Fix Customer Onboarding and Stop Revenue Leaks – Srikrishnan Ganesan

Episode Overview

Srikrishnan Ganesan, better known as Sri, is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rocketlane, a fast-growing SaaS platform designed to revolutionize customer onboarding and project delivery. With over 15 years of experience in the startup and enterprise SaaS space, Sri is a seasoned entrepreneur and product leader who is deeply passionate about helping businesses operate more efficiently while delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Before founding Rocketlane, Sri co-founded Konotor, a mobile-first customer messaging platform that was later acquired by Fresh works. At Fresh works, Sri led product teams and gained a deep understanding of the challenges companies face post-sale—from inefficient internal workflows to onboarding experiences that fall short of customer expectations.

Rocketlane was born out of this firsthand knowledge. Sri saw the gap between customer expectations and the tools available to help implementation and delivery teams meet them. Under his leadership, Rocketlane has emerged as a powerful solution to help businesses eliminate onboarding chaos, reduce revenue leakage, and bring transparency, accountability, and speed to internal processes. His platform is already being used by leading fintechs, SaaS companies, and professional services teams around the world.

Sri is a strong advocate of radical efficiency—a philosophy that encourages teams to aim not just for incremental gains but exponential improvements in productivity and performance. He believes that with the right use of automation, time tracking, and artificial intelligence, companies can compress onboarding cycles, boost team morale, and turn customer onboarding into a strategic advantage.

Episode Transcript

Srikrishnan Ganesan: I can actually help in meaningful ways for their teams because they see it as, hey, this is all manual consulting work that we’re doing. There is very little that I can come and optimize, maybe like a 5% productivity improvement, not a radical improvement, but our view is that you can actually have radical improvements in productivity if you use AI well and if you are constantly exploring. And I don’t mean this as only using Rocketlane, but I think there’s two kinds of work that any project delivery team does.

Kevin Rosenquist: Hello and welcome to PayPod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist. Thanks for being here. In this fast paced world of business, every delay, whether it’s in onboarding a new customer or managing internal projects has a cost. But how much do these inefficiencies really impact the bottom line and what can companies do to stop revenue from slipping through the cracks? My guest today is Srikrishnan Ganesan, co-founder and CEO of Rocketlane, a platform that’s transforming how fintech companies approach customer onboarding and internal project management from reducing revenue leakage to improving employee experience. Sri shares insights on how structured processes, smart time tracking and even I can turn operational chaos into a competitive advantage. So please welcome Srikrishnan Ganesan.

Kevin Rosenquist: So it’s easy to dismiss a slow.

Kevin Rosenquist: Onboarding process or a few inefficient meetings as minor annoyances, but how do these small inefficiencies snowball into significant revenue leakage over time?

Srikrishnan Ganesan: Yeah, so I think when you look at tech and SaaS companies that are onboarding large customers, what you will find is there is very often a large backlog of customers that haven’t been launched on their platform or customers who haven’t gotten to value with the platform, and very often this leads to multiple problems. One is, of course, when it comes to renewal time, there are two things that happen one, the customer has lost trust in the partnership, so they’re going to look for the first opportunity to exit the contract and say, hey, I don’t think we’re getting to value you hour. It took us way too long to even get launched and we didn’t see the value. So we’re going to move on to a different vendor or they’re going to negotiate for, hey, you know what? We paid for 12 months, but we’ve used this only for four months now, so we want more credits. And so you’re sort of leaking revenue really when it comes to working with these customers, renewing them, giving them discounts because of late launches. In some cases, it’s also truly just direct lost revenue because maybe you’re billing them. You’re starting your subscription revenue only after they go live with you, or in some cases only if your product is more usage based, as many AI solutions now are. Then if the customer is not fully launched, fully utilizing your platform, you are, you know, they are spending less with you, right? So if you’re not accelerating their deployment, if you’re not accelerating their usage, then again, it’s a problem where you’re missing out on revenue that you could have had. That’s that’s the big impact I would say.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. And we often focus on the financial cost too. But what about the impact of an employee experience and burnout. Like how do you see that lack of structured workflows adds to employee frustration or even turnover?

