Episode 91 Transcript

Banoo Behboodi: Welcome to the Professional Services Pursuit, a podcast featuring expert advice and insights on the professional services industry. Hi everyone, great to have you with us. I'm Banoo and today's episode is part of our series on navigating the complex process of purchasing a technology or software solution.

Listen, we do this every day with our own prospects and customers. We know it can be complicated, working through stakeholders and moving parts when you're thinking of selecting a new tool. We want to help you by bringing experts on and having conversations that allow for the opportunity to break down this complex process step by step and give you, hopefully, some tools to navigate it effectively.

Today we're joined by Austin Grigg, co-founder and CEO of Kalon Creative. Austin helps businesses automate processes, eliminate manual tasks, and turn data into actionable insights for growth. We'll be diving into integrations as a critical element of any tool selection, and how to approach them from the overall buying journey and things to watch out for and look for. Thank you, Austin, for joining us. Really happy to have you on the podcast.

Austin Grigg: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me. Excited to chat about this topic with you.

Banoo Behboodi: Awesome. Why don't we start with an introduction. Tell us a little bit more about yourself, about Kalon Creative, and the types of problems you solve for your customers.

Austin Grigg: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. For me, my love of technology started really young. When I got to go to college, I went to Clemson University and got my degree in computer science. I was always tinkering with computers and interested in that.

I started my career off as a software developer. I came with a technical background, but through my career, I realized that I also love the business side of things. I found a niche there. About 12 years ago, I started Kalon Creative with my business partner Brett. He has a design background. We brought the technical side, the design thinking side, and married those together. We are passionate about helping operations teams streamline their processes.

When I started getting into technology, the power of it to me was you could build something and transform someone's day. You could transform what they were doing in their work through this technology. That's what we get to do day in and day out and what we love to do.

Banoo Behboodi: That's awesome. I am really happy to have you on. I want to dive in. I think it's great to approach this topic by looking at the steps in the buying journey, acquisition, and implementation. Discussing each step and having you share your best practices and considerations would be valuable.

The first step we should start with is consideration before one starts evaluating software solutions. What are the things that you have to have in place or think about so that you can be successful in the evaluation stage?

Austin Grigg: Right. Absolutely. Yeah. This is fun to talk about. I know you guys are doing a series on how to choose the right technologies, implementing those right technologies, and integrations is a key piece of that. Like many things, making a plan at the beginning is crucial.

Before you even start the process, there are some things you can do to ensure it's a successful process. One of the first things is to list the specific tools that you need. Before you talk about integrations, look at your technology stack. Identify the tools you are already using and how those need to integrate into this new tool. One of the things we find when working with people is that business people often say, "Hey, we need an integration between our CRM and this new project management tool." However, you need to get specific.

If you're not specific, when you actually get into the implementation or choosing the tool, you run into problems. Instead of just saying you need an integration, start writing out the tools that you need to integrate and what those need to look like. Integration may look like just syncing contact data between the tools, but it may be, "Hey, when we have something in sales completed in the CRM, we want that to create a project in our project management tool." Being specific about the types of things that those integrations need to do will be helpful throughout the process.

Banoo Behboodi: That's awesome. You would build some of that into your checklist and considerations as you decide who the vendors that you're going to look at, etc.

Austin Grigg: Right. Yes, exactly. It gives you the right questions to ask as you dig into those things.

Banoo Behboodi: Then you go into your selection process. You're going to have to identify who are some of the options that you’re going to look at and then start looking at who you ultimately choose. During this selection process, what are some of the things you need to watch out for with respect to integrations?

Austin Grigg: Yeah, sure. I think even as you're going into that process, some of the things that can be good to be thinking about are making sure that you're getting buy-in from key stakeholders—talking to your IT department, talking to your ops department, maybe there's some reporting that's already in place that you need to make sure you support. Even as you're entering in and starting to have those conversations with those technology providers, getting the right people on board can be critical.

