Introduction & agenda 

hi everyone welcome to today’s product update webinar with client I’ll let a couple of people get in and then we’ll start in a couple of seconds if that’s okay all right I see we still have people coming first webinar of the year yes all right let’s get started so welcome to today’s January webinar um today we’ll be talking about version 49.1 14.2 which is our latest version um my name is Rosalie and I’m a customer success manager at client um and I will be your host we also have as always Yanick our CEO hi Yanick hi everyone once again our team has been working very to bring a ton of value to our customers so we have another feature pack webinar today so exciting Ros and we also have Natalie our project advisor slch change advisor uh wearing many hats at client and she’ll be answering your questions in the Q&A and in the chat um let’s go to the next slide perfect okay so these webinars go very well if you do the three following things make sure you participate to our polls we have a couple takes a few seconds and it helps us know what you’re thinking um make sure to use the react Button as well we have the little screenshot if you don’t know where to find it and then you can use the chat in the Q&A to ask questions this is where Natalie will be able to answer you um so let’s get you to participate to our very first uh poll which I’m launching right now we just want to know is this your very uh is this your first client webinar yes no I’m a regular no I’ve been to a couple um and it’s always great to see I think every time we always have people that answer yes well half the people so that’s great we always have new new faces joining us and hopefully we keep doing great webinars so there’s more and more people that want to join us every time yes we have a lot of newbies I think it’s probably part of some people’s new resolution for 2025 to joining client webinar every month all right thank you so much everyone all right yeah it was about half people are first timers that’s great um all right so what’s on the agenda for today so we’re going to be talking about new features and improvements that were released in version 49.1 14.2 and uh before that uh we’re going to look at the product road map for version 50 yes we’re already at version 50 that’s gonna be released in early February and we’re also going to talk um we’re going to share some exciting news about a new e-learning initiative that we you have um so stay tuned for that at the end of the webinar let’s dive right into it shall we um so in terms of new functionality we have five of them today and as you may notice there’s a recuring team it’s all about the resource planner so let’s start with our very first one which is align schedule with with logged hours

 Yanick before you show us how that works can you tell me why someone would want to align their schedule with logged hours yeah absolutely and um you might burn a few brain calories on this one uh it’s not the easiest one to demo and I wanted to be everybody to be attentive for the that first demo uh but uh and I’ll try to make it simple uh so we can look at the details the the concept is in client you have several uh fields or several way that you can um that we address effort Associated to a task so first on a task you have the estimation of ours as we can see here we have on that specific build task we have 120 hours of estimation meaning that we think that it’s going to take the team to deliver this 120 hours then we have another concept where it’s scheduling hours in this case you can see as well that we have 120 schedule hours meaning that there’s only roxan is sign here on this uh on this task so she has she has 100 hours of scheduled to work on this uh I’ve put also the variance between one minus the other so we can see that there’s zero variance and the other interesting field is the number of hours that you’ve logged so all this is to cap U to capture the effort and we allow as well for over scheduling and under scheduling which sometime brings some over U some some misalignment and some variance in between so this is what that feature uh is going to be U addressing so let me show you what it means by looking at the global uh the project resource planner for that specific project let me just uh realign a little bit my dates and show you the task underneath so as you can see here in that build task we have 120 hours so three blocks of 40 hours for that specific task and if I show the actual hours log we can see that um last week uh five hours have been logged on that task while the scheduling was 40 meaning that there’s 35 hours that we not work on and this happen all the time right you ask somebody to do something other emergency comes um I’ve pushed back but this create a Delta of 35 hours same thing for this week uh roxan told us as well that she’s not working on this tomorrow either so there’s 30 hours that’s going to be remaining so total 65 hours are going to be uh needs to still be rescheduled usually what you would do is that for example if you’re in the the resource planner like this uh you would come in here and you would reschedule 65 hours on top uh and then it’s going to add at the end so you can see that those 65 hours have been added in the week after the problem now if you do the maths is that we’re over schedule so if I’m coming back here and I’m refreshing my page I can see that we are now over scheduled by 65 hours okay so it could be fine because you could might be measuring if your resource really doing what you expect them to do so a schedule versus log but let’s say you did that mats and you did log it and maybe you use one of our snapshot item to capture that information and that variance at that point though having over schedule sometime cause problem for a project manager because it doesn’t know really how many hours still need to be scheduled to work on it so this is where the feature come into play so let me go back here and by opening the task panel for that specific task and going to the schedule tab we have that button here that’s going to do that alignment and the dates that are shown are the start date of that assignment till the end date of that specific assignment we’ve created uh now what I want to reset I just want to reset up to tomorrow because we said that there’s o this is not tomorrow let’s go back to January so up to tomorrow so we’re going to clear and align the lugged hours with the schedule hours for this range year and by doing this there’s a warning meaning that the schedule going to be changed accordingly so by doing this what it does if if I’m coming back here I’m going to see now that the schedule is now five for that specific week because I log five hours and this last week or this week it’s 10 hours of schedule versus 10 and uh then we now have because I’ve added my 65 before if I’m coming back uh in here refreshing you can now see that my variance has uh been um eliminated so I’m back to a proper estimated and a schedule hour so this is one use case sometime though you just want to just okay I’m going to clear the pass and then I’m going to see what’s remaining and I’m going to do some kind of scheduling later on so you can do the same thing uh but now I it’s available through throughout our right side panel so now even if I’m staying here in the workspace I’m going to schedule tab what I can do now is that I can repress that button and instead of changing my my end date I’m going to REM leave it this way and I’m going to save by the warning and now what’s happening is that I’m going to be under schedule because now it only uh it only aligned with my lugged hour so now you can see that I’ve still one on 105 hours remaining to be scheduled in the future which could be uh something that your team want to do uh because they just now they really want to know uh and they they can come in here and now start scheduling their hours directly here so that’s a concept here of that uh aligning schedule uh versus with log at this point we’re just flushing the hours aligning and we’re not doing anything with the remaining hours in a future version we’re going to prompt you other question what do you want to do with the 105 or the number I’ve said before 115 hours do you want to schedule it at the end do you want to apply another scheduling pattern you want just clear it and leave it so I can manual manually schedule it so those options are going to come in a future release but at least now you can align so you can have a fresh Baseline of your schedule and having a clearer view uh in term of your scheduling versus your estimation does it make sense clearer yeah it does make sense and I think just to mention and I’m gonna launch a quick poll just to support what I’m about to say but this functionality is really useful if you’re doing two things so you need to be scheduling your resources and then you also need to be logging time unless you’re doing those two things then you can’t really use that feature um but these two things are definitely best practices so if you’re already scheduling your resource you’re already logging your time um you should also make sure that that um those columns here the estimated hours scheduled hours estimate versus schedule and total hours you should definitely have a preset that you’re using that shows those columns if you’re going to be using that functionality I think that’s key um and uh yeah as Yanick mentioned we have some more work coming on but I think the demonstration was pretty clear to me at least so yeah for the polar we were just curious to um check because we’re working on that functionality so we want to see if people are actually scheduling their resources which most people seem to be doing it so that’s great news and then if people are logging their time which people also seem to be doing if you’re not then you can definitely start doing that and then use that functionality all right good so this is the Align uh let me switch back to the deck so this was the Align with schedule uh LED hours uh 

