How to Run a 4,500-Location Enterprise Rollout (In One Year) | Zach Larabee (Sr. Manager at Toast)

Carter (00:07.255)
Well hey, Larabee, introduce yourself, give the people a quick intro, who are you, what do do now?

Zach Larabee (00:13.25)
Hey, Carter. Yeah, my name is Zach Larabee. I am a senior manager of the enterprise sales coordinators at Toast Inc. My job is to, well, I manage a team of eight enterprise sales coordinators who are in charge of essentially managing the rollout of our enterprise, mid-market enterprise customers at Toast. So.

What that entails is we are kind of a hybrid of onboarding and sales. So when a large brand like the Jamba Juices of the world, Waba Grills sign on with Toast, they sign on with an account executive at the brand level. And then it is handed off to my team that individually works with the corporate, with workers of the corporate team on scheduling the rollout.

coordinating it and then also working with every individual franchisee of the brand at the location level. So we are essentially the sales reps for the franchisees of a rollout. So my team is, you know, calling up individual locations, letting them know that their brand is committed to toast if they haven't heard already. Typically at that level they do. They make some big brand announcement, letting

All their franchisees know that they're making a move to a new tech stack. But yeah, my team is the sales rep essentially for every franchisee of the brand and help answer any questions, give demos, coordinate their order, identify what they need, what they may need versus other locations and help them answer any questions and get them through, get them started with the onboarding process through Toast.

Carter (02:08.704)
When the rollout goes well, like what has to be true before the signature? Like, do you know when one's gonna go well and when it's gonna be not, when it gets to you? Like, are there certain things that you're like, this is gonna go well or this is gonna go bad or it's gonna be an issue or hard to get them rolled out?

Zach Larabee (02:25.068)
Yeah, there's definitely some key factors. I think that setting expectations at the corporate level is very important and preparing the customer for what the experience is going to be like. It's very important to understand whether their franchisees are actually autonomous in a way. Can they determine what exactly they need or is there a standard?

set up for this brand that is identified at the corporate level or mandated at the corporate level across every location. I would say that the when there's more variables such as being able when the franchisees are autonomous and can enable and can do whatever they want and brands let them do that that is both a good and bad thing. It's a great thing for the brand or for the customer rather the franchisees because they get to run their business the way they want to and down to the you know

however loyalty, gift card, online ordering platform they wanna use. For us, it's a lot easier if that's mandated at the corporate level. So, but that doesn't really determine whether or not it goes well. It definitely, you know, making it standardized definitely helps on our side, making it much more easier, I would say. But it's not necessarily.

Because you have to have a conversation with every franchisee if they are autonomous and identifying every, it's a lot more work involved with doing that. Not to say it couldn't go well, but those are some, that's a major factor I'd say. That's the biggest factor is whether, how much power does corporate have or rather what they mandate their franchisees to do.

Carter (04:13.994)
you'd say that's the main thing why they get delayed or why issues come up later on.

Zach Larabee (04:18.538)
Yeah, I would say so. That's definitely number one reason. Because if you know you're having these conversations with every individual owner, when you get to the level of a thousand locations, having a thousand different conversations with people can become very tedious and time consuming and identifying challenges that franchisee A may have differently than franchisee C or X or Y or Z or you know.

Carter (04:37.995)
Yeah.

Zach Larabee (04:48.934)
it's essentially a, it's essentially a sales rep having to work with a thousand customers on a crunch timeline because we do have a specific timeline in which, you know, corporate wants their brand rolled out on toast. so it is, definitely time consuming and you have to find the time of the day and have these conversations and find the answers that you need to go to for everyone. And, that can be very delayed if we have.

product gaps for some franchisees or if we have, if franchisees are determining what platforms they want to use that may be different than other franchisees. So there's a lot of the more variables again, as it can make it more challenging, but the more standardized it is, the more quickly we can do it. For example, we had one brand last year that a hundred locations, which seems daunting.

at first, but they're all standardized, all get this exact package across the board. A hundred different franchisees. That's a much easier conversation. They know what they're getting, their brand, their corporate level team prepared them, set expectations very well. So every time we were connecting with a franchisee, they immediately knew what we were talking about. They knew what they were getting. They knew what they had to do and they went smooth sailing for...

We got 100 locations rolled out in a month of that brand.

Carter (06:20.472)
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And I know you said set clear expectations. What information is usually or most often missing at handoff that can cause issues? And what should a seller ask to catch it early to set those right expectations? Like what are the type of questions they would ask?

