Podcast Episode 24: Episode 193: Choosing Services & Products That Support Your Mission

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Choosing the right services and products is critical in ministry. What questions should you ask? Plus, explore feedback from nearly 100 churches and vendors in the 2025 Integrated Services Survey.

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This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock partner Triumph Tech, a full service specialist partner. Rock partners provide crucial support for Spark Development Network and important services for the Rock community. Connect with Triumph Tech today at rockrms.com/partners. Welcome to this episode of the Rockcast podcast. I'm Emily Forman, and joined by Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo, and we are going to tell you everything that's been happening in the Rock world since we last recorded a podcast, which was be about a month ago, I think. So there's been a lot going on. Today, we're going to talk about, of course, where we are with our version releases now, which is most relevant if you're listening to the podcast right after we release it. We are going to talk about kind of what's going on with our development team. A lot of good things on that front. We've been doing some work on a new integrated services survey we'll tell you all about. And we have some great insights for you on how to wisely make the technical decisions that you may find in your day to day life and in a few community announcements. So let's dive right in. Nick, catch us up. Well, I've got some exciting news to report. We are finally live with version 17. Super excited to finally have that out the door. And seventeen point zero was a year in the making. Yes. And if you haven't read the release notes yet, you'll definitely want to go see that. There's 181 items in there to read about. And some of them are fantastic, just the amazing features that we poured in there. It's funny to think that I think LMS is one of those items. Yeah, that we started- That's one line item out of That was so long ago. Was one of the first things we started to work on. I feel we needed some party noises right there without announcement, I wanted to press the button. We are also working on 17.1. And so normal, we will have a patch release of 17. There's nothing really super critical yet, but we typically expect that to come within a few weeks or so of 17. Just anything that people run into. But this was the first week it's been pretty quiet, just really nothing significant to report. So we'll see next week how things go too. And then beyond 17.1, there's just some really cool things happening in our environment, in our world, the development world. We've got a new director that's started. Right, director of software development officially. This week. Yes. The day we released seventeen point zero, so that's really That was a big day for us here. And we also now have a bunch of new candidates, developer candidates coming our way, and they're looking pretty high quality, right, John? Yeah. I mean, I really feel God has really brought us some great help. And I'm excited about what's happening because I think it's gonna help us level up in the in the short term. But what I'm most excited about is where this leads us to in the long haul. We've kinda tasked this new director to to help grow the next generation. Right before this podcast, we were talking with a senior pastor and he was telling us about how Rock is empowering his church and it's really become a foundational piece of the church. And the whole time, I'm , oh, man, don't mess this up. And and it's kind of reassuring knowing that we're pouring so much time and attention and thought into the next generation because this has to live beyond our careers. And I think God has provided some really great young talent on the team. And our task right now is not only to grow a great product and a great community, but to grow a great next level of leadership, and I think that's happening. And it's exciting. Seventeen is excitement, we should celebrate. Seventeen one has some features in it. Wait, what? Oh, yeah. It's not just bug fixes. It's new features. It's a communication template builder, something we kinda hope to get into 17, but we didn't want to wait hold it up. So it's in there, and it'll have the the underlying bits needed to run Rock Mobile Chat, which is Oh, so cool. Huge. Yes. And there's a few other little small surprises in there. Those are very understated, , micro announcements. You just slid there sideways. Yeah. And we kind of I don't wanna say promise because that's a I feel that's a once you that's a huge commitment, but we don't want version 18 to be as large as 17. Right. I think we have a pretty good roadmap on that. And work is already much underway, and we hope to release that way quicker than than seven 16 to seven, 17 to 18 would be much shorter. So but really looking forward to, , seeing some of these candidates and and even just some of the new leadership coming in. It's super encouraging. And so if you haven't started your testing for 17 yet, this is a great time to get started on that because we're we're off to the races. We're moving forward quickly. Yeah. And as as always, pre alpha is always up to date, so you can get your learning and your experimentation done at any time. Yes. That's right. Let me add one more thing. So I did hear from somebody right before Easter, and they said, Hey, is anybody else running V17 beta in production? I'm , Well, there could be a few. And he said, Well, I'm gonna wait till Monday. But it turns out he didn't. He did it right before the weekend. So it was quiet. Just wanted to make sure people realized it is it has gone through a lot of testing. Mhmm. Yeah. I think the testing for alpha beta was very rigorous. Yeah. Community did a lot of great testing, and then the team was very responsive to fixing a lot of the things that were found. So I feel that was probably one of our better testing. Yeah. And I want to say hats off again to those alpha test That's great point. There's just a number of them that went above and beyond again to really help us identify, especially a really weird one that we just ran into late