A Tigerpaw guest blog by Chet Neal President of Sound Stage, Inc.
Many small businesses experience growing pains at some point and we at Sound Stage are no different.
As an audio and video integration specialist based in Winter Park, Florida, we’ve been fortunate enough to double our number of employees in the last three years and increase sales at a double-digit clip for the last decade.
We’ve worked hard for our success, most recently hiring additional sales consultants and staff to develop and track sales opportunities. But along the way we’ve also struggled to manage employees’ workflows, a situation that has proven costly in both time and money.
We spent nearly two years looking for the right CRM system, but none seemed to offer everything we needed at the time and what we felt we would need to help the company grow even more. Then, last year we happened to hear a presentation by a Tigerpaw Software competitor—ConnectWise—at another company’s partner conference.
We were intrigued by the professional services automation (PSA) concept and started doing some due diligence. After contacting Tigerpaw Software we were invited to their 2015 conference in Omaha. We loved what we heard and less than three months later we became a customer.
Right away, Tigerpaw seemed perfectly tailored to our line of work. Most business software solutions are based in the IT world and don’t understand the audio/visual industry. Tigerpaw does. They have specific workflows and processes for A/V services. It didn’t hurt that the other two solutions we looked at didn’t even compare in cost. Tigerpaw had more functionality and a more compelling price point.
Another thing that was very important to us during the vetting process was finding a partner that wanted to know where we came from and where we were going. We weren’t going to be satisfied with anything less than a complete, system-wide deployment. Our goal was to bring our entire workflow online.
To make that happen, Sound Stage made the bold decision to get every employee trained on Tigerpaw—even at the cost of taking a week’s worth of work out of the mix if we had to—before going live. Led by our Operations Manager Andrew McClelland, we embarked on our first ever large scale training project, and the more we worked with Tigerpaw, the more we realized that Tigerpaw Academy was unlike any other training initiative we’d ever seen either.
For example, our employees quickly noticed that Tigerpaw tracks the training scores of not just Sound Stage employees, but compares how Sound Stage scored against other Tigerpaw customers too. Our competitive juices started flowing.
When you put a group of people in front of monitors for a couple of days, a certain fatigue sets in. But when so many people starting going through the modules and ranking nationally—one employee reaching #1!—that’s effective. It made it fun and it kept people on track. We didn’t need to give them any more incentive. We listed the rankings on our SharePoint page and everyone could see where everyone else was sitting.
The format not only kept our employees engaged, it made them more confident to use Tigerpaw. And their excitement extended beyond scores—they recognized that they were learning how to be more efficient at their job.
We captained some employees who really went above and beyond to complete the entire course as champions to inspire the others. Our Marketing and Human Resources Director Rhonda Neal even organized a very fun Tacos & Tigerpaw event for employees, celebrating their accomplishments and rewarding them for their hard work.
I’m glad to finally have a great system to manage our workflow. Beyond that we’ve also seen additional cultural benefits: Employees are happier. We’ve even held regular “Tigerpaw Day” meetings and lunches where employees presented how the platform made their job easier. We’re still learning!
I’m eager to see what new features and functionality Tigerpaw adds, but it’s nothing compared to knowing that my fully trained and passionate staff is even more excited.
Thanks again, Tigerpaw!
Chet