Zach Larabee (06:35.606)
Yeah, identifying their tech stack, would think is one thing. It's better if we know exactly like all the possibilities, know, mitigating. If we talk about these variables, like mitigating the variables and understanding what exactly we're looking at there is very key. so knowing your customer, knowing that they have, you know, they have three options. These are XYZ platforms that they can use, whether for gift card loyalty and online ordering or

scheduling or payroll, whatever it may be, understanding the account executive, understanding that and really getting in really diving into that and understanding what their options are, what they're looking at or what exactly they are trying to do per se. If they are trying to make another, make a switch from what they're currently using really helps us in streamlining their onboarding process on a toast so that we are more prepared.

to have those conversations with every individual owner. And it's arming the team with the knowledge that they need in order to have an easy conversation, I would say.

Carter (07:49.049)
Stakeholder wise who tends to derail enterprise rollouts is like IT finance the franchisees themselves and how should sellers get them aligned by you know before closing again make sure things go smoothly

Zach Larabee (08:00.844)
Yeah, there were, so I've been at Toast for nine years now. And when I first started, was eight years ago doing this role as an enterprise sales coordinator by myself. back then I would have told you it was our internal systems a little bit, know, scaling a business, scaling to that level of what, of the customer base that we were reaching towards was very challenging and

to be quite honest, we weren't prepared for it at the time. So at that time, was definitely early on, it was internal struggles and internal process, lack of internal process, I should say, in who owns what in the onboarding journey, how are we gonna manage this, all the different nuances you can have of.

at this customer base that we weren't aware of. And now, you know, eight years later, we are very well aware of and we find fine tuned it and we're really running with it. Nowadays, it's usually the franchisees, I would say is the main challenge. They are their business owners. They don't see themselves as franchisees of a larger brand. They see themselves as their own small business owners. So they want to make that

decision themselves and you know, as a business owner, can imagine not many people like to be told what to do. The whole reason you start your own business is to not have a boss. I would say, or one of the reasons I would say is to be able to be autonomous. So when that decision making ability gets taken away from you, I feel like a lot of people kind of get defensive and retract back from it. But

Carter (09:36.727)
Yeah.

Zach Larabee (09:53.528)
getting everyone aligned, franchisees, getting them excited, being able, on the sales side, being able to create momentum and create excitement for the product that, and the change that's coming down on the brand is, helps motivate the franchisees to move faster and really streamline that process. yeah, I would say it's pretty much, the franchisees are typically the hardest ones to.

are the biggest challengers and the biggest blockers on a rollout. But getting them excited, creating that urgency, creating that motivation to switch, showing them why the brand and corporate team have made the decision to make this switch, this big, huge switch to their business, are all things that can be done to kind of help motivate them and help streamline that process, I'd say.

Carter (10:41.366)
Are there a lot of, I know you said they like to do their own, you they don't like to be told what to do, but are there a lot of expectation mismatches like, timelines, responsibilities, limitations, anything like that, or usually you guys set pretty clear expectations so that stuff doesn't come up as, as much.

Zach Larabee (10:55.246)
I wish we were as perfect as we all hope to be, but no, there's certainly lapses in communication, lapses in timelines being told. It's just like any other business, coordinating anything, coordinating an event as small as a birthday party or as large as an enterprise rollout, you need alignment with everyone and the team that you're working with.

Carter (11:01.346)
Yeah.

Zach Larabee (11:24.666)
And sometimes there's franchisees who don't, we set a date for them. want, sometimes we regionalize our install schedule. We'll start in California and work our way east or vice versa, go east to west. And there's always some, always people that miss the email or miss the call or just don't respond and don't wanna move, stick their feet in the mud. But...

Again, it goes back to kind of creating that urgency and creating that motivation to do so and showing them why that's, know, creating the why, showing the why of why the switch is happening can help mitigate those challenges and those risks with the teams.

Carter (12:09.314)
So, and I know you're the senior manager now, but in presentations and demos you did as a coordinator, what messaging usually made rollout smoother? And how did you, like, what are some things a seller could do to set clear expectations?

Zach Larabee (12:24.332)
I would say, yeah, identifying what is important to your customer is the number one thing I would say. Everyone has a why as to why and what they do. Whether it's if the business owner, maybe they're money motivated, every dollar and cent counts. Maybe it's creating a great experience in the restaurant. Maybe it's being able to have

Carter (12:24.556)
and like things they could say.