in the beta phase. Without her help, Tiffany Bunny, we would not have been able to track that down as quickly. So thank you. Very cool. So many exciting things. Let's talk about the annual integrated services survey that we just did. What is that? That is a big name for a really important thing that we do. Because we're open as a platform and a community, it means that it's possible for many different other platforms, services, providers to come into the ecosystem and offer things that benefit churches. And we think that's fantastic. That's exactly the kind of ecosystem that we want to build. The flip side of that is it can be a little confusing to look at all the options out there and understand what might make one unique or what might make a different have a different service, slightly different. Those things can be really hard to navigate. And so the best way to understand how something is performing, how it's serving churches in the Rock community is really based on the people that use it. And so we started a couple years ago an annual survey to ask you in the community, which of these services and platforms do you currently use in conjunction with Rock? Tell us about them. And we ask for two measurements. We ask for a numerical rating for the overall experience of using them out of 10. And we ask for some written summary about why you gave it that rating. And that's very important because that's the actual experience. Right? That's what somebody wants to know about. And on our side, we can't know all of those things. We don't use all of those services. We're thrilled that the open community is thriving, but we don't have the insights into exactly what that looks . Only you do. So we basically wanted to create something consumer reports for churches that use Rock. Now we don't need a whole separate organization, and we wanna do it in the Rock style. Right? So that means let's crowdsource and let's make it open, and that's exactly what we did. So a a big thank you to the 80 churches that participated and replied on multiple fronts about the various services they use. I think we had three fifty different items that were submitted as far as I use this service and here's what I think. And that information is completely without influence by the core team, I just wanna add. So the way that we conduct this survey is we send it out to everyone in the community with a couple reminders asking for insights. Again, those insights are gold. They're reality. And then we bring those results back and tabulate them. So the way we do that is we take the average of the numerical value, and then we take all of the summaries, the written summaries, and we run that through AI to get an aggregated response or result that doesn't specifically quote any specific one, but that kind of puts them all together and gets the themes. And if you wanna know exactly what that AI prompt is and how we do it, the way the survey works, it actually can be found online right there with the results. So there's we're trying to be as transparent as possible in all of this because the goal of the survey is transparency, that you should know how things are going with others who use the service. So we're really excited about that. That's rolling out kind of as we speak. And the easiest way to find it is to go to our sponsors page, which is rockrms.com/sponsors. And right at the top of the page, there's a link to the integrated services survey. You can go there and if you are considering moving into a new service area and you don't have a provider, or if there's some reason you're considering switching providers, this is a great research point and we strongly encourage you to make it one part of your multifaceted research. Of course, you'll wanna speak with various providers and you may wanna talk to some people in your maybe your regional hub specifically about things, but this is a step you don't wanna leave out in your reviews. So this year we did something one step beyond what we did in the previous survey, and we actually separately surveyed giving providers. So there were many Again, Rock is open, right? So we don't attach ourselves to any one provider. We don't have anything that we recommend or support, but we do know how complicated it can be to look, especially in that area, at all the facets of fees and approaches and all the things that can be evaluated with different giving platforms. So we surveyed the most used providers in the community and asked them to answer a few specific questions that are probably the kind of things already available on their website. So we can bring it back and put it into one place, and you can see all of those there. Now, decision you wanna make is obviously made by the research and speaking with the providers listed, but it sure does take a lot of leg workout to see some of those basic things available right there at your fingertips. So we're really excited about that. We had some great participation. And again, this is one piece of your critical evaluation if you're looking at potentially moving into that space, you don't have an integrated provider in that area, or if that's something where you feel you need to make a move. Yeah, awesome. It's a great tool. And when's it coming out? It should be available at about the publication of this podcast. So if it isn't, it'll be next day, but we will add a link to that in the show notes. So that'll be the easiest way to get there. That's awesome. Yep. It takes a lot of work. This is not something that just comes together by itself. It actually has there's quite a lot happening behind the scenes to to bring it to life. Definitely. So thank you to everyone who participated, both giving vendors in the new area as well as the community, those of you who replied and told us about your experiences. Okay. I feel I just really monopolized this podcast so far. Let's move on to something else. John, you talk. Okay. Well, is a very related topic, and it comes down to what I wanted to talk a little bit about is how do you make wise decisions in product selection and service selection. I think it's critical that we make good choice when we do this. Now, I've I've talked a little bit about my career path in the past on other podcasts. But during a time at