Storytelling About Discovery By WalkMe With Adriel Sanchez

William Tincup: [00:00:00] This is William Tincup and you are listening to the Use Case podcast. Today we have AD Adrian on from WalkMe and we’ll be talking about discovery by WalkMe. So we’ll do introductions here in just a second ad. Adrian, would you do us an a favor and introduce both yourself, comma me Discovery by walk me.

Adriel Sanchez: Absolutely. So Adrian Sanchez, chief Marketing Officer WalkMe which is an organization in the software space that is the developer and creator of a category called Digital Adoption Solutions. And when I talk about what WalkMe does, I like to start with the problem that we solve. When you think about the last couple of decades of investment in technology that enterprises have made, [00:01:00] we’ve created a bit of a mess, right?

There’s this web of technology that we’re asking our employees to use to get their jobs done, which in a lot of cases using the software has become the job itself and the workflows that software was. To help make easier for our employees. It’s really complicated things and created a bit of a mess of it.

So that’s the problem that WalkMe helps resolve, help you identify all of the friction points in your tech landscape, and then deliver help to people at the point where they need it most, which is the point that they’re experiencing reflection. Give you an example. You have people who are onboarding into an organization, I don’t know.

How many people believe that the onboarding process has been totally smooth, but when you think about all the technologies you need to onboard with, when you think about all the internal processes, that is an example of a workflow that is made significantly [00:02:00] easier with a tool like WalkMe that sits on top of the software stack and helps guide people through the major applications they need to go through to get a particular piece of work done.

William Tincup: And then, yeah. Here, do take us into no. Take us into discovery real quick. That’s where

Adriel Sanchez: I was gonna go next. When you think about what you need in order to optimize your kind of experiences for your users on all of these different applications, the first thing you need to understand is what software you’re running in your business.

Who’s using that software and whether they’re using it in the way that you wanted them to use it. Like a really interesting stat is that organizations are not even aware of 51% of all of the applications that are running in their organization. That’s the shadow it out there. And what WalkMe Discovery does [00:03:00] is it’s at the click of a button.

Allows you to see all the software that’s running in your organization allows you to see by department down to the individual user level. If you configure it that way, who’s using it, how often they’re using it, what types of things they’re doing on it. Click by click and in the context. Of the business processes or the workflows that the user is trying to execute with those applications, and it works on one application or it works on many applications.

This is especially important right now because of the amount of pressure that software budgets are under. Everybody’s looking at profitable growth. Everybody’s looking at how do I create a sustainable business moving forward? It isn’t growth at any cost anymore. And something like WalkMe discovery is resonating really well because it gives organizations the visibility they need to make better choices about what to do with inefficiencies [00:04:00] once they find them.

So are you going to redistribute licenses? Are you going to consolidate tools? Are you going to perhaps reduce licenses or change license types based on what you’ve found? This is the kind of data that WalkMe enable WalkMe discovery enables you with. So

William Tincup: what I love about WalkMe in general is I spent 2009 to about 2016 studying user adoption in the HR and recruiting work tech space.

And I worked for the, but it was consulting. I was cons helping people. After the bell run, you sold something great. How do you get people to use it? So consumption, usage, adoption, et cetera. And really what I learned through that whole, and I was a consultant, so what I learned through that whole process is that it kind.

Comes down to three things, change management, communication, training, et cetera. But what I also learned is that a lot of the business cases that are made by practitioners, [00:05:00] they the mass flawed because almost all of them are assumptive or use the assumption that they get, they’re gonna get a hundred percent adoption.

And so that math of that payoff if there is an roi, that ROI is flawed. And so that was, stark to understand that and then be able to communicate that with clients and things like that. But what I love about what y’all have done with the market, I think y’all started, if I remember right, you started in sales and marketing or sales and came over and you’re helping a, all the work tech folks.

