Originally published on LinkedIn, John’s Corner is where Fortimize CEO John Hamon shares the perspectives, challenges, and hard truths he sees from the front lines. View original publication.
Two banks bought the same software. The careful one never went live.
Call him Tyler. He has sold Salesforce to banks for nine years, and in June he was on a quarterly call with one of his accounts, a bank in the Southwest a few weeks past go-live, when the customer apologized that her teams were only using the system for referrals so far. Tyler had every incentive to nod and move to the upsell. Instead he told her about a different bank in his book. Bought the same product 18 months ago. Spent every month since perfecting it. Never went live. Same software, same vendor, same kind of institution, opposite outcomes, and Tyler sells into both. The question he left hanging is the one I have not been able to put down: if the product is constant and the diligence was higher at the bank that failed, what exactly is the variable?
I should say plainly that my firm is the implementation partner on the live account. You can discount what follows accordingly. But the comparison was not mine. It came from the one person in the room who gets paid either way.
Two Banks, One Product
The bank on our call went live in weeks with a system that did one unglamorous thing: referrals. Bankers entered leads. That was the whole show. No case management yet, no marketing journeys, no off-us balance data, none of the capability the platform was bought for. Within a few weeks of that incomplete launch, more than half of the leads entered had already converted or qualified. The pipeline read millions of dollars in proposal-stage opportunities and several million dollars already closed-won, visible on a live dashboard the executives check for themselves. Then the bank expanded its users for its operations center and marketing team, on its own initiative and its own budget. The head of retail banking asked us, unprompted, when she could get external account balances flowing in.
The other bank in Tyler’s book has none of this. It has something arguably more impressive: 18 months of careful construction. Requirements gathered, edge cases handled, integrations specified, training materials written for a launch that keeps moving. The people on that project are not lazy or incompetent. By every account they are the opposite. They believed, reasonably, that an unfinished system would not be adopted, so they resolved not to ship an unfinished system. The result is a finished system that has never had a production user. Eighteen months of payroll, license fees, and opportunity cost, and the bankers it was built for still track their prospects in spreadsheets.
The Belief Underneath the Plan
Diligence and drift are opposites. They should not arrive at the same dead instance. To see why they do, you have to find the belief underneath the careful bank’s plan, because the plan was internally rational. The belief is this: users adopt systems because systems are good.
Almost everyone in enterprise software holds some version of this belief, and almost nothing in the history of enterprise software supports it. Good systems sit unused in every bank in America. Mediocre systems get used hard for decades; ask anyone who has tried to pry a core processor or a shared drive out of a branch network. Quality is not nothing. But quality is not what converts a tool into a habit, and a CRM that is not a habit is not a CRM. It is a data entry obligation that loses to whatever the banker did yesterday.
The Window
What converts a tool into a habit is repetition on small stakes before the big stakes arrive. A banker who enters referrals every day for six weeks, because that is the one thing the system does, has built the muscle before anyone asks her to run her whole book through it. When case management arrives, she does not face a new system. She faces a new room in a building she already lives in. Tyler put it this way on the call: they will already know how to use it when the other stuff comes. The careful bank built every room at once and is still waiting for someone to move in. Nobody moves into a building they have never visited.
The window for this habit formation is real and it closes. Launch energy, executive attention, the political capital that got the purchase approved, the patience of the people who were promised something: all of it decays on a clock that starts at signature, not at go-live. The perfectionist misses the window by polishing. The negligent partner misses it by drifting. The window does not care which.
What the Contract Pays For
You cannot fix this with willpower or talent. The diligent partner on the stalled account is not weak. Their commercial structure made polishing billable and shipping optional. Time-and-materials engagements reward more building. Milestone-based contracts make go-live the finish line, so go-live keeps receding while everyone acts in good faith. Any partner would drift toward perfection under a contract that pays for perfection and merely hopes for adoption. Mine included. The question is never whether your partner has craftsmen. The question is whether anything in the deal makes early production use the thing the partner gets paid against. Either the delivery model makes the habit window someone’s deadline, or the window closes while everyone does their job well.
Screen Differently
The qualities banks screen for when they hire an implementation partner are rigor, thoroughness, and craft. Those are virtues. They are also, under most contract structures, the exact qualities that produce the 18-month outcome, because they all push in one direction: do not ship until it is right. A buyer who selects on polish is, without knowing it, selecting for the stalled account in Tyler’s book.
So screen differently. Skip the methodology deck and the certification count and ask a prospective partner two questions. First: what will be live and in daily use in 60 days? Not in a sandbox, not in UAT. In production, with real bankers entering real prospects. Second: what does your contract make expensive, shipping early or shipping late?
The bank on Tyler’s call could not answer a single advanced question about the platform a few weeks after launch. Its people were using it anyway, every day, for one small thing. The other bank can answer every question. There is nobody in the system to ask.
