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November Demo Day Recap

Watch the recording of our November Demo Day! Our 4 recruits were crackling with energy - showing us their sales prowess. Watch or read along with this event recap!

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Uvaro

Aug 23, 2022

Our November Demo Day was a sight to behold. You could see the air crackle between our top 4 tech sales recruits!

After 12 weeks of training at Uvaro, our recruits more often than not - become some of the best tech salespeople within Silicon Valley. Every day, these talented individuals work towards polishing their skills in tactical prospecting, discovery, objection handling, and weaving in personalized stories to become better tech salespeople.

In 15 uninterrupted minutes, watch our top tech sales candidates of the term showcase their newly honed abilities to deliver a specific type of software demo.

Event Recap: November Demo Day

Event Transcript:

Joseph Fung: Hi there! Welcome to the Uvaro demo day. For those of you who are joining us on YouTube, we have such a great panel of competitors, judges. This is going to be a lot of fun. Let’s actually get things started and dig right in. first, I'd love to introduce our panel of judges.

We have Rod Weir, VP of Sales at Easy Projects. Rod, thank you for joining us. Drew Williams, Founder of the Sales Playbook Builder. So he is a Head of Sales. Someone who builds Sales Playbooks. Jake Ristevski, a Sales Rep at WatrHub. So somebody who's living and breathing this work every single day to help hold people kind of accountable to that bar.

And Callum Bramley, who's one of our Course Instructors. This is going to be a really fun time. Today we are going to not only crown a winner but see everything that our team has learned over their most recent 12 weeks which brings me to our recruits the people who are going head to head today. So first off everyone asks this is not the order they're presenting in our competitors don't yet know who's presenting first.

But let me introduce them first. we have Fathima, Linh, David and Alysha and they have got the challenge of not only pitching a product, moving a sale forward, but in that tight window, we're also asking them to give a real technical demo. Now keep in mind, during our program as they learn how to do a discovery call as they learn how to do a demo they're usually given up to 30 minutes to do this. So we've compressed the time, we've put them into a head-to-head competition and leveled up the pressure.

So for everyone who's joining us, like you take a moment just to recognize how difficult that challenge is to wish our competitors good luck. And also recognize how challenging this will be for our judges. I'm glad I'm not in that seat. So let's actually hop in. for our audience, we do have some house rules. We have a number of people joining us in the Zoom room. And we'll bring that on screen in a moment. We also have an audience on YouTube.

For those of you who are in Zoom, I'd ask you to keep your mic muted and your camera on that makes it easiest for our competitors our judges to see reactions. Make sure people are there; see if you're waving because the stream suddenly broke. What I'd also ask is to please engage with the chat, you can see it there in Zoom.

If you're on YouTube, it's on the bottom right there and please feel free to highlight the things that are going well. The areas where the sales are going off the rails. And any suggestions for questions our lead judge is one of our instructors, Sheila Fung, and she'll be watching for tips tricks questions from her buying team. You never know who's going to show up, maybe she brings in a CTO, maybe she brings in the head of security, maybe she brings in questions from the crowd.

So please keep your eyes open for there, toss her suggestions she'll be looking for good ones. And then of course remember this is space for building up. Questions catcalls are always fun. But we're also launching some fantastic careers today. So looking forward to some of the exciting comments and enthusiasm. What I'd also suggest is we'll share a link to the YouTube live stream in the chat. If there's anyone that you'd like to invite to share to bring into it, you can pass that along.

And if you are joining us on YouTube and you enjoy the event be sure to click the subscribe button because that's how you'll get notified of all of our future live streams. For our competitors, the rules of engagement, here's how it's going to roll. First off, when you start off your presentation, please be sure to say or your name, what you're selling and who you're selling it to. That gives us a great idea of the role that Sheila is playing, but also the product that you're pitching.

As well you'll have 15 minutes to complete your whole presentation, then we'll have a two-minute transition for the next presenter. Which is a great segue. This is about two minutes from starting the first presentation. So let's take a look at who's up first. Let’s see the lead judge, Sheila, can you let us know who our first presenter will be?

Sheila Fung: We can absolutely do that. I am going to ask if we have our deck handy if we can pull up their faces that would be. Let’s do that.

Joseph Fung: That will be great! Absolutely!

Sheila Fung: Are we sharing first presenter to give them two minutes to prepare or is that?

Joseph Fung: Absolutely! One second let me pull that up for you!

Sheila Fung: I can see all of your faces. There’s a bit of nerves going on here there you go so today our first presenter

Joseph Fung: There you go! I'm like okay, fantastic, in terms of that flow you get your 15 minutes, there'll be two minutes split as we hand on to the next one. And at the end of it the lead judge will be collecting feedback sharing notes comments and tapping our judges on how to move forward for those of you in the room. We’re about to get ready competitors any questions, anything we can clarify for you.

Awesome! So let me take care of undoing my share for those who are on YouTube. I'm going to bring you right into our Zoom environment. So you can see our panel of competitors and judges. Next step is I'll mute myself and the podium will be yours. Linh, I have 15 minutes on the timer and yes there will be a gong if you get cut off. So again remember to introduce yourself, your product, what you're selling. But other than that, the floor is yours.

Linh Nguyen: Okay! Thank you so much, Joseph. Hi everyone! I'm Linh and today I'm gonna be selling easy project platform. This is project management software. And my prospect would be a Director of Marketing working in Lonely Planet. So they're like a publishing company working with traveling and tourism. Alright. Alright, I'm gonna be speaking to Sheila, right? And that's nice, okay?

Sheila Fung: Yes!

Linh Nguyen: How are you, Sheila? how is your morning so far?

Sheila Fung: Good, Linh! Pretty good so far! It’s a little messy here in the morning!

Linh Nguyen: Thank you so much, Sheila. I appreciate the time that you take to meet with me today, to detect how your business could benefit from a platform like Easy Projects. So I stay in the calendar, we've got 15 minutes. Is that does it work for you?

Sheila Fung: Yeah, 15 minutes is perfect though. But it's a hard stop today!

Linh Nguyen: Alight! okay perfect in order to maximize our time then, I know the last time we spoke on the phone and you mentioned that you're just looking around in the market for a new solution because the current one are you using Asana, right? It’s not working anymore. So coming to this meeting you must have some expectations going on about how project management software could aid with your business, would you like to share those with me?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! So you're right! Asana’s kind of where my jumping off point is for the research that I've been doing. And I've been I'm looking into a few different options. I like the general sense of Asana, but I find that it's not sophisticated enough. I don't really feel like it does everything I needed to do. And I'm also finding that the way my notifications are set up, is driving me a little bit crazy.

Linh Nguyen: Okay! So notifications and what are some other things that you might say that you expect in project management software, that we could help you with? I just want to make sure that I could cover that for you today.

Sheila Fung: So I like the way I can map everything out in the Asana. But I don't really feel like there's a way for me to see everything that's going on all at once like a bird's-eye view or a dashboard or something.

Linh Nguyen: Alright! Okay, dashboard. Okay, so dashboard and notifications. Which among all of these do you think is the highest priority to you, like which has the most business impact on your business right now?

Sheila Fung: Okay, I'll be realistic probably the dashboards. I do think just to keep tabs on everything that's going when I think about impacts the notifications are annoying. But it's not, it's just my brain my bandwidth right. Yeah but just seeing kind of what's going on and knowing where everything is so I can predict accurately, for all the projects at the same time.

Linh Nguyen: Okay! So I make sure I cover the dashboard today. And the notifications part as well. In order for me to speak anything relevant for you in these topics, I'm gonna have to ask you some questions regarding your company team, your day-to-day operations as well as your technology Stack. Is it okay if I ask you these questions?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! Absolutely! That's cool!

Linh Nguyen: Right! Thank you so much. And at the end of our meeting today, there should be really no pressure for you to make any big decision. However, usually at that point, we should be able to decide whether it is worth it to go to the next step or not. Would that be okay with you?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! What do the next steps look like?

Linh Nguyen: The next step would just usually be a 45 minutes digging deeper into the product, where from my end, we're gonna have a product specialist. And you can bring anyone on your team as well.

Sheila Fung: Okay! That sounds great!

Linh Nguyen: Okay! Perfect! So I guess let's just talk a bit about your world and the challenges that you're facing right now. So you, mentioning notifications. So how is this bothering your day-to-day operations right now? Give me an example so I can see the picture.

Sheila Fung: Okay! So on anybody, any given day, I have more projects on the go than I really want to count. and when I was kind of being cheeky complaining about the notifications, but the thing that gets me is that anything I've input in there even if I didn't put it for someone else I'm getting like paint constantly.

Sometimes, its stuff I need to know about sometimes it's not. But because it's in the moment on the go, and then I clear the notification, which is probably my problem. I don't always catch it. Like it falls through the crack. So it just feels like a lot of noise and it hasn't allowed me to prioritize. But I don't know that might that might be my fault. But it's just not the information that I want that I want to be seeing.

