Transcript
George Shalhoub: Hey everybody. Thank you for joining us on this week’s episode of What’s Brewin, where we talk about how we brew success with our clients, partners, and customers. On today’s podcast, we are joined by David from Nintex so we’re going to talk a little bit about the main use cases at Nintex solves for, the application of, and probably learn a couple things along the way.
And so I’m your host, George Shalhoub I’m an RVP here at Plative. I oversee our financial services practice and I’ve been in technology for north of a decade now across many different roles, Salesforce Microsoft, and now here at Plative for the last five years or so. David, I’ll pass it over to you, give yourself a quick introduction.
David Stephen: Yeah. So, I’m David Steven, I’m a Senior Solutions Engineer at Nintex. I’m actually approaching your decade. I know I can’t say that yet, but I’m getting close. I think I’m at eight or nine years doing this. But yeah, I’m a Senior Solutions Engineer, just a fancy way of saying, I talk about Nintex all day on sales calls.
Getting people feel comfortable about the technology, understanding it, et cetera. One thing I’ll also add, I know it’s the What’s Brewin’, I am drinking a LavAzza from Costco, it’s espresso flavored. I don’t know if I was supposed to drop that.
George Shalhoub: Thank you for keeping me honest. Yeah, I was supposed to drop the coffee I’m drinking as well. I was awake very early this morning putting together a deck, so I’m currently drinking chamomile tea, but I am drinking it out of a Brooklyn Coffee Roasters coffee cup. So maybe that passes.
Very good. So like I said, David and I are going to have a general conversation about Nintex and how our clients are using the platform. What we wanted to mainly focus this on is, client onboarding, servicing your clients, and then any of the other applications that maybe we’re not all aware of, of what Nintex can bring to the table.
We want to start first with client onboarding and account management, because this is such a common use case that we at Plative use Nintex to solve for. And so, whatever industry it might be in wealth management, in the non-profit space, in anything in the alternative asset space, you name it. Even if you think about someone that’s selling technology, they’re all onboarding clients and then managing the clients themselves. And so David, I want to pass this one over to you. What are some of the common client onboarding challenges that you guys might be solving for with your clients?
David Stephen: Yeah. Well, I think, the first thing that’s thought of whenever you’re applying a new technology, whether it’s us or anyone, is it’s going to be hard, right? It’s going to be hard to implement and it’s going to take a long time. And is the juice going to be worth the squeeze at the end of the day?
And that’s one of the things my role is for, is to make people feel comfortable that it’s not going to be, that it’s going to be easy. Which is the truth with Nintex as you start to learn it. The other piece is because we’re talking a little bit more about the, the DocGen tool at times here, is the Salesforce data model. What, I mean by that is, you know, what are people going to have to change now to get us to work tomorrow? So are they going to have to change the way they work with, for example, Salesforce? What is this going to look like?
Are they going to have to change their documents, make them look different? And that’s another piece that I always like to kind of really land the plan on is. You’re not going to have to change anything you’re going to have to do in Salesforce. You can work with it the same way, organize it the same way, and you can use the same style documents.
So, we work with template documents like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF documents, and you can use those same documents in our service, right? And those are, I think, the clear pieces are just getting folks to understand because I think going into the call, they’re thinking, I’m going to have to change all this stuff.
They’re going to see me just do a demo and they’re going to think, oh, I’ll have to make my document now look like that, which isn’t the truth. So, I think that’s the challenge I have, is to make sure I can more eloquently probably than I just said, it make people understand it’s not going to be a big calorie burn on their end.