As you start to have those conversations, you want to look at the different ways that you can integrate those tools. One of the three buckets I like to think about as I'm talking with software vendors, evaluating software, is often three different ways those things can come together. There may be built-in integrations, so maybe you're looking at a tool, and it already has a connector. Maybe it has a connector to Salesforce or a connector to the accounting software that you use. From that first step that we looked at, really identifying the types of integrations you need, you need to look and say, okay, are those connectors doing what I need them to do? They may be very robust, or they may have a more surface-level functionality.

The second bucket would be middleware tools. That would be something like more on the consumer side, you see something like Zapier. On the enterprise side, you'd see things like Workato or MuleSoft. Those are built to connect different systems together. Those can be a nice in-between. You don't have to write something from scratch, but you may need someone that's a little more technical to pull those things together.

Those are great for simpler integrations. Something happens in one system, and you want to send a notification. Or something happens in your source system, and you want to update that same data in another system. Those can be great options if there's no built-in connector.

The last case, and each of these gets deeper and more technical as you go, is API integrations. You want to look and see if this tool has an open API. API stands for Application Programming Interface. It's a way for you to do things with that tool and automate things in a programmatic way. It will take getting a developer in there, having someone more technical.

That's where if you've involved your IT department, they can evaluate that API because we found APIs that are very robust, and we started working on a potential integration only to realize that the API only supports certain types of functionalities. Maybe you have a payroll API that allows you to enter time-tracking data but doesn't allow scheduling people. If you were planning to build your integration around scheduling, you're in trouble if it doesn't support that.

Once you've looked at those different options, it's important to find out if there are different costs or limitations. We talked about some of those limitations, but maybe there's an additional cost for gaining access to the API. Some solutions include that for free out of the box. Some charge for it. All those things are important so that you have a full picture when evaluating that software tool. Finally, understanding what kind of support they offer. As you get into that integration, is someone going to be walking with you and alongside you for that integration? Do they have good help documentation? All those pieces come together to provide a better picture of the different aspects of this tool so that you can evaluate things side by side.

Banoo Behboodi: Yeah. Let me summarize what I've learned because I think what you've just shared is so critical and something we run into all the time when we speak to our prospects. If you take the example of someone who is interested in looking at PSAs, I would say more often than not, they haven't thought about how that PSA fits into the rest of the technology stack and the overall company strategy.

I love the fact that you're saying as a best practice, take some time, figure that out, go cross-functionally, understand how that PSA interacts technologically but also strategically and business-wise as you formulate your requirements and what you're looking for. That then allows you to figure out what are the capabilities I'm really looking to replace, where are the capabilities that I have elsewhere and I'm trying to interface with, and then based on that, getting your requirements. Did I understand that correctly? Because if that's the understanding, I a hundred percent think that there will be much more success in that selection process.

Austin Grigg: Yeah, absolutely. No, you're a hundred percent right. I think it's really stepping back and seeing the bigger picture. It can be easy to start comparing features or getting excited about an individual component, but if you're not seeing how it fits into the overall picture you're going to set yourself up for failure.

Banoo Behboodi: Based on hopefully having done all the assessment, understanding the technology stack, developing your requirements functionally but also technically from an integration perspective, and understanding anything else, whether it's middleware, depending on the strategy you're taking, anything else that's needed, you then make your selection and dive into your implementation. What are some of the considerations to make sure that implementation proceeds successfully?

Austin Grigg: As you're implementing a new piece of software, there's so many things that are happening. You're getting it set up correctly. You're making sure that people are getting trained and you're creating materials, but you can't forget about the integrations and how that's fitting into the overall picture. I think a lot of this is just straightforward but sometimes things we forget about.

I think setting a timeline if you're working with an implementation partner or your vendor or internal team, laying out a timeline and saying, okay, what are the projects we're going to tackle and when? Using that prioritization that hopefully you did ahead of time to look and see, what are the things that we need to get done first and mapping that out and then creating a meeting cadence, connecting with that team on a regular basis to say, hey, how are these things going so that you're making sure everything's progressing smoothly?

I think for me, one of the things that may be counterintuitive is starting with a small win. We can create a prioritization framework. We could look at impact versus effort. Sometimes the thing that's going to have the most impact may also be the most effort. A lot of technology projects can get in trouble if they try to bite off something too big upfront, especially with an implementation. Because this is a new platform, a new integration.

