Top 3 Reasons Why you Need to Take Action and Adopt Parallax
Just like adopting a new pet, getting married or going on a long vacation, there’s never a perfect time to adopt a new business solution or process automation tool.
That’s exactly why we built Parallax. Unlike disruptive solutions that leverage a fragile array of spreadsheets and homegrown tools or require the adoption of a monolithic all-in-one solution that no one wants to use, we envisioned a solution that connects the best-in-class tools your team is already using to provide a complete picture of operational performance, opportunities for growth and evolution while encouraging the adoption of more sustainable, impactful operations.
Read on to find out why we believe now is the right time to start your journey toward growth and evolution.
1. Parallax can be a catalyst for change & kickstart better operations.
When our customers and PAC members first learn about Parallax, they get excited to leverage the clarity into their operational and financial health the platform provides. But far too often, they believe they need to fix something internally before they implement Parallax. Maybe they think they need to develop more rigor around the metrics they track and how they track them. Maybe they think they need to hire or appoint someone as the PSA champion before putting Parallax to work. To that we say… nonsense! The longer you delay, the longer you risk losing out on the benefits of clarity or worse, exacerbating the problem by building around bad practices to begin with! The most important thing you can do today is just get started.
When done right, the value of adopting a platform like Parallax goes far beyond connecting tools and organizing data. There is a big difference between talking about change and experiencing change. Leveraging the best practices used by the most successful professional services companies combined with our own expert customer success team, we make it our mission to help you adopt the right behaviors, processes and operational cadence[1] required to experience valuable change. Behaviors that help you generate the data you need to make strategic decisions about your business and your teams.
We also understand that value needs to be experienced quickly in order to create and maintain excitement. The Parallax adoption process was purpose built to deliver that value out of the gates.
“The Parallax team has been just amazing. They have been in our shoes and understand the challenges that we face. They have repeatedly gone above and beyond sharing their experiences and recommendations. This advice alone has been worth the price of the product.”
We’ve heard first hand that the visibility provided just by setting up an account and integrating it with existing tools – which takes days or weeks, not months of onerous homework – is immediately valuable. The next value delivered is related to the adoption of operational best practices the most mature professional services companies leverage for success: such as consistent sales pipeline management, deal pricing and planning, project accounting, resource management and even consistent time tracking and reporting!
Be honest, have you always struggled to get consistent or insightful reporting from your time management platform? You and everyone else. The integration between time tracking tools like Harvest and Parallax, along with our consultative approach, can help you get more out of your tools through better utilizing and managing these tools and creating better habits among your team.
“Foundry uses Parallax as the core of our project and resource management toolkit. It’s been invaluable as a way to intake new projects, plan out our team’s schedules, and get insight into our future work.”
See how agency leaders use Parallax to solve big business challenges
2. Parallax helps uncover the root cause of business challenges.
Far too often, strategic business decisions are based on data that’s not totally reliable, informed by fragile spreadsheets and homegrown tools that are prone to user error or simply based on a narrow focus on one side of the business when the actual improvement may be needed elsewhere. Parallax helps create a shared perspective across the business aligning priorities for operational improvement. Plus, our expert team is available to help consult on how to optimize and improve – driving actionable, insightful decisions that create business results.
Consider this common story: Chris is the CEO at a mid-size digital consultancy that has missed revenue projections for the past two quarters and assumes it’s a sales issue. Their instinct is to expand the sales team to win more deals fast. But by leveraging Parallax’s powerful integration across CRM, project management and time tracking platforms, they realize the larger problem is actually related to revenue leakage, ie. The delivery team’s utilization is too low because they are not billing for all the available hours that have already been sold!
With this information, they decide to upsell some recently developed new services to customers that have available hours. An increase in new revenue doesn’t need to, and likely won’t solve the issue alone. Parallax can not only help expose these organizational issues, but it enables organizations to optimize and better manage delivery teams and improve utilization.
“Parallax gives you boundless amounts of information and access, which allows you to become more efficient and make more money.”
Parallax helps organizations make smarter business decisions with visibility and reporting across sales, delivery, hiring, and accounting teams. It answers questions like: how are my projects (really) doing? Do I have the right skill sets for the demand in our active work being sold? Why can’t I better manage to margin? Is my sales pipeline accurate? Can I improve my utilization? By simply integrating the tools and data you have today, Parallax can help expose areas of the business that need improvement – even things you may not have considered.
3. Parallax sets the groundwork for smart, strategic growth.
The landscape is a changin’. With the increase in distributed teams and the resulting need for more data security and innovative tools to support new workflows, many digital services consultancies have recently experienced tremendous growth, as their clients look to solve these kinds of big business challenges. But moving into an era where there’s more competition for top talent, more demands for higher salaries, and more pressure for efficient work, adopting a platform like Parallax can help your organization be more thoughtful in how they invest, grow, scale, and succeed.
Having healthy margins makes investments in evolution and growth possible. However, many organizations don’t fully understand their margins let alone know how they stack up to industry benchmarks. How many services become a commodity over time, leading clients to drive rates lower while the cost of delivering those same services increases with your desire to retain top talent, you may see a different story. With CRM and PM integrations, Parallax can deliver detailed forecasts showing you the impact on margin if you choose to invest in higher salaries or raise your rates.
Potentially more important however, is that Parallax also shows you the change in demand for specific services and the change in cost to deliver them, allowing you to identify ways to optimize your people and leverage top talent. Many companies are looking at high-level metrics like sales goals or revenue. Parallax delivers a more granular, strategic level of business insights that can help you navigate a rapidly shifting landscape. And it can help you shift from a reactive selling model to a strategic and scalable approach.
Plan today for better insights tomorrow
Running a digital agency or consultancy is tough, let alone growing one. There are always challenges to overcome between finding and nurturing talent, filling the pipeline, advancing your business and maturing your offerings.
Unlike disruptive solutions that leverage a fragile array of spreadsheet and homegrown tools or require the adoption of a monolithic all-in-one solution that no one wants to use, Parallax was purpose built to help digital services companies adopt the best practices needed to drive immediate value and help organizations overcome common operational challenges quickly, without the heavy resources needed to stand up a complex business application.
By integrating and implementing today, Parallax can be the catalyst you and your team needs to grow with confidence and purpose. It can help expose, identify, and overcome critical business issues or areas of weakness that stand in your way. Ultimately, Parallax enables better visibility across your business and tools, so you can focus on what’s important today and plan for what’s ahead while empowering your people to do their best work and allowing your business to thrive.
Ready to get started? It’s easier than you may think!
