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Before, we’d get a customer up in about six weeks with training. Now, we’re pretty consistently hitting three weeks with much larger clients.
The worst part of Dan Green’s previous jobs was always headcount planning. Dan, who has spent his career in corporate finance, had to juggle multiple tools and systems, consolidate scattered emails and Google sheets, and coordinate with several stakeholders across the company when looking into detailed headcount requests. And it’s not just Dan; financial analysts spend a large chunk of their time on headcount planning, rather than strategy and other important tasks. That’s what led Dan to start TruePlan, “a one-stop shop for next generation headcount planning.”
TruePlan fuels both sides of the headcount planning process for large companies. Executives and budget owners can go into TruePlan to add headcount plans, see budgets and forecasts in real time, and send requests through the proper approval channels. On the other end, the recruiting team can work on actually fulfilling the headcount requests through TruePlan’s recruitment tools.
Because TruePlan is a comprehensive tool, implementation involves a lot of moving pieces, steps, and coordination from both sides. That’s why TruePlan decided to use Accord to help streamline the onboarding process.
The Goal: A Streamlined, Repeatable Onboarding Process
TruePlan aims to help its customers simplify headcount planning, but at the beginning, its own implementation process needed simplification too. “Before we started using Accord, our implementations were a complicated web of communication channels,” Dan says. He’d try to manually consolidate multiple email threads and conversations in order to send daily updates to the customer, although he made it work, it wasn’t ideal. And Dan knew it wouldn’t scale.
Streamlined Onboarding = Competitive Advantage
TruePlan began using Accord to help the company meet two key goals: make the implementation process faster, and build a repeatable process to enable the customer success team’s growth.
Streamlining onboarding was an opportunity for TruePlan to differentiate: “We want to get our customers to value as fast as possible,” Dan says. Some of TruePlan’s biggest competitors in the financial planning space can take six or more months to implement. Other smaller competitors can take two months. Dan’s goal was to set TruePlan apart by reducing the implementation process from its typical length of months, to less than three weeks.
Repeatable Process = Team Growth
Dan also wanted to build his customer success team over time, so he needed a scalable process and playbook that new hires could follow. That way, the TruePlan team could spend less time on training and learning the onboarding process, and more time focusing on the customer and ensuring they see value as soon as possible.
By using Accord to manage customer implementation, TruePlan was able to meet their goals, improve internal processes, onboard faster, and enhance customer relationships.
The Outcome: Faster Time to Value with Accord
Internally, TruePlan uses Accord to create and follow steps for preparing customer contracts. Once a contract is signed, it’s loaded into Accord with other relevant documents, so that both the customer and the TruePlan team will have access to them.
“It helps break up the pain of implementation, starts the conversation, and gives customers a clear roadmap,”
Next, implementation begins with a kickoff meeting between TruePlan and their customer. The TruePlan team walks through the playbook in Accord with each customer, showing them the plan for the next few weeks: what work needs to be done, what value the customer receives at each step, and who is accountable for each piece. “It helps break up the pain of implementation, starts the conversation, and gives customers a clear roadmap,” says Dan.
Having an agreed-upon plan in Accord between TruePlan’s internal teams and each customer gets everyone on the same page while cutting out the noise of additional channels. Dan saw immediate process improvements by not having to jump between multiple systems and email threads, or manually update training materials for new hires. The standard structure created in Accord enabled TruePlan to become better, faster, and more professional at the onboarding process and getting customers to value. The team can also spend more time defining what’s working and adjust the playbook as needed, ensuring they continue to improve customer relationships.
Best of all, the improvements to TruePlan’s onboarding process led to Dan meeting his goal of cutting implementation time in half. “Before, we’d get a customer up in about six weeks with training,” says Dan. “Now, we’re pretty consistently hitting three weeks with much larger clients.”