Honeywell, I always thought Honeywell was a weird time because I I I kinda especially in the beginning, went from jumped around in teams a little bit based on where they wanted me to to go next. For a brief moment, I I worked in what they called the commercial packages team. I was glad that was a short lived assignment because I didn't it. It was very boring. I wanted to do more hands on technology and basically help them create rubrics for picking different products and services within the aerospace division that I worked. And it was God ordained though, because I learned a lot there. I mean, I wanted to learn it, but I'd learned a lot. And it's basically how do you do product selection and how do you run projects to make these decisions? And it's really important that you make a good decision. You might say, Well, yeah, I can see that at Honeywell because you're making multimillion dollar decisions. These products were very expensive. But I think it's equally important in the church. Not only is it money, that's obviously a huge one, right? We wanna be good biblical stewards of the money that people have given us. But it goes way way way beyond that. Money is is probably the first thing that comes to mind. But if you make a wrong misstep with a product or service, it really impacts your mission. It's gonna set you back easily a year, possibly multiple years. You picked the wrong product, then you're not having success. It takes a while to implement it. It takes a while to to give it a try. It takes a while to try to fix whatever's broken. And now you gotta start all over. Easily a year of mission lost. It also impacts job satisfaction. No one likes working on something that's not working, or having to work uphill, or trying to convince people that, hey, maybe we made the wrong decision. That greatly impacts job satisfaction. In fact, it's probably one of the most common things I hear people talk about why they left a job. It's , it just couldn't be successful there, or they wouldn't listen to certain changes. So time, lost mission and job satisfaction, but also lost time in terms of getting things done. I think oftentimes, not just in the church space, but in secular space, but for sure in the church space too, tech purchases are often made on emotions, relationships, and surface level appeal. we're humans. That's basically how we make decisions off the cuff. Right? And so I think one of the things that was an eye opener to me was the rigor that needs to go into these decisions to make sure that we're making the right decision, and the impact again if you make the wrong one. So some common pitfalls to avoid. Slick presentations. Okay. I mean, they call it sales for a reason. Right? And just because it looks polished doesn't necessarily mean it's gonna fit your your mission, your ministry, or it actually does what it says it does. Sales people kinda have a reputation for a reason. That's not labeling all of them that way, but there certainly are those who do slick presentations, but it doesn't actually perform. So that and on a sense, that's shame on them. Right? Mhmm. Well, here's a shame on us. We fall for or have this concept of a silver bullet thinking. We think that the answer to our problems is going to be a simple, easy I there's requiring little effort on my part. Silver bullets don't exist. There might be an edge case once or twice in a career, but for the most part, success looks hard work and looks more coveralls than it does a three piece suit. Mhmm. I can go back to the thirty years of of my experience in in the tech industry. It's always gonna be more effort than you think, and success always comes from effort. There's no easy magic wand. But we fall for this trick all the time. , if only I got had this, then my whole life would be fixed. I fall for that all the time too for smaller type projects products. , oh, if I only get this new tool for taking notes, I will now never miss a a thing. And well, it might help me. But at the end of the day, it's gonna come down to my discipline. So so throw away that silver bullet promise or silver bullet thinking. Another common miss a pitfall is relational sales tactics. So as a salesperson, you want to build And they teach you this right from the beginning. We've probably read articles or books about this, the best way to influence a purchase is to become relational. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can be if that's becoming what's driving the product selection. You wanna have a good relationship, sure, with these products and services. But if relationships is what's driving the primary decision, that's probably gonna lead to not necessarily a success long term. It also sometimes causes a differing of opinions within the organization. The person who has the relationship loves the service long term, and those who are actually left working with it are often , yeah, this isn't good, but there's nothing I can really do because there's a great relationship, and we kinda sometimes, as humans, turn a blind eye to certain things when we have a good relationship. Another thing that I could comment as a pitfall is just the lack of follow-up. So you can just remember, you're probably never gonna get a better response than in the sales process. So if you don't have good follow-up on the sales process, it's not gonna tend to get better. Right? And then we can realize this, we're never as good of a person than we're dating than when we're married. We're putting on our best Yep. Self when we're dating. When we get married, sometimes it's easy to fall back into normal. Right? So just realize that. So follow-up. That's a key distinguishing factor about the organization. So maybe some strategies for making wise product decisions. First of all, start with mission. Does this product align with your ministry goals? Now oftentimes, if you're out looking, that's probably a little bit easier to ascertain. But sometimes you're not even looking, but all of sudden, you get forwarded an email from somebody saying, hey, this product, look look at this. We should do this. The first thing you have to ask is , oh, what ministry goal is this is this actually trying to achieve? And making sure it's in alignment with your goals. And that basically goes