I recommend finding something that's going to be impactful, but maybe that's a lower effort. Start with that, and then you learn so much through that process. Then when you move on to the bigger integrations, you're taking that knowledge and those learnings and applying that forward and you just build momentum. I think that's just a helpful principle. As humans, we think we're all perfectly rational, and it's like, okay, I'm going to go with the most impactful or the biggest priority first. But really, if it's a longer project, say, that's a three-month initiative, we can get bogged down and feel like, are we really making headway? I think if you can deliver that immediate value, that provides a lot of benefits.

Banoo Behboodi: Once you get your perspective on an element which is reporting, it would mean considering or prioritizing what you go after first and what you go after next. Reporting, if one of your integrations is maybe getting data out of your new tool into your data warehouse, I would imagine, and that's, again, it's a conversation we have and redirect a lot of our customers to this is yes, we want to get reporting. That is the outcome because the insights are what will drive the difference, what will drive the knowledge and the information you need to make a difference in your business.

You have to be patient. Understand the tool you're implementing, understand the data and how it's going to interact. That may have to be one of the next steps, not the immediate step. What are your thoughts on that?

Austin Grigg: Yeah, that's a great point. I think a lot of times, especially technical people, even like myself, can jump to wanting to have the perfect solution or having everything automated. Actually, a lot of times, starting with something really simple is a great place to start because you're still understanding what the data is going to look like and what you need to see. I think even just starting with a lot of the built-in tools—a lot of these tools are going to have built-in export capabilities. Export to Excel and start looking at that, make a simple report. When you know what numbers you want to see, then start pushing that data into your data warehouse, then start building automated dashboards and reports.

A lot of times we get into trouble if we jump straight to building Power BI or Tableau dashboard when we haven't actually thought through what are the real KPIs that we want to see. That takes time getting used to the tool. That takes time figuring out what that data looks like if you need to massage it in different ways. There can be phased approaches to these things as well.

Banoo Behboodi: Yeah, I'm going to state the obvious, but I'd be curious about how often you guys run into this: If you're integrating with other systems, that means you need technical resources that are available throughout your project to be able to work with you on the other technology you're trying to integrate with. That also is something that, if you don't plan well and you don't get the commitments from the organization, can cause repeated delays in the project and constraints. I don't know what your thoughts are and how frequently this happens as a problem.

Austin Grigg: No, absolutely. Every organization has constraints. Particularly when I talk to teams, their IT department seems to have way more things that they can do than time to do it in. I think that's why bringing them in early, getting their buy-in, getting their input, and understanding how big of a task this is going to be for them and then scheduling that out is really critical.

Banoo Behboodi: A lot of what we've talked about, I believe that in the podcast we will share a link. You have a number of very useful checklists going through the journey that will allow people to go through and say, well, have I done these things to make sure I'm successful? Anything you want to add? Any preamble you want to provide the listeners on this?

Austin Grigg: Sure. I can give my top five just a couple of things, and then we'll include them in the show notes. It's just kaloncreative.com/PSP for Professional Services Pursuit. If anyone wants to grab this, we'll have a free checklist up there. You're welcome to get it.

We break it into these stages. If that's something that's helpful, I know it can be hard when you're listening to a podcast or on a drive. You can't write it all down, so you can access it there. Just a couple of quick-hit things to tie those together:

This is something you and I have talked about several times now—starting with the end in mind. Be clear about the problem you're trying to solve so that as you're going through these processes, you know the different things to look out for.

The second one is bringing stakeholders in early. We've hammered on this because it's so critical.

Third is prioritizing your integrations.

Fourth is being specific, and that's both on what you mean as an integration and also being specific with your potential technology partner about what you need from them.

The fifth one is starting small. If I were to boil it down, these would be my top five because they really can set you up for success.

Banoo Behboodi: Perfect. Before we go to my personal question, I did want to touch on one more topic. When we were talking about your business and what you do, one of the cool things you offer, one of the cool services you offer is going into a business, looking at their technology stack and systems, auditing and providing some recommendations on how they can optimize, how they can use the technology to optimize their process. Can you tell us a little bit more about those services? There may be listeners that are interested in it.

