TRANSKRIPT 🔗
WEBVTT
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So this is the same business as episode three.
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This is Jamie and Claire.
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They fix their form problem, and leads are landing with the right people.
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The sales team is talking to prospects, and customer care is talking to clients.
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In week one, this is what Jamie found.
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With the form's problem fixed, leads are landing with the right people.
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Customer care is talking to clients, sales is talking to prospects.
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And then a deal closes, and the sales rep pulls up their notes, detailed, thorough, everything about this client from the first conversation to the signed contract.
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They fill out a handoff form.
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The form sends an email to the implementation team manager.
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The manager opens the email, reads the notes, and enters everything manually into their own system.
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It's a second program that was set up by implementation in the way they needed it.
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They assign the project to a team member.
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The team member started their work.
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A few weeks later, implementation wraps up.
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They fill out their own completion form, and another email goes out.
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This time to customer success.
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Customer success opens it, reads the summary, and enters the relevant details into a third program.
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Three teams, each one careful, thorough, and doing exactly what they were supposed to do.
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And every single time information moved between them, someone had to type it in again from scratch.
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The information existed.
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It just wasn't traveling.
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I'm Sarah Robinson, and this is the obvious myth.
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For anyone who's ever felt like their business should be performing better than it is and suspects that the answer isn't more leads.
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Here's what this myth is about.
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As long as it's written down somewhere, we're covered.
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And honestly, it sounds right.
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It sounds responsible.
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We're taking notes, keeping records, and documenting the client journey.
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That's what good teams do.
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And this team was doing it.
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Everyone was doing it.
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Sales had records, implementation had records, customer success had records.
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But here's what written down somewhere actually means in practice.
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It means the information exists, but it doesn't mean that the business can use it.
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Every time a client's information moved from one team to the next, it had to be manually re-entered, which means it was reinterpreted, resummarized, and sometimes abbreviated because one form or the other only had so many fields.
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Sometimes just slightly wrong, because humans make small errors when they're copying data from one system to another for the fourth time this week.
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And over time, those small errors compound.
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The customer success team is working from a summary of a summary, the original context, the specific thing the client said in the first sales call that explains everything about how they need to be served is a couple of handoffs back in a system the customer success team doesn't have access to.
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Written down somewhere isn't the same as available everywhere when it's needed.
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And available everywhere it's needed isn't the same as automatically surfaced at exactly the right moment.
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The myth is that documentation is the solution.
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The truth is that documentation without a system to move it between teams is just really well organized friction.
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And here's what I mean when I say organized friction.
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A person can know something.
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Sometimes a team can even know something.
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But the business, the entire entity that serves a client at scale, consistently, regardless of who's in the room, only knows what's accessible, shareable, and actionable inside the system everyone is working from.
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Everything else is tribal.
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And tribal knowledge has a shelf life.
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It works when the person who holds it is available, paying attention, and remembers.
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It breaks when they're on vacation, overwhelmed, or gone.
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This client wasn't losing information because people were being careless.
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They were losing it in transit, in the gap between one system and the next, every time a human had to bridge the gap manually.
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Each manual re-entry was a chance for the information to degrade.
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Each summary was a layer of interpretation between the original truth and the team that needed it.
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And by the time customer success was trying to serve a client well, they were working from a version of the story that had been filtered through two other teams' understanding of what mattered.
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The fix wasn't complicated, although it was a lot of work.
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We moved everyone into one system, HubSpot, and built the handoffs around deal stages instead of emails.
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When sales marked a deal as closed one, the information moved to implementation automatically, whole, not summarized, not re-entered.
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The original notes, the original context, the full picture.
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Right there, waiting for the implementation team when they open the record.
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Implementation started being assigned manually based on team capacity.
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No manager manually routing the work.
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So we didn't have email chains.
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When implementation marks the project complete, customer success had everything they needed before the handoff email could have even been written.
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And if something was wrong, if a record was incomplete or a previous team had missed something, there was a process to escalate it back up the chain.
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Checks built into the system, not dependent on someone remembering to ask.
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We didn't change our teams.
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Before episode five, here's a question I want to leave you with.
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Think about your client or customer journey.
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From the first time someone expresses interest to the moment they've been with you long enough to renew or refer, how many times does their information have to be re-entered along the way?
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Maybe it's copy and pasted, maybe it's manually re-entered, typed in again by a human who's interpreting what matters from what came before.
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Every one of those moments is a place where information degrades, where context gets lost, where the person serving your client next has a slightly less complete picture than the person who served them last.
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Find one of those moments.
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Just one.
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Because that's not a documentation problem, that's a system problem.
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And system problems have system solutions.
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That's it for episode four.
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If you're starting to see where information is getting lost in transit in your own business, the revenue leak quick check will help you pinpoint exactly where.
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It takes five minutes, and the link is in the description.
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Episode five is next, and it's about a client whose customers genuinely loved her, but they kept leaving anyways.
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And not because they wanted to, but because no one was reminding them to stay.