Srikrishnan Ganesan: Very real. I think post-sale teams, delivery teams and most organizations are already under stress. On one hand, customers are demanding a lot of you. On the other side, you’re stuck with probably a product team that has a roadmap is not going to necessarily give you all that each customer wants in a timely manner. So already playing that balancing act on top of that, if you’re not launching customers, you’re not onboarding them with the right intensity. It means you’re piling on more and more projects which are not completing. And that results in burnout because, you know, the number of projects you’re handling. It’s not like the team can infinitely expand the resources. You have a limited number of resources depending on the stage of the company. And if more projects fall on your plate, more of them from the past are sort of stalled projects. You also don’t feel successful anymore, right? Because, you know, all these customers aren’t really going live. They’re stuck in a backlog in the implementation team. They’re not being passed on to customers fast enough. Real problem. I appreciate that you recognized the impact on internal employees as well. And I think when the team operates in a different mode where you’re sort of coming in with the right intensity, the right process, the right rigor, and you’re able to push and hold customers accountable in a better way as well, because sometimes the delay is on the customer side.

Srikrishnan Ganesan: They may still blame you for not launching on time, but it’s that partnership that needs to start working. Once you get that partnership working well and trusting each other, you get customers launched faster. Customers feel like they’re winning with you, so they want to do more with your team. They’re going to expand faster with you. And all of that credit really goes to how you got them launched in a very positive way. The first experience mattered so much, right? Because think of it, if you found a great first experience of a partnership, even when you drop the ball on something, even when you make a mistake, the customer is gonna have this approach of or this thought process of, hey, usually these books are really good. So, you know, this is a one off issue from them. Let me bring it up with them and address it at the same time. If you start it off on the wrong note with a customer, then their attitude towards the partnership is going to be. If you have one screw up, they’re going to be like, oh, this confirms what I thought about this company. They’re not who we want to work with. I think a lot matters in how you’re doing that initial onboarding phase successfully with customers.

Kevin Rosenquist:  Yeah that’s a good point. That is definitely a good point. And then in fintech for fintech show onboarding new customers isn’t just a technical process. It’s often like the first real test of the relationship. Kind of like what you were talking about. And like how does poor onboarding contribute to more revenue leakage and what is a more structured, profitable onboarding process actually look like?

Srikrishnan Ganesan: Yeah. You know, we work with a bunch of fintech platforms as customers of ours. And the common thing I’ve seen is very often these companies have built multiple modules that customers can benefit from. And a customer is first coming in for one part of your offering saying, hey, I’m going to go live with billing. And then I will also add on invoicing. I’ll also add on revenue insights, recognition, whatever. Right. So you have a bunch of capabilities as the platform. Someone comes in, for one thing and expands into more. The challenge is that if you start off on the right note, then customers starts using the platform very often. Fintech also means the number of transactions going through the platform determines how much money you’re making of them. The customer usually has an option to say, I’m going to soft launch this with a percentage of my customers before I switch over fully to the new platform. And imagine if that soft launch did not feel successful. The partnership did not feel like a strong partnership, strong collaboration. Then we’re going to say, okay, not shifting more over here. I’m going to stay with my current platform. Or even if they’ve shifted things over, there is a lot of, I would say, reluctance to change things. If they start working and if you’re not setting them up, well, the right way, if they haven’t, you know, had those best practices with you, the right collaboration to get things set up, then they may not be in a position to utilize more of your platform to get more value. So I think that early trust in the partnership, early tight collaboration to get things right determines whether it’s going to, you know, the partnership is going to grow to X faster and expand you know to to X the size quickly. Or is it going to taper off and either stagnate where it is or even result in churn.