Resource Planning grouping now works from everywhere and if we’re moving to the next feature uh now we’re going to talk back uh talk about grouping so in the previous webinar we said we were able to group um some resources the only place you were able to not resource some schedule uh the only place we were able to uh group was from the planner itself Now everywhere in the system you’re going to any anytime you’re creating a project assignment schedule or a task assignment schedule they’re going to be grouped together so I’m going to Showcase this functionality now so to do that I’m going to just create a brand new task here and I’m going to create a great Emoji now you can add Emoji so it’s going to be a train task uh that we’re going to do it’s for 40 hours I’m gonna come and I’m gonna sign again just our friend Haan to keep this yeah to keep that project going and I’m just going to readjust a little bit the timing of that specific task I’ve created I’m going to spread it across a few few days and I’m going to link it after the deploy to train the team okay so now I’m set up with a new task that’s been scheduled uh to roxan so if I come back to my project plan here and let me just maybe widen my arrange a little bit so I can see the U the hours have been assigned to ran so we can see that those for the hours have been assigned here and by the color coding you can see that they’ve been grouped together so this one is all purple so they all been grouped together we have that other one here that is um teal or light green so those this is the kind of grouping that are created so I’ve created from the the I could have created from the stas panel or there’s another other mean that you’re creating those uh uh those assignment they’re going to be grouped together and let’s say I’m adding another Block in here maybe for another 12 hours of training you will see that this going to be a separate uh block uh and uh it’s going to be whoops I didn’t spread it enough so let me just recreate on 3 weeks let me put the 40 hours and I I’ll change the other one so now you’re going to see that uh it’s going to be group this one is not group because it’s in the same week so there’s uh that concept is not done that as soon as you put it on several um several cell it’s going to show you that grouping so they’re group meaning that they’re going to be as we were see in the next feature you’re going to be able to move them separately and this way it also helps you uh streamline your rescheduling so you don’t have to move one block at a time or change one block at a time so that grouping is going to really help in term of scheduling even more so when it’s a schedule that’s not just prad across or distribu evenly when you’re creating your own schedule of uh uh that there’s some break in between your work on the same task those grouping helps a lot uh for the uh for your team this is the grouping part uh this works as well on the project assignment schedule perfect um and then I think the next one Right click in Resource Planner 

right click in resource planner so yeah no exactly um so if you like to get things done quickly you’re gonna love this new feature um I know we’ve talked about right click in the workspace couple of times um so we figured we’ll just add that functionality to the resource planner too Yanick I know you’re pro at getting things done quickly with your shortcut and everything so why don’t you do a little demonstration on that right click function it yeah uh streamlining and making sure that we can do everything in one place so we don’t have to go in several uh interface to do stuff so again that right click is very helpful so we brought a few features so first if I’m right click here in this one this one is not group like we’re saying so you can easily now move and delete uh some of those block let’s say am I’m clicking on a group now I’m going to have more functionality Associated so maybe I want to move that and instead of dragging can drop it like I was doing it before I can just pick a date and let’s say I’m going to do it the beginning of uh change it a bit more uh the end of the March 17 and clicking move so that block now is going to be moving uh March 17 so the entire group is moving with it so that’s the move so again uh if you’re because drag and drop it let’s say you want to drag and drop it and you don’t see it here instead of changing the number of column you see uh because I could have done the same thing just by drag and dropping that block for example now it’s going to be uh it’s going to move two blocks within that week or it would have um because I’ve it’s possible to work that 4 the hour in a single single week um now that right click move is going to help as well the other uh functionality that we can see is that we have uh ungroup and delete group so delete group is it does what it does what it says is going to remove the entire group that we have in here and uh unless let’s say I just want to delete one specific block I did it before but I maybe I could ungroup so now it’s going to be SE this block is going to be separated and I can just delete that specific block if I wanted to even in a specific grouping you can delete that specific block too so those are the kind of functionality that you can do uh now with the right click menu uh and now I’ve deleted everything so let me maybe just create another one or the other functionality so uh as in many software the we use as well keyboard uh shortcuts so you can do control and selecting several group together or several block together and then you can group them so the control key is also uh enabled in here so you can select multiple uh separate groups separate blocks and group them together so after that you can when they’re going to be moved they’re going to respect that Gap in between uh the grouping yeah I think that was actually our second uh the moving multiple uh that was our second thing right perfect that’s covered yeah no no actually it’s another one you’re going to see it because now you can also move control with another on the other slide I I see let me know if there’s any question you want me to answer um I’ll be pleased no I think we’re seeing a lot of people that have feedback and uh like oh would be great to do this and that but it’s all going straight to host and panelist so I don’t think everybody else is perfect but keep them coming awesome okay so now um the

 Move multiple TAS/PAS blocks in Resource Planner one that you talking about is this one so it’s moving multiple blocks at the same time but the the key trick is now what I was doing is I was moving on a single line okay but now what we also did is that you can do control select but you can also select across different task and then you can move several of them and uh remember that we still have some tweaking to do in term of the UI the first block is the one that’s going to be um even if it’s not showing this one is is where you drop it the rest is going to respect that scheduling but you saw that my two lines got changed uh because I’ve did again that control and selected multiple across multiple lines so again uh to facilitate that uh the usability of that resource planner you’re going to be able to do those kind of uh of changes and movement across your across the board yeah I know right now you’re looking at one project but I can see how um if you’re looking at the resource planner for all projects you you can have way more lines so and this work with project assignment and task assignment we recommend using task assignment because at the end it’s a bit more granular the task again could be very simple as a build deploy train but if you want to go very granular all those functionality also work uh so this going to be helping a lot of our customers perfect um I think we’re getting to our very last feature and then we’ll move into Improvement so improvements are whole feature in my mind but like the big resource planer the resource section exactly many Yeah we actually added a new filter in the resource planner um to 

Scheduled utilization filter in Resource Planner get visibility on the schedule utilization before we dive into it I just wanted to do a quick poll um I’m just really curious uh we often talked about the filters and presets in the workspace uh but we’re curious to know if you’re actually using the filters and press uh in the resource planner because that’s what we’re going to talk about now um so you can take a few seconds but Yanick you can already get started and show us what that looks like I’ll let people answer uh let me go back to My Demo environment and now I’m going to open up the global resource planner to show you that filtering uh and um so what what we have now is I have a certain preset I’m showing only a few resources uh just to put you give you a certain context you can see that my coloring code is between 80% of utilization and 100% is going to be in green less than 80% utilization is going to be in yellow and red over 100% so meaning that all the yellow one is the one that I need to address so we’re not uh we don’t have assigned enough task or work in the upcoming week or this week for those specific resource uh I’m only showing four resources one with one placeholder here but let’s say you have a very long list uh filtering is becoming key so key so we have that filter uh panel here that’s showing up and this is the newest uh addition to that filtering and then you have those uh um com comp comparator it’s not a word right it’s a those uh those filtering that’s going to tell you which one uh what you want to do so for example in my case I want to show all the resource that have less than 80% utilization so by applying that filter now you can see that uh the the one the line that was all over 80% has been removed and only the one that I need to address in term of the workload are now showing uh so I could do the exact opposite than having a greater than uh so the operator this is the word I was looking for my operator so now um what did I didn’t put put the percent but maybe we’ll back put the percentage here greater than 80% now only Mia is showing because she has more than 80% across her her workflow if you want to reset it you just have to do a select and then it’s going to go back to cleaning up that filter uh so hopefully this going to help in term of really putting in front of your project manager or your resource manager who uh needs to be um schedule or which one of your resource need a bit more work in the upcoming weeks uh so and that filtering take into account the column we’re showing so if you were showing more than six column uh it’s going to be apply on that room range uh that we’re looking at go ahe yeah I was just going to say based on the poll I know some people may just use filters I think most people use just filter maybe not presets yet but this is the type of view like if you like this filter then save it as a preset exactly so for example even my range for example I have my range 80 to uh to 100 so this is also Sav in my preset so everything is being saved within so this one you can see it’s 8500 uh and uh that filtering is going to be also be saved so yeah again it it comes to improving the filtering uh we know we have other um backlog items in term of putting more criteria and having other um like logic operator and an ore kind of filtering so those are coming in the future release too but this is the first one that’s being rolled out in term of utilization so hopefully it’s going to help and this came from ideas from our customers so again we’re delivering on what you guys requir but we’re super open to feedback so if you have any any other feedback we want to hear it um all right I think that was our last um feature and I’m just gonna do the poll we always do because um we’re doing internal uh internal uh bets internally to see which one we think are going to be more popular but we just want to know which functionality you’re most excited about from all the ones that we mentioned um and then if you already upgraded to our latest version so I’ll leave that poll open um and then we’ll transition to our improvements and fixes I think in this

