processes to retain enterprise customers
If step 1 is building your product or platform to enterprise scale and getting enterprise customers on board, then step 2 is all about developing the processes needed to delight these big customers while also ensuring that you continue to evolve what it means to be enterprise ready across a number of important areas that come into focus after you’ve closed the deal.
While the product, design, research, and engineering teams (Prod-Eng) will be central in building the product that closes the first deal, your “go-to-market” (GTM) team that spans marketing, sales, and success will be crucial to ensure these customers renew and expand their relationship with your company. Of course marketing and sales are central to step 1 above, but they are equally crucial here in the phase that centers around keeping customers happy and engaged. For example, your marketing team can see firsthand how these big customers are using the product, and can partner with your success team to prescribe ways to heighten customer engagement. Likewise, while sales team members will be focused on landing new enterprise customers, in the early days of bringing these bigger customers on board, they will be sought out by the buyer as a key go-to relationship.
Within the GTM team, the processes and interactions that your success team develops will be vital. Customer success teams can be multi-faceted — including implementation, user support, and customer success, among other job descriptions. However, each of these team members provides a valuable service for somebody in the enterprise customer’s organization that, if done well, adds to the trust the enterprise customer has in your company. In many ways, the processes you establish for how you implement your customer on boarding and then how you continue to monitor the success these enterprise customers experience with your product determines the probability of renewing and expanding the customer relationship before you even enter the renewal discussion.
While your Prod-Eng and GTM team members are busy scaling their efforts to support enterprise readiness, behind the scenes operates a third leg of the stool that delivers for your biggest customers: your business operations groups. Everything that your finance and accounting, data and business intelligence, people operations, and legal teams do to support your enterprise-sized customers adds to the long-term success you realize in this high-end segment of your business. In fact, a major part of what the business operations effort helps you assess — and then engage with your Prod-Eng and GTM teams to collectively level up — is how your company measures and addresses the combination of security, user content, and compliance risks.
3. Support your people to build meaningful relationships with enterprise customers
When it comes to how you and your company approach the topic of scaling up everything you do to become enterprise ready, the third — and most important — dimension that you must invest heavily in is how you engage your people in this effort. We all get comfortable in the status quo. Nothing feels better than the cozy feeling that “we’ve got this”, but that feeling’s akin to the mountain climber who reaches a base camp, only to realize there’s another camp further up the mountain. As a company, everyone must hold firmly to three beliefs when it comes to beginning the climb to that that next base camp called “enterprise ready”:
everyone on the team must believe that enterprise readiness is critical to the dual, long-term impact and business outcomes you are trying to achieve together;
everyone on the team must believe that your company can do this — that you can eventually get to the base camp together that represents delivering on a continual basis an enterprise ready product or platform; and
everyone on the team must believe that your combined resiliency and “test and learn” ethos will get you past any storms of adversity that will inevitably test you on your ascent to reaching the goal of being “enterprise ready”
One last thought about how to stay centered on this immense challenge. If you and the team constantly put your customers first — essentially using them as your north star in this effort — you’ll never lose your way. If everyone on your team commits to listen to your customers empathetically and to respond to them authentically and with integrity, you’ll always be on the path to enterprise ready no matter how challenging that journey may feel at times. After all, it’s the “hard” — yet fulfilling — journey that we all aspire to take on.
Originally published on Medium on December 16, 2018 This Substack version is maintained as the canonical archive.