Austin Grigg: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. We really believe that there's so much great software out there. I think the challenge now is determining which to use and how to piece it all together. One of the things we do is we're happy to have a free call with people to sit down and look at what is their technology stack, what are the things that they're trying to evaluate. Part of what we do is then we go into a process where we can interview stakeholders and identify the key pain points. We try to really understand someone's business and the problems they're trying to solve.

We map out those different technology pieces and identify what are the different elements that you can get from off-the-shelf tools. We really believe that you can leverage so much of the software that's out there, but then what are these other integration pieces? Do you need a data warehouse? Do you need a custom dashboard? Do you need to connect two systems together? Seeing how those might fit in. Looking at it holistically, trying to point them in the right direction, and then if they do need something customized—that's part of where we come in—we can really help bridge the gap for that last 10% to 20% that you may not get in one solution that you're trying to tie everything together.

Banoo Behboodi: If anyone's interested and wants to reach out, is it just through LinkedIn or what would you suggest?

Austin Grigg: You can check out our website, kaloncreative.com, or send me a message on LinkedIn. We are also doing a series of webinars this year. If you'd like more info, you can check our LinkedIn for Kalon Creative. We will be posting information about it. We are focusing on how to help operations teams streamline their processes, so it’d be a great opportunity if you want to learn more. Check it out there.

Banoo Behboodi: Perfect. Sounds good. Now, getting to my last question, which is personal. We're going to do something a little bit different today and have you walk us through. I know you have a preferred framework that you found very helpful in your career as you have worked throughout your career to address issues and get to success. What is that framework?

Austin Grigg: I love learning new frameworks, new mental models, and maps. One of the things I'm passionate about, in addition to technology and business, is leadership development. As I've grown in my career, and I think a lot of people can relate to this, they start having more responsibility. They may have direct reports, they've got people coming to them. I came across this framework from Dan Martell, and it's called the 1-3-1 framework. If you have someone that's coming to you and you're trying to delegate things to them, they have questions, I found this to be really helpful.

The framework is what's the one problem you're trying to solve? You try to get them to be really clear. Don't bring three things to me at once. Come with one specific question. What are the three options to address it? You get them to do the homework right. You get them to think about instead of just coming to you for an answer, they have to do some pre-work to say, hey, I've thought about this problem. I think here are three ways we could address it. And then what's their one recommendation? One problem, three potential options, and then their one recommendation. What it gets them to do is it really trains people to do that work ahead of time, come with potential options. The hope is you made that first conversation. Those first couple of times you're training someone up, you may say, well, you recommended this one, but maybe you hadn't considered this piece, and it creates a conversation. Or maybe there's a fourth option they hadn't considered. But hopefully, over time, they start coming to you and you basically just say, yep, I think your recommendation is the right one, go with it. Eventually, they stop coming to you because every time they come, you're just telling them to go with their recommendation. It builds that confidence in people.

I think it's just a really neat way both to help and empower your team, but also, just be able to get more off your plate and really build a team that's independent on your own. I found that just to be helpful. We use that in our team and share that with other people, and people find that valuable.

Banoo Behboodi: I love it. It’s great. I think it’s also a great tool if you're playing a role of a mentor because you're building skill set, which is awesome.

Well, listen, Austin, it's been amazing having you on this podcast. Thank you. For our listeners, as always, thanks for listening. If you have any follow-up questions for myself or Austin, we would love to hear them. Send us an email at podcast@kantata.com, and we would be happy to get back to you. You also have Austin's Kalon Creative site. You can always reach out in that manner or through LinkedIn with Austin. Thank you so much and have a great day.

Austin Grigg: Thanks so much.

Brent Trimble: If you enjoyed this podcast, let us know by giving the show a five-star review on your favorite podcast platform and leaving a comment. If you haven't already subscribed to the show, you could do so anywhere you get podcasts on any podcast app. To learn more about the power of Kantata’s purpose-built technology, go to kantata.com. Thanks again for listening.