Linh Nguyen: Right! So like it comes at the wrong time and it doesn't give you the content that you want to view. So it's really distractions, right? So how long has this problem been going on for?

Sheila Fung: As long as I've been using Asana. I'm gonna say it!

Linh Nguyen: Okay! So it’s always been there, it's always been there!

Sheila Fung: Yea!

Linh Nguyen: But I’ve seen that lately your team is expanding is that why all of this notification is just driving you nuts and it no longer works.

Sheila Fung: So it's not just the growth, it's the shifting to remote. And because with that a lot of things have been switched to sort of notification based asynchronous communication that kind of thing, it's just a lot. So when I think about the noise, in my day-to-day, I it's kind of like, if I can remove that. That would be super.

Linh Nguyen: True! So it's also true like, if you have to focus on one work at a time right because we're only human and I know like you even if you're a really good project manager, we can only focus on one thing at a time and the same for your team, like if you have to quantify this into the hours, you lost into all of these notifications, what do you think it would be in your in a day?

Sheila Fung: I don't know that I could put time to the notification. And I think when you when you're talking about time, the bigger concern is, actually not having insight into where everything is at any given point. Just because if I'm off with what, like if, I don't know a deadline has been extended or sped up, then something's going to be we're going to be completing it on time, we're missing deadlines.

Or if something's over budget and I don't know to kind of adjust accordingly. Maybe because I'm not specifically looking at that thing. I would just like the important things to be the things that I'm getting the notifications about.

Linh Nguyen: Wow! Yeah! Like this is serious. Though, okay I'm gonna dig a little bit deeper in here but, if, have you found yourself being in a situation where you have a project delay or anything with budget that this notification cost because from what I'm hearing, you know, you cannot prioritize whatever it is going on. Has it caused any specific business impact to you?

Sheila Fung: Well, every time, we're late with the project. Yeah, okay.

Linh Nguyen: So it's time, yeah, it has happened.

Sheila Fung: Yes for sure! And it's right it's hard to determine exactly where the ball gets dropped. You know I can kind of go back and try to see what got updated that I missed, but like at that point, it doesn't matter, it's the proactive part. That I want to get into.

Linh Nguyen: Okay! So I would only assume that if this pandemic, is anywhere to be over, even in the next three months, six months, you would be bombarded, right. Like this no longer be viable if more projects are flowing in. okay!

Sheila Fung: Yes, yeah, so that's accurate!

Linh Nguyen: Let’s talk a little bit about that report about that dashboard view that you're saying about like apparently you're using Asana and you don't think that it works for you now?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! The view is just too it's cluttered and I can't see it's like right there's, yeah very little with the back end.

Linh Nguyen: Right! Okay! So I'm going to share you my screen now just to see how Easy Project could help you with, all of these you know with Asana going on. I'm sorry I have got a of problem little bit. I'm being disabled from screen sharing.

Sheila Fung: That doesn't help!

Linh Nguyen: It’s okay!

Sheila Fung: Joseph, is that a thing that I have to fix on my end?

Joseph Fung: You should be able to know. Sorry about that!

Sheila Fung: Okay! Thank you!

Linh Nguyen: Okay! I'm good now. You see my screen, okay?

Sheila Fung: I can! Hooray!

Linh Nguyen: Alright! Okay! Just a little technical thing.

Sheila Fung: Good!

Linh Nguyen: So in the view here, this is where you can see easy project a general platform looks like. A lot of features and this might seem really intimidating. But we can customize all of this for you, according to your business needs. So don't worry about all of these intimidating features over here. I want to talk a little bit about this activity center before I go into the dashboard and notifications. So in the activity center, this might look really familiar to you already right, Sheila, because it's quite familiar to Asana.

You also have the view of all the tasks, the due dates; you can assign as many members on here as possible, collaboration box and budget and expense tracking. We also provide you with can board and calendar view. So nothing quite strange to your nature. So let's talk a little bit about notifications. So you can see here that you know in a day-to-day business, you might have tons and tons of these notifications and you know I can see where you say you cannot even know what is important anymore.

And that is why we provide you with this filter that you can just, if you click on it expands for example you know your project is a bit delayed over budget, you can control what exactly do you want to see. You want to call every single expense to see where this is going wrong. And we also offer you the control over notification settings.

Sheila Fung: Okay!

Linh Nguyen: Yeah! So just imagine, like, eight hours at work and you bombarded with hundreds of notifications. But you don't want to see every single one of it. You only see for example if your boss message you, probably you want to you know take the lead on that, so you can turn it on. But if somebody you know working in lower management assigns somebody else the task, you want to just let them do your job because you've got bigger things in mind you have to worry about.

This is where you can just earn some of these notifications off if that's not something that you that's relevant for you. Now in the emails, so this is where it might cost you a lot of purple as well. You know you're working every day and in the weekend you just want to have some nice relaxing days, enjoying, lunch, dinner with your family.

And you want you want all of these notifications to come at a time when you're ready you know to go ahead for the week and we offer you just that. And even in the form it comes, if you're if you're more comfortable when it's a summary instead of separate emails, you can do that too. How do you find this helpful to you so far Sheila?

Sheila Fung: I like how specific I can make this.

Linh Nguyen: Very specific!

Sheila Fung: Yeah!

Linh Nguyen: Because we know these problems of distraction. You know it's just like another issue that you have to worry about. So a little bit about the dashboard, there are a lot of things here, it could be intimidating. But we can we offer you the visual view of what you can be able to view. and you can expect that it's going to turn out you know very specific like this, once you import your data, is this something that you see in the center as well? Or how do you find it so far?

Sheila Fung: This is really interesting you mentioned importing data. Is that, can you tell me a little bit about that?

Linh Nguyen: Yeah! So, we provide the facility, if you want to import data from you know excel or any kind of forms, we integrate with also more than 2000 other platforms. So you know we make this very easy for you.

Sheila Fung: Okay! I did not know that and that that's a huge bonus. I'm just thinking about sort of the work for implementation that would be a bit of a shortcut, interesting.

Linh Nguyen: Yeah! Like I know that you're worried a lot about you know where your project is and everything and if it's delayed, if you can see what is prioritized, so you would you say that this scan board is something that would help you with it with the visuals?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! I like the visual of the Gentt and I like that the fact that if we were to use something like this, it wouldn't mean just recreating things that already exist. We can we can import, that's exciting.

Linh Nguyen: Yeah! So the Gentt board is like one feature that could help you with adjusting, where it is that you want your project to go, where to prioritize. And this dashboard is another thing. I don't want to go into technical things, but this is what you can expect as well to prioritize, what deal is at risk, what use is on time. So you can have the agile project going on.

Sheila Fung: Can you tell me a bit about pricing? What’s pricing like?

Linh Nguyen: Yeah! So the pricing we actually start with 24 dollars per user per month. This is with basic features. Is this somewhere in your ballpark?

Sheila Fung: Okay! That’s cool and this is the per user license? It’s not a shock or anything, it's kind of the range I assumed it would be in. what does it look like once you get do you have like a minimum team size associated with it or what happens?

Linh Nguyen: That’s a good question. Yeah so this price it includes some basic features. And it also matters how many team members you're gonna on board. So these all of these like number of users, number of features that you want to employ, storage, a lot of things could contribute to how the price could be.

Okay yeah and all of this is negotiable and we could totally discuss a specific price to your company. Once we go into more details of what you really need, what your team needs. What do you think if because I think that we're touching the clock here? What if we have a meeting for the next week, so we can discuss a little bit?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! Something more specific to how we'd be using it and maybe also we can talk about user permissions if it's something that I can change.

Linh Nguyen: Okay! Right! Okay! So we’re gonna talk about user permission and pricing for the next meeting we have. Wednesday 2 pm, how does that sound to you?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! I can do you know what shoot over the invite and if I have to move it, I will.

Linh Nguyen: Right! Perfect! And typically in this meeting, I’ll include my product specialist in together with my account executive. So it is really a…

Joseph Fung: Sorry for interrupting, but you've hit your 15-minute live. You’re up! Well done. You can stop sharing your screen now! I saw you getting down to that wire on booking the timing that was tight. That was tight close.

So you're trying to fit it in, but we do want to make sure that we're sticking to the rules there. We’ll give the next contestant a two minute break before we get going there. Then next up we have is, Alysha. So Alysha, you've got a couple of minutes to get yourself ready there. Before we pass it over to her, Linh, how are you feeling? Now you can take a breather, how are you doing?

Linh Nguyen: Yeah! I feel like a bit rushing because I was about to ask Sheila, what team members actually want to onboard? Just a little bit more, and then I'll be finishing. But yeah you're like very nervous, but I'm good now.