to the next one, which is understanding the needs. So you should list out your pain points before buying a solution or looking at a solution. You start getting tempted by all the slick presentations and high relational sales, take a step back and first say, Okay, what is it that we're looking for? It's really easy once you start the buying process, that all of a sudden things can get off the tracks. I often said in the experience in my personal life, it's , Hey, never step onto a car lot until what you want, that's what you really need. The worst thing you can do is , Hey, we have nothing to do this afternoon. Let's just go look at cars. Guaranteed, you are moving to buying a car at that point. The emotional self kicks in, and now you are on a slide, and at the end of the slide is a new car. So don't ever do that. I haven't met a person who has that much discipline. So go into it first, and doing some little bit of work, understanding what you need, basically doing some of these other steps before you engage with highly rational salespeople and slick presentations that have silver bullets. The next one is very unique to, I think, the Rock community, and that is consult the community. In a lot of secular spaces, you can't do that. Yeah. Your competitors are not going to want to help you. Or if they do, you can't trust what they're gonna tell you. Do you think they really want you to pick a better ERP system so that you can be more competitive against them, lowering the cost, and that they're gonna have to compete against? Course not. Now there are some secular consulting companies Forrester or Gartner Group that kinda do that a little bit for you. You can kinda trust them, but those are very expensive, and and they actually don't really participate in the church space, by the way. There's not any money in it for them. But we have something better. We have the community. We have people who are working the trench and are are doing and working with these these clients, and that's why this integrated partner surgery is so so important. And another strategy for when making your decision is try to do a pilot. And that's not always possible, but when possible, try before you buy. And then test it with a very small team. If you're looking for a small group type of product or something that, you can kinda do that. Giving's gonna be a little bit harder, although you can still do it. But make sure that if the vendor doesn't want you to do a pilot, maybe there's a reason. I'd also say evaluate support. Go try the support and don't tell them you're coming. Just pretend. And if you say, Well, they're not gonna be able to help me find out the product, well, find a church who does have it, and just say, Hey, do you mind if I Will you help join me on a test call on support? I just wanna see how it goes. I think another one is just really making sure you understood that understand the total cost of ownership. Great point. Looking at the initial price is is one thing, but you have to look at training support. What are future upgrades cost? What's the infrastructure cost if you have to run it yourself? Making sure you understand the total cost of ownership. And then one of the things that's commonly not considered is training. Yep. And that's just not saying, well, they have the training class to go to. Well, it might be your time training your staff. If you buy a tool and you don't train your staff, you basically just wasted a whole bunch of money. So look at the whole total cost. And I'd also say too, another good one is getting multiple voices. It's very common sometimes in the church world that these decisions are made by the executive team, and they don't get the input or voice from those who are actually gonna be using it in the trench or from technical users. Because of the relational tactics of some of the sales, and because of the silver bullet thinking and the select presentation, the decision's already made. why wouldn't we? We've already we're doing this, get on board. I mean, I've heard that from several people in the communities. I didn't have a choice. I was just told get on board. Man, that is really not good. Getting multiple voices within the organization is super, super, super important. And I'd say if you want to get that changed, you can say, Well, I don't have the ability to change that. Well, the best thing you can do to change that is to get out in front of it. It's too late once the presentation's been made. Right? They've already been to the car lot. Guess what? They're buying the car. But if you get out ahead of that proactively and say, hey, what we feel is a is a really great way of of evaluation is is is these criteria, getting multiple voices. Now they're , they hear it ahead of time, and it's much more it's much easier for them to go, oh, yeah. what? This is a good way of doing it. Because we're not putting enough rigor into the product selection, which is what we're talking about here is putting more rigor and structure into that, realizing the cost and the trade offs if we get it wrong. Okay. So let's go a little bit more deeper into how do you select a product or service. And this is where we created these really rich rubrics within Honeywell to do this. And they would change based on each product, of course. Now, I'm not saying we need to go to that level. We were spending tens of millions of dollars in some cases on this software, so we had to is wise. We can pull that back a little bit, but it must be done if you're spending If you're buying a two user seats of of some note taking software, don't You don't have to do it that level. But most of the things that we're talking about are gonna live for a long time, and they're gonna have huge consequences. the the giving tool that you're using is gonna have a huge consequence. It's gonna be very difficult. And I would say anything that touches your members and attendees, you have to be doubly careful of. Because changes there is impacting a lot of people, moving a lot of cheeses, And if it doesn't go right, could mean breaking trust with them. So how do you do this product selection? First, again, define the problem clearly. Don't start looking for tools until you can clearly articulate what do the real problems you're trying