 Improvements & fixes release there’s actually sometimes the improvements and fixes are kind of hidden in between the release notes but we want to highlight them today because there are some great ones um in their workspace um Okay and like I was saying before some of them are should be labeled as a new feature because there is a lot of functionality and ease of use that’s being added and again it’s it’s all about efficiency making it easy for you to be able to work with our platform and we’re going to be looking at all those that have a star a uh and you can always refer back to the release note or that deck if you want to know a bit more about what has been added so let me uh go and uh do the first one so the first one I’m going to go into my come back to my project uh my resource plan here or my project plan with my workspace my project workspace and and it’s about U the right click menu on the Eder and adding field so before U or when I’m going to add a field now you’re going to see it’s going to show on the right side of where I clicked before it was always showing up completely on the on the right so uh you had to scroll a bit more to get there so let me add a few Fields I’m going to add the start date I’m going to add the description uh and uh and just by doing this now it’s on the right side of where I click that is going to be show so I don’t have to go back on the right completely and then move my column back or where I want it to be clicked so it’s all about making sure that that information you require or request uh they’re showing up exactly where you you want them to to show and again because this has changed my preset I could save my preset you can see that uh some change have been applied with that red icon or red star here on the right side so this should also help in term of uh making sure that you’re seeing the the task and limiting the number of click and and and moving around in that workspace this one is simple yeah if I can add something because I always miss it so maybe we can point it out to customer when you’re actually right clicking um you can like uncheck and check certain uh column headers but you also have always on the top you can hide that specific column so sometimes I forget and I have to go back and try to find the name of the column and my whole list but you always have the shortcut at the top to just hide it um so little tip there while we’re on absolutely and Y absolutely so the IDE is always there and then you can select whatever you want and right clicking the feature is putting it on the right side yay okay uh the the next one uh if we’re moving along uh we brought back the overing on the timeline side so on the left side is our grid the right is the the timeline together it it create a gent uh but that overing is also bringing that uh that list of start date and date and the status uh so this way it’s uh a bit easier when you’re looking on the timeline side uh and it it makes everything simpler even more so when you are in that timeline view and you don’t see the grid anymore so uh before and this is also linked to the next feature we’re going to do so we’ve re uh We’ve reimplemented again the right click menu so now uh on the timeline before we didn’t have any right click menu on the timeline online now we do have that same list that we had on the grid so you can uh you can do some work right from here including uh inserting task uh above or below uh the way you want and then you can play around and move your task around directly from the timeline by double clicking as well on the on a task it’s going to bring the task panel so if you want to change the name or change some of that uh setup of that specific task you’re going to be able to do it right from here as well and as you can see the menu we have add task you can assign people right from here you can move them if you have to move them in the in the project itself uh and updating statuses including the D task and if you want to see what else we can do we have that uh keyboard shortcut when you’re working with the grid that’s also available from that right click menu okay uh so let me delete back maybe that specific task with that right click menu and and uh now we can move to the next one and the next one it’s about uh statuses so again here you can see the percentages and you can move that percentage around uh if but with that endler but if you want to see the status right from here too so you can just we have tuggles that allow you to switch and show you that timeline statuses across your different task so this should be helpful in term of uh what you can do uh with the right right click uh menu uh within the platform just going to whoops I’m going to go back to my Grand View so far so good no question yeah yeah I think the timeline is maybe one that people are not looking at as often so it’s nice we focus on it a little bit yeah and one of the main reason was that too because you could do when you wanted to add a task or move things around you were not able to do it from the timeline view only now you can you can do it and I think you’re going to mention but now we’re bringing the future release some zoom in zoom out on the timeline too so it’s going to be very helpful workable okay the the next one it’s uh another toggle that we’ve moved around it was in the filter now before but now we’ve brought it back into as a toggle in the project workspace so it’s the Milestone view so you can see here that I have my Milestone signature and go live only two Milestone so the difference between a a task where you have to work and a a milestone a milestone is a specific date and time when it’s a pink pink diamond it means it’s just a date when there’s a black you can have a black milone as well means that there’s some amount Associated to it there’s no amount in here but when it’s black it means an amount so those are very useful they also very useful to show progress or show specific date either during the um cell cycle or when you’re looking at a project and to remove the noise and only Fe focus on those Milestone uh we have that that toggle here that you can just filter out easily and only see your Milestone uh so now in it’s again it’s a very simple project I have with only a few tasks but when you have a project with 100 lines just being able to uh within a single click see when is my goal I schedule so I don’t have to search even if now we have some cool search functionality uh have being able to filter out or like toggling those information with a single click helps a lot so we have that toggle that’s been added in our menu and we’ve reorder as well the uh the the menu on our tole site uh I think I was it’s not a new feature but I think he wanted to meet as well to to Showcase that we can do like multiple task and move multiple tasks so again with the control click uh now I’m going to mess up my project but I can I can realign uh some task just by uh selecting selecting multiple task and moving them along so this is also very useful when you just want to do a kind of a a translation of your project and not just changing dates across the board so you can again with the uh clicking and do uh control you can select multiple tasks and you can move them around uh by by doing so so uh the the task you’re going to select are going to be moving depending on on that selection yeah and if you’ve already set up dependencies then you really just need to move that first task but I know sometimes when you’re creating your project and you have all the task on the same date you don’t need to manually go in the pick list for each one and change it it’s much faster just to select and drag exactly and in this specific case you see I in purposly didn’t create that linkage between my my start and build because I want them to be separate but when you have those linkage they’re going to follow but when you don’t then you can do control select and move this has been there for a while but yeah people don’t always know okay uh next one next Improvement on that workspace so we have that description column we have other fields text Fields so let’s say we have a next step so as you know all those column you can change right I’ve created a task before uh the next step I can just come in here and put some some text but when you have Rich Text field where you can put images you can just double click on those and now we made that UI a lot bigger so it’s easier to see more context I was a bit too zoomed in and zoomed out now but now you can see that uh and and this make it very easy to just come in here and take your notes uh we’re coming with the autosave functionality as well soon uh from here you can hit the control save and it’s going to contrl S and it’s going to save otherwise you have those save button and cancel button uh but by just double clicking on those Rich Text area field so not only just the description let’s say you’ve added some other fields by double clicking on it it’s going to bring that interface and it’s lot bigger than it was before so it’s easier to uh to see at the full description of that set up uh the difference is this is a rich text area so you can paste images you can put balls and bullets uh while other field like the next step uh this one is just a pure text field so this one you can just edit it straight from the grid uh we’re coming with a wrap I think I’m stoling all your punch J on the RO map but there’s going to be for longer field we’re going to have a wrap feature as well that’s coming uh for now um yeah for now you have to make that column a bit wider when you have too much text uh what you want to show okay another one that’s an improvement in term of uh of the look and feel and it does help to really know what’s happening so we have let’s say you have the billable column you want to show and the Milestone column you want to show so I’ve added both of them and now before it was a true false you would see true and false as word now we’ve brought just the fact that it’s a checkbox like like it should be so let’s say that train platform uh train task it’s non available I can just come in here and Mark it as not available so any checkbox item are not represented with checkbox so it does again for visibility of views and uh you don’t need to go inside and put the text true false so it’s very simple but uh with the number of arts and flap I just saw as emojis I’m guessing uh this is what this was wanted by a lot of customer and uh so we added that for all the check box Fielding including your custom checkbox that you might have put on a task they’re going to be showing as a a checkbox now I know that was one of my favorite one it was hidden somewhere in our notes but I was like oh this is game changer I’m using this the day we can access it before you had to do a true and false and with the keyboard wasn’t that bad but now you can do it and it with the keyboard shortcut if you do the the the space bar this is all we’re going to trigger between check and uncheck so you can move around and just uh use the space bar to um to Mark those task easily uh okay the next one it’s not as much as in the grid but uh depending on how you’ve you’ve been using uh our filters um sometime you create complex filters and sometime you just want a variation of that complex filter uh before you had to restart from scratch and creating a brand new filter and try to do the same logic that you add and the operator and redo and sometime there’s six because you can do conditional logic as well in our filter so uh sometime it it becomes very long I don’t know if I have a have a longer um filter that I can exit for example this one is just one and two but sometime I have a list of eight filters uh so instead of redoing them all now we have a save as so it’s just going to take that specific filtering and then you’re going to be able to save as you just have to enter a name and it’s going to create a copy of that filter that you have built uh so so again to simplify your life and make uh everything uh faster in the system uh we have that save as that been added on our filtering list yeah two more Improvement that are not related to the workspace um here under Global actions and the global layout you can now drop a new one that’s called new project uh if you recall from a previous webinar we’ve shown you in I think 30 seconds how you could add that client preload to really speed up the first time load of the day you can now do the same thing so you just have it Go in set up and then your Global layout and Global action and drop that new project so now that new project what it does it just show our new project uh our new project page uh which includes our uh project import wizard so uh from that Global uh workspace uh that from that button here with all the global action So within a single click you can create a brand new project before you had to go in client project and do a new which going to do exactly the same thing but now wherever you are in the system you can just press in here and it’s going to open up that uh that new project window uh so it’s going to be easier to uh to create project and please start using our import wizard uh and we also as you know we have a templates that we’re providing through our Marketplace and we’re going to be Bon ifying that list in the very near future so um this is a simple Improvement again um speed speed speed and the last one I don’t think I’m going to have time to show it but we have a the QuickBook grouping so uh before when you’re generating an invoice and sending it with our Bridge uh that’s included in the package sending it to QuickBook uh every line item would follow through in zero connector we have another connector included in zero that you can group in sage and Tech as well you could group and Define the grouping that should be sent to QuickBook and not each and line of time comments so we’ve added those for QuickBooks as well so if you don’t want all the individual line but you just want a one line per task or one line per project or one line per resource this can now be sent to QuickBook uh the reason is that you might be generating your invoice in QuickBook and not with our PDF uh for whatever reason so you might be doing it so now you can group it this being said all the information remains and and you can rely on the data in clients so it’s just a representation the data is intact with all the different line but for the generation purposes you can group it so I didn’t I don’t showcase that feature but uh it was worth mentioning and in terms of improvement and fixes like we’ve talked about a couple of them but essentially after the webinar we’re sending the deck and then you can have the direct links to all the fixes and improvements so you can read more about all the ones we didn’t talk about the star ones are the one we mentioned and then the other ones are also important but we didn’t showcase them today the project status in the fixes you can edit now the uh the send email you can edit the the title so there’s been a few quick uh good fixes as well in this specific release perfect yeah I think we’re gonna move to the road map and since we 