Joseph Fung: If, you'll feel better now that you're done?

Linh Nguyen: Yeah, definitely!

Joseph Fung: There you go! So still want to make sure we give our judges another minute there to finish their notes and ratings. Alysha, how are you feeling? You ready? Have everything hooked up?

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Yes, I'm ready! My heart rate is you know going a little faster than normal, but…

Joseph Fung: There you go! Let, Linh set the bar for you to jump over.

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Exactly!

Sheila Fung: So I'm looking to our judges. Can I get quick thumbs up from our judges if you're done with your scoring and notes? There we go. So, Alysha, again as a reminder, as you introduce yourself, what you're selling, who you're selling it to. I have just reset my timer. So I'll start that right after you do your introduction. But the floor is yours.

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Perfect! Thank you, Joseph! So my name is, Alysha. Hello everyone! I'm selling Vidyard today. My primary buyer is a customer support manager in the e-commerce fulfillment industry.

And from previous discovery, I have found out that they are supporting on average 50 plus customers and receive around 30 to 37 tickets a day, the average number of emails before a full resolution is between five to six. And they are currently building out their knowledge bases they want to promote self-service within Zendesk. Okay, I'm just going to, perfect, hey, Sheila, how's it going?

Sheila Fung: Hey Alysha! Good! How are you today?

Alysha Thistlethwaite: I'm good I just saw some of my friends post some pictures of their hike to Garibaldi. And I'm here in Toronto looking out my window and seeing nothing but condos, so pretty jealous of where you are right now.

Sheila Fung: Yeah! I love it here too! It's beautiful!

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Okay! So we have 15 minutes in our calendar. Are you still good for that time today?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! 15 minutes is perfect!

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Okay! Perfect! So in light of that I'm going to just jump right in a couple of things on the agenda today. First, I'm going to ask you some questions regarding your role, your team's process and your goals regarding customer communication and then based on what we discussed, I'll demonstrate some parts of the platform which align more with your interest and from there, if it makes forward, if it makes sense to move forward, we can chat about next steps at the end, how does that sound to you?

Sheila Fung: That sounds great!

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Okay! Before I jump into asking you a bunch of questions, is there anything you want to add to the agenda?

Sheila Fung: I guess once I get a feel for how it works, I'm probably going to want to talk about pricing if we have time for it.

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Pricing! Okay! Perfect! So the last time we chatted you mentioned that you have around 50 customers and receive about 30 tickets a day. Can you just walk me through what those tickets look like and how your team responds to and solve those tickets?

Sheila Fung: Sure! I'm laughing because you're gonna laugh. So

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Okay!

Sheila Fung: When a ticket comes in its whoever is available kind of tries to jump on it as quickly as possible. I'm gonna highlight that there's a pretty high volume of these. And the main reason that I reached out was because it's usually for the same, I want to say, anywhere from five to ten of the same issues repeatedly.

So then it's because it's all a you know email, phone, texting , if it happens but because of that often times, the length of time it takes to actually you know deal with the issue, is longer than it should be because of the back and forth. Because they might throw in the ticket and if we reply right away, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be there to respond or they'll respond to half the question.

So it's really difficult to get a clear picture, immediately of what's going on even though. Because it's always the same thing over and over again we can kind of predict. But we don't want to assume so. That’s primarily how things are working right now there's a lot of back and forth.

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Okay! Yeah! And that's what we usually hear and as much as you want to build those templates I guess we can call them. It can still be extremely time consuming.

Sheila Fung: Yeah and even with the email templates, it's kind of like, you know I gotta dig through and find the right one and then adjust and personalize it. Just that sped things up a little bit, but it's not, it's clunky, clunky is the word.

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Yeah! And then have you guys attempted to make those answers more efficient at all?

Sheila Fung: How do you mean efficient?

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Just you know building out maybe you have a word document, where you can refer back to copy and paste those answers?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! So we started to try and compile all of this into an FAQ, thinking that would be a super convenient way to sort of make it available to customers and then maybe they'll just start using that. But if they submit a ticket.

Alysha Thistlethwaite: But yeah well it sounds like the process of responding to these emails is pretty lengthy. I guess my question for you is how is this impacting the rest of your customer experience?

Sheila Fung: So from a customer perspective, I'm of course imagining that smoother would be better and just being able to you know have personal connection right away as soon as they have an issue. But that's not realistic, it doesn't scale. And we're not gonna be able to do that consistently.

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Okay!

Sheila Fung: So I know from our perspective, it's time consuming, but from their perspective of course it could be smoother. So the easier we can make it for them to access the information better.

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Okay! Yeah! I hear you and you know what this is honestly a common problem that we see with people who have your use case. And we have clients who have dramatically decreased their first reply time after introducing video into their process.

Sheila Fung: Interesting, okay! So like that first outreach to the, and replies faster because of video?

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Correct! Yes! Okay! So that gives me a good idea on how you handle email but what about live support. Do you have customers being like hey can we hop on a call instead of email?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! It happened! I'm gonna say at least half of the time, maybe more. Their sort of best case scenario is having a real person to talk to.

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Okay! And I don't know if you're going to know this answer, off the top of your head, do you know like what the cost per call is currently?

Sheila Fung: Oh! That is a good question I don't have that number I can find it for you for sure

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Okay! Perfect! And then with those calls coming in and all those emails do you do those phone calls specifically impact your team's day and their ability to handle increasing volume?

Sheila Fung: Yes! Giant speed bump, in the middle of the day.

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Totally and sometimes people just like to get on the phone and talk about random things and you know you can always go sideways a little bit. Okay, got it! So now with you receiving mostly the same questions from some clients this usually presents a great opportunity for self-service. Can you walk me through some of the strategies you've implemented or thinking about implementing regarding self-service?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! So I mentioned that FAQ that we're putting together. And we kind of pulled that from the most common problems that we're seeing. But right now, the idea was to sort of put it on our website, but it's purely text based right now. And I don't realistically know how often anybody's going to access that.

Alysha Thistlethwaite: So yeah and it's just kind of sorry to cut you off sometimes it's the same thing when you're sending that email you know having a large amount of text you can get lost in it very easily.

Sheila Fung: Yes!

Alysha Thistlethwaite: So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen now, just to keep this in mind while I walk you through the platform, a number of customers we work with use video heavily throughout their knowledge base.

Sheila Fung: So! Okay! Both internally and externally, are you talking just the customer facing side?

Alysha Thistlethwaite: The customer facing side. But you can also; there is an internal side as well.

Sheila Fung: Okay! Cool!

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Okay! I'm going to share my screen. Can you see my screen? Okay!

Sheila Fung: I can!

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Okay! So first this is your video library, where you can create videos, upload videos, as well as store your videos. So if this was your library, it would most likely be filled with a bunch of you know how to do something similar to mine in a way beyond sales. I freelance on the side, so I have clients who love to see what I'm working on, changes with their marketing campaigns, web designs and then I also frequently send videos out like you can see November 4th, I had to send out how members can change their passwords. So that's probably something that resonates with you there. And you can see there that it only took 24 seconds to send out.

Sheila Fung: Okay! Sound of 24 seconds!

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Yeah! It's awesome! So for the purpose of this, Sheila, I want you to picture this as your product screen. you know a client of yours email ins, asks you a question, what previously took you maybe a couple of days or between 15 to 30 minutes to type out that step-by-step, how-to guide or hopping on a phone call as you said with a customer, can now be done. And let's just say less than three minutes kind of depending on the size the length of the video that you are recording.

So next I'm just going to show you how to send a video and just or how to record a video sorry and just the ease of the platform as well. So what you're going to do is you're going to click in your Google chrome browser, the green robot extension. And this is going to prompt you to three different types of videos. First so first, you have your camera which is totally that Selfie video, the second one is just your screen itself and then the third one is a combination of both. So you can have your video here and it's you can move it around.

So if you're hovering over something or you're hiding something, that you want to show you can just move it to the other side. So when you press start recording, it's going to prompt you to share your screen, very similar if you're familiar with Zoom when you share your screen, just the difference in the application window and the tabs. So I'm going to go ahead, share and it's going to prompt you down three, two, one. Now you're going to be inside of your recording.

So the main one, there's a couple of controls that you have here and the main one, Sheila, that I want to point out to point out to you today is this pen. So you can direct your customers, you can highlight, annotate, so you can point your customers in the direction where the voices are where the customer should look. And then you have the ability to pause. so a lot of customer support teams we work with benefit from the ability to pause because it allows them to go, find an answer and then return back and finish recording. And the last one is the restart so you can just refresh it and then do it again.

So I'm just going to press stop here. And that's going to direct you to a landing page. So this is where you can change the title, you can just review your video and you can also set your thumbnail. So now your video is ready to be shared with your clients. And you can help them walk through their questions. So for example, you're showing a video on how to log login. you record that walkthrough, you use that draw control feature, point them in the right direction and then now once you're finished and ready to share it, you'll simply press share, copy the link and thumbnail and you'll paste it in your email and with you using Zendesk, there's actually your video library built directly in the email window.