to solve. That great quote, forget who said it, you might remember Emily, a problem while stated is half solved. I don't remember who said it, but I quote it all the time. Yeah. So and we find that is so true, , even in technical things. If we can clearly articulate the problem, it's pretty much almost solved. And that's the same thing with product selection. Here's a test question you could say. If we had nothing holding us back, what would success look in this area? What are the features? What would we hope to see? Don't even start looking at the products. Don't second guess, can or can they not do it? Just articulate what is it that you're looking for. Next, so define the problem clearly, involve the right people. Form a small selection team with a mixture of ministry leaders, administrators, and tech leads. I think it's important to have all three. You could say, well, I think the admins and the tech leads can make this decision. Maybe, but you may not be fully versed on the ministry part. I know when I started working at the church, I often got that wrong. I mistook the I assumed what this ministry strategy was, and I got that wrong a lot in the first part, especially at the church I worked at, it was really about reaching lost. A lot of discipleship, it was still important. Not saying it wasn't important to them, but reaching the lost was so much more important. It took me, honestly, a couple years to really get that in tune. So ministry leaders, admins, and tech leads should all be a part of of this process. And I would also say avoid letting one person drive the decision making in isolation. So sometimes you could be tempted to get this small team and say, Okay, well, have a voice, but it's not gonna be part of the decision making. Okay, that's probably gonna end up with back to relationships mattering, silver bullet thinking, and the things that we've just talked about. So just make sure that people really do have an active voice in the actual process of making the decision. Really, at the end of the day, the rubric that you create should drive the decision. Mhmm. At the end of the day, you add up your rubric and the scoring, and for the most part, that should drive it. Unless it's super close, then you can maybe the rubric doesn't have to be, , the the only driving factor if you're off by a tenth of a point, , okay. And then then we can kick into some other things. But let the rubric drive it, and you gotta set set that rubric before you start talking to people. Yes. Because all of us will start creating a rubric that plays to the strength of the person we want to win. Yes. Maybe without knowing it. Guaranteed. , I'm not saying we're intentionally trying to do it, but but we all do it. , we're human beings. I do. I I don't, again, intentionally do it, but I'm rooting for the one that I really want because they had the pretty website. So that goes down to creating this evaluation framework, aka rubric. So use a shared rubric and rate the options, consider scoring based on I'm gonna start with community feedback. Okay. Know, the people in the Rock community, they're The survey. They're all smart. Right? And they learned. A genius learns from his mistake I'm sorry. A smart person learns from his mistakes, a genius learns from mistakes of others. So community feedback, fit for ministry need. Mhmm. Okay. So go, what is it our senior leadership is trying to achieve? How does this do that? Ease of use, of course, we want something that's easy to use. In in our use case, integration with Rock, we want to keep our data in one place so we can make wise ministry decisions. Integration with Rock is very important. Support, training quality. Obviously, you're gonna have your own part of training, but the more that they can do and the more resources they have for you to show your staff, the better off you'll be. Cost, upfront, ongoing. Vendor reputation and mission alignment. Longevity and stability. Sometimes that one has to take a little bit , when you're in highly innovative spaces, that one can take a little bit of a a of a backseat. But again, in your rubric, you get to score that. Right? So you're gonna go through and you're gonna make this list of your rubric, and you're gonna get weightings to each one. So not each line item is gonna be the same importance. But really, we're coming down to back to the ministry need is , does this product solve the that you're solve the problem you're trying to address? That goes back to the pre thinking that you're doing. Okay. So now you have your rubric, you have the right people involved, you have clarity on the problem. The next thing to do is to create a short list. But you have to do that wisely. You wanna start with a very broad list, making sure you haven't missed anything. I mean, the amount of time I've spent looking and making sure that I've seen the whole landscape, that takes a lot of time. So you wanna look broadly, but then you wanna start as quickly as possible limiting it down to the to a shortlist. You can't review 50 different products. Yep. So what are the top three to five that you're gonna go out and and really look at? Now in the Rock and ecosystem, that's a little bit easier, having tools , , the integrated partner survey is very helpful. That's kinda done a lot of the work for you, but you you wanna make sure that there's nothing out there new and and and coming. And again, be very careful about the flashy options. Make sure that they can deliver and that they pass the mission test. Does this do what you need to do? I'd also probably say too, just make sure that Rock doesn't already do it. There's a lot of people selling products and services, and I hear from the community all the time That's a great point. And they keep saying, but Rock already does that. Maybe a ministry leader is saying, hey, we gotta use this tool because my buddy's using it over at XYZ Church. It's , okay. But Rock can already do that. So that's a very common one I hear almost on a weekly basis. Next up is scheduled demos, but when you do it with purpose. So don't just have them come in and talk about whatever. they don't know what you're wanting. They don't know where you're at. They don't know what matters to you. So do it with purpose. So prepare