Zach Larabee (12:54.452)
the autonomy to do whatever they want and being able to try different things. Identifying the reason for why the person who owns and runs the business does the things they do is the biggest thing, is the biggest weapon as a sales rep you can have, I think. And then being able to touch on that and really show them the value in whatever that why is.

You know, the easy one is dollars and cents. Most business owners are very price oriented, you know, price conscious, I should say. And, you know, showing them why, hey, this is how toast is going to save you 100, 200, $1,000 a month is an easy way most of the time. You're not, you're losing money by not switching to toast right now. You know, every, every day you spend dragging your feet, you're watching a hundred dollars walk out the door that you could be saving and putting towards something else in your business.

That's an easy, that's the easiest one I'd say. That's very simple and straightforward.

Carter (14:01.41)
Well, you know, on that one, does that ever cause issues? Like, do people try to come in and undercut you guys and then it becomes a race to the bottom or not that often?

Zach Larabee (14:09.614)
I would say, I mean, for sure. You you look at some of our competitors, I won't name, I don't want to name names, but there's a lot of competitors that do all these free, you could look at any POS marketing. They offer free hardware, free this, free, you know, software subscriptions for a year, so on and so forth. All these big promotions in order to get in the door and then that's, you know, they have their customer. Not to say we didn't do that.

Yeah, at the beginning when Toast was first starting out, we had a huge marketing plan and marketing and you know, that worked to that level. We do that with some customers today. We sign our master agreements with promotions that are time oriented. You know, if you sign up and get onboarded onto Toast within six, 12 months, you get X percentage discount higher than what you'll get after 12 months.

So yeah, there's, mean, there's certainly, that's just business and that's sales. I think that you can, you're always going to have a threat of getting undercut. But luckily with the sort of master service agreements across brands, there's not really, there's no room for negotiation really, because you're a franchisee of this, of this corporate entity, of this corporate brand, the brand, you know, put it this way as it is. Working with that corporate team and I, and really,

It's really helpful to have to be armed with the knowledge of why corporate made the decision to switch and being able to communicate that to franchisees because, you know, they're they're business owners as well. You know, they're not making a bad deal. They're not negotiating bad terms necessarily. mean, you know, 99 percent of the time you hope that's not the case. They want a good deal for the franchisees. They're getting a good deal for themselves. You know, they see the value in what they're doing, whether it's money or if it's, you know, more.

Carter (15:57.142)
Yeah.

Zach Larabee (16:06.722)
visibility into their data or methods of creating a stronger business and sharing those reasons down to the smaller business owner is really important and that's how you can really sell the value of your product.

But yeah, of course, everyone's gonna come in and undercut you, try to undercut you at any time, so.

Carter (16:39.404)
All right, that makes sense. And you know what I was really curious about? Because Toast is a pretty, is a huge company. How did you win employee of the year in 2020? Was it a lot of politicking, people liked you, more so results or kind of a mix of a lot of different things?

Zach Larabee (16:54.926)
I like to think people like me, no, 2020 was an interesting year. A lot of it had to do with COVID, to be quite honest. you know, I tried to be as at the time I was one of two enterprise sales coordinators. So there was a lot of business that I was doing was very efficient. I thought we were having, you know, I think we did upwards of four, 4500, I want to say that year locations.

and like 3000 of them were by were contracted by me, which is was a pretty wild number at the time.

When COVID first hit, it hit the restaurant industry really hard. So when that happened, Toast had a massive layoff. And at the time, as I said, it was me and one other person doing this job for thousands of restaurants. We were furloughed, my coworker and I, and no one else was doing our job. So I...

Carter (17:39.97)
Yeah

Zach Larabee (18:04.321)
took the initiative. I had been at Toast for three years at the time. I care about Toast a lot and you know, I don't I think that I think it's a great product. I think it's a great company. I like the leader. I love the leaders of it and the founders of it. I'm a big restaurant foodie person. I believe in the restaurant industry. I've worked in restaurants growing up. Having meals and restaurants are important to me and that experience and building that experience. You know, that's where memories are made in my opinion.

a lot of great memories. But so with that in mind, I took it upon myself to document everything that I was doing and step by step rules. We didn't really have that at the time because it was just me and this my teammate doing it ourselves. Wasn't there was no documentation. We built the process and we're like, OK, this is it. This is how we do it. And we just had it on memory because we were the only two people in the company doing it. I took I took the time right before

I was officially off, laid off, or furloughed, I was furloughed, but...

to document everything of the process that we were doing. On my last day, it was like a 15, 20 page word doc of just step by step of all, here, this is what you gotta do. You gotta do this. And going back to when I talked about our systems being not ready for this, there was a lot of little nuances and little picky things within our system, our onboarding platform on Salesforce that we had to do in order to make things work correctly.