Kevin Rosenquist: In moving on to another aspect? Time tracking is one of those things companies know that they should do. , but it often feels like a burden for teams. How can fintech companies track time and resources effectively without adding friction? And how do you guys at Rocketlane help with that?

Srikrishnan Ganesan: Yeah, I think when it comes to fintech companies that have a, you know, implementation team or professional services team that’s doing this onboarding type work, oftentimes this may be the only team that needs to do time tracking because you know, they’re charging based on efforts of people and, you know, to recognize the revenue. Right? You need to do it. It’s a compulsion from a finance function perspective. But the teams may not understand that, you know, this is something that is only my team subject to this practice, which feels like a big brother, feels like it’s something antiquated. But I think the first thing is, how do you communicate this change well to the team? Secondly, I think there are many ways in which you can make this easier for the team. One of them is if you procure a modern tool for them like Rocket Lab, which facilitates, for example, a calendar integration. It makes it so much easier and pleasant for the team to say, hey, I just need to select which meetings I was on this week from my calendar, pull it into my timesheet, and submit my time for the most part, right? So of course, there may be other work outside of meetings that you do outside of a calendar, but it makes it easy to fill up a lot of where your energy is going. You can also do this from a mobile app, which means I’m commuting on the way to work. I’m on a subway or something else.

Srikrishnan Ganesan: I can do my time tracking on the fly. But also, I think just the experience of making it easy to do. Setting the right granularity, right? Do I want to do this at a project level? Face level? Task level? How do I make it easy to pull in the right task that I was working on this week? You know, I don’t need to go collect things manually. Instead, you know, there’s a quick button to do it. Very often you’re doing continuing things that you did last week next week. So can I just say pull in my work from last week? I want to, you know, add to it. Right. So all those small experiences start mattering a lot for you to say, hey, you can finish your tracking of time in seven minutes instead of it taking you 30 minutes. And people care about that because you know, they don’t want to be spending their Friday evening opening up parallel tabs to think back, where did I spend time last week? Compare things, put in the time instead of the tool is suggesting and facilitating a lot for you. Then the team feels that the management has invested in making their lives easier. So I think that’s the approach we’ve taken to even how we built the product. How do we look at the jobs to be done by the tool of the person, and sort of bring together the right experience for them?

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, and I suppose.

Kevin Rosenquist: The untracked hours, poor internal project management, it can all lead to financial forecasting errors. Would you agree with that?

Srikrishnan Ganesan: Yeah. Even in terms of understanding how you utilized your team and hence are you at a point where you need to hire more people? Are you able to see, you know, your forecast for how many resources you need for the projects that your sales team is going to bring in? Do you need to hire partners to deliver on some of it? Do you need to train your team based on what kind of work they’re doing today, versus what kind of work do you foresee coming that way from avoiding burnout perspective, from avoiding over hiring perspective. All of this, I think looking at the historic time data helps a lot. And, you know, comparing it with what was planned versus what is actuals.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay. Can we,  you mind if we talk a little bit about this new AI thing for a minute? Absolutely.  A lot of fintech companies are investing a lot in AI for fraud prevention or customer facing experiences. But do you have any insight into maybe an underappreciated role I can play in improving internal operations, especially around staffing, budgeting, project delivery and the like?

Srikrishnan Ganesan: I think that you and I talk to services leaders, implementation leaders across different industries. The common theme I see is a sort of disbelief that AI can actually help in meaningful ways for their teams because they see it as, hey, this is all manual consulting work that we’re doing. So there is very little that I can come and optimize, maybe like a 5% productivity improvement, not a radical improvement.

Kevin Rosenquist: Right?