Product roadmap already kind of talked about a couple of them should go super fast um so as always just reminder you can always access our road map from the community so if you log in you have the road map Tab and then you can see our latest up toate um road map of what the product team is working on so that’s what I I’ll just cover quickly but then you can have a look later and we’ll talk about it on the next webinar anyways so our next version is version 50 should be released early February so in two weeks or so um essentially what we’re going to be doing in that version so we’re gonna have column filters in the workspace yay I think we’ve teased at that one a couple of times um and uh my work so we talked about my work two webinars ago or one webinar ago it’s going to be rebranded to my deadlines and since it was like a new page that we released we’re just adding making improvements um in the next version so among those um you’re going to have column sorting uh sorting icon project redirect a couple of different things which is all based on the feedback we got from customers that already tested out uh my work my deadline so keep sharing your feedback um but we’re making improvements there um preset sharing in global workspace as well when we release preset sharing in Project workspace a lot of customers yeah it’s great we want it on global too so it’s going to be available um and then beyond February a couple of fun things that are coming up I think you mentioned it Yanick wrapping columns um zoom in and out in timeline and this has been waited on for so long copy pasting tasks that one is going to be Game Changer can’t wait to test it out but um that’s coming um editable Global workspace as well right now in the global workspace you have to click in a project workspace to then make edits but you’re going to be able to do all that from the global workspace um we’re gonna have some time sheet improvements as well on the UI and ux we’re going to add filters and presets as well to my work slm my deadlines uh we’re going to do some uh color uh adjustments in the research planner as well um for me that one zoom in zoom out I love this it because when you have like a two years project three-year project uh this is going to be very very use ful so we’re working on it there’s like subtility about it but uh the zoom in zoom out is coming out very soon as well yeah and a couple more that you can see in the list you can have a look later and then again before our next webinar we’re going to update that list um so yeah I’m curious to know actually I’ll just do a final pull and we’ll move on to um the next section we just want to know which feature upcoming feature you’re most excited about so I’ll leave it on the side and then move on with the next section if that’s okay next one on so yeah at the beginning of the webinar we mentioned that we were working working on some exciting 

New eLearning initiative & conclusion e-learning initiative so to be more specific we are planning to launch this initiative in early February that’s very soon um and then as part of that initial launch we should have 10 courses that you can see on the screen now and yanic maybe you can give us some more insights into that yeah part of why we’re doing this initiative of the product webinar while we’re writing content while you and our customer Su team trying to um talk to us as as often as possible to our customer to Showcase new functionality it’s all about knowing they exist but also knowing how to use them so our Consulting team and our change management team uh lead by natal and the rest of the group are is doing a tremendous job but quite often during implementation we train Champions so we don’t train the entire company so that’s a concept here it’s really bring uh to par the knowledge of everyone in the business new customer but also existing customer or new employee that you might hire that needs to learn clients so we’re we’re starting with that how to use client courses uh and those are the 10 uh first topic uh creating project using the workspace assigning managing uh executing work with the my deadlines and my schedule we’re going to be looking at at the the next with that new homepage and the next webinar so we have that list of 10 courses uh if you guys like it and if you want more we’re going to create more advaned classes but also admin classes so we have a a full list of uh of learning uh class that we are going to be doing the differ between we’re doing already Al articles and Al text this but there were more kind of technical uh documentation on that specific functionality this is more how to do it the impact of it and a list of best practices use cases and plus we have quiz and we’re going to have also some nice surprise as soon as we officially launch it uh so and it’s going to be available to all of you for free so there’s no additional cost link to that uh so this way you can get up to speed on some of those functionality but also send it to all your new employee like I said and so this way they can learn a client very rapidly perfect and what I’m going to do just before we wrap up we’re just curious to know if this is actually something you’re EXC exed about or not so we just want to know about the e-learning and then which course you’re most excited about because we’ll we’ll release all of them but it’s good for us to know like on top of your head looking at that list is there one that’s like catching your attention one or or more um and then the good news I’ll let you answer that but the good news is we want to give you a sneak peek into those e-learning so uh when I uh when we send a webinar follow-up email we’ll include the link to one of the courses um so it’s likely going to be the logging your time so we’ll include that link so you can already do that course if you want uh but then you’ll have to wait uh for early February to get access to all the other ones but um yeah and in that follow-up email just um as always we include as well the today’s webinar recording um the slide deck as well where you can find information on how to upgrade which is what Yanick is showing right now the release notes and all the other useful resources um so you have links to all of that um and then as always just a little reminder if you have any questions or feature requests or after today you go and upgrade your your account and then you start testing out or new features and you have like feature requests more things you want us to work on please just email us at support um I’ll just close off the poll thank you for answering um and then the last last very last poll I just want to do is for the webinar feedback um so if you can just take a minute 30 seconds to just let us know how we did today um and then if there’s anything you want us to talk about on the webinar next because we’re essentially looking at your feedback and that’s how we make every webinar um better so was a really future pack webinar we went over time um thank you so much everyone I don’t know Yanick if you have anything you wanted to add before we end this webinar I’ve talk enough I’ll see you in the month with another list of great features all right perfect thank you so much everyone and we’ll see you uh next month for our webinar in February thank you everyone thank you always a pleasure

