Join Chris Corcoran, founder of CloudExtend, as he shares lessons learned from building and growing a business. Drawing from his experience with CloudExtend and his own entrepreneurial journey, Chris discusses the importance of customer feedback, empowering employees, and embracing continuous improvement.
Gain valuable insights that can help you overcome the challenges of implementing and adopting systems like NetSuite, and ultimately transform your business for the better.
Don’t Hyper Focus on Your Competition
At CloudExtend, they have a product board where customers can come in, add their ideas, and upvote them, so they know what customers are requesting. But in speaking with customers, they also know if an idea is a priority or not.
“We would have lost three, four months’ momentum trying to build an application a competitor was releasing. Since our customers did not see it as a priority, we doubled down on our vision and did not hyper-focusing on our competition.”
Listen to the Needs of Your Customers
The customer is not necessarily always right. It’s really more of customers reinforcing what your company is thinking because you’ve been doing this a long time and you’ve got our own internal roadmap. Obviously, there are some limitations, but you can discover a larger need across your customer base.
Do the Right Thing. Always.
Chris shared, “We had this round table where we wanted to build a mission statement. So we had all these convoluted ‘we want to be like the company that changes the world’… which sounds great, (but) very hard to do. In the end, we just decided on the mission statement, ‘Do the right thing.’”
By empowering people to do the right thing, and always backing them up, Chris believes this is the best piece of business advice. Remember, the customer isn’t necessarily always right. “One of my regrets is that we had a customer who was actually very aggressive with one of our coworkers and made this coworker so upset that they were in tears. I should have just cut ties then and there with that customer. So that would have been an example of following my best business advice and doing the right thing.”
Challenge the Status Quo
“What worked last year is probably not going to work this year, and you’ve got to be able to recognize whether it’s working or not. I think the best companies, the best business people out there are making lots of small minor adjustments and then doubling down on what works.” Chris commented.
Start with minor tweaks. Tweak a pricing model, and find a pricing discount, as long as you are ensuring that your company still gets the revenue that it needs to build and enhance your products, why not try?
Don’t Let Your Data Walk Out The Door…Literally
Successful organizations understand the importance of creating a single source of truth. Rather than relying on individual employees to retain critical information, businesses should ensure that customer interactions, files, and key business data are centralized and accessible.
Chris shared that NetSuite is their single source of truth.
“You’re not going to see the benefits right away. The benefits are going to come maybe two months, three, four months down the road when someone needs that piece of information and either that person’s not there anymore, or their application, or they send that individual in the company an email saying, hey, did you ever ask the customer this question? and what was the response? But it’s right there in Netsuite because they attached that email or they attached that file. So you’ve got to start using the product before you can really start seeing the benefit. Some customers will stop early because they don’t have anyone on their side really enforcing the usage until the adoption increases because they see the benefit.”
By encouraging adoption and consistent use of systems like NetSuite, organizations can preserve institutional knowledge, improve collaboration, and ensure important information remains available long after employees move on or roles change.
Transparency is Key to Successful Change Management
Being transparent is the best change management practice you can have according to Chris. “Our business metrics are all available for anyone on the team to see. So, in short, if we’re making a change, that writing has been on the wall for everyone to see for some time and everyone’s had some input. While we’re not a democracy, we’re also not a dictatorship. People have a voice and there’s lots of transparency.”
Training Can Make or Break You
Chris shared, “Go through the training, learn how to use it. Stick with it for a few months so you can start to see the benefit. Ensure you get those executives to track their metrics and say, okay, well, we bought 20 licenses. Who are the two users that aren’t using this? and why not?”
When a business invests in a new idea or technology, the buy-in and execution are imperative to the success and return on investment. Time is money, and sometimes you need to go slow in order to go fast later.
Whether you’re implementing NetSuite, introducing new technologies, or looking to improve adoption across your organization, long-term success depends on continuous improvement, transparency, and empowering your team.
Watch the full discussion with Chris Corcoran for additional insights on automation, change management, and building a business that is prepared for growth.
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