Gallup says it takes a different set of skills because instead of saying, “Yes, we’ll do whatever you want,” you might have to say, “No, what you really need is this.”
“It’s a different mindset — instead of just install it and get out, we’re now there to push the client to achieve an outcome for the patients’ sake and for their sake,” he says.
In order to manage larger enterprise, outcome-based deals, Gallup says the company has hired more project or engagement managers, while also training everyone heavily on its four disciplines of execution.
“I don’t think there’s a silver bullet or one lever you have to pull to be able to manage that type of stuff,” he says. “You’ve got to pull several levers to make it successful within the organization.”
Send up test balloons
When you’re adding to your product portfolio, you want to test it slowly to ensure that your assumptions are correct. TeleTracking has spent the past few years doing this.
“We’re not ones that want to hire people and find out it didn’t work, and then we’re backing out of what we were just saying,” Gallup says. “So we’ve taken our time to test it out, try it at a few clients — really push the technology to be tested, also.
“And we’ve found, over the last couple of years, that there is a market for this; there is a demand for it,” he says.
In order to spearhead these pilot programs, Gallup says they worked to get the right set of leaders who can deal with the ambiguity of figuring out new business processes, implementation and maintenance.
Then, he says you have to keep reminding and encouraging the team because there’s a difference between building and creating vs. managing.
For example, TeleTracking updated an old product in order to help its clients manage their clinics. The team in charge had to determine how to price it, create the product, launch it to the sales team, etc.
Multiple times throughout the product development and testing, Gallup says everyone was wondering if it would be a failure or success because all you can see are the problems.
“It ended up being the best launch this company’s ever seen,” Gallup says.
By putting the building blocks in place with testing, it enables an organization to use those blocks to build the house, he says.
It also shows you the roadblocks, so you can see where products don’t make sense anymore or need to be deprioritized until later. People want everything to be successful, but sometimes it’s a success when you find out something is a “no.”
“Not doing something is just as important as deciding what you’re going to do,” Gallup says.
Implementing new processes, however, puts stress on any team.
One of the ways TeleTracking has dealt with this is implementing only one or two, what it calls, “wildly important goals.” By narrowing the focus, Gallup says it helps drive execution.
Focus is critical; even when you try to focus, the organization may still feel like it isn’t. He says you must have some tool that points to what you’re focused on, outside of your normal daily work.
“If you try to do too many things, obviously you’re not going to do anything well,” Gallup says. “And that’s something we still have to perfect. By no means am I planting the Tele flag on top of the Mt. Everest of focus, but it’s something we have to continually try to do.”
You need to stay on a quest of how do you focus on the right things and get them done and get them done well, he says.
Get organizational buy-in
Testing through smaller pilot programs doesn’t just prove a new product’s value to customers; it also proves it to employees.
Gallup says leadership that comes off the mountain and announces what the company is going to do cannot expect everybody to be in awe and follow.
“That’s why we try to do it this way, which is, ‘Let’s test a few of these things so that we can get real data and prove to ourselves and to our employees and to the market that we can do it,’” he says.
Then, Gallup says you can stand up in front of the employees and explain what happened: A group got together, focused on developing the product and sold it into the market. It worked brilliantly. This is going to be big for us, and here’s why.
You can walk people through that success versus talking about getting into the market because it strategically makes sense, he says.
Again, it comes back to putting together the smaller blocks.
