Listen to part 2 of our podcast with Justin Leader, CEO of HyperVelocity, to hear how to effectively modernize implementation of CRM modernization within your agency.
Roberto Musso: Welcome to the Atlassian Advantage Podcast Series. Here is Part Two of How Jira Makes Staff Onboarding and Stakeholder Relationship Management Easy.
Sean O'Sullivan: Let's shift gears here for a second and talk about our next topic, which is modern and light CRM tools for government agencies. Just based off of your expertise, what's new in the area right now?
Justin Leader: It's interesting, when we wanted to talk about these two topics because we've had a lot of government and military clients doing both of these things. I think it's because the tools are really allowing it now. We use Jira for this. Some of the IT people listening might be familiar with really heavy but awesome tools like Salesforce, and we help teams with that too, but that's not usually something that a government military agency need. They don't have dozens and dozens of salespeople make cold calling. What we find is needed is just a way to track relationships between the agency and very important stakeholders, or strategic engagements, they're sometimes called, or just important meetings and discussions that happen.
And so we use a workflow and database tool like Jira to use that web app to build a really lightweight tracker because work is already happening. Almost every one of these agencies already has Jira to some extent. It's a low hanging fruit to use it. And so what we've found is this need. So I'll take an example of one of our DOD customers. They're growing hugely, 200%, 300% a year, and they were finding that different levels of the organization were talking to different parts of the rest of the government and other important stakeholders like heads of research universities that were read in on projects or heads of military contractors. And so these meetings were actually often highly planned. There were briefings to a Senate Committee or the staff of a Senator or a Congressperson, but there wasn't a way to track and associate all this information.
And there's other types of relationship management where certain divisions of a military organization will get projects from the rest of the DOD and sell themselves in a certain way. But in all of these cases, they just need a way to track the work that's happening to prepare these or deliver projects and also connect it to these discussions, and each discussion can be a record. And we've heard often from the top of the organization, "I don't know what we told this committee two years ago. I know some things we told them, but I don't want to be surprised about, oh, they got this briefing and then we didn't do it and then we're going to get in trouble from this Congressperson or this Senator or this other division of the government." So just an exhaustive list of times that these meetings happen. It can be done relatively lightweight.
Sean O'Sullivan: Got it. So, I mean, it's clearly an evolving process, but there's obviously a lot of room for improvement, I would say, with it, right? I mean, what would you say if you had to at least label the first step to CRM modernization?
Justin Leader: Well, there are two things you want to iron out right at the start, which is really, how are things working? So one is, what are the conversations or the engagements that we want to track? Are these big briefings and meetings that are being prepared for two weeks beforehand? And so we want to have a lot of depth like, where are all the notes? And sometimes even their security on them, they're secret and so we just point. Okay, they're on this place and if you have security clearance you can go and walk over there and look at it. And then sometimes, they're more fleeting. "Hey, we don't want to track these long, big engagements. We want to track just these short, spontaneous conversations." So we don't have a deep record. We have a shallow and wide record where there's going to be more of them but they require less information.
So what does the team need to attract right now? The second thing is, what is the point? What does management need to know? Do they need to know what happened? Do they need to know what was said? Do they need to know if the follow-ups were done? What are the follow-ups? So again, just like back in the previous human resource discussion, the key is knowing why we're doing this and really providing a business outcome improvement. And, of course, figuring out how to make it so people will actually use it, which means it has to be as low friction as possible. People have to feel like they're not just doing homework for management.
Sean O'Sullivan: All right. So then they've evolved, they've got a process in place. Great. In what ways then can agencies measure that success of having a modernized CRM system?
Justin Leader: Well, the thing is that in almost no cases were there any measurements beforehand. So we can't say, "Oh, well, used to have records on five engagements a month, and now you've got 45 a month," because really they can't even produce that. Generally, we'll do a sentiment survey at the start and then 3, 6, or 12 months and 12 months after and also log any requests for changes throughout that time. But really it's through sentiment and the use of the tool. If the use of the tool is going up and the perceived cases where it hasn't been used is under 5%, we think that's really successful, because not only is there compliance, but it's useful. Because even in these organizations, this type of tool won't get used unless it's useful for everyone involved.
Sean O'Sullivan: Gotcha. Okay. So my last question for you, Justin, let's crank out the crystal ball here for a second and predicts the future, which considering how 2020 has been so far is even stranger to think about or even harder to think about now these days. But what do you think CRM modernization would look like, say, 10 years from now?
Justin Leader: It's an interesting place to be, but I think there's going to be lower hanging, maybe is not the right word, but easier to implement use of machine learning and artificial intelligence. A couple of years ago we had a client who was big into computer science, he's like, "Oh, can't you just connect Google's recent open source AI or machine learning tool to JIRA and any problem that comes in it'll automatically route it to the right person?" And we generally don't find that that's useful yet, but in 10 years, sentiment analysis of entries so that you can essentially say, "Let me look at every interaction with a customer where they were frustrated."
Now, that's doable in some customer relationships to a small extent now, but implementing that in every flexible way is going to be really easy in 10 years. They're using machine learning and AI to really get a better set of analysis on how even a small agency of 200 to 400 people that aren't creating big data, how are they doing? Where are the bottlenecks that we don't even know to ask for? We can measure bottlenecks that we know to look for right now, but we don't know what we don't know and so I think having an AI that can analyze the edges of our data will be actually practical and not a $5 million project as it would be now.
Sean O'Sullivan: Sure. Well, no one can see the future, but it's an exciting premise.
Justin Leader: I'd be nice.
Sean O'Sullivan: So thanks again, Justin. Hey, where do you suggest our listeners go to learn more about using Atlassian's tools and HR onboarding management, CRM modernization, and how they support government agencies?
Justin Leader: Absolutely. Well, we'd love to give people a tour of ways that they can get help and hear what they're looking to do. You can get in touch with us at 866-250-4157, or you can write to us at hello@hypervelocity.com. Also, of course, there's the Carahsoft Blog. There's a lot of stuff available just about the products on your website, as well as on Atlassian's website. But we'd love to talk to your listeners and tell them what things are a good fit and what things might not be.
Sean O'Sullivan: Perfect. Yeah, we can't wait to read it. These are all great suggestions, Justin. Thank you.
Justin Leader: Yeah, right?
Sean O'Sullivan: Hey, Justin, we really appreciate your time today and all the insights and information. This is obviously a topic that all agencies are going to have to find ways to adapt to and this kind of information I think is critical to understanding those types of challenges. For our listeners, please check out Justin's suggestions and the resources on Carahsoft's Atlassian Advantage site. Feel free to contact us anytime at atlassian@carahsoft.com or you can always give us a call 833-547-2468. Thanks again, Justin, and we look forward to seeing everybody again.
Justin Leader: Thank you.