Convincing Your Team That LiquidPlanner Is the Perfect Solution

You’ve looked through dozens of task and project management tools and have finally found LiquidPlanner—the perfect project management solution for your business. Now, you have to convince everyone else. Where do you even start?

During my three years on the sales team, I worked with thousands of prospective customers evaluating project management tools. I found that teams with a solid evaluation plan and timeline were much more likely to be successful when it came down to purchasing LiquidPlanner.

Here are the top five things to consider when coming up with an evaluation plan to bring LiquidPlanner to your team.

1. Set Aside Time for Testing & Building Out Proof of Concept

Time is the Number 1 reason I see evaluations fail: people fall in love with LiquidPlanner, but they simply don’t have enough time (or don’t make the time) to test the tool in a dedicated period.

• One to two weeks should be enough time to test out features and build a sample project in the trial, especially if you leverage our sales team for tips and best practices.
• Set a deadline on the trial period for yourself and the team—and stick to that deadline.
  • Putting a real deadline on the trial period will provide the team with more urgency and a goal to work towards.
  • The objective of a trial period is to test out features and functionality and make sure the product fits your top requirements; letting a trial drag on for weeks will detract from regular work, make colleagues grumpy, and also delay your onboarding process.
• Literally block off time on your calendar to make sure you spend uninterrupted time in the system, at the very least a few one- to two-hour blocks throughout the trial period but more time if you can manage it.

2. Get Buy-In from Other Teammates

Yes, Batman can do his job alone, but it’s more fun when sidekicks are involved so you can tackle obstacles together.

Get buy-in from your team in a couple of ways:

• Detective Work. Sit down with people throughout your department or organization and listen to what is and isn’t working. Pay attention especially to what sort of manual processes could be eliminated with a dedicated project management tool. Be sure to take lots of notes to use for helping build your business case.
  • How many hours could be saved by having a single tool that provides automatic updates through time tracking and collaboration?
  • Are people having meetings just to give updates on the status of a project or task?
  • Where can LiquidPlanner help teams be more efficient?
• Batman and Robin. As you start to talk to the team, identify and enlist people to help with testing—but not too many people. It is a great idea to have at least one other person involved in testing out the trial so you can get another perspective and another champion of LiquidPlanner early on in the process. They might even help save you time if they can help with setting up some sample projects. However, the more people involved, the longer the process might take if you have to coordinate several schedules when setting up demos or internal meetings, so keep the evaluation team small but mighty.

3. Engage with LiquidPlanner Product Experts

LiquidPlanner has a dedicated sales team to help you throughout the entire evaluation process. We can help speed things up and give advice based on experience working with teams similar to yours.

We are here to help in several ways.

• Product Demo. Save time by setting up a 30- or 60-minute personalized walkthrough of the main features of LiquidPlanner. This session can be recorded to share with the team or for reference as you dive into the trial.
• Workspace Consultation. Every team is unique in their process and project workflow, and we offer consultation sessions with expert sales engineers on the best way to set up and structure your workspace (best utilized after you have set up a few sample projects).
• Pricing Consultation. Our sales team will help you identify which tier is the best fit for your requirements and give you the best pricing available.
• Final Presentation to Management. If you need help with a final presentation of LiquidPlanner to management, our product experts can tailor a demo specifically for executives.

4. Get Ahead of the Procurement Process

Bringing this up might seem premature, but you don’t want to get to the finish line and then get stuck in the procurement process for weeks.

Here are a few good questions to start asking if you aren’t familiar with the procurement process at your organization.

• Who needs to sign off on a purchase of this size?
• Can we pay upfront with a credit card to save time?
• Does our company require a purchase order? Would we need to get LiquidPlanner set up as a vendor in the system?

Sometimes figuring out the process can take time, so the earlier you become aware of each procurement hurdle, the better you can stick to your timeline.

5. Wow the Decision Makers

When you are ready to make the final pitch to get budget approval for LiquidPlanner, we have some excellent resources to help you make your business case.

• If you are making a formal pitch on your own, we have a PowerPoint presentation in our Executive Buy-In Guide, which you can customize with your top business objectives for a new project management tool.
• The Executive Buy-In Guide also includes an “Executive FAQ” and an overview of the “Business Case for LiquidPlanner.”
• If you plan to showcase the work you did during the trial, I would recommend using one of our dashboard templates to create a Portfolio Dashboard in your trial and customize that dashboard with your company logo. This will help executives see what sort of high-level reporting and visibility they would have access to for free (as external dashboard guests do not require a LiquidPlanner license to view a dashboard).

If you need more ideas on how to convince your team to switch to LiquidPlanner, be sure to watch our webinar, “Getting Your Team to Yes! How to Get Buy-In from Your Executive Team for a Project Management Solution.”