00:00 Introduction

Thank you very much for attending our Klient Inception webinar. This is episode one of season two, and today we’re gonna be digging into the five projects that drive success and revenue for Salesforce SI partners. I do believe it’s gonna be very interesting for all consulting firms as well. I’m Yanick Abraham, I’m the Inception Architect. I’ve been in the Salesforce ecosystem for the past 16 years. And I’m Klient CEO. I’m joined today by our Growth Agent Sean. Hi Sean!

Hi Yanick! Hi everyone! Thanks so much for joining this webinar. Make sure you stay at the end because we’ve got a special offer for you. You wanna make sure you stay tuned for that.

Here we go, the sales guy talking already! So we are from Klient PSA, we are an all-in-one project management suite, fully native to Salesforce. So we help you manage your project directly in Salesforce. We are a partner since 2015. The Klient inception, quite often we feel that we live in a dream. We used to be an SI partner, then we became an ISV partner. Now we’re developing a tool that helps SIs grow their business. So we are you and you are us. And it’s bringing that great movie of Leonardo DiCaprio, Inception. So a dream within a dream. So today we’re trying to seed some new ideas and we have a guest speaker with us, Sean today?

Yeah, absolutely. So I wanna welcome Katie Bluth. Katie started her career, actually at the prestigious Culinary Institute of America. I have a lot of questions about that later, Katie. But, you know, she somehow got into the Salesforce admin world and she focused on really, solution-based architecture. She started SaasInct in 2016 and since then has been developing solutions, for some of the better-known brands in the financial services world. So, welcome Katie.

Hi everybody. Thanks for having me.

Awesome. Thank you for being here, Katie.

02:00 Customer Success Equals Project Success

So the title, Customer Success Equals Project Success. What does that mean? So, let’s just start by maybe redefining what a project is because at the end, a project really helps drive your business and it’s a key driver for the success of your business. So, a project has a start and end date, just the way that it’s structured with tasks and checklists. It’s really a good way to streamline your business by structuring your processes and by assigning people to the task. Making a project owner visible and aware creates responsibility across your team.

So really, a project helps on several levels, including providing a ton of visibility to stakeholders. So when it’s a customer billable project, you want to have your project aware of the development, but also maybe the Salesforce AE might have some interest in terms of the progress of the initial deployment because he wants his license to be renewed the year after. Structuring a project well and creating visibility helps a lot. Plus, all the data points you have on a project can help you take better decisions with the business insights it provides, whether we’re talking about margin, utilization of your resources, billable versus non-billable. And the most beautiful thing is that you can templatize a project, meaning that you can make a template out of it. And every time you’re done executing that project version of that template, you can improve it and always improve your business process and always streamline your business.

So that’s why, Sean, projects run your business.

03:36 Overview of the 5 Projects that Drive Success

Okay. So what’s the first one we’re gonna be talking about? Oh yeah. The five projects that drive success and revenue for Salesforce SIs. So, what are those five types of projects, Yanick?

Yep. So what we recommend at Klient is that when you implement a project management solution, whether it’s Klient or any other PSAs, that you structure your business and implement those five projects within your company. The first one is a classic, you need to bill your customer. So we’re gonna be looking at the structure of billable projects because there are different types of projects in the billable world. After that, we’re gonna look at the customer roadmap project. So this is something you need to start building to create future revenue. We’re gonna also spend time looking at a non-billable customer support project, meaning that this is pure support and pure costs so you have to monitor it closely.

And then moving to recruiting and onboarding. So, maybe at this point with the economics, it’s a bit more difficult for some of us, but some others are growing as well. So, at the end, you need to hire, and we hopefully gonna all be hiring a ton and onboarding a ton of people. So you want to be streamlined and you really wanna be able to get your first billable hours from those new resources as soon as you can, and their certification as well in Salesforce as soon as they can. So we’re gonna be looking at that. And the last one, it’s kind of our new pet project. So, Sean, we’re gonna come back to what we’re gonna use Klient for moving forward on the pre-sale side of things.

05:10 #1 Customer Billable Projects

Alright, billable projects. Do you want to kind of describe what those are and then maybe we’ll bring Katie to talk about some of her billable projects?

Yeah, because a lot of the people in attendance are from Salesforce SI or the consulting world. I won’t go too deep but usually, these are the four kinds of billing types that we see across projects. Time and expense is the most classic one. It’s the less risky because you have to deliver under a certain scope, not a certain amount of hours. If you go over, you can charge your customer. When it can get tricky is when you go over budget. So the customer might interpret the requirement that it was in scope. Well, it’s not. So you have to just maintain the budget and have a lot of transparency if you wanna make this work. But this is a classic project type. Fixed fee. You need to know what you’re doing. So it’s a lot more risky because you have a set amount of cash. You’re gonna invoice the customer for a deliverable. So if your recipe is not clear and what you deliver is not clear, you might come into margin problems.

And those fixed fees, usually the way that you get paid on fixed fees, it’s either on the first day, the beginning of a project, or at the end, or with milestone completion, let’s say after the design is approved or after the user acceptance testing is done. Okay, so those are the main classic ones. Then we have recurring, more for software but SIs quite often sell products as well, or maybe recurring products, or recurring every month for a certain amount. Some resource placement firms as well use this kind of mode to just charge the resource that they are placing at their customer. And the last one is a retainer. It’s a good model. You charge like, let’s say $4,000 in advance for 20 hours of work during the month. If the customer doesn’t use it, you still charge $4,000. And if they go over, you charge more if you have over it. So it’s a great model. The only thing is that you need to absolutely prove value if you want your customer to renew.

So we’re gonna be looking a little bit at that structure here to generate more revenue.

09:56 Klient Demo (Customer Billable Projects)

But before Sean. We’ve got Katie on the line. So Katie, maybe you can tell us a little bit more about Saasinct. And, you know, what are the types of projects that you folks do, billable projects, and maybe if you’ve got some tips or some insights you can add to that as well, that would be cool.

So we do three out of the four of these project types as billable. We do time and expense, we do retainer, we do recurring. So I think a lot of what’s nice about what I focus on is, you know, what is the project success for billable projects? And for me, it’s really about the profitability at the end of the day. That’s, as a leader, what I care about. But also, from our customer perspective, it’s making sure that what I’ve sold and what we’re doing with our customer, we’re closely aligned with them. So I like that I can have kind of the flexibility to mix and match based on the different offerings that we have because we do the time and expense for a typical implementation, but we also have a monthly managed services where we do kind of a fixed fee and then we can do the overage afterward. So this really allows us to be able to kind of mix and match all of that, and then easily generate invoices with the right rates, right minimums, all that kind of stuff. So just making it super streamlined for customers helps us be successful, but also just being able to track that profitability is really important. What did I sell? Did I sell it at a certain margin? Are we executing it at the same margin?