Like I can access it while I'm writing an email?

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Yes!

Sheila Fung: Wow! Okay!

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Yeah!

Sheila Fung: Okay!

Alysha Thistlethwaite: And then we also have a couple of customers that are using the like Vidyard and Zendesk together right now, for the exact same use case. And they have seen an increase in their one-touch ticket percentage and a decrease in their full resolution time.

Sheila Fung: One touch ticket!

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Yeah! Wouldn't that be nice?

Sheila Fung: Yes!

Alysha Thistlethwaite: So I'm going to pause here I know that's a lot of information to digest. But based on what I've just shown you, am I on the right track and thinking this looks like a good solution for you?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! This looks like a really good solution. I'm like, what does pricing look like? You’ve talked about customers who use it for exactly this. Maybe hearing a little bit about that or it's like it looks great.

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Of course so in terms of pricing, it is on our website. We are very transparent about it. But based on what we have discussed in the sides of your team, I think the teams package would benefit you and your team the most and that is priced at 300 USD per month. Is that in line with what you were expecting?

Sheila Fung: Right! It’s well it's not sticker shack. So that that's a good sign.

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Perfect!

And the integrations with Zendesk, is that an additional cost or is that just a thing?

Alysha Thistlethwaite: That’s a thing so we have a native integration with Zendesk?

Sheila Fung: Okay!

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Perfect!

Sheila Fung: Alright!

Alysha Thistlethwaite: So I guess for you know you're coming up to the busiest time of the year. Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Boxing Day, I'm very excited for your team because you're going to be very busy, but I can't imagine how stressful that could be. So would it make sense to discuss getting started now, so we're fully rolled out before then?

Sheila Fung: It sounds like you know my world. I was just thinking about the support increase that comes up. Black Friday is a nightmare for sure and of course Christmas would be great. So I'm okay with trying to move forward on it quickly. What does how long does implementation take, what does that look like?

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Yeah! So depending on kind of where we are today what I can do at the end of this is I can send you over at DocuSign. Once that is signed, what I'll be able to do is connect you with our customer success team. They will run you at through everything from implementing the tool, connecting integrations, training your team. So you really don't have to worry about that.

The only thing you really have to worry about is what kind of videos am I going to put on my knowledge base or what are the most popular videos or those how-tos that these customers come and ask us all these questions about. So implementation is very quick.

Sheila Fung: Okay! I like the sound of that. I'm happy if you shoot over the DocuSign and I'll take a look at it. Can we connect with, is it do you take care of all this stuff? Do I have to connect with someone else?

Alysha Thistlethwaite: I'm gonna connect you with an account executive of mine

Sheila Fung: Okay! If you can shoot that over and then I'll connect and if I have any questions I guess that would be the time to discuss.

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Perfect! Okay. So amazing! as mentioned, I will get the DocuSign over to you and we will get started on your video journey. Any questions, please feel reach please feel free to reach out to me. I'm here to answer anything and again I will connect my account executive on that as well.

Sheila Fung: Great, thanks so much, Alysha!

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Okay! Thank you, Sheila. I hope you have a great day.

Sheila Fung: You too!

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Bye!

Joseph Fung: Wow! That was great! Alysha, you had one minute 59 seconds left on the clock from my timer. That was fantastic! Well done! How are you feeling?

Alysha Thistlethwaite: I can breathe again! Oh, I feel like I didn't take a lot of breaths during that whole thing. So feeling good!

Joseph Fung: There we go! So for everyone in the room, we are two demos down. We are gonna take a really quick. Five-minute break so people can top up their coffees, hit the bathroom, grab some water. As soon as we get back, we'll let you know who the third presenter is and I guess by the same mechanism who the fourth is. So let me just load up for our folks on YouTube. We are going to be keeping that five minute intermission. So I'm going to pause that YouTube stream and we will be right back with you.

If you're joining us on YouTube, we're just wrapping up our short intermission, we'll be back with you shortly. For those of us on YouTube welcome back in. we are back from our intermission. For everybody in Zoom, we're ready for two more contestants. We want to give everybody two minutes, heads up. So our third presenter will be, Fathima.

You’re up next. So you've got a couple of minutes to get yourself ready. While you're doing that, would love to check back in on just a couple of quick reminders. Number one, if you find these demo days interesting, educational and you want to see who's at the top of each cohort, you can always join us. They’re open and streamed on YouTube.

If you're on YouTube right now, you can click that subscribe link. If you're joining us in Zoom, we'll be sure to share our channel link with you, so you can get notified. As well one of the things we also do is the week after graduation, we send out our hotsheet, the list of the profiles and the awards of all of our graduating students who are available. So if you want that advanced access to the talent, you can always get access to that.

The two places where you can get email those notifications are uvaro.com/demoday and uvaro.com/hotsheet. And hopefully, my brief commercial gave Fathima a couple of moments to get herself ready. I do have 15 minutes back in my clock. How are you doing Fathima? All ready and set up?

Fathima Begum: Yes!

Joseph Fung: Great! And then a quick pulse check from our judges, can I get a thumbs up if you're ready you got your scorecards? Nice! Okay! We are good! Fathima, again a reminder, please introduce yourself, what you're selling, who you're selling it to. After you do the intro, I will start my timer. But the floor is all yours.

Fathima Begum: Okay! So my name is, Fathima Begum. And I'm selling Easy Projects. And I'm selling it to executive manager for Hr operations, at the Deloitte Shade Service Center. So hi! Once second! Okay! Hi, Sheila. How are you?

Sheila Fung: Muted of course! Hi Fathima, I'm good! How are you doing?

Fathima Begum: I'm fine! So how was work from home going for you? I see you post a lot about it on LinkedIn.

Sheila Fung: It’s an adventure for sure. Kind of getting into a groove now but there was some learning pains at the start of the whole work from home thing.

Fathima Begum: Yeah! I understand that. It happens to me. So before we begin, I just want to set the, I just want to clear that this is not a sales call. I'm not trying to sell you anything, at least not right now, so it's just a conversation between both of us just to see what you are trying to look, and if we are a good fit for you, so at last if it makes sense then we'll book another meeting or else we can part as friends. How does that sound to you?

Sheila Fung: That sounds great! Right!

Fathima Begum: Okay, so last time when I see, this meeting is booked for 15 minutes. That, does that time still work for you?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! 15 minutes is good!

Fathima Begum: Okay! So the today's agenda is basically it's all about you. What are you, what is your team, what do you do, and what are your pain points. At last we'll see how we can really get a good look at the product do you want to add something else, on the agenda?

Sheila Fung: No! I want to get a feel for how it works. And just understand if it makes sense or not for us.

Fathima Begum: Very good! Great! So before we talk about us, let's talk about you. So what kind of projects you're trying to run on easy projects?

Sheila Fung: Okay! So some of them are for me are mostly for my team. And every project that they're working there's two sides to it there's, what the team sees and then there's what gets passed on to our clients. So any given product is going to take somewhere from two to six months and information might pass through.

I want to say three to five different people's hands. And then and when I say client it's typically not a single person client, it's like their entire team and the team sizes are pretty big as well. So I need something that's gonna let me have everything in one place. Really good insights on the back end in terms of what's going on. But then, also is something that my team is gonna be willing to use.

Fathima Begum: Right! So what are you using right now for your project management?

Sheila Fung: We are using a hodgepodge of a few things. We have MS Project. And then we try to keep all of our information in whatever repository works best for the nature of the information. So some confluence, some drive and then in terms of managing the project, there's a few things going on depending on the individual team members. But for the most part, it's a combination of MS Project and then whichever messaging system they prefer. Exactly text!

Fathima Begum: Are you facing any issues with that, with the current system you're going?

Sheila Fung: I'm gonna say the primary issue is just that it feels like it's all over the place. And like on any given day, I can't just know where to find the thing. If I want to know about a specific project, I could be digging through three or four different applications in order to find it. You know or tracking down two or three different team members to give me insight as to where I should be looking. And I would just like to be able to access everything from the place.

Fathima Begum: Okay! So that seems you have issues. So did you do anything to solve these issues in the past?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! MS Project was the solution! Yeah! And we've tried to just establish best practices, like, really open, constant communication with the team and in general keep this here, keep that kind of thing here. But it's not consistently adhered to. So it's, yeah. And that's our own failing. It’s not just the tools, it's like follow the process.

Fathima Begum: Now, I'm going to ask you the hard question, why haven't you tried any project management tools before? Any particular reason?

