At Baton, we can trace the company’s origins
back to our founders’ struggles in scaling
implementations — starting with the huge amounts
of time wasted tending to static silos of data.
We experienced firsthand how 30–40% of pivotal project time is lost on manually updating disconnected platforms. For instance, our implementation teams would have to:
None of these tools interfaced gracefully with one another and teams naturally resisted signing onto yet another platform, so this maintenance sank half of their weekly bandwidth.
By extension, our teams consistently spent only half of their time performing pivotal functions.
Why do implementation & customer onboarding matter at scale?
When implementations don’t go according to plan, it will likely impede your company’s ability to scale, especially if you’re planning to increase capacity and revenue. To double revenue, you double customer count — and thus double the size of your implementation team if you are scaling only by adding people.
When most of your grunt work (i.e., data entry and updates, internal reporting) is carried out by humans, not software, any amount of scale necessitates hiring more bodies. In the long run, the more people you hire, the more it impacts margins and software model because you’re no longer selling SaaS. You’re selling professional services.
The Downsides of Service Models
This gradual (often unintentional) shift toward becoming a services-heavy software provider is tricky and damaging for a number of reasons.
You now have to balance utilization, i.e., “How much of X worker’s time is billed out vs. what do we pay them for that time?” If the ratio is low, your margins drop.
As a software company, this shift means you’ll rapidly see services revenue eclipse actual software revenue.
Presenting as a low-margin software business then harms your ability to raise more funding or even go public.
The Baton Solution
We built Baton to be the customer facing team’s source of truth on implementation projects. Baton facilitates collaboration between implementation teams and their customers, by enabling bidirectional sync and a single source
of truth.
At the same time, more and more tools for software implementation, project management, and professional services continue to enter the market. But they operate without considering or implementing two critical pieces of customer insight. Teams do not want to log onto yet another program, tool, app, etc.
Want more tips & best practices for scaling your implementation process?
The hard truth about implementing B2B software without engaging third-party partners is that it’s irrationally expensive, complex and doesn’t scale. Fortunately, there a several steps software providers can take to establish streamlined and scalable process that eliminate much of this pain and manual work.
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