So we’re talking about profitability. Yannick talked about visibility structure, right? And then, we have a lot of SIs on the line. What about scope creep? How do you deal with items where the scope starts to kind of grow out of what was originally agreed upon? So maybe some tips there, if you wouldn’t mind.

Yeah, I mean, for us, we are okay with, kind of wanting to do a change order in the middle of it. We’re getting much faster at producing those change orders. We love it when our clients increase our expected revenue. So whether our client has the budget and wants to go do more than what we originally expected, we’ll do a change order and just tag it on to one of these existing projects. We’ll kind of do a roadmap project, which I think you guys are also gonna talk about. So it depends on what they’re interested in, but we can either add on to an existing project we’ve already been managing, or we have the flexibility to sell a new project.

Awesome. And I think this is a good segue as well to go to kind of the portion of the showcase of what we can do. So that Klient Inception Series, the concept, it’s a customer success series, but also with insight on how we run our business at Klient. So we wanna showcase the customer billable project, but mainly the structure of how to properly structure those for success. So for customer success and for transparency.

But as you can see here, I have a list of all my projects. I’m logged in Klient, and I have my billing types for the projects we discussed. What we recommend in terms of project structure, it’s at the minimum to have those phases here listed, that are big kinds of buckets. So at the minimum to have those as tasks in your project. So you can have that granularity of tracking and logging time on those buckets, at least the minimum. And the other minimum, bare minimum, is to have milestones. So a list of key deliverables that you need to deliver with specific dates.

So let me just bring that Gantt version here. So you can add that Gantt chart and really dates that are easy to focus on and target for stakeholders. So as a business owner, as the customer, I don’t wanna track every 22 tasks that we have, but tracking four milestones for when we go live, when the bill is approved, this is totally manageable and something that we encourage all our customers to maintain. So having those dates and sharing those dates with the Salesforce AE, like I said as well, they love seeing where the project is going on the Salesforce side of things.

So this was a very bare-bone structure. Let me go in maybe into something that is more substantial with the custom development project here, where I have different layers. So first we can see we have subtasks and this one is based on, we’ve talked about billing types, but there’s methodology as well. So we can be more Agile, more waterfall, or in the hybrid just in case it’s a hybrid. And we have that level of detail.

And what do we wanna point out is how efficient and how powerful it is to have good descriptions.

Yeah, absolutely. We recommend putting these descriptions very clearly, right? You’re defining that task so that the customer has an understanding and expectation of what that task means, what that deliverable is. So transparency is the key to kind of eliminating scope creep. Because they have an understanding of what you’re gonna be doing. And we also recommend that these descriptions be customer-facing. So these should be pushed out to your SOW during that sales cycle. And that way you have alignment on what’s gonna be done and when it’s gonna be done.

And there are a few things you said Katie, when we were practicing and before, it’s about the structure and one platform. So this could be customer-facing, and really to create transparency during the sales cycle and during execution. But you can also have guidance for your internal team to make sure they follow the process. So when it’s a story like that, maybe you wanna make sure that they validate the requirements, that they will write a proposed solution and get it approved. So you can build a list of checklists to really guide your people.

So again, this is within our system, but any system could have that granularity of project structure and sub-level of detail. So this is what you need to make sure that you improve your quality because based on templates, you create more and more updates.

So this is kind of the high-level review that we wanted to give on the customer billable project templates. There’s a ton of other variety that we can look into. We have four others, where we’re gonna cover some of those aspects as well.

13:20 #2 Customer Roadmap Project

Ready for the second one, Sean?

Yeah. Customer roadmap project. So I like this because what this does is create pipelines for me, right? So you don’t want to put everything in a phase one because that’s not feasible. It’s gonna scare your customer. It’s gonna be a big bill. So the things that don’t fall into phase one, fall into next phases, and that becomes a pipeline project. I think it’s very important during the delivery phase that your consulting team starts to identify those right away. And I think we should kind of do that here on this call. What do you think?

Yeah? It’s really on the sell side. Sean, already during the sell cycle, you can identify a lot. Then during implementation with the consulting team, they will get a ton of wish list items, nice-to-have, some like Katie said, you can add in your existing project. Other bigger ones not related, you can, you should park them because when you’re gonna need more revenue, you need to go have a fallback plan to show exactly what your customer needed so you can position it better.

So yes, let’s do that. Let’s do a role play. But before we jump into the role play let me switch environment and come to a Saasinct account. So, in our environment, we do have Katie because we use Klient to run our business, right? So we have Katie in our system with our contact, with our opportunity, but we also have all the projects that she’s completed with us. So we truly have the 360 degrees of our customer in terms of the project side. And you can see that she followed the Academy and all is in green. She became a partner. And now we have that customer roadmap project that we also track. Those projects are created as soon as Katie became a customer of ours. So we created it automatically.

And this year, this is where the map, the role play comes in play. This is an empty document, with only sections, but we have suggestions for your team in this case, Sean, if you wanna run and define that roadmap planning for Katie to see how she’s gonna get even more customer success. And, I’ll be your sales engineer or your note taker, and I’ll build right here that project plan to see how easy it is to build those.

We’re calling it a role play, but this is for real, right? This is real. So Katie, you know, thanks very much for being a Klient partner, and being a Klient customer as well. Obviously you have a deployment of Klient. You’re using it, you’re leveraging various kinds of modules as you’re going forward. But, what does the future tech stack look like for Saasinct, right? Where are we? Where are we going next? So maybe you could start identifying areas in the business that you want to kind of start adding value.

Yeah, so we’ve already rolled out the projects. We do invoicing using Klient. We do a lot of pit pieces. Now that we have all that running, there are a few more features we’d love to roll out. So I think that one of the things we want to do a better job of is getting customer surveys. I know Klient might have that feature ready for me. So customer surveys, I wanna be able to send a survey out to my customer, get their feeling of what kind of a rating they’re gonna give me, and then submit that to my Salesforce partner portal so that I can get those CSAT ratings on my AppExchange. So using the survey feature would be one thing I’d be interested in, so that I can focus on that goal of getting some of those ratings.

Another one would be doing weekly budget updates for our clients. So like a status report, automated out of Klient would be great. We have all this data now in our projects that our project managers are tracking, and I’d love them to be able to just click a button and send the weekly status report. I know that’s also something you guys offer, so I just wanna look more at that feature and see if we can do that for our customers and save us some time manually pulling those slides together.

And the third thing I think we wanna do is build out some project templates. So you’re obviously showing us some project templates, but when we’re doing pre-sales activities, we have a number of offerings now that we’ve gone to market with. And so each of those offerings has a certain dollar value, certain estimates, a certain different set of tasks. So we’d like to set up templates for each of our offerings so that our sales team can kind of pull from those templates and limit the pre-sales time we’re spending on deals prior to closing them. So those would probably be the next things on our roadmap.

Awesome. Awesome. So we talked about surveys, we talked about status updates, and we talked about project templates, pre-sales templates. You know, give me a concept of priority, right? What’s the first thing you wanna work on? What’s the most, the next thing you wanna start out?

Something very relevant for us right now, I was just meeting about it yesterday actually. The project templates. So we are putting some new offerings on our website, and we wanna get that first project template so it’s repeatable and something that will help us continue to scale.