Sheila Fung: So I kind of thought we were you know trying it, without this product, and when it comes to project management, at the time, didn't realize that there were tools specifically designed for the things that I'm talking about. So for me MS Project made the most sense at the time. And it's funny that's not actually a hard question, because it comes right down to just what I don't know. Right, what I don't know about the industry and bandwidth and time and just nailing down a solution.

Fathima Begum: Oh, okay, no problem! The reason I asked is the most common reason, I listen is corporate bureaucracy, like you get a lot of pushback from the leadership getting the approval to such a lending process, that you push back. Is that the case in your organization?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! Okay! So I'm gonna say that's a real thing, especially with a team this size, it's kind of like, if you want to adopt something, you got to do it with your baby team and then maybe eventually get it pushed all the way through.

But with something, because what I'm talking about is pulling so many things together into one place, like realistically, I don't know how long it would take to push something like that through, if it's something that I could start with a smaller team and then grow. Right, I guess you can't talk about what that looks like.

Fathima Begum: Now, did you get the approvals finally?

Sheila Fung: So I have approval to look for something. There’s going to be a few other people who have to see it before we can get signatures on everything. But I have complained enough that they now realize I need something.

Fathima Begum: Okay! So the budget is set aside for it?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! They don't have a number, but they have agreed that there is budget for something.

Fathima Begum: Oh, that's very good news now you don't have to get reading the approvals. Yeah on that positive note, let me just share my screen and see what we can do to help you. Make your life easy! So, okay.

Sheila Fung: I want to make my life easy!

Fathima Begum: Can you see my screen, Sheila?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! I can!

Fathima Begum: Okay! Great! So I'll start with this like, let's imagine you have a project with a very tight deadline. And it's a small project, so how do you select your team members?

Sheila Fung: Well theoretically, I look at what's going on right now and I figure out who has availability or who has the appropriate skills set twice, okay.

Fathima Begum: So how's it going, if you get any pushbacks from your team members?

Sheila Fung: Only if it's related to stuff that I don't know is going on. So I think they're available, but they're not or I think they have a certain skill set that maybe they don't but it looks like, there's a way to categorize that here.

Fathima Begum: Yeah! Exactly! You always have those feelings that they are hiding something. So what we can do here is, you can select team members by the skills, or by their name. So let's say I'm selecting AJ, his workload is hundred percent. So I of course I cannot assign him more work. And I can select someone else like Bob, his workload would be at 50 percent. And you can select someone else, his workload is less and now your brand new team is ready. And they cannot lie to you about their workload.

Sheila Fung: Can I ask something, that not that I want to do this, but if it says workload is 100%, does it prevent me from assigning it to them or is and is it just kind of like up to me to not?

Fathima Begum: No! It’s just like you have to decrease the workload for that certain period of time. You should it's like blocking the calendar. So you're blocking the workload for the next week. Or so

Sheila Fung: Okay!

Fathima Begum: Do you like what you think?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! The team is special. It’s looking good!

Fathima Begum: So let's try something else! So Sheila how much time does it take to build a report on normal spreadsheets or MS Project?

Sheila Fung: Okay! It’s like you know the thing. I hate the most. I should say, it takes a lot of time to generate a report that is accurate, that I want to actually make decisions based on. because I can pull reports at any time from any single one of those applications relatively quickly, the time consuming part is, that I have to do it for all of them and then cross reference and then do the call out, is anybody behind on updating their spreadsheets.

Fathima Begum: Yeah! Exactly! So here at Easy Projects we have bunch of reports which are which are pre-built for you. Which are generally used in project management. And of course you can make your own reports, you can customize your own reports. So let's say we are using, what are the activities due. And for all our projects you want to see it. Run the report, how much time did it take?

Sheila Fung: Okay! Can I ask another question?

Fathima Begum: Yeah!

Sheila Fung: Will it be this fast with all of our information in it?

Fathima Begum: Yeah! It will be this fast, maybe 10 seconds, add 10 seconds, that's it. So okay you get your reports in hand and you can run multiple times. And Sheila, do you want to see something more interesting now?

Sheila Fung: Do you have something more interesting? Because this is pretty cool!

Fathima Begum: There are a lot of features here you know. I have to control my urge to not do the product show here. But okay so let's see, let's go, you have to just see this one project. Like example one and what is going on like what are the activities due in this project. So I see bunch of activities going on right. Which are due, which are not completed yet.

So I want to know why this is not completed. So generally what we do we just call it is this activity is assigned to, Alysha, right? So you have a meeting with, Alysha, like what is going on why it's not completed right. Before the meeting what you can do is, go to your activity center and task two is assigned Alysha right, C1 is going on here, and here you can see all the messages, if they have or audit trial, what's going on, or else when you see this activity is dependent on task one.

So Alysha couldn't do it because she's waiting for the data from someone else. Press on it, so who is it? Task one is assigned to AJ. So Alysha couldn't do her work because AJ haven't done it. So now you know whom to have a meeting with.

Sheila Fung: Now, I know who to hassle!

Fathima Begum: Yes! Okay! It generally happens in projects, you know, they say that I didn't do because they didn't do. So now you know. So Sheila, how much time does it take to get to the root of the problem generally?

Sheila Fung: I'm gonna say two three, phone calls. I guess it depends. Well now remotely it's different. But it used to just be sort of like ask and then follow the fingers. As they're pointing.

Fathima Begum: So! Yeah! So it just takes you know two minutes to get to the room. I'm sorry in my excitement; I just stopped screaming something else?

Sheila Fung: No! I don't I don't have any questions right now. I guess, what I want to know is what pricing looks like in terms of like I'm not going to be able to roll it out company wide right away, I'm definitely going to have to start with the pilot? And you know what does that look like structure wise? And then how long does it take to implement?

Fathima Begum: Okay! So first we'll talk about the pricing. So pricing is different! For it’s per user license, its 24 dollars. And it's like team based and enterprise level. And it generally depends about how many licenses you're buying and for what time. So we can adjust the pricing there. and I want to assure you that we are will work out the best pricing for you, because I am trying, I'm seeing this that we want to roll Easy Projects across all your departments. So don't worry about pricing. You’ll get the best offer.

Sheila Fung: Okay and I like that that's a thing you could do start with a small group and then roll it. Oh I meant to ask length of time to go live with it, what does that normally look like?

Fathima Begum: Okay! so for generally for the team of your size, it will take a couple of weeks. But it's pretty easy you know the implementation is pretty easy, you have the support team. And I would say, you don't even need that support team because it's very easy. And it's like, I'm saying so many things, Easy Projects, Easy Projects, easy, but it happens, it's really easy. So Sheila, do you have any more questions?

Sheila Fung: No questions right now!

Fathima Begum: Okay, so in the beginning, we just asked like you know if we want to move forward, so yeah at the end, do you want to move forward finally?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! So I do! I know that there's going to be more conversations. So if we can you know whatever your next step is, I'm sure there's other things involved. But I would like to bring my security person in as well. Whenever we meet next.

Fathima Begum: Yeah! Great! So next time I'll ring with the, my AE with me. And you bring your security person. And we'll do a customized demo. That will be book, will book more time on your calendar. So that you'll know how it will look with your data on it. So do you want to add something else you want to see on the next demo?

Sheila Fung: I would like to see it with some data in there just to see how it moves like I know you're saying it's just as fast I want to see more data in there the better. And then, we looked at recording, just yeah! Any integration, we can talk integrations.

Fathima Begum: Integrations, Easy Project integrates with 2000 plus products here.

Sheila Fung: Okay!

Fathima Begum: Generally, what from back overloaded! Yeah! With integrations! So yeah so next time we'll meet, we'll discuss about integrations and your security official will be there. So stay, I'll just send my Calendly link to you. So we'll book the meeting. Stay in touch! You don't have to wait for the next meeting to talk to me again! Always email me! I will always be there for you!

Sheila Fung: Okay! Thanks so much Fathima.

Fathima Begum: Thank you Sheila! Nice meeting you!

Sheila Fung: Good day!

Fathima Begum: Bye!

Joseph Fung: Wow! There we go! Well done! I have got 58 seconds left on my timer! Well done! I confess, I'm disappointed! I have my finger right over that gong button, but wait a way to wrap it up with some time left. Fathima, how are you feeling now that you're done?

Fathima Begum: It is so the urge to do the product show is so high with easy project because they have like really cool features. And I want to show everything, but we don't have time, but it was good.

Joseph Fung: Well it's a good job resisting. That I mean you managed to tighten it all up inside that window, that's great.

Fathima Begum: Thank You!

Joseph Fung: Job well done. wanna make sure our judges have a couple moments to finish their comments and scores. David, you're gonna be up next. How are you feeling now that you've seen all three competitors ahead of you?

David Cowan: So well, I assumed I was either going to go first or last. Kind of the way things go. But yeah I'm the anchorman so here.

