A new Microsoft ISV partner on the block, Wych Money optimizes money, and effortlessly manages savings, investments and spending. The platform is available on phones and smart home devices, helping customers work out where their money goes and how to reduce fees. The company promotes that using their 7 steps to financial success, their customers can take control of their future.
Wych Money CEO Dermot Butterfield recently completed the Partner Elevate SalesPlay On-Ramp™ program, so we virtually sat down to hear about his experience.
Before you started, what were you struggling with?
Before joining the program, we didn’t really have a standardised or shared sales process within the business. As a start-up, we have a lot of experienced people with ideas, but we needed the right processes in place for our level of maturity. Fostering our people and their ideas while also creating structure in the way we developed is important to us.
We realised that the leadership team had very different ways of communicating our message. Our messaging was either technical, business focused, or sales-minded depending on who you spoke to, which meant we struggled to deliver a consistent message about our product’s value. We realised we needed to take a standardised approach to the way we were communicating - internally and externally.
We knew that the information we were producing was valuable, we just needed to distil that message to the right audience for it to have an impact.
Initial thoughts about the program?
Because we were talking with our Microsoft Partner Manager about listing on the Marketplace, when I was sent the link my initial thought was that it was technical, and related to Marketplace. After talking through the program with him it became clear that this was a business-focused program which surprised me – but the detail did interest me enough to sign up.
Did you have hesitations about signing up?
The main hesitation I had was related to the level of commitment required to complete the program. I was mostly concerned about my time. I’d been challenged before after signing up for what I thought was an information session that turned into a 5-day commitment.
As a CEO I don’t have that level of flexibility to take such large blocks of time away from the day-to-day running of the business.
How was you overall experience?
Probably the biggest impacts I’ve seen are around process and communication.
My background is technical, and I have been doing this for 15 years. What I noticed was that I have the technical conversation down pat, but when it comes to sales conversations – there are some gaps. Going through the SalesPlay On-Ramp program highlighted those gaps for me, and made me see that while we have very valuable information within the business, we could be communicating it in a more effective way.
Now, we have built a more structured approach to communicating our product and its value, and we have a clearer understanding of the message we are communicating.
To top it off, my concerns around time commitment were quickly put aside. I was able to move at my own pace, and when the time was broken down between check-points, I was spending only an hour or two per week to get the work done which was very manageable.
Results you've seen so far
Because our product is not live yet, we really used the program to help us prepare to hit the ground running.
Now as we approach launch, we are lining up potential customers. We are much further along than we could have ever expected in such a short period of time. From the chaos of COVID, to having a pipeline of our core customers, we are in a very good position.
We can also attribute much of our growing relationship with Microsoft to our newfound ability to better communicate our value as a business. We have gone from having a non-existent relationship with Microsoft, to having access to some great people at Microsoft who have helped facilitate our partnership with them. We are very excited for the future of Wych Money.
What's your advice to partner considering the program?
To any Microsoft ISV Partner that's struggling with how to create a framework around how to best communicate your unique value, I encourage you to get involved in this program today so you can start filling your pipeline just as Wych Money was able to.