demo questions ahead of time and share them with them so that they know , hey, what you're looking at. It's also good, sometimes people are very hesitant to do this, but I would say it's very important, is share with them who else you're looking at. Allows them to tell you a little bit about the other systems. When I worked at Honeywell, I actually got to work with a brilliant guy. He was two levels above me, so I didn't have a ton of FaceTime, but I watched him all the time, and I learned so much from him. He would often tell us, , hey, you're out of school now, but you still need to learn. The best place you can learn is not back at the university, it's with with vendors. They're actually paid to train you about their product and the industry. So get them to come in as often as you can, learn from them, question them, interrogate them, have them play against each other. So hey, I'm looking at have product x, I'm looking at product z too. What are the best things how would you compare and contrast your product to their product? Well, we do this and this much better. Okay. Tell me at least two things that they do better than you. And if you don't, I'm gonna judge you against that. Really force them. You can put the screws to them a little bit. And honestly, any product is gonna have one or two characteristics better than any other products. If they don't if they say there aren't any, , that's kind of a lie. Ask them things , can you show us real world use cases that aligns with this ministry goal? How does your tool integrate with RockRMS? And then don't just say, yes, it does. Okay. Well, tell me. How does that work? Now, you may not understand anything they say, that's okay. , you can pretend that you just nod your head. Okay. Okay. But if they can't get down to a level, maybe even past your understanding, then maybe they're the wrong person. Typically too, when you work with sales, there's two types of sales. There's the sales guy, and there's a sales engineer usually, and the sales engineer usually has the more technology. So look for that. And if they can't answer it to your liking, just say, hey, is it possible to get a sales engineer who can maybe assist with some of these more technical questions? But if they know that ahead of time, they should be prepared and they should bring that to the first one. And then another great question is what does onboarding look ? Record these demos, make sure that you can go back to them. Can't tell you many times. I'm , didn't they say that? Or you think your brain's gonna catch all of it, but it doesn't. Because you're gonna have to come back out of these and fill out your rubric. Ask for references. You have to ask for references, and then get in touch with them. I can't tell you embarrassing how sometimes I've asked for the reference and then I never followed up with them. And then ask them real questions. And I'd say as much as it takes three levels of people on your team, you want references at each of those levels too. A ministry contact, an administrative person who uses it day to day, and a technical contact. You might just ask for the head, to have these three types of contacts, at least two organizations using your product. Ask real questions , would you have differently if you could start all over? Is their support very helpful? What surprised you after going live? Oh, ouch. That's a good one. That's a great question. There should be at least one thing. I I don't care how great your product is or how great your implementation is. I mean, there's always something that could have gotten a little bit better. That's right. And every organization is different too. So it's something you may not be able to anticipate. Yeah. So now you've had them come in, you've asked for the references. If you can, we talked about, pilot with boundaries when possible. Do small scale tests with, , a limited number of people. Avoid having to go all in. There's a concept within companies, they call it the moat. So once they get you on the other side of the moat, you're in. Not only can people not get to you, but you can't get out. The moat is a very bad thing. You wanna be very cautious about this. A lot of these services do have a pretty big moat that keeps you in. And just realize that in some cases, that's not necessarily saying never use them, just realize you're stuck on the other side of the moat. So make sure this is the person you really want to be with long term. And if maybe there's an alternative that doesn't have a moat, maybe that might be a better option if they're very close. , that might give them a little bit of thing. That might be something on your rubric. Are we stuck? How stuck are we if we make this decision? And that's gonna vary by the type of products and services. Obviously, some products and services have literally no moat, and some have big moats. Review the pricing transparently, understand all the light layers of cost. I mean, some of the pricing is a little confusing. Know, pricing for, , Tableau, kinda confusing. , lots of different levels, and and they're not trying to hide anything. They're but they're trying to tailor the pricing to meet the best needs for everybody and that also met while maximizing profits. You With them, it sometimes it depends on what time of the sales quarter it is. , and they literally tell you that, , hey, it's the end of the sales quarter, so I can do better. I prefer I don't that. I don't to be rushed. I don't think pricing should matter based on what time of the quarter it is, but, , whatever. But you wanna understand the base cost, required add ons, training and support costs, future costs, overages, scaling. Usually, the last services will have, well, you get this many transactions per month. Well, what does it look if I go over And then you have to really make sure you understand what you look . Super watch out for intro pricing. , that's scary. So you read the pricing, that that was that step. Next step is pray. , that's something in the secular world we didn't Commercial packages division that Honeywell did not teach me about that one. But it isn't just a business decision. It is really kingdom work. And so sometimes I know some people say, well, at the end of the day, church is kinda a business. I