George Shalhoub: Yeah. And we see it all the time, especially with tech companies that we’re working with. Their sales team, it might be the first time that they’re rolling out Salesforce, they could have been on Salesforce for six years, but they might still be building quotes in Word. So they might select their products and do everything out of Salesforce, but then they’re not actually generating it out of the system and then they go into Word and build the document there. There’s very little oversight into what the document itself could look like. There could be formatting issues and so, just showing them that, that Word document that you guys have been editing 16 times a day, very easy to just transpose that into Salesforce, hit generate document and it’s going to merge all the information that you have inside of Salesforce. And so, it’s a simple tool to get set up and it is a huge time saver, especially if you think about salespeople, anyone managing clients, who just want to give them time back in their day, take 30 minutes back from building that quote and let them hit a button and send it out to their client from there.
David Stephen: Yeah, one hundred percent.
George Shalhoub: So, what we just talked about right there is Nintex Drawloop. That being the tool of course, that you’re going to be generating that document with. But what I want to ask you about is some of the other applications of Nintex Drawloop as a platform. What are some of the top three use cases that you’ve seen Nintex solve?
David Stephen: Well, I’ll bring up one of the big ones, I know we actually talked about it a little bit earlier was QBR reports. So, I didn’t know actually what that was until we had a sales guy come in to Nintex and I was working with him and he had to make these QBR reports at his other job, which are quarterly business reviews, which is a common thing.
I just didn’t know what it was because I didn’t work in sales too much. But essentially what you’re doing, and you tell me if I’m wrong here, George, is you’re going into your Salesforce environment and you’re making, whether it’s a Word document or a PowerPoint, you’re making a new slide for everything you did for the last quarter.
So, for instance, making a whole slide about how many opportunities you closed this quarter, and then next quarter. And then how many you think will close next quarter, and then you’re maybe making another graph of your year to date in sales, which is going against maybe other data.
And there’s all these formulas and all these different slides you’re making to basically show how great you are.
George Shalhoub: Mm-hmm.
David Stephen: And it takes a while to build that. I was looking at that thing like if you had to build that manually, it takes a while. And so what I did with the sales guy I was mentioning that worked at Nintex, we built this as a demo so we could take this down the road and show folks, and I couldn’t believe people’s reactions that worked in sales that were seeing this because it took something that was taking them a day, two days, three days to put this report together, and then they can click a button, wait 15 seconds and there was their PowerPoint.
George Shalhoub: Yeah. Or an entire week of free time, but yes.
David Stephen: And I think the jaws probably were hitting the floor at that point. Because it’s like, oh my gosh, I can do this now in 15 seconds and you get a lot more feet on desk time at that point, which I think is anyone’s goal, right? Is focus on what’s important and less on those kinds of tasks.
George Shalhoub: David and I are laughing because I, as we were talking about this session and planning for it, I just made a little a joke about how when we were done planning, I’m going to get back to my QBR deck. And that’s how this one even came around; I had no idea that this was even possible. And more to this is thinking about sitting in these QBRs, any sales leader that’s ever been in them before, you don’t really want to ask questions of the other person that’s presenting because you’re like, maybe they’ll get to their close rate or lead to close ratio and what their sales cycle might look like and the duration, because you’re like, oh, maybe they’ll have that on a future slide.
So having these QBR decks be something that’s structured is going to make sure that everybody has the same format and you’re really just being graded out on the metrics instead of saying like, oh, how did they actually format this deck? Such an easier way of running through these. These are 90-minute sessions and we’re some of the more senior people at the firm. If we could take a 90-minute session, turn it into a 45 minute session, and also take back the eight or nine days it takes to put together this deck, have it put together in 15 seconds, there’s a massive time back to just apply yourself back to the business and do any of the other 5,000 things that you might have on your plate at any given time.
David Stephen: One hundred percent.
George Shalhoub: So aside from the one that we bubbled to the top, because this one very much fit a pain point that I’m currently going through, are there other pain points, other use cases that you see Nintex applied for across the ecosystem?