Joseph Fung: So there we go. You’re getting all set up there so same thing I've got my 15 minutes kind of back on the clock. For everybody once David wraps up, again we'll give all of our judges a couple more moments to finish their scores finish their comments. And then we'll circle back and dig into the best part actually sharing some feedback before the final step, crowning a winner. So a little bit of housekeeping we'll have at the end there. We gave our judges a couple of minutes.

Can I get thumbs up when you're done with your scores and a marking? I see nodding! I see thumbs! Great! So two thumbs up. Oh there we go; dad the bar's getting raised. You know so double checked got my 15 minutes. In a moment, I'm going to mute myself. David a reminder, please introduce yourself, what you're selling, who you're selling it to and then I'll start the clock. But here, I'll mute myself. The floor is yours!

David Cowan: Okay! Thanks, Joseph! Thanks everyone for being here today! I'm glad that it's going to be interesting! It’s been interesting so far. So I'm David, David Cowan and I’m selling to a VP of operations for an IT consulting firm. And its Easy Projects is the product concerns are about client visibility and how to deal with importing Microsoft projects because that's their primary platform that they're currently using. So let's get started, I guess. Hey Sheila. It’s David from easy projects. How are you doing today?

Sheila Fung: I'm good, David! How are you?

David Cowan: Oh, I'm doing great thanks so I know you're in Vancouver. And I have relatives actually live in West Van and Port Coquitlam. Is that anywhere near where you are?

Sheila Fung: Poco's pretty close to me actually!

David Cowan: Yeah! It’s been years since I've been out there. But I remember going to the airport and something I think isn't part of that strip below sea level? Somewhere around there?

Sheila Fung: Yeah you're right! It is that, it's actually fabricated like it wasn't there. They made it of the landmass that it's on, it's pretty cool.

David Cowan: Yeah like I said it's been a long time. But after all this pandemic business is finished, I hope to get out there again.

Sheila Fung: It is beautiful out here!

David Cowan: So Sheila, I want to thank you again for taking the time to meet today and I know that we originally assigned 15 minutes to do this. Is that still good for you?

Sheila Fung: Yeah 15 minutes is perfect but I've got a hard stop today

David Cowan: Okay! That's awesome! So I just want to have a relaxed conversation with you today to explore the issues that came up during our first call and I hope you don't mind. But I'll have some more questions to ask you and I'll also need to take a few notes as well. And we’re just starting to try and figure out whether or not Easy Projects is the right platform to suit your needs. How does that sound?

Sheila Fung: Sounds good! Yeah!

David Cowan: Okay and if at the end, it looks like we are aligned, then we can move towards the, our next steps. And if not we can just part his friends and everything cool?

Sheila Fung: Right on!

David Cowan: I'll say awesome! So I think from what you told us before, you have some issues with clients. They requesting better access to project information, is that correct?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! I'm gonna say also it's not just that the clients are requesting it, it's I'm going to own the fact that we should be doing a better job with having communication, insight. They trust us so I would like to be able to allow them more visibility.

David Cowan: Right! And you also wanted to know more about how you can take your Microsoft projects and bring them into easy projects is that correct?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! So if this is a solution that we go with, that would be way more convenient than having to just recreate everything that already exists.

David Cowan: Right and is there anything else you want to add today?

Sheila Fung: I guess, my primary concerns like with both of those things are from on the security side of things, just making sure that the insights we're offering our clients are the visibilities that we want them to have but that it's not you know jeopardizing anybody else's privacy.

David Cowan: Right! No problem! And I’ll try and make sure we have a last few minutes reserved, set aside, to make sure we can discuss next steps if there are going to be any. And feel free to ask any questions at any time?

Sheila Fung: Awesome!

David Cowan: So Sheila, can you basically describe to me the kind of projects you are currently running?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! So the cycle takes anywhere from one month to six months, I guess, we'll have the odd long one in there nine months. but a lot of information going back and forth and a lot of it, this is why I mentioned the privacy side is stuff that, it can't be it's got to be secure.

Okay in terms of what we right now do with our clients, throughout the course of the project, we'll be sending back and forth really it's a lot of screenshots because the way everything's set up right now there isn't a way for us to show them what's going on without also showing them other things that are going on. At least not in a way that's like visually appealing. So it's like a lot of data a lot of information and that's not ideal for anybody, one that's a clunky process, two it just looks gross.

David Cowan: Right!

Sheila Fung: But the other thing is that it creates this really static situation, where if things get updated a client doesn't even know if they have an updated version of what we're doing.

David Cowan: Okay! Yes! It sounds like you're running a lot of client-facing projects. Is that a correct assumption?

Sheila Fung: Oh yeah sorry, I should have specified the majority of ours are client-facing. There are some internal ones as well but that's we're not as worried about the visibility for that because it's like the kitchen, the cooks see the kitchen, they know what it looks like.

David Cowan: Okay yes I understand. So Sheila typically when I'm talking with a VP of operations, I know they take pride in leading the team and helping them achieve or even exceed their targets. And where they sometimes struggle is in the communication with clients, both keeping that open and transparent. And as a result there tends to be some miscommunication with clients and sometimes deadlines can be missed, and just because there's been some confusion around who’s responsible for it and when it's due, is that something that resonates with you?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! I'm gonna say, it's not just the miscommunication part but the not up-to-date communication like its old information. So that creates confusion with the responsibility factor but also just with the veracity of what we've told them. And that's the worst feeling and I know every single team member feels that I feel it when we've told a client one thing and then the next day I have to call them back and say, sorry, I'm going to tell you something, completely different, yes.

David Cowan: Yeah! That's not good! Yeah! I understand! So well we've already established that you're running with Microsoft projects at the moment. How well are you able to provide clients access to the projects using Microsoft products?

Sheila Fung: I typically don't! Like I was saying it's I do the screenshot thing because I'm so nervous about accidentally exposing somebody else's proprietary information. And I know that that's probably not the most efficient way to be doing things. But I it's one of those I'd rather be paranoid in this situation then slip up and make another mistake this way. That would be an even worse phone call having to call them and explain that I've exposed proprietary information oh god.

David Cowan: Absolutely!

Sheila Fung: Yeah!

David Cowan: Can you can you tell me why client access is so important to you?

Sheila Fung: Okay! There’s two factors. One is just the integrity and pride that I take in our work, my work, my team's work. The customer experience is important for so many reasons we've been in business for a very long time. And you know we've come through that phase where everything was referral and word of mouth. We’re in the digital age but we do have clients that have been with us for a very long time. And on the other side of things there are some times we need feedback before we can move forward with things. So if we need to feedback before we can move forward that had better based on accurate information because oh my gosh!

David Cowan: Absolutely! Yeah! So I understand where you're coming from. And how long has this been a problem?

Sheila Fung: Oh since the dawn of time! Okay since forever. It’s like it's something I've been concerned with and of course as we grow, it becomes more of an issue. But also I feel like there's been this shift, just I don't want to nail it down to covid, but I feel like it started before then clients just wanting more visibility. I guess it's that whole the more educated buyer the more educated consumer. They also want hands in a little bit more.

David Cowan: Right!

Sheila Fung: And then, yeah, so I'm gonna say it's becoming it feels more urgent.

David Cowan: Right! Yeah! I see what you're saying. And have what have you done have you done anything previously to try and resolve this issue?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! The screenshots was that attempt, it was. Yeah! I had to teach the teams have a screenshot that was fun. Yeah no I'm joking! I don't actually! But that's the only attempt with me to try to increase the visibility and of course the mandate across the board just being like, be in more contact with your clients.

David Cowan: Right! Yes! And so how much do you think this issue is costing you right now?

Sheila Fung: It’s costing relationships for sure! I don't know if I can give you a dollar value, but every time a project comes in late, like we finish later than we predicted, that costs us money. Any time we under or over budget, that's an obvious, cost us money. Yeah so I don't have a dollar value for it. But it is significant enough that I need a solution.

David Cowan: Yeah! That sounds pretty frustrating too. How does that make you feel?

Sheila Fung: It’s like a blend of concern, frustration. But it's all directed at myself, this is something I should have gotten a handle on ages ago. And then I worry for my team because I know having worked in a role where I didn't have the tools that I needed. I just I know that that's got to be frustrating for them.

David Cowan: Absolutely! Yes! I certainly understand that. So Sheila basically the next thing I need to know is basically your organization do you feel that they're in a position currently to implement a solution and what's that going to look like?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! So I, yes everybody's on board that we need a solution. And I have tossed a few names into the hat but easy project is the one that I'm looking at right now just from our conversations. In terms of what it looks like to implement, the whole the whole team would have to be onboard. That’s simple enough we can do that within a one training session I kind of poked around on your website. It sounds like there's a fair bit of support in that regard. is that accurate?

David Cowan: Oh yes, there's lots of support! There’s also a lot of online things that you can do for yourself. And it is very into it's a very intuitive platform it is literally easy. Hence the name.