mean, I get what they're saying, but I don't really that thinking. I'm not saying it's necessarily a % wrong, but I think it leads you to start thinking in a in a way that I don't think is healthy. Right? And so I yeah. There is a kingdom work to it. There's stewardship that we have to be cognizant of, but but beyond stewardship too is this mission, making sure we're maximizing the mission impact that we have through these decisions that we make. So realize this isn't just all business. This is a kingdom thing that we should pray over it. We should involve wise counsel when needed, counsel of other people at their churches, the council maybe of your elder board, or maybe key leaders within your church. If your church is over probably a couple hundred, you probably have a subject matter expert inside your church. You probably do. The scary part is many churches are making decisions and they're not They don't have the expertise needed to make the decision wisely. And that's okay. That's not a value judgment. , it's just these Every church can have a technology expert on staff, but there's probably one within the congregation. Now, the difficult thing I would say is it's hard to know if that person really is or isn't. That's a good point. But what I would do in that case is , there's a church near you who has one, have that person help you interview a congregant or a set of congregants to say, help me vet. Once you help me with the vetting of this person, there'll be a a great wise counsel for me, but I need someone to vet them for me. And it's okay. Don't don't don't feel bad about that. I've often said it takes a good programmer to know a good programmer. So go find a good programmer who can tell you that is a good programmer. Now you can trust their Mhmm. Their input. , obviously document everything as you can. , just make sure this isn't a a from the head, from the heart, emotional type decision. So I think it's important that we go through these things, that we encourage to have a a technology discernment as we make these decisions, which means following an evaluation framework, a checklist scorecard rubric, don't do it from the gut, from the heart. Train your ministry leaders to ask better questions instead of just looking for the quote cool tool. That's a big thing right now. So and so is using it. It's cool. I can't tell you how many times I've seen so much money wasted on these tools over the course of , , what's cool today is usually gone tomorrow. And sometimes highlight the power of saying no, not every shiny thing is needed in your church. Sometimes it hurts because I see people spending way more for some of these cool shiny objects that only do one small thing. They pay more for that than what they pay for Rock. And they they see no problem with that. It's kinda , wow, that is a it's kinda crazy. And then that doesn't go anywhere, you're , oh, if that money could have been invested in something that could have made sense, boy, that's too bad. So just wrapping it all up. So lead with wisdom, not hype. Don't lead with emotion. Don't lead with what your peers are doing, what seems cool. Check those references. I have seen it many times where these services are saying, Well, these people, they have quotes on their website from certain people at those churches. Yes. Go verify that. Yep. I actually know of a couple, those references would not give a good reference to that product. Today. Yeah. And sometimes they don't know they're on that website or sometimes there was something in the contract that required those things. I actually signed up for a service that actually said that we had to provide a good testimonial. I'm , wait, you what? I have to? What if I don't it? That all got taken care of. That was part of their thing. Also too, I wouldn't trust just that person. Go find the administrative contact or in a technical contact to verify that. In many cases, yeah, that top level ministry leader would say that, would back that up. But there's a totally different story if you would talk to the administrative staff or the technical staff. They would say say something very different. And so that identifies that relational type of Yes. Of of maybe a conflict of interest, conflict of thinking, maybe, that's that you need to know. And so again, trust the community, , the the voice of the people, if you especially if get many of them doing it, which is what our survey does, is gonna tend to bring out the truth in advertising. Dig into that survey. It's not a one time thing. Keep going back to that. Keep sharing it with other people. Keep helping people to do these evaluations. Talk about this before you have to make a decision. Once someone is on an emotional mission, probably not gonna be able to change that from senior leadership. And if you do, if you're able to change it, you probably had to spend some relationship capital with them to do it. So even if you even if you waive them off, it costs you something. But if you can start putting these kind of rubrics or the and these kind of this kind of systematic thinking to the process, it's gonna help you when it's time to actually make those those calls. And I would think it might be a relief even to have this kind of process in hand ahead of time for senior leadership that might feel ill equipped otherwise if they are given certain technical things to dig through and try and figure it out, knowing that there's some trusted process that could be very helpful. Yeah. And while everything we talked about was very much for technical decision making for services and products, it really is. Everything we just said, if you need to buy anything of substance, you need to buy a new astroturf for your field. Okay. Well, what's the rubric? How are we gonna make this decision? What does success look on the other side of that purchase, and how will I know the markers that will get me there? It's not choosing your shoes or your outfit. It's a totally different type of decision. Yeah. And these decisions are so expensive for the church. They are. So sometimes I'm I'm somewhat shocked at the size of the decision and and the amount of rigor that went into it. Mhmm. A lot of times it's so and so had a call with so and so or played golf with so and so or