Srikrishnan Ganesan: But our view is that you can actually have radical improvements in productivity if you use AI well and if you are constantly exploring. And I don’t mean this as only using Rocketlane, but I think there’s two kinds of work that any project delivery team does. There is the actual work that they’re delivering to the customer, and then there is work around work, which is, you know, I need to do decent stuff better. I need to do my, you know, project updates that I need to send to the customer. I need to stack the project the right way. And, do you know, update tasks on the project plan to reflect for the customer, etc.. So a lot of the work around work can also be automated with you, but a lot of the real work also can be automated. With AI beginning to doing more automation is in getting your right, in doing more active, proactive Docentation and all of the projects you’re executing on your customers. And that’s an area we’ve invested in. So on one side, we have operational capabilities like how do you staff the right team for a project. So there is something that we launch called resource I which helps you do that. But also we launched this capability called I cells. Think of this as, you know, when we started recording this podcast, you asked about the note taker. So that is a note taker that we’ve introduced, which is listening to our call and is able to glean the right information from different kinds of calls.

Srikrishnan Ganesan: Hey, this is a kick off call. This is a requirements call. This is a call. What you want to take away from those calls is very different. And what you want to either add into a docent versus add into an email that you’re composing is going to be different as well. So what we’ve helped with over here is how can we enable more automatic of what’s happening in different types of calls? Pull in the right information into the right type of docents. Pull in the right information to the right kind of emails you want to send out. I just went into an escalation call with a customer. Now I want to send out an email to them. But what I want to take away from that call, to put into that email is what topics we discussed around the escalation. What were the suggestions we already gave on the call? What are the pending action items? If I can codify that makes my job super easy to then send out that email without having to think through and manually create all of this each time. Write a post as opposed to a regular, just a common meeting smart type output that most meeting tools provide. What we’ve done is use AI and use custom prompts that you can codify in docents and emails to pull the right information. That’s a huge productivity boost for any delivery team, because there’s so much work that needs to go into emails that they’re sending out to customers.

Srikrishnan Ganesan: And we’ve done a lot of automation as well around all of this now. But as I said, this is like the beginning of automation, right? The more you’ve docented, the more patterns you’re able to find among different types of docents across projects. You can say that, hey, for someone who had these goals and requirements, these are the solutions that we proposed. These are the configuration options that emerged based on the solutions that we had. Now, if I have hundreds of projects where I have all of these docents and probably there’s more types of docents now, I can start learning across these docents and say, hey, for this goal, here is a proposed solution for this solution. Here’s a proposed configuration which I can auto create. So even though the role of the han becomes less about, let me come up with everything on my own to hey, let me look at proposed suggestions from I pick the right one for this customer and finalize it. So a han in the loop system becomes more important when you have more data, more docents, more insights already from past execution. And I think that’s why we believe, you know, more helps. And that’s why we’re helping in creating that addition with ease and automation.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. And how do you see AI helping companies forecast staffing needs and match talent to demand more effectively? Does it really come down to the more you have?

Srikrishnan Ganesan: I think the more data you have from the past, the easier it is to do that kind of forecasting. I would say,  probably doesn’t need generative AI or, you know, very fancy things to do that. We can have basic regression based models, etc. as well help you with better forecasting as a starting point. It does help if you have, I would say, more of a scenario planning type experience added to it so that you can test various future scenarios and say, here’s what it could look like if x, y, z. If we sort of close deals at this percentage, then what things can look like. And hence you have these contingency plans as well. Not just like a. Here is what I’m sure of, but also here is what could be. And that helps you make better decisions.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay. Yeah. And what are the most important metrics that you think a company should track when they really want to get serious about operational efficiencies? How can they know they’re on the right path for getting there?