Sheila Fung: Okay! Well that's reassuring. So I like we've talked a little bit about timeline, my preference is to have it rolled out before the holiday you know everything slows down in terms of interesting decisions. I would like to get it done before then if that's feasible. I don't know realistically if that's a thing but, that's kind of what I'm making.

David Cowan: Okay! That’s great! And is there any concerns regarding integrating easy projects with anything else in your tech Stack?

Sheila Fung: Oh that's a good question! Does it, what does it integrate with?

David Cowan: It’ll integrate with over 2000 current applications; it also has an open API so it's easy to customize things as well. So it's very flexible!

Sheila Fung: Okay! Does it integrate with like messaging, like Slack or anything like that?

David Cowan: Absolutely! Yeah!

Sheila Fung: Okay!

David Cowan: And there's messaging within it as well. So you know sometimes you can just do the messaging within the projects, directly to people as well. Which I'll show in just a moment.

Sheila Fung: Okay!

David Cowan: So what I'm gonna do now is just do a quick screen share. Let’s see hopefully this is working. It is good technical difficulties have been worked on.

Sheila Fung: Always!

David Cowan: Oh can you see my screen there, Sheila?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! I can!

David Cowan: And I guess you can still hear me because you're answering me, that's a good sign! So this is the activity center, this is the most common place you're going to be. There’s all kinds of things in here. We won't worry about the rest of it for the time being because through your onboarding process, they will help you with learning about these things. But when it comes to dealing with your clients, right here is where, this is how you assign people to a project. And that could be people on your team. But you can also, there's a spot here where you can invite a user. And under regular that would be like people who are within your organization. But there's also an option to invite a guest. So this is referred to as the guest portal.

Sheila Fung: Okay! Interesting!

David Cowan: And all you have to do is put in their email address, their name. They’ll get an invite and then they just answer it, they create their own password and off they go. And the nice thing is that having the guests. Having guests is a free thing that you don't have to add user licenses for guests. And there's virtually no learning curve its they can handle email they can handle this sort of thing your sensitive data as you were concerned about earlier is protected because they're only going to have access to whatever projects and tasks that you assign them. And basically once they're in there they can view project progress, they can submit requests and issues, that they can track the status of those things, upload and download files and there's also collaboration with using the message board within here. Any thoughts?

Sheila Fung: If a guest logs in, they don't see what I'm looking at right now, they see a different version of it or does it look different?

David Cowan: They’ll see whatever it is you want to assign to them.

Sheila Fung: And that's all?

David Cowan: And they can't adjust anything.

Sheila Fung: Okay! Is there a limit to the number of guests you can invite to a project?

David Cowan: No!

Sheila Fung: Okay, it seems super simple.

David Cowan: It is and I mean it's one of those things that help people with reducing a lot of time with meetings and emails and that sort of thing. And I know we're getting down the wire here so I want to just quickly show you how you deal with these Microsoft projects if you scroll over to the far right and there's an import and export part here. All you do is you simply make sure your Microsoft project is saved and you hit this Microsoft project import and it'll bring in the project and then you can again assign people to it as you see fit.

Sheila Fung: You can just import it directly! I feel that silly for not knowing that this existed how long how long have you guys been around?

David Cowan: Well, a few years now.

Sheila Fung: Okay!

David Cowan: So basically, Sheila, based on what we've accomplished today, I'd say we seem to be a good fit now. What are your thoughts on that?

Sheila Fung: Yeah! I like I'm a little floored at how simple and appropriate this seems.

David Cowan: Well basically, the next step we would in our process is we actually would do a customized demo for you and is that something that you would be open to.

Sheila Fung: Yeah does customized mean my data is in there?

David Cowan: Yes, we can do that something more specific to what your needs are and I have my AEs calendar open. Right here, I can set you a time rate up. Would you prefer the end of this week or early next week?

Sheila Fung: Let’s do early next week! That’s perfect!

David Cowan: Tuesday at 10 am.

Joseph Fung: David, but we've hit your 15 minute limit.

Sheila Fung: I heard David’s timer.

Joseph Fung: How are you feeling I know I had to cut you off there? But how you doing?

David Cowan: Well that's good, okay. I was at the, I just booked it, so I'm good.

Joseph Fung: Way to go way to go. So yeah you can wrap up. You don't have to keep your screen shared. You can take a breather; you're not in the hot seat anymore. Job well done. You dug in deep with her. Well ahead of getting into the question. So good job on those. I see our judge’s head to sound fiercely filling in notes and comments. So for David, Linh, Alysha, the whole crew, Fathima, how are you feeling now that the presentations are done?

Linh Nguyen: Definitely! very relieved and excited to hear the result here.

David Cowan: Yeah, it was it was fun. Yeah it was everybody did great and it’s a great experience. It’s a whole different thing being on this end of it compared to just being the spectator.

Joseph Fung: It's tough! Especially when you have such a great group in front of you. Were running that conversation with Sheila. I could see her picking up questions that were passed to her. But there was 24 people listening in, feeding her notes, feeding her challenges, that's tough. Usually your buying committee will not be 24 people. So you made it through this. You can make it through any call, this is solid. I see scores coming in, notes getting added. Sheila, I see you still typing away. So looks like you still need a minute or two. Is that right?

Sheila Fung: I think we'll need a minute or two to get final scores in and everything, while we're doing that, I'm happy to pull in judges for feedback, if that's appropriate.

Joseph Fung: Fantastic! Why don't we get that ball rolling? What’s great is, we're well ahead of schedule, so we have the opportunity to dig in maybe a little bit more than we usually do. It’s a great job for everyone. But I'll mute myself here and Sheila let you steer some of the feedback.

Sheila Fung: Great and I'm so excited that we have time to dig into the feedback like this. And judges just for you guys have a heads up with us. I was gonna ask, Drew to speak first and then I was gonna ping, Callum, followed by Rod and Jake, Rod. Rod, I was gonna ask you to speak to Alysha for feedback and Jake to Linh. Drew I'm gonna have you start with David and then Callum, I'm gonna ask you to speak to Fathima, okay. So Drew, if you're ready I'm gonna put you in the hot seat.

Drew Williams: I am ready it's not it's this seat is definitely not as hot as the recruit seats. It’s kind of like a warm seat. But great job, great job to everybody. It’s always impressive, like Joseph says at the beginning like you got 15 minutes, you got the pressure on you everybody's watching you're live on YouTube. and it's not easy to get everything in. but I'm always just impressed that all that content and demos and questions and feedback and all that sort of thing can happen within the 15 minutes.

So great job, great job everybody. David, yeah awesome work. I think it was at the very beginning you kind of just set out this like tone that you're just there to have a great conversation, understand a little bit more about Sheila's issues. I felt relaxed listening and watching the demo, at the very at the very beginning, but you also were to the point and you got to the point pretty quickly. So it wasn't just about a good time, it was very focused, which was which is great.

You did a great job of confirming the agenda with kind of the main points from the previous conversation. And then also asking her if she had anything to add. At one point, Sheila was saying about the data that she was sharing of with, clients was that it has to be secure and I made a note to say okay well, I hope you come back to that and you did a great job of coming back to that in the demo.

So clearly you had you were taking notes either by hand or on the computer and then you're able to bring that back into the demo and I think that's when you're doing demos it's always great to make it as relevant to the person you're talking to as possible because a lot of these technologies can be applied to many different industries and many different end users. So that was awesome to see. Yeah you made the general demo just very relevant to like a VP of operations.

Lots of empathy and understanding in your line of questions, which was which is great. I like the question of how does that make you feel, again, just goes back to that empathy and relationship building and that you had and also brought in kind of a personal aspect of because everybody, the, all the buyers are sure they're VPs of operations but they're people at the end of the day. So bringing that how does this make you feel because she wants the best for business but also the best for herself too.

So that was awesome. and I think oh just the last thing I'll say, I was just thinking all, two things there was a an opportunity where Sheila at the end said that she'd like to get something going before the holiday but just wasn't sure if it was feasible on your end. And that's a huge opportunity for you to just kind of reduce like take that barrier down to say and you didn't mention anything there.

But just to say something like yeah of course we can get that done like we've implemented we've onboarded people within 24 hours 48 hours whatever the case is. But just to kind of address that concern right away. So that she's okay with kind of with moving forward. So yeah great stuff.

Drew Williams: Thanks Drew, appreciate it!

Sheila Fung: Thank you so much Drew. Callum, I was gonna reach out and ask you to speak to Fathima if you're in a place to do that.

Callum Bramley: Yes! Yeah! I am can you hear me okay yeah okay. I think it was great overall Fathima. Tone was good, really set yourself up as an expert on Easy Projects, the platform. I don't know a lot about it and I learned a lot from your demo. I'll be honest, I came away from it feeling more informed on the value.