got an iPad from such and such. Next thing , we're we're spending 6 figures on something. And again, the money is only the tip of the iceberg on that. It's setting back our vision, it's setting back our mission, it's impacting job satisfaction. Man, all for what? , we need to do better in this. All of us need to do better at making wise technology decisions on products and services. So many great points. I'd encourage everyone to go back and listen again. Get out your pencil and your paper and make a few notes, because a one time pass is probably not going to give you everything you need on that and there's so much wisdom in that. John, I could not help but think about this last Christmas when you were talking about this slick sales job. And it just reminds me of this gag gift experience that I did with one of my kids that I thought was so funny. I I took a huge box and filled it with shredded paper and a tiny gift card down on the bottom and wrapped it in just beautiful wrapping and it took over the entire footprint under the tree. And when they opened it, they were just digging through shredded paper, just shredded junk paper and it looked nothing was in there and they finally got down to the gift card. But you're right that sometimes the wrapping does not fully embody what's actually inside. And in that case, was about size, but sometimes it can be about quality. And that's just a great thing to keep in mind. Mhmm. And just realize, I mean, as much I I don't wanna downplay that that salespeople are evil or bad because they're not. There's some really great ones. In fact, one of my best friends is is is sales, and he's amazing and good. But but there's they have a goal. Right? Yes. It's to close the deal. Yes. And hopefully, most of them have a product that they come back and they love, but there's some that don't. Or they're in the mid. They're mid. See, look how cool I am. I'm using mid. You're mid. Yeah. No. You're not mid. But they they still have to quote that. That's their job. But just realize there's an opposing set of strategies trying to get you to do something that they want you to do. And you just you have to be you have to put some distance and some buffer between them. Well, there's two roles in any negotiation, and they're playing their role well. But you're the only one that knows your organization and your unique needs. So don't neglect your role. Mhmm. Your role is to make sure that their great product and service is actually fit for what success looks at your church. So just make sure you you fill out that side of the negotiating table. Yeah. And from a relationship perspective, if if you say no because it's not a good fit for your organization and that breaks the relationship, then you didn't really have a friendship. True. So much to think about there. Before we sign off for this podcast episode, however, I want to put a reminder out, and we keep talking about RX a little bit every podcast because it's so incredibly important as a way to connect in the community. And as an update today, I just wanna thank those of you who have submitted some great pitches for speaking sessions at the conference. We have a great number in hand. We're working on putting those together to get the schedule in place and have some really great speaker concepts coming. There will be more that we'll continue to publish on that front. So keep an eye out. If you haven't registered yet, there's still quite a few who come every year and we haven't seen the registration come through for you yet. Go ahead and just get that in there so we know what to expect. And as , once we get closer to the event, the the ticket price will have to go up a little bit to cover the last minute headcount issues because we do have to start locking things in earlier than you might think. So go ahead and get your registration in for that. And as you're preparing, don't forget about your gold circle award opportunities. So the the incredibly powerful Rock ministry tools and the beautifully designed tools that you're working on right now could be something that you can get recognized for. The community can celebrate and someone else might take inspiration from and kind of ignite the fire of what comes next. So if you go to the Rx page, there's a little button at the top that says awards. You can go ahead and submit that now. And that those are judged by an independent panel of community members who function as judges in those areas. And we're always happy to announce those awards when we get to the conference. So could be you. You'll never know if you don't enter. Make sure you do. Of course, we have lots of classes coming up. There is one master class right before the conference, but a virtual class in the summer and lots of other classes from lava to finance to check-in. So check the classes schedule on our community page so that you don't miss out. And finally, we're gathering roadshow opportunities, and this is a great way to continue building the community. And it's not hard. You do have to get over the slight concern of standing in front of people, but usually it's not it's not even a room full. It's a smaller group. And you just really get to share from the heart and the presentation comes to you. So as things go, it's not too difficult. There are usually other area churches that are willing to to help post that with you. So reach out, let us know if you want more info. We are so thankful for you as a community, and your efforts make a huge difference in how this all works, as we've seen talking today about the integrated services survey feedback, and the many ways that you get involved to help power Rock. Thanks so much for tuning in. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss our next episode. Do a church that loves the idea of using Rock but hasn't taken that leap yet? With managed hosting, churches of any size can get access to Rock's amazing technology, hassle free. With just one click, Rock's managed hosting removes the roadblocks that might stop a church from switching to Rock by making the process simple. Churches get the ease of a SaaS church management system without losing any of Rock's powerful features. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? Visit rockrms.com/hosting today.