And I had to document it all of that. There was like one little field you had to hit. You had to click it first and then click this and then go unclick that and then go do this and then enable that and go do that. A lot of tricky little things that I'm so happy we've improved from there from there now. Documented all that, shared it with our with my director and VP of sales and the funny story they they we were supposed to be furloughed until end of August. This was April, beginning of April, we got furloughed.

Zach Larabee (20:11.075)
they called us back in May and, the director and the VP got on the call and were like, we saw your doc. We went step by step and it still took us an hour and a half to do like one location. And so at the time, yeah, we were doing, my colleague and I were doing thousands in the year and they're like, we, but taking the time and documenting all that, having the, having the.

Carter (20:32.522)
Yeah, so they needed you back, much, you're saying.

Zach Larabee (20:40.395)
initiative to do that for them, I think went a long way and they saw the value in... That essentially showed the value of our role. when we came back, there was a big, huge backlog of locations that were needing to roll out because at the time, know, parts of the country as it goes on throughout the summer of 2020, some parts of the country were still kind of

operating as if there was nothing affecting them and other parts weren't. So those ones that were still open and operating as it was needed to still move and roll out. And so there was a huge backlog because there was no one doing this for a month. So when we came back, we cleared the backlog in about six to eight weeks and

then took it from there and documented them more process, built more process. And I like to think that's, that was a big reason as to why I got employee of year. That and I try to be as friendly to my cross-functional partners across different departments as much as possible. We're all, it's all one team at Toast. know, if whatever, whatever I can do to make my...

colleague downstream, whether it's onboarding consultants, business operations, the customer success team, which is our account management team, whatever I can do at the front of the process to make their lives easier is important. It streamlines the whole process and it gets creates a great customer experience on the customer side. And then they're happy and go talk about toast and be like, well, my experience was great. I love toast so much. And that enables us to

be able to market and sell more and make us more successful. So I'm a big believer in, you know, leave it better than you got it and help your downstream partners. And I think that that led to earning that award.

Carter (22:50.776)
That makes a lot of sense. So you'd say if somebody was trying to do the same thing, you would say take initiative, like go above and beyond, be friendly with your downstream partners. That is a lot of what you would suggest or you'd have other tips.

Zach Larabee (23:02.795)
Absolutely. You know, it's a bit, it's a team, you know, in sport, we think about sports all the time. A lot of people make the business to sports analogy. It's without being cliche, it's, it's real. It's we're all here for the same goal. You want your business to succeed. You want to be successful in your role. You want to be successful in your job. You want your, you want to show that you're an important part of something.

you make it better for your teammates. You're only as strong as your weakest link in that regard. So if I can streamline the customer's journey and make the lives easier of my teammates, then I'm gonna try to do that. And making the customer experience easy and streamlined and happy and joyous, then they're gonna go talk about how great toast is to other people and then that makes it easier for to sell and then that makes it easier for me to...

get more locations to onboard. Yeah, so it's, it's create just ownership. Wanting to wanting to leave it better than you got it, like I said, and I think that a lot of, you know, not everyone has the opportunity, I think to do that, which is I know I'm not to say I'm very privileged to be at a company that I believe in and that I like and I

you know, I'm very happy to be at. I completely understand that that's not the situation everybody's in. But I understand that my coworkers are doing the same for me, I think. I believe that. don't wanna, no, we're not bashing heads against each other. We're one team. They're just doing their job. Sometimes, you know, I run into some red tape.

per se and we differing opinions of how to handle something or I'm asking whether it may be like, can we get an exception here? Or like, you're being kind of strict on this. Can we be a little more lenient? My advice would be you're all on one team. No one's trying to stop you from doing your job or doing well at your job. They're just trying to do their job well.

Zach Larabee (25:24.371)
And understanding that and having that mutual understanding is what will benefit everyone in the long run.

Carter (25:34.54)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, cool. I think we got some good stuff here. I'll stop it here.