What I love about it, again, they can see if it’s, I’m just gonna use brand names cuz it doesn’t matter. Phenom or Workday or whoever it is, they can see usage. If the company can see usage. They, they can see it by the client, they can see it in meta. They can see what features are being used, not used, et cetera.

But it’s hard for them to then translate that into action. So even if you’re a super admin of Paycor, you can [00:06:00] see the usage. But what do you can’t do anything with there’s no action. And what I love about, we saw each other at Unleash and you had me do the WalkMe challenge and what I loved about it, because it’s browser base.

Is it actually helped me it was like a virtual assistant kind of walking me through and making me, smarter. Okay, I don’t know the answer to that. Click, oh, there you go. And then, and in, of course it’s in that application. But it’s like a, I wanna say an overlay. That’s probably not the right way of thinking of it, but I just love what y’all have built because I studied that space for so long and there was nothing, not even nothing in that space.

And y’all have you’ve come along and fixed a very real problem for all enterprise software. Not just the spaces, not just work tech. We’re, I care about that a lot because that’s the space I’m in. But for all I Fink, FinTech, ed tech, like all of ’em have the [00:07:00] same problem. They buy things and then they don’t use all the features and functionality and all that stuff.

So I love what you’ve built and I love that we met, and I love that you made me go through the walk that didn’t make me we, I went through the WalkMe challenge and and I love what you’ve done with discovery

Adriel Sanchez: and I and you brought up a couple of points that’s really resonating with our customers when we’re going out and talking to them.

The first is, yeah, you’re right. You can get data about application usage in other places. But it’s different kind of application usage data. It might be login data, it might be information on time spent on a page. But it doesn’t give you the richness that you get from a browser based understanding of where people are clicking inside of an application and what is the thing that they were trying to do when they were accessing that application?

What application did they access just before that? And just after that, And the other thing [00:08:00] that you said that our customers are really reacting to also is what do I do with all that information? That’s the power of WalkMe is that WalkMe discovery is just the first step.

Now we give you all of the tools to actually address the problem. Because one of the things that you can do, if you find out that you said there’s an assumption that the ROI that the business case is built off of, that you’re gonna get a hundred percent adoption. Let’s say that you find that you have 10% adoption and you believe this is a mission critical application.

One of the things that you can do is drive the adoption of that application from 10% to 80%. How are you gonna do that? Are you gonna walk these digital adoption capabilities to do that? And it’s all built in the, from the same system you have. You have now bought into a platform that can help you with the adoption challenge in addition to the richness of information to make choices about how you manage licenses.

William Tincup: So one of the things I think When folks listen to this, they’re [00:09:00] gonna wonder, okay, another piece of technology, another login, another integration, this, that, and the other. And I believe as you talk to me about it, it’s like we can integrate, but we don’t because we’re browser based. We don’t have to integrate.

If I have that right. Is that like, how do you handle when people give you, they throw up that, in fact, I had this is actually a different conference. I had a practitioner come up to me and I was having lunch. She goes, oh, William can’t talk to you for a, oh yeah, what’s up?

She’s I just want less tech. I’m like the irony is that we’re at an HR tech conversation.

Adriel Sanchez: So what?

William Tincup: Why are you here a B? But I, I, I got it. I understood what she was saying, and she was, what she was saying is, it’s just, it’s confusing. There’s too much, I don’t really know what I have.

To your point earlier, I don’t know what people are using. Okay. I don’t have any insider visibility into that stuff. No, I can’t change it even if I did. And it’s not like I need one more thing. So the question is [00:10:00] when you get. Your sales team in particular, they’re getting that objection.

How do you coach them into responding to that?

Adriel Sanchez: Yeah, it’s an interesting question because the problem is framed as we’ve created a mess of all of this technology and there’s too much of it and it’s not well integrated. It’s like the, a series of really smart decisions that collectively have created a big mess, right?

Each of these decisions taking on their own are like, yeah, we should have done that. But what has been ignored is the experience for the user and the way that we talk about it is that yes, it’s an additional application, but the user doesn’t see it. It isn’t an additional application for the use.