And what kind of timeline are we looking at for starting something like that?

As soon as I get back from vacation, so in a couple of weeks.

In a couple of weeks, okay. So let’s say mid-September.

Yeah. Okay. That sounds great. Thanks Yannick for building that out. And, this was a bit of a role play, but I think there’s some reality here, right?

And by the way, everything Katie did mention is available out-of-the-box. The purpose of all this, it’s not to show how fast I can type. It’s really to show you how easy it is. And it’s always something. You should always be doing it. Your consultants should always be tracking new ideas or wishlists of your customer because this is future revenue. It’s a lot easier to close with existing customers, new business on the service world, versus finding a new customer. So building that roadmap and not just relying on sales, really having the consultants, the teams, the project managers, even the developers logging ideas. Everybody should be involved, everybody in sales when you do this. We need more projects so this is a great way of doing it.

14:26 Klient Demo & Role Play (Customer Roadmap Project)

How are we doing on time? Pretty good? Non-billable customer support project. Why are we logging time against non-billable projects?

Just one second Yanick. I will say we’ve already answered a couple of questions, but there are some questions coming in. So if more come in, we can ask them now, or maybe at the end.

Yeah, I didn’t mention it. Please ask it. And we’re going good on time, so at the end, we’re gonna answer all the questions. I just wanna make sure we go through the five templates and project business recipes. And at the end, we’re gonna answer all the questions. We’re gonna have time then. Cool.

20:56 #3 Non-Billable Customer Support Project

Non-billable customer support project. So the concept here is, why do we need this? Why do you need this? As an SI, it seems to be more kind of a SaaS world thing, or just support. It’s true and not true. So at the end, it’s between paid engagement that you have holes, that maybe your project manager or your consultant are receiving questions from the customer. Sometimes it’s something that takes 2, 5, 10, 15 minutes to answer, and they will answer it for free because there is no engagement. But if you don’t do that and collect all those 15, it’s a lot of revenue that you’re leaving on the table, or it’s not a good offer that’s packaged for the customer too, so it’s important to restructure those requests from the customer, like those support cases, and properly manage them inside a project.

Because those are pure costs and if you don’t monitor them closely, it can be very expensive. And there’s a way that you can always figure out, the simplest way to answer support cases. But as a concept here, if I’m going back to Katie and Saasinct…

One other thing to add there is some of those questions become roadmap items that can add to revenue as well.

That’s exactly it. That’s the concept. When your case is coming in, you’re gonna find a solution to resolve a problem you might have with your service, but also you might find new business opportunities. So again, Katie, when you joined Klient, we’ve created automatically a non-billable support project. And in this project, it’s empty until you create cases. We use Salesforce cases for our support, for our omnichannel and everything. And every time there’s a case coming into our account on that non-billable support project, we create a relevant case. So this way you can come and log your hours to it, and we can see we use assignment and we use statuses to track it. But the key thing is that we want our people to log time so we can really measure the costs. And you can do this simply through this interface here.

But the beauty as well is that that interface, you can directly put it on your case object, so your support team can log their time directly through their case. They don’t necessarily need to come through that environment. So this is a really simple demo. There’s not a ton of structure here, but this is what has been working well for us. It’s to create a support project when you close a new customer, then create a case every time there’s one coming, and then logging hours to really measure the true costs, which is the purpose of this, right? The overall margin of our customer includes all billable and non-billable time so it’s important.

Any insights Sean?

Yeah, like we mentioned, you’re gonna get a good overall understanding of your margin because your consultant has a cost associated with it, and you wanna log that so you have an understanding of what that project margin is. But most importantly is you’re gonna get a lot of pipeline ideas from there, right? Support issues create opportunities for you to get closer to your customer and create revenue opportunities in some of those findings.

Here you can see there’s ‘gather feedback after case resolution’. So when you’re binding this through that project and that task, you can send that new survey you’re gonna build as well after a support case. So this way you can get your CSAT easily and see how’s the feeling because when you resolve a problem, it’s probably a good time to ask for an AppExchange review. So, tying it with that mechanism here really helps get those reviews out because we know it’s important for both SIs and ISVs to have good AppExchange reviews.

24:43 #4 Employee Recruiting & Onboarding Projects

So moving on to the next one. We’re going deep on the inception loop here. So it’s gonna be on the employee recruiting and onboarding project.

So Sean, why is it important, before we look at the detail with Katie, why is it important to have a project of recruiting and onboarding resources for an SI?

Speaking for myself, on day one, I knew who to go to for what, had a structured process that allowed me to kind of understand where the information was, where the buckets of information were, and what was expected of me in terms of knowledge gaps. And so, structuring that onboarding process allows you to get to that first billable hour, as fast as you can, on the consultant page. And really that requires structure and rigor. And also to be templatized.

And that full inception is that today we have a discussion with Katie about best practices on recruiting and onboarding, we’re gonna look at your own candidate record in KORG. This is our production environment of Salesforce, where we run our business. And the candidate is a Klient object. And this is where we capture everything during the interview process and the onboarding process before his 9, 30, 90-day probation period. And as you can see, here at the bottom, we have three projects. We have the candidate selection/recruiting project, we have the IT onboarding, so all the credentials that need to be generated and all the payroll stuff for the internal people before Sean gets in. And then we have the workforce onboarding. So from day 1 to day 90 or to his first billable hour, if he was a consultant or to his first sale for Sean, if he’s in sales. Or to his first demo as a sales engineer, this is the workforce onboarding.

So Katie, let’s look at how we structure it and then you can tell us what works well for you in terms of recruiting.

The mechanism I’ve been doing in recruiting with the team is pretty much the same for the past 12 years, in different environments, is that we have a structured way, which is always the same. And for us, it goes through those steps. So Sean went through an intro call, then he did a Battle Station Challenge, which is something on the Trailhead on the AppExchange that he has to do, and then record himself to show that he can express the business side of things and the technical side of things. Then we do a psychometric test. So we have that all structured process that we do all the time. So for us, this has been very key to our success, and that’s why we’re templatizing it adjusting the questions, adjusting the checklists, the descriptions, and logging all that information back.

So that’s why you can see, one system to rule them all. We have the notes, standard Salesforce notes, standard Salesforce files, but with all of Sean’s psychometric tests, videos, all the notes that we had so all this recorded in one system.

So, a first for you Sean, right? You had never seen that side of the business either?

No, and it makes complete sense to me. I always understood why we had offboarding projects. You wanna make sure you get people logged off of their systems and get their computers back and all. I always understood that part but honestly, and this is real stuff that he’s showing you, this is literally my candidacy profile. This helped me get accustomed to Klient, the way Klient does things, who does what here, where the information is, very very quickly, in a very structured way. I knew from the moment I started at 8:30 AM, what are the tasks I need to complete that day. So yes, it was very helpful.

So this is the recruiting. We’re gonna jump in onboarding in a sec. So Katie, on the recruiting side, any tip, or advice that help you get the right people for your team?

Actually, I just learned a whole lot from this, so I’m excited to take some of this. The Battle Station Challenge looks pretty cool. It’s something to add to our recruiting process but I think learned lessons for us is really having a recruiting process. You can spend a lot of time going down the path. Spending my time interviewing people that maybe aren’t the right fit. So we wanna be really organized in our recruiting process, so we’re maximizing everybody’s time. And then obviously investing in resources is a very expensive thing for us. So we wanna make sure we’ve kind of thoroughly vetted all of our candidates before they join the team. And so we found that having that process in place, especially for a small team where many of us are wearing multiple hats, where we can kind of share and team up on activities and finish them based on all of our skill sets. So I would say the process is the most important for recruiting, onboarding, offboarding, and tackling, kind of swarming things as a team to help finish it.

