Mossbrook Data Partners / BG-Demo – Check In
Callcompleted
Mossbrook Data Partners · 7 Sep 2026 12:30
On the 7 Sep 2026 check-in, Marcus Bell showed active users down about a third, to around four a day against twenty-five licences. Joanna Platt expects to be asked whether the size is right and agreed a plan.
What was said
What this says
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026On the 7 Sep 2026 check-in, Marcus Bell showed active users down about a third, to around four a day against twenty-five licences. Joanna Platt expects to be asked whether the size is right and agreed a plan.
What happened: Marcus Bell showed that active users fell by around a third over the last quarter. Joanna Platt gave three reasons: summer leave, consultants on client sites, and no review of who else should be using it since rollout.
Customer view: Joanna is the main user and called the dependency on her uncomfortable. She said B-Viz sits next to consultants' work, not in it.
Commercial: Marcus said the order form and invoices agree and nothing is overdue. The renewal is not until 29 Aug 2027, but Joanna expects to be asked about size and uses the usage as her reference story for referrals.
Watch: There are no tickets, so this is silence, not breakage. If usage has not moved after the team session, Sophie Ling joins a conversation about size.
Themes
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026Theme
Falling usage, licence size
Importance
renewal
Sentiment
mixed
Voice
champion
Who was there
BG-Demo
CRMmade from
Them
CRMmade from
Follow-up
Next steps
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Marcus Bell sends Joanna a per-person usage list split by group, and she marks it up.
- Marcus sends a session outline with starter questions within a day or two, and Joanna sends the invitation.
- Marcus books a review of usage after the session, and brings in Sophie Ling on size if it has not moved.
Risks
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Active users are down about a third and still falling slowly, with use concentrated in a few people including Joanna.
- Joanna expects to be asked whether twenty-five licences at £26,000 is the right size.
- Weak internal use undermines Mossbrook's ability to recommend B-Viz to the two scoping clients.
Opportunities
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- A thirty-minute team session built around handovers and kick-offs could widen day-to-day use.
- Two scoping clients have asked how to get answers from their data without writing SQL, which could mean referrals.
Transcript
Marcus BellHi Joanna, can you hear me alright?
Joanna PlattYes, loud and clear. Can you hear me? I've got some building work going on next door, so shout if it's awful.- Marcus BellNo, you're fine. Bit of an echo, but it's fine. How's your week been?
- Joanna PlattBusy. Back from the long weekend and straight into it. I'm eating a sandwich at my desk, so apologies in advance if I go quiet.
- Marcus BellHa, no problem, I did the same. Right, thanks for making time at lunch. I'll share my screen in a second. What I want to cover is quick: how the account's been going since the summer, the usage numbers I've pulled, and then anything on your side that I should know about. Happy to go where you want, though.
- Joanna PlattPerfect. Can I start with the pipeline, though? Because it affects what you're about to say, I think.
- Marcus BellYeah, go on, please.
- Joanna PlattSo, clients. We've got a handful in the middle of Snowflake migrations at the moment, a couple more in scoping, and a few that are just in steady running. The scoping ones are the interesting ones for you. Two of them have asked us what we'd recommend for getting answers out of their data without everyone writing SQL. And obviously I want to say B-Viz, but I want to be able to say it with a straight face.
- Marcus BellRight. And that's, yeah, that's fair. That's exactly why I wanted this call, actually.
- Joanna PlattGo on then. What have you got?
- Marcus BellOkay, so I've shared the usage page. Can you see that?
- Joanna PlattI can see a graph going in a direction I don't love.
- Marcus BellYeah. So that's the active users line. Over the last quarter it's come down by around a third compared with the quarter before. On an average day it's about four people using it, out of the twenty-five licences you've got. Which is not where I'd want it, and I didn't want to send that in an email without talking it through first.
- Joanna PlattMm. Four. Right. That's lower than I'd have guessed, to be honest. I'd have said six or seven.
- Marcus BellIt's the thirty-day average, so it smooths out the odd busy day. But the shape's the same whichever way I cut it.
- Joanna PlattOkay. Let's write that down. Four a day, down about a third. Who are the four? Is it the same people every day?
- Marcus BellMostly, yes. It's a small core. I can see the names, and I can send you a per-person view after this if that helps. You'd recognise them. It's you, it's a couple of the senior consultants, and then someone who dips in.
- Joanna PlattSo it's me and the people I've nagged.
- Marcus BellHa. A bit, yeah. Which, no offence, is the thing I'd want to dig into. It's the same few people doing the questions.
- Joanna PlattNo, none taken. It's a fair point. That's a dependency on me, and I don't love that either.
- Marcus BellAnd then on the other side, there's nothing. No tickets in the last month, nothing high priority, invoices all paid on time. So it's not that anything's broken, as far as I can see. The nightly refresh is landing, the connectors are loading. It's just quieter.
- Joanna PlattRight. Which is almost worse, isn't it? If it was broken I'd know what to do about it.
- Marcus BellYeah, I think that's fair. Quiet can mean fine, it can mean people have drifted. I don't know which it is yet, and I'd rather ask you than guess.
- Joanna PlattOkay. So, honest answer. I think there's a few things going on, and I'm hedging because I haven't asked everyone. One, it's been the summer, so half the team has been off at different points. Two, a few of the consultants have been on client sites most of the week, heads down on migrations, and when they're like that they use whatever's closest. Which is usually the client's own tooling, not ours.
- Marcus BellMm, that makes sense.
- Joanna PlattAnd three, and this is the one I don't love, I think when we first rolled it out I pushed it hard, and we had a lot of people trying it, and then it settled into something where only the people with a real use for it carried on. And I've not gone back and said, right, who else should be in here?
- Marcus BellThat's really useful, thank you. And it's not unusual, if I'm honest. The first few weeks are always the highest, and then it finds its level. The question is whether this is the level, or whether it's still falling.
- Joanna PlattAnd is it still falling?
- Marcus BellSlowly, yes. Not off a cliff. But I'd call it a trend, not a blip.
- Joanna PlattOkay. Thank you for not dressing it up.
- Marcus BellWell, you'd see through it. Can I ask something else? When you use it yourself, what are you actually asking it?
- Joanna PlattMostly delivery stuff, to be honest. Where are we on a given project, what did the client say last time about their reporting, who's been talking to whom. It saves me ringing round. And for the referral side, I use it to pull together the history before I introduce a client to you, so that I'm not walking in cold.
- Marcus BellRight, so that's the pre-sales and the account memory side, not the Snowflake builds themselves.
- Joanna PlattCorrect. And that's maybe the problem. Our consultants spend most of their day inside warehouses and pipelines. B-Viz is sitting next to that, not in the middle of it. For them to use it they have to want an answer about the business, not about the data.
- Marcus BellThat's a good way of putting it, actually. So the question is where in a consultant's week there's a business question.
- Joanna PlattHandovers. Kick-offs. When someone new joins a project and needs the background. Status calls. Anything where you'd otherwise ask a colleague, who's busy.
- Marcus BellOkay. That's quite concrete. Could I suggest something, and you tell me if it's daft?
- Joanna PlattGo on.
- Marcus BellA short session, thirty minutes, just for the team. Not a general demo. Built around those moments: here's how you'd get the background on a client before a kick-off, here's how you'd catch up on a project you've just been put on. I'd run it, but I'd want you in it, because it's your examples they'll believe.
- Joanna PlattI like that. Who owns the invitation, us or you?
- Marcus BellYou, I think. It lands better from you than from me. I'll send you a short outline you can paste in.
- Joanna PlattFine. Let's write that down