It is embedded in the flow of the work of the user. So yes, there is a builder or someone in your organization that is gonna be managing the WalkMe ecosystem, absolutely. But they’re going to be deploying help to users that. Many times the [00:11:00] user isn’t even gonna know it’s Walk Me. You experienced the Walk Me Challenge, right?

You were getting help within the applications that we were asking you to execute tasks on. And if you didn’t know that, you were standing in front of a sign that said the Walk Me Challenge, you may not have even known that it was Walk Me That was powering that. So you’re creating the conditions for really beautiful people.

First experiences for your users. And you’re actually simplifying the process. So in a lot of ways, consolidation of tools is hard. It is hard to take these things out. One of the things that WalkMe allows you to do is simplify the experience without necessarily having to go through that mass consolidation because you’re just guiding people through each step of the process, across one application or many.

William Tincup: So another thing that you kept brought up as well that, that. That’s really important for us to explore is again the integration piece not being [00:12:00] integrated. Again the user is not gonna even really not know. Guess they could figure it out, but they don’t really have to. Cause you brought up a point early on is like using software at work isn’t necessarily a part of the job.

It isn’t the main part of any, almost anyone’s job, unless that’s their job, Rob. But if you’re, director of DemandGen, yeah. You use software, but then there’s a bunch of other stuff where you’re not using software and so the usage of that software, you want to get the most bang for your buck.

You don’t want people to figure their way out and try. Every time it’s brand new, they have to figure out things out every time they go into it. And what I love about. Again, like our performance management take that’s once a quarter, once a year, once a month, whatever it is.

The knock on that has always been, people forget like they’ve logged in. Yeah. And then the next time they log in it’s like I have to relearn all of the stuff that I, and again, it’s not their [00:13:00] job. And that’s I wanted to ask you about that because, it’s again, this using software at work.

Isn’t it’s tools to help work, it’s tools to make you help your do your job and all that other stuff. But by and large, you’re not paid to do that. You’re not paid to use that software.

Adriel Sanchez: You know the situation that Yeah, like we, we our clients come to us for a few different application problems and one of the problems.

Is the one that you’re describing, which is it isn’t that the application itself, it’s difficult to use, it’s just that it’s not used very often. So it could be the most beautiful experience in the world. It’s just that like when you think about things like performance appraisals, when you look at things like onboarding an employee, when you look at things like exiting an employee, when you look at things like doing your benefits, these are things that an employee or a manager are doing a handful of times a year.

And they’re doing it in the middle of 1700 other things that they’re working [00:14:00] on. So no matter how you slice it, there’s gonna be friction. There’s gonna be friction in that process. How do you identify where that friction is and just eliminate it? Because what you’re paying that manager to do is assess an employee in a performance review.

You’re not paying them to figure out how to input that into a system, right? What you want is the richness of the assessment. You don’t want like the richness of understanding how to input the assessment into a screen.

William Tincup: I love that. I love that. Let me ask you a couple buy-side questions real quick.

What’s your favorite part and occasionally when you get to show people the software, right? What’s your favorite part of showing, especially discovery in a demo environment? You know there’s an aha moment when you get around to this point. What is that for you?

There hasn’t

Adriel Sanchez: been a single customer that we’ve shown WalkMe discovery to that hasn’t said something along the lines of, oh my God, [00:15:00] we were gonna build this ourselves and it was gonna take us a year. This is the most common feedback that we’re getting. We work with some of the largest organizations in the, and they have been wholly unsatisfied.

With the solutions out in the market to give them this level of richness of information, and to hear them say that we can deliver that to them within weeks. And it’s just you can see like the bells ringing oh my gosh I can get to work. I can get the data that I need to get to work like in weeks, and I don’t have to wait nine months.