And then the other thing we’re doing right now is we’re building out more training materials. So because we’ve consolidated everything and Klient is the main use case for all of our users, and then we also use Slack, those two things are kind of the key to all of our teams. So we’re doing more role-based training as we onboard new people, so that project managers can get up to speed with how we run Klient, how we execute projects and get the tools and templates they need. And then, also kind of architects and technical people. So we’re kind of really focusing our training for each type of role that we’re hiring so that they can get onboarded and up and running with our best practices as quickly as possible.

25:48 Klient Demo (Employee Recruiting Project)

Exactly. And while you were talking, I was showing our onboarding project, or Sean’s onboarding project, and it’s exactly that. Like, what should I learn? I’m in sales, my track is a bit different, but the main track of learning the company, the codes of ethics, the values, the vision, all the same. So that’s why I think structuring it makes everything faster. We don’t see it here because Sean is in sales, and I decided to go with Sean for the demo, but when you look at the consultant one, we have a milestone that we track for the first hour billable and for the Salesforce certification admin, let’s say if it’s a project manager coming from the outside of Salesforce, we want them to become admin fast. So we have one of our resources, Francois-Pierre that did it in record time. So we track those because we want our people to be billable as bigger than 85% as soon as we can. So this is the milestone you need to track plus is he happy in the role? So that’s why also getting that structure for the first 90 days helps. After that, there’s a lot of other things that’s gonna help that new employee to be happy, but at least he’s gonna be definitely structured to learn your business and your practices.

30:47 Klient Demo (Employee Onboarding Project)

Exactly. And while you were talking, I was showing our onboarding project, or Sean’s onboarding project, and it’s exactly that. Like, what should I learn? I’m in sales, my track is a bit different, but the main track of learning the company, the codes of ethics, the values, the vision, all the same. So that’s why I think structuring it makes everything faster. We don’t see it here because Sean is in sales, and I decided to go with Sean for the demo, but when you look at the consultant one, we have a milestone that we track for the first hour billable and for the Salesforce certification admin, let’s say if it’s a project manager coming from the outside of Salesforce, we want them to become admin fast. So we have one of our resources, Francois-Pierre that did it in record time. So we track those because we want our people to be billable as bigger than 85% as soon as we can. So this is the milestone you need to track plus is he happy in the role? So that’s why also getting that structure for the first 90 days helps. After that, there’s a lot of other things that’s gonna help that new employee to be happy, but at least he’s gonna be definitely structured to learn your business and your practices.

32:09 #5 Pre-Sales Projects & Klient Demo

So we’re going to the last one. Sean, this is new, it’s not even released. This is a new thing we’re gonna start, right? We’re going deeper into the dream and the inception.

Yeah, absolutely. So up to this point, we talked about best practices for those common projects, right? These are what you should be doing, the best practices, but what we’re gonna talk about now is next practices, right? So how can we use the project management concepts for completing a sales cycle? So you may already be sharing your discovery notes with your customers. I do. So this is what I understood from our discussion, can you validate these notes that I’ve taken? But what about structuring the process and giving visibility into that sales process to the customer and actually involving them? Yanick, maybe you wanna show how we’re planning on doing this.

Yeah, exactly. So this is still in the work. I cannot show the real thing. While we still run this process all the time, now we’re restructuring it and we are exposing it, and we’re making sure that the customer collaborates during the pre-sales cycle. We are already collaborating with our customers through the community during the execution of a mandate. Now we wanna bring it even earlier in the process so the customer can already see our structure, can see his project. We can build his roadmap with him right from the get-go.

So from day one, Sean, moving forward, we’re gonna be sending credentials to our prospects, and they’re gonna have access to their pre-sales project, which we all have a certain flavor of. In the SI world, you have your ideal sales cycle that you want to follow, and you don’t want to deviate too much. This is ours. A full sales cycle up to a go-live can be as short as three months. For SI partners with a sales cycle of a month and a half. So this is our typical cycle that Sean will adjust with the customer. So that concept of having this project here and assigning the customer to some of the tasks will allow us to expose this into our Klient Customer Community. This is the overall one, where it’s gonna be a lot more streamlined just for the pre-sale cycle, but here you can see that we’ll expose that cycle where we stand, where we are, but we’re gonna also assign tasks like we saw. So the customer can come in here and can see that Sean asked me if we can do a proper demo of the platform that I submitted a statement of work, a work breakdown structure, an invoice. The customer can just come in here and upload it and even chat to Chatter directly to Sean because all this is within the sales experience, Salesforce Experience Cloud.

So that’s the beauty of having this. I wanted to show the checklist, but they’re not showing now. But even checklists will be shared with our customer.

So we’re managing engagement right off the start, right? We’re exposing his project, the milestones are his, Mr. Customer do you want to go live on this date? In order for you to go live on this date, we’re gonna do a reverse timeline. You’re already doing this, right? These are the things that need to happen. You can go live by this date. But I create that project plan, I expose it to him. Guess what? He starts using my tool right away in the beginning of that sales process. So he’s more familiar with it.

There’s the inception. The inception, it’s the dream within a dream. And to not confuse, this is the sales process that we will share and collaborate on. And this block here, it’s the implementation we will sell. This one is based on our standard Academy, which is a two-week thing that you can get rolled in Klient. Sometimes it would be a six-month project, that block here. And we would spin another project for this. We’ll not build that within this one, it would be another professional service project, starting from a template that we will generate. So this is really pre-sales. We’re gonna start experimenting with this.

So Katie, do you have any comments? This one is out there so we’ll tell you the results in the next episode, but what are your thoughts so far? Would that be useful?

Yeah. I mean, the sales process is a science. It’s just a checklist. That really is what we do in sales. So I love the idea of being able to teach other salespeople that it is a process. And especially when I’m co-selling with Salesforce, I’m typically trying to line up very quickly with their sales process. So being able to kind of get through that scoping, that discovery, and getting those proposals turned around, the more organized we are and again the more I can pull in other people to help me expedite those sales processes… I like this. I think this would be really helpful.

I wanna say this is a great way to hold your account, your prospect, accountable to the milestones they set, and the dates they set, right? Awesome, awesome. This is not relying on emails, this is the actual project you’re interacting with. So that’s what I like about it.

So this was number five. I will tell you how it goes when we start experimenting with it but for now, Salesforce partners on the line, it’s time for you to live the dream so you can become a role model and also run your project in Salesforce, with the Klient PSA.

37:38 Special Klient Offer & Conclusion

And Sean, what’s that special offer you advertised before? This is an incredible offer, an opportunity for you to start using Klient, right? Remember this email address, [email protected], essentially I want you to reach out to me, I’m the one who’s gonna receive that. You’re gonna get two free lifetime licenses, so it’s not a one-year thing. I wanted to do that but Yanick said no, it’s a lifetime thing for two licenses. We’re gonna give you five project templates via our marketplace so that you can get started using that right away. And one of those spinners that they use in the inception, so that will be mailed to you via snail mail, just go ahead and reach out to me and we’ll be happy to talk about that. Of course, Saasinct is available for your deployment services.

Thanks so much Katie for attending this webinar as well. Do we have any more questions to take online? I’m seeing a lot of comments here.

Yes, we do have time. But first I would like to thank you Katie, before we jump into the questions, thank you very much for being here with us and showing those insights. And Sean, thank you for being a good growth agent throughout this episode. We’ll come back with episode two, which is gonna be about how to deliver a product. We’re gonna have our product development team talking about how we manage our sprints and development stories, and ideas coming from our customers. This is gonna be the topic of episode two.

Available soon

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