Srikrishnan Ganesan: Yeah.  The metrics that I think teams track from an efficiency perspective is for a project delivery team, you’re looking at what is my time to launch or time to deliver on projects. The more standardized the type of work you do, then you know that, hey, this needs to be a 45 day project, not a 90 day project. So I want to compress that timeline. So time to value, time to launch or two things that people measure. Then there is utilization rate on the team. There are also margins on your project delivery that look at utilization, billable utilization margin and time to value, time to launch. These are things that people would measure from a productivity and efficiency standpoint. But I think the goalpost needs to shift from what it is today towards what radical efficiency means for my team. And I think that’s a question that every leader needs to ask and aspire towards because of what AI is able to enable today. And, you know, going into the future, they should be planning for that radical efficiency, which means your margins, let’s say, today, are -5% to 5%. As a, you know, fintech company with a team, you don’t necessarily care about the margins, but maybe you need to be thinking about how do I get this to 50% margin? Or if your time to launch a customer is, you know, 90 days today, you need to be thinking about how can I do this in three weeks? And that might sound like an unreasonable goal, but I think when you start looking at it in that way and start planning for what do I need to achieve this, then you will see some of the pieces come together.

Srikrishnan Ganesan: What are the big areas that you need to build more automation into? What are the big areas where you need to have a more creative approach around how to get customers launched? All of that will help you build more internal tooling as well, to help you get closer to that number. So you aim at three weeks. Maybe you land at six weeks, but it’s still much better than 90 days. So that’s how I think teams need to start thinking, especially because the toolset that’s available to them has really, really evolved in an exponential way in the last, I would say, even a few months.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, I’d agree with that too. What? I mean, you founded your own successful companies, scaled them. Well, what have you learned about balancing speed and structure and the customer experience in your. You know, to to get to where you want your company to be.

Srikrishnan Ganesan: Yeah. I think we are a very product focused company which brings product innovation to customers. And we made a very conscious choice of initially go slow to go fast from a GTM perspective. Now when I say go slow, it’s not about building a product slowly, but rather deciding that we will not launch an MVP to customers. We’re gonna build like a full featured product early on and then launch it to customers. So take out this phase where customers are working with you on an MVP. They start giving you direction on where they want to push your product. Instead, he heard out customers on where they wanted to push our product. We were showing them like showing prospects along the journey. We had like 120 companies we showcased the product to to our first year, where it wasn’t yet a product, it was still marked. It was still like what we were building, have built product, but a very, very full featured product, got their reactions and then launched the product that we wanted to launch. Because if you launch too early, customers are going to pull you into directions based on what they’ve seen with other products. But if you launch your full vision, then they get what you’re going for. What is differentiated about this? They know there is a trade off versus other products, and they’re actively choosing to work with you. So that’s the sort of approach we took from a speed to market perspective. Now, I think from launch we focused on moment with customers and, you know, growing fast. And we also have a certain product velocity that is unmatched in our space. So I think that all of that helps us quickly release more and more capabilities with customers, quickly understand what’s working, what’s not, and iterate with you know, customers. So that’s been big for us in terms of how it’s helped us win trust of customers. Over time, they’ve seen how quickly we evolve and how we’re poised to be continually ahead of the market because of the rate at which the product develops.

Kevin Rosenquist: Is this your third company you founded?

Srikrishnan Ganesan: A second company I founded, though I was,  you know, founding member or very early employee number two in a startup before that.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay. All right. Are you,  is this it for you, or are you going to keep,  keep that entrepreneurial spirit alive? That’s the plan. Yeah.

Srikrishnan Ganesan: So go big or go home.  and looks like things are definitely set for a go. Big outcome over here.  Things are lining up. Well, we have, you know, great team that’s executing passionately. The idea is to build something big and world class in every aspect of the company. And,  yeah, it’s been an exciting journey. But I think for me, the way I look at it after this is more about giving back and,  maybe working with entrepreneurs, but not necessarily, you know, building my own business the next time. And,  yeah, I’m passionate about startups, so I want to be involved with startups, but I don’t think I will build one.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, that sounds like. Yeah, go into the consulting role.

Srikrishnan Ganesan: I would, I wouldn’t say necessarily consulting,  just more of a how do I give back to the ecosystem? How do I stay involved and give back.

Kevin Rosenquist:  Gotcha. All right. Well the company is Rocketlanes three. So good to have you here. Thanks so much for your time.

Srikrishnan Ganesan: Thanks for having me, Kevin.