Change Connect + Wave: strategy meets simplicity

Change Connect is a boutique sales consultancy that helps businesses transform their sales processes and increase their top-line revenue. They work in the background, crunching numbers and optimizing systems for max productivity. The nature of Change Connect means they have to be master organizers, able to keep track of a whole lot of data. Wave keeps these organizers organized by helping them keep tabs on their own accounting data.

A helping hand for businesses, from start to finish

Agnes Lan became the Director of Business Development at Change Connect about eight years ago. Lan has around two decades of experience not only laying out strategies for businesses, but also working with them to implement those strategies. With that knowledge in hand, moving forward with Change Connect allowed her to do both.

“When we designed the formula for Change Connect, we pretty much had the best of both worlds, where we’re doing strategy work for small to mid-sized businesses, and we also make sure that people implement the change,” Lan says. “That’s our biggest thing, and our value proposition at Change Connect: we’re not there to just sell you the strategy, we’re really there to help you with the change and the transformation. Because we know change management is key to getting return on investment in any strategy or implementation execution.”

Since they started, Change Connect has had a nearly 100% satisfaction rate. They’ve helped startups put systems in place, and bigger businesses grow competitive enough to be bought out by larger firms. “Or we’ve worked with companies that have been around forever that don’t really have a sales system in place, and we go in and systematize the sales part,” Lan says. “So now they can predict their sales moving forward rather than just rely on their reps that have been there for 20 years.”

Keeping track of things

It’s probably not a surprise that a company that works so much with data would need to have systems in place to keep track of their own data. Lan says Change Connect uses Wave to track transactions before they’re sent off to their bookkeeper and accountant. But it also allows for a few things that those people can’t take care of because of the cycles they’re working on.

“Wave allows me to also have the ability to invoice myself as I need to, rather than go on a regular invoicing cycle,” Lan says. “It’s comprehensive and easy enough for us to do things that aren’t following a cycle. So the bookkeeper and accountant will take care of things during the cycle, but if there’s some sort of invoicing need or deposit that we have to track or what not, it allows us to manage that stuff off the cycle much easier.”

As well, Change Connect has new ways to take payments, now.

“One of the things we’ve been using more of lately is, traditionally, we’re not a company that takes credit cards,” Lan says. “We’ve had a few requests lately to do that and we were able to accomodate fairly easily using Wave, because there’s a pay-per-use fee rather than a subscription service.”

Tools of the trade

Like Wave, Change Connect uses tools that can make a company grow and set systems in place that make the business part of life easier. No matter the system, it can always be improved on.

“We want to grow strategically, when it’s the right time to grow, with the right team,” Lan says. “We want to keep helping organizations to do better in sales, because there is still a lot of education out there. Sales can really be systematized. There are tools out there to help people with sales, sales recruitment. There’s so much out there in the world of sales that we can help small to mid-sized businesses thrive with.”