One at the very beginning you used something I think you said this isn't a sales call. I know what you're trying to do there, I realize that could be a little risky just putting that out there not in that way though. I would say Sheila is on that call because she expects to speak to a salesperson. So it's okay that you're a salesperson. Right we're actually nice people. So it's fine, okay. The way you kicked off your demo was great. I think you said, I think you used an example, you said let's imagine, I'm you, well let's imagine we're doing this, really great way to paint a picture and shield his mind of what the future states going to look like.

If she did implement Easy Projects, so I really enjoyed hearing that. Its very nitpicky, but you called Sheila, Alysha, at one point. I don't know if you noticed that, which can be confusing because there's a lot of names floating around on this meeting and that's fine and very similar names. I noticed too I didn't know if I heard it right. So I had to check with someone else, and they heard it too.

But yeah you called her Alysha. The closing was pretty good. I think there's a chance because you've built so much trust with Sheila to be more assertive and tell Sheila what happens now with our process, where you could say, typically when I speak to people in your position, at this point here's what happens next. And tell Sheila what happens next. And this is where we're going from here, you gave Sheila more of an option all right what do you want next.

And sometimes that can lead prospects to be a little flimsy and not be accountable on those next steps. But other than that, I thought it was I thought it was great overall.

Sheila Fung: Thank you Callum! Okay, and then coming down my list here Rod. Are you in a place to speak to Alysha?

Rod Weir: Yeah, you bet! So some of this is specific to, Alysha, but it's also I would say kind of across the board for the others as well. So I would first like to congratulate you all. It’s never fun to be under the microscope. And this is a big microscope. So a lot a lot of eyeballs staring at you. So well done across the board. It occurred to me hearing Alysha, where there’s a couple of things. When a prospect says something like upon discovery or sharing like you showed and they say something like it looks great.

Right so there's that moment where they go it looks great. you know my inclination would be to jump in there and say I know you're in a comparative mindset and perhaps you're looking at other tools at this point do you recall a moment when you're looking at a competitor of mine, where you had a reaction like that. And they're going to get reflective and then before they would answer, you said you know what I've got more to show you just stay tuned you're going to say that again. Something like that it's kind of a leading.

So you had an opportunity to do it and that just comes with experience. But so you got that reaction and I would say that sort of evocation you just want to jump in there and kind of take a run with it. And so I guess the other comment and again thought of it with you but it's kind of a general statement is, there was a pretty good job, in terms of this discovery of getting some numbers, you know, either number of videos or whatever it was.

When it came to the conclusions those numbers were kind of left alone they weren't pulled back in, to sort of numerically sort of justify or explain what an outcome word number or benefit could be. So that's another thing just to be just to be cognizant of. and then I didn't hear today and I wouldn't say it's a concern, but if I'm going to call like this I like would like to preface a call by saying why now, why is you know November 5th 2020 the time you've taken to pursue you know Easy Projects which is near and dear to my heart.

So just getting a clarification and depending on what the reaction is, it may elicit an upcoming deadline it may illicit that a previous project went off the rails. It may elicit that there's a new senior executive and he or she's got you know a much tighter intention to run saying so. it's just general why now is it a personal motivation are you being told to do this just trying to get a little bit more of that sort of vibe and energy. So I guess those were kind of the comments I thought of.

Alysha Thistlethwaite: Thank you, rod I appreciate it.

Sheila Fung: Thank you so much! And then on my list here we have Jake speaking to Linh. Are you in a good place to speak to Linh, Jake?

Jake Ristevski: I am! Can you hear me, okay?

Sheila Fung: Yeah, we're good!

Jake Ristevski: Wonderful! Sounds good! Off the hop, I just wanted to give a big congratulations to everybody, those were some very inspiring demos. And like our other panelists here alluded to. Certainly a big state to be on so hats off to everybody. I'm sure you've put in a lot of work over the past few weeks and certainly showed very inspiring to have seen them. As far as Linh goes, I thought that was a great presentation.

Never easy to go first, but most certainly set the bar high. I would say. Some things I liked how you dove right into it, more or less you came off very friendly and easy to chat with. But the dance around the small talk and got right into it, a lot of people will appreciate that, a lot of prospects will appreciate that. So well done doing that. I really like maybe my favorite part of your whole, basically demo and presentation was how you not only identified the pain point right off the hop, but you took it a step deeper.

You made her prioritize, those different pain points that she was, your buyer was feeling. And then from there, you basically structured your agenda around that as well. So I thought that was very relevant and timely. So well played on that. I would certainly say. When you actually moved into demoing Easy Projects, very crisp, very smooth. You can tell you've worked with the platform before. Made it look quite seamless some folks, oftentimes just click around too much because they're so excited to show the buyer absolutely everything that it can do.

But you were very much focused on the notifications and on the dashboard piece of it which Sheila had identified as being important to her. So I thought that was excellent. And then as you continued, you did a good job of attempting to quantify the pain that she was feeling throughout, I think you asked her at one point, how many hours are you anticipate yourself losing to these inefficient notifications. And that's super important because that might not be something that the buyer's thinking about .so super well done there.

Big hats off to you. and then constructive criticism, I would have, just the obvious one, I went a little bit shy, when sorry little show you went a little shy on time when now when pushing for the for the close there. Just a timing thing, I think when I know I'm working with a with a hard stop, I'll always give myself an even extra two minutes because that's arguably the most important part of the call.

Last thing you want last place you want to find yourself is trying to secure those next steps over email or something strange like that. So all in all though, excellent job, really inspired, really impressed. Well done then.

Linh Nguyen: Thank you so much! That means a lot to me. But definitely, yeah, I need to work more on that close, asking you know for a strong close. Because I agree with you. I was a bit shy over there and not asking for strong close. Alright! Thank you though!

Jake Ristevski: Well done!

Sheila Fung: Wow so I love that you recruits have this opportunity to get feedback like this so valuable thank you so much to all of our judges. To our recruits and I know I'm head judge but when in prospect, I'm not taking notes. So what I want to say is that I am just so proud of all of you. The four of you have made huge strides over this whole course. You’ve helped me elevate the rest of the classes while the whole group has done so much in the last few weeks. I just want to say thank you and good job. Joseph, that's all I had for judge’s feedback.

Joseph Fung: That’s fantastic! So we've gone through that flow fantastic note, Sheila, when we started that off you said you might need another minute just to make sure you've got your scores and the items. Are you in a good spot to actually share a winner?

Sheila Fung: I am!

Joseph Fung: Okay! Before you do just so everyone knows we will crown our winner we've got a little bit of housekeeping. Before we wrap it up we told you all we'd get you out before the top of the hour and happy to give you some time back so like all good sales calls, we're trying to stay on schedule. But Sheila if you can get ready to share our winner let's get a drumroll going.

Sheila Fung: I'm so excited!

Joseph Fung: There we go!

Sheila Fung: Okay! Without further ado that, the 2020-8 winner of our demo day competition is, Alysha .

Joseph Fung: For everybody in the room, that is amazing. The scores, the comments are all great. Don’t worry for everybody who competed today, you'll get your full scores complete with the full comments. You got the highlight here. But you will get the full picture like I said before we let you all go we've got a bit of housekeeping. So first off, for those joining us on YouTube, let’s pull that up and I should do the same for everybody here in the Zoom room.

So if you give me a moment here I will pull up a couple of notes before we let you get going. So first off what I'd love to remind everybody of, is that if you'd like an introduction to any other grads. So if you're here as a guest as a judge you're on YouTube and you want to join us if you'd like an introduction to anybody who's presented here or in the graduating class, let us know. We’re happy to help with that.

We’re literally here to help with exactly that. The second thing is that we do have another upcoming demo day. You can always subscribe to us on YouTube to get notified you can also put it in your calendar right now. December 3rd we have a special demo day coming up. It is an all-stars edition we're bringing back previous alumni winners demoing some of the products they're actually selling right now. So that promises to be a lot of fun. And then of course if you're actively hiring you can always grab our hotsheet at uvaro.com/hotsheet.

The next hotsheet will be coming out next week. And you can always reach out to our grads directly on LinkedIn from that or get a hold of us earlier and happy to make an introduction. but before we let you go, now that we've nailed off some of that housekeeping, I'd like to wrap up with a really big congratulations, to all of the students, all the recruits, who made it this far, who won who put themselves, in the hot seat. Well done, but also a really big thank you, especially to our judges, we couldn't do this without your participation, your feedback, your insights are not only validating but super crucial to ensure that they're getting the right kind of feedback and holding them to the right bars.

So thank you everyone for making that possible for those of us on YouTube, thank you for joining us. I think we had a fantastic time. Be sure to click that subscribe button and come back soon for those in Zoom. We’ll let you go in a moment, but first off, let me wrap up that stream. So there we go. I am going to stop sharing my screen. The folks on YouTube now have a placeholder and we'll let them go.

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