Mosaic Team,
We’re almost halfway into 2018 – hard to believe! – and we have really hit the ground running. Our relationship with Ultimate Software is growing in some very exciting ways! Because of our exclusive focus on UltiPro, Mosaic has made ourselves an expert and reliable partner for Ultimate and carved out a name for ourselves as a “go-to” solutions provider for complex issues. It’s been so rewarding for me to witness this evolution as we’ve become more efficient, more capable, and more diverse in our service offerings. We’re able to bring more to the table for Ultimate and our clients, and I see great things down the path for us as this relationship continues to grow.
Every year, we’re invited to participate in some key Ultimate events which give us opportunities to learn, network, and find new avenues to support Ultimate and our clients:
- Ultimate Sales Kickoff at the beginning of each year. The Ultimate Sales Kickoff brings together Ultimate’s sales team with product and service partners, including Mosaic, which allows us to reconnect with Ultimate’s executive sales leadership, mid-market and enterprise sales team, sales managers, and the ERM teams.
- Connections, Ultimate’s customer conference in March. Connections gives us the chance to see and talk with our partners at Ultimate and current and prospective clients – it’s the Ultimate networking event of the year!
- USG Advisory Summit in April. The Advisory Summit is an opportunity to learn more about Ultimate’s roadmap for the future, where they are rated among competitors, and to network with other product and services partners.
We came home after Connections with some important takeaways, not just about new products and services, but about our relationships, areas where we bring value, and Mosaic’s growing reputation among our clients and partners.
Here’s what we learned:
- Mosaic’s reputation with Ultimate is outstanding. Once upon a time, we were competition for Ultimate. Now, there’s a growing appreciation for Mosaic and how we can support them. Ultimate understands the full value of partnering with us. Over time, we have proven ourselves to be a reliable, innovative, can-do partner who can take on the unique and sticky client issues that Ultimate cannot accommodate and shine. We have really shown Ultimate what we can do with some challenging and complex clients and projects: Emcore, CableOne, Sun State, and Jayco/Thor. Our team has done outstanding work and created some real traction with Ultimate, from helping them to win deals to getting projects over the finish line. We have a tremendous opportunity with Ultimate’s ERM, mid-market and strategic teams. While networking with the Ultimate sales team at their Sales Kick-off, their top salespeople said of Mosaic and our table, “this is where the winners hang out!” What a great compliment to us!
- Ultimate is using their relationship with us to grow their business! Ultimate has shared some exciting new products and services that they’ll be rolling out in 2018 that generate a lot of strategic and tactical opportunities for us. It was great to hear direct from executive leadership at Ultimate about some exciting new products and services coming down the pike, and start to put the pieces together for how we can dig into new areas, broaden our expertise and expand the services we offer to Ultimate as they introduce this technology to the marketplace. Here’s a few things we heard about:
- Workforce Management (WFM), a time & attendance tool that will be offered to some customers as a replacement to UTM. Although, they will not be forcing current UTM clients to transition to WFM anytime soon. That means that Ultimate, and Mosaic, will be supporting 3 T&A solutions for the foreseeable future.
- UTA implementations. Ultimate would like to rely more on Mosaic for help with UTA. Currently, 24% of Ultimate’s UTA work is going to partners, and this will increase to 40% — a huge opportunity for Mosaic.
- Perception, a survey tool that can translate data into usable formats for strategic HR and organizational development purposes. This will be sold as a Core supplement or standalone module and is a huge upsell and consulting opportunity for Mosaic.
- BenefitsPrime, Ultimate’s solution to enhanced benefits administration. There’s an opportunity for us to roll this out with PlanSource. We may ultimately build a practice around BenefitsPrime.
- Launch, a renamed activations methodology that includes a new data migration solution tool that should reduce data testing efforts by 50%. This is slated to roll out in Q3.
- A self-developed master tax product – that some Ultimate clients are already using — that they plan to fully migrate to during 2018.
- Surge, a backlog of technical, interface, data conversion and BI work. Ultimate needs resources to reduce their backlog by the end of the second fiscal quarter of this year. This is another great opportunity for Mosaic to back them up and build our business.
- Open Enrollment/Life Events outsourcing: Ultimate is outsourcing a lot of this work to free up internal resources to focus on BenefitsPrime – another great opportunity for Mosaic to lean in.
- Enterprise activations – Ultimate is formalizing and socializing its outsourcing arrangement with Mosaic to pull five opportunities to give us at least one on the front end to work directly with clients. This marks a significant internal change of mindset.
All of this allows us to increase our footprint with our clients. Once we develop familiarity with these new modules such as BenefitsPrime and Perception, we can upsell these tools and through helping Ultimate relieve pressure points and taking on residual work, we can build our relationship with them and do more for our clients – good opportunities which also generate revenue, a win-win.
We’re positioned well with Ultimate, and with the right people at Ultimate. Our experience and competencies have won us a seat at the table as they look at ways to build their business, and what is emerging is additional openings for us to step in and fill the gap for Ultimate as they are concentrating on certain products and services for their clients. I can’t wait to dig in to these new areas of opportunity.
- We’re creating Mosaic stories. We’ve talked a lot about storytelling and creating an experience for our clients. As we tackle new business opportunities and develop new ways of working together to offer innovative solutions for our clients, we are continually adding to our Mosaic story. I love hearing about the creative ways you serve our clients and the best practices that grow from our team working together to problem-solve and help our clients make the most of their investment in UltiPro. From top executives to VPs of Ultimate’s enterprise groups, the Ultimate sales team told stories at this year’s conference of how Mosaic has helped them. There has been a notable change in mentality from the beginning of our relationship, when they wanted us to go through the services team to be vetted to determine if we were the right partner for their clients, to putting us right up front with their sales force, working with them directly as a team for their clients. Ultimate’s ERMs and sales team come to us because of the uniqueness of an opportunity and their confidence that we can not only handle it, but knock it out of the park. We’re viewed as a boutique firm with the capability to help clients in need. We specialize in clients who are challenging, high profile, and complicated. We have the ability to handle their needs and help not only with a tactical, hands-on-the-keyboard solution but also deliver client peace of mind.
As you all know, we’ve had those clients with complicated problems, demanding timelines, or unusual needs that we’ve been able to fulfill when no one else can. And this is why Ultimate is referring clients to us – because we deliver. Our team has got to move from “why are we getting this?” and get into the mindset of “this is what we do, and what we do well.”
I think that’s the central theme in our own story: we provide a great experience, and we figure out how to solve our partners and clients’ problems and make them – not us – the hero of their story.
Thanks for your great work for our partners and clients. You make Mosaic shine!
Your biggest fan,
Vicki