That to me is just you see that aha moment that is just they’re almost like skeptical that it actually is real. You know what I mean? You have to actually put it in and show it to

William Tincup: them, oh yeah, I can see two things happen. How fast can we get started? And also that they don’t have to depend on it to build it.

So I could see a [00:16:00] relief on one level. Oh my God, thank God. Don’t have to do that. And oh, by the way, can we talk? Can we get it started? Can we get it live, Monday, like I could see that also happening which isn’t a, which isn’t a bad problem to have, of course. Because folks aren’t maybe adept at purchasing digital adoption platforms.

What are questions that. Buy side questions that they, if you could script them, that they should ask of WalkMe. So if you could just write down the questions and say, this is what you should be asking our sales team. What would those things be? Look,

Adriel Sanchez: the first is your IT department’s gonna wanna know what level of scalability and security and compliance and governance we have.

So I want you asking us, I want you to take us to task on that. We’ve just completed FedRAMP certification, so we have now been certified at the highest level of [00:17:00] security, governance and compliance. We are the only enterprise grade solution in the market. I want you to take a task on that. The other thing I want you asking about is what is the ecosystem that you work within?

Because oftentimes, especially in the size of company that we’re. Not looking at WalkMe in a silo. It’s typically part of some larger talking about upgrade of an infrastructure or some digital transformation project or some, and you’re working with the largest GSIs in the world, which we have relationships with very strong relationships.

So ask us how we can plug into those bigger projects with the large systems integrators or large partners that you’re already working with. And number three, ask us about our ability to scale to more and more use cases as you’d need. So what we often find is that people will come in and [00:18:00] want us to solve a very specific and important, but a relatively narrow problem.

Take us a task on what’s the next problem that we can solve for you. And the next problem after that and how we can tell your colleagues in other departments what are the problems that we can solve for them. Because I think that when you start to really get your arms around the power of WalkMe, you start to understand the depth and breadth of the problems that we can solve in your organization.

Love it.

William Tincup: Okay, last question. Because y’all have so many different customer stories, you might have to use your most recent favorite customer story. You don’t have to use brand names or any of that type stuff. That stuff doesn’t matter to me, but it’s where, someone might have even been skeptical and they tried it out and it just, boom.

Changed their life. Give us a couple of those stories.

Adriel Sanchez: A couple of ones that I really resonate for me is there’s [00:19:00] a major CPG company that is a customer of ours that we’ve started small with them many years ago, but have expanded to solve many, much bigger and bigger problems.

And telling a funny story about a procurement system change. In some European country that as a consequence of it they literally couldn’t get their products on the shelves, couldn’t get potato chips on the shelves. People were missing their potato chips, and that was because of the software change, created some supply chain disruption and it all had to do with how the software was being used.

It all had to do with individuals really not understanding how to use the new system. And that’s where WalkMe came into help. And now they’re not suffering from those issues. That’s a story that I love. Another story that I love is a major retailer was[00:20:00] their POS systems were on green screens.

And the employees as dated as green screens are, they loved the green screens. They loved them because they just knew all the shortcuts, like they’ve been working there a long time and they just knew how to get work done. Oh, yeah. And. But what I love about this story is like resistance to change. No matter what William like people are just resistant to change.

Even if the new experience is gonna be far superior, they’re just resistant to change. So what walk me and the experience they were putting in to replace the green screens was like far superior, right? It was far superior, much more capabilities. They used WalkMe to help. Manage that change. And I just love that story because it helped pe ease people from one interface to a very different kind of interface.

But it just shows you how entrenched people can be and the way that they get their jobs done. And no matter what you’re giving them new and [00:21:00] how much shinier and how much richer it’s, you have to manage through that change. And at the end of the day, that’s what a lot of customers are relying on us for, is to help them manage through that.

Change

William Tincup: drops. Mike walks off stage. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I love what you do and a huge fan. So just thank you for carving out time for us. Appreciate it. Thank you so much and thanks everyone for listening to the podcast. Until next time.