Market Disruption and Becoming an SME Growth Enabler – I Salute John Cheney…
workbooks It is a cloud-based SaaS CRM platform that helps growing companies run their businesses and interact more effectively with customers. They provide affordable solutions to small and medium businesses. They have a price point that’s usually 50-70% lower than other CRM providers like Salesforce or Microsoft, so it enables businesses to scale in a realistic and manageable way.
John Cheney, CEO, speaks to Business Matters and shares his story…
What prompted you to start working on workbooks? Did you want to shake up the status quo, was it a challenge or a gap in the market that you could fill?
Before Workbooks, I founded a cloud-based email security company. As we grew, like many small and medium businesses, we invested in different IT systems: we used Salesforce as a platform for sales, but then a separate platform for marketing automation, finance, customer services, and so on. Running a company with many different systems adds unnecessary complexity and cost. Therefore, I saw an opportunity to mainly develop a CRM and business application platform for medium-sized companies like ours.
The goal was to allow companies to build better businesses and remove the burden of managing multiple, siled solutions. Along with traditional CRM, I wanted Workbooks to provide tools like order processing and customer support that could join the customer-facing side of the business and integrate seamlessly with accounting systems.
That was the vision: to create a business application platform for growing companies that can’t necessarily afford enterprise applications but need more power than simple, disjointed accounting, marketing, or sales tools.
What is the USP of Workbooks?
Apart from the CRM service, we also offer a combined approach to success for new projects, which is a unique selling point for workbooks. Many companies take a technology-first approach to choosing the right CRM, but that can be a fast path to failure. Instead, companies should start by defining the business outcomes they want to achieve in order to set functional goals.
Our Shared Success approach helps companies define and prioritize their business outcomes, understand their CRM requirements, and set clear expectations for their implementation. We invest in the success of our clients’ CRM projects in three ways:
- We help clients understand what CRM software they need to achieve their business goals through a co-funded workshop.
- We participate in implementation financing to give customers made-to-measure CRM at an off-the-shelf price.
- We offer a co-financed customer success program so customers can future proof their business operations with a CRM that grows with them.
What is the main problem you solve for your customers?
Our CRM platform helps small and medium businesses increase revenue, enhance customer experience, reduce operational costs, and improve decision-making by joining the entire business. Our core CRM services extend beyond sales, marketing, and customer services to include marketing automation, event management, order management, fulfillment, invoicing, and supplier management functions for small and medium businesses. We consult with companies to deliver customer relationship management and workflows that address their unique challenges. In doing so, we are proud to say that we have been ranked #1 for customer satisfaction by G2 for the past six years.
What are your brand values?
Our customers’ success is our success – and that starts with our individual customers. Our holistic approach is to focus on the people we work with, and how we can help them be better at what they do. Business success will follow.
Do your values determine your decision-making process?
When helping a customer implement a CRM, it is very important to us that the people we work with understand it. We’re willing to invest the time in making sure they’re using the tools successfully, because we know, in the long run, if they’re successful, they’ll continue to invest in the Workbooks platform.
Is team culture an integral part of your business?
I believe team culture should be an integral part of any business. We have our five company values on the wall at Workbooks HQ. Most important is “customer first,” and it’s about how we make sure, as a company, that we deliver the results our customers expect. The others are: “Committed,” “Creative,” “Identify Opportunities and Problems,” and “Competitive”—we love to win! But all of these company values depend on us working well as a team.
If team culture is an integral part of your business, what do you do to show your team that you value them?
We have the company’s sixth unofficial value, which is cake. It’s important to celebrate milestones together, whether it’s winning a big deal or a birthday. We also have quarterly “public rooms” where I will give a business update for the entire company and, as part of that process, recognize the accomplishments of key individuals. We call them the heroes of our pamphlets.
In terms of your messaging, do you think you speak directly to your customers in a clear way?
Honestly, speaking directly to potential clients in a clear manner is not always easy. We have a diverse client base, and we need to communicate clearly with everyone, from manufacturing to professional services firms. We’re working on it, but until then, every business will have slightly different needs. The most important thing is that we understand it.
What do you think about inflation and interest rates – will you pass that on to your customers or will you allow your profit margins to influence customer loyalty in these trying times?
Many of our clients are already protected because they have signed a multi-year contract with us. The price of the product remains the same during this contract period, regardless of what happens with our public price list.
Over 75% of our customers are on multi-year contracts, so there has never been any price inflation on their Workbooks licenses. However, costs are always re-evaluated at the time of renewal, and prices may need to be adjusted to inflation.
How often do you evaluate the data you pull and process your KPIs and why?
I have a bunch of dashboards that show data from across the company that I look at every day. We use data to continuously review and evaluate our performance against key performance indicators. We look at top line revenue, sales performance, customer satisfaction, customer health, customer retention rates, and then key financial metrics, like billing and cash flow.
We use this data to measure the performance of our budget. How will we fare against where we thought we would be? Do we have any customer related issues that need to be resolved? This last part is a particularly important part of what we do with data every day – we want to identify potential customer issues as early as possible and understand what causes them.
Does technology play a much larger role in the day-to-day running of your company?
We’re making incremental and continuous improvements to our technology stack, and like many companies, we use some technologies like video conferencing tools a lot more than we used to. On the whole, technology has always played an important role in conducting our daily business.
What is your position on your competitors?
I am grateful to our competitors. I think they add real value to us. Our largest competitors, such as Salesforce, have helped create the market in which we operate and against which we can differentiate our services.
It can be a lonely, pressured place to be the main decision maker for the company. What do you do to relax, recharge and sharpen your focus?
I love to cook and enjoy a glass of wine. Sometimes at the same time. Preferably at the same time, in fact.
Do you believe in the 12-week work method or do you develop longer planning strategies?
The short answer is yes, I believe in the 12-Week Workout method. However, this is actually one of three things we do at Workbooks. At a high level, we have a three-year business plan, which is more strategic; 12-month financial plan, which is more detailed and includes budgets and KPIs; Then a three-month plan that focuses on our most pressing goals and what we’re trying to achieve.
What is the environmental strategy for workbooks?
We are taking steps to reduce our carbon footprint wherever possible. For example, we are participating in a cycle to work scheme and are about to introduce an electric car scheme. Electric vehicle points are being installed in our offices as we speak. We are also looking for ways to run our business in a more environmentally friendly manner. For example, we work with our suppliers to reduce the energy consumption of our devices.
What three things do you wish existed within the next 12 months?
International expansion is our main focus going forward. In 2018, we opened an office in Connecticut to support our growth in North America, where we recently won our largest contract to date. Within the next twelve months, we hope to grow our team in America by five more people.
We also have plans to open a third office, which will be in Europe, and we are looking forward to launching a new product to help our clients manage projects more effectively.
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