David Stephen: Yeah, so another really big one is contracts. Now, contracts historically though, aren’t as cool looking as an output of a QBR report. Because in the QBR report you might have charts with Salesforce data and you might have a whole bunch of replicated rows of all your content. It’s a lot of cool DocGen stuff happening there. In a contract it’s just, name goes here in this paragraph, it’s very simple stuff. But what makes contracts a big use case is how we work with, one-to-one data, which is the data in Salesforce and it goes in the document, but there’s also what we call situational data, which can determine what happens. So, a light use case would be, you know, whenever I send this contract outside the states, I always have to remember to append this extra page of legalese.
You can apply logic like that to these use cases where the document is going to checks in or checks out just based on the data model. Now it’s not just true to the document, it can also be paragraphs within a document. To that point we actually had a customer to use case I always like to bring up where they were doing business in 50 different states and instead of having to manage 50 different templates, we actually had showed them the concept of one template money version.
So what that meant was instead of having all these different templates, because let’s say paragraph four shows up in 23 of the states and there’s another paragraph that shows up in 18 different states they’re not even the same. So instead of having all these different versions, they could put the logic into the actual language and then one template could decide which language showed up based on any kind of rules and validation you wanted to put in there. Why that’s huge is not so much that just the end users could then just press a button and get the correct document every time just based on what they enter in Salesforce, but also when there’s a language change, instead of having to maintain all those different versions of the template, they could change the language in one place and it changed it for everywhere it existed if it’s all pulling from the same location. So, making it easier for the, the back end user too. So that’s one of the big use cases when we show how to manage contracts. That’s always a huge one for folks with situational data.
George Shalhoub: Sales op loves that answer. Prevents them having to kick back contracts and then the salesperson flipping out because there’s something wrong with their deal and they weren’t aware of it.
David Stephen: And slows down the sales cycle.
George Shalhoub: Yeah, exactly. Slows down the sales cycle.
David Stephen: And also when you’re new to the organization, the last thing you want to do is send out the wrong thing. So this allows you to feel more comfortable when you’re sending out a contract, it’s the correct one. What’s the phrase? Garbage in, garbage out. Make sure your data and Salesforce is correct to get the correct document out the door.
George Shalhoub: Yeah. Just thinking about all the different mistakes I’ve made at companies when I’m new. I’ll leave the company nameless, but there was a time it was a software company and I was not provisioning licenses for deals that had been sold. And so I had no idea that that was happening so I could have definitely used a workflow cloud type tool to make sure that the licenses themselves were being provisioned after the opportunities were closing.
But like I said, we’ll skate right past that one really quick. Aside from the quotes, the purchase orders and, and everything Drawloop related, we’ve really been targeting it on, on Nintex Drawloop, which is that DocGen piece, there’s another huge part of Nintex and this is the Workflow Cloud.
David Stephen: Mm-hmm.
George Shalhoub: We alluded to it just now with my example that I had just mentioned, but this is the part of Nintex that, in my opinion, is extremely powerful. Not that Drawloop isn’t, but that is less widely known. And so I want to just give a quick overview back over to you, David, of what is Nintex’s Workflow Cloud and what are some of the main applications? And then we’ll open it up with a general dialogue.
David Stephen: Yeah. So, I always like to mention with Nintex Workflow Cloud, it’s a cloud workflow solution. Salesforce is an example of a powerful system that works with it. Nintex in general is a very large platform end to end. So when you’re talking about wanting to plan your processes and map them out, you want to do document generation, you want to shoot out workflows and have them all communicate together.
DocGen for example, is just a line item, just like Workflow Cloud is. So it’s another piece to the puzzle that you may want to use, you may not. But what Workflow Cloud does is it allows you to connect different systems together and do so logically.
A good example I always like to bring up is, if I relate it to a car, Workflow Cloud is the engine. Now when you put that engine into a plane, the plane, does something different than the car. You take another engine you put it into, a train or you put it into a rocket ship or whatever you put it in, wherever you put that engine, that’s where the application’s being used. But at the end of the day, it’s an engine, and that’s where Workflow Cloud comes into play. Someone asks, what is it? And I’m like, well, it depends on where you put the engine, right? If you put it into DocGen, it can do a lot of things. For example, it can mimic an approval process, or it can quarterback redlining use cases because the workflow could be, for example, a delivery option for DocGen.
So, you press button, magic happens, get document. The document then is the beginning of the workflow, which then, shoots off and does all these different things and maybe eventually, goes to re-sign after everything’s been approved. So, contract use case, common one for that, right? Generate a document, have it go through a process of an approval or a redline, and then at the end of the day, push it out through e-signature, and then at the end have it stored back into the Salesforce record. Workflow can quarterback all of that.
George Shalhoub: Right. You just brought up the approval process and redlining itself. This is internal only, or is this also you generate the doc and maybe there’s an internal approval process after it’s been internally approved, we could send this out and start the redlining process with externals, with clients, with partners as well?
David Stephen: Yeah. The governor’s off here, right? You can go inside and outside of your environment.
So when you’re talking about going outside your organization and actually going to a customer or client and you want to actually send them the document to redline, you can. And one of the cool things is, when you’re talking about just redlining specifically, the way that we handle it, the regular mechanics of what they do doesn’t change.
So if you remove Nintex what do they get? They get an email with a Word document attached. They edit the document, make their amendments and changes, and then send it back. With Nintex they can still get an email with the Word document that Drawloop dynamically put together, they can make their edits and then push it back.
When it pushes back though, it can automatically take the document, attach it to a version control in Salesforce, which then could automatically ping, instead of a salesperson who sent it out, maybe it automatically goes to legal. So instead of now the salesperson getting the document going, okay now I have to go ping legal and hopefully they’re available. It automatically can just go into a queue for them. There’s no interaction. So then the salesperson’s already figuring out what their next deal is and then moving onto that. So again, the workflow can quarterback that so nothing’s falling through the crack, so to speak.
George Shalhoub: As we joked about the QBR deck earlier, this is another one that David, I want speak to you a little bit more after today’s session on. Legal red lines going back and forth, it’s not a massive pain point for us, but I’ve heard about it in many other companies. But even for us, I mean, the back and forth on legal, it’s, you send out a contract, it gets stuck in spam because it hits some spam filter or whatever it might be, and you’re wondering why you haven’t gotten your red lines back.
And anyone that runs a monthly business, a quarterly business, those last couple days of the month are important to be as efficient as possible. And so if you could automatically ping legal, they’re working through a queue, you don’t have to start pinging them and slacking them. They’re just quickly working through the queue itself out of one system, instead of looking at 15 different ways that they actually get messages.
David Stephen: Well, I don’t work in marketing, but if I did, and it’s a good thing I don’t, the slug line at a booth would be more, something along the lines of “Nintex is removing the steps for human interaction of getting in the way.”
Because they’re getting in the way of the finish line. And when we can say, well, this is this, and this is that. Why do we have to wait for this person to do something when they could just be done? That’s what we’re doing. We’re removing those steps. Or another slug line could be ” maximizing your laziness”, but I don’t think that would do well in the booth event.
George Shalhoub: The best salespeople follow a process. Maybe they might be a little bit lazy, they just get stuck in their process and that allows them to follow through with everything that they’re doing. But also preventing human error. I think everything that we just talked through, information gathering, generating of the documents, getting quotes sent out instead of ending up editing them in Word, and then the whole redlining and approval process, all taking place in one centralized platform, and make sure that everything is gonna fit the right mold. So if you guys can’t tell, there’s a lot of cool things that you can do with Nintex way beyond just generating a document, sending a quote, or looking at a report internally.
So as always, David, I’m learning something every time we’re on the phone here. I think that’s about all the time that we have for today. We do want to keep these short and brief as if this was a coffee break with What’s Brewin’ even though David is drinking coffee, I’m drinking tea, but that’s okay.
Everybody, audience, thank you guys so much for joining us on today’s episode of What’s Brewin’ once again, we are brewing success with our clients, partners, and customers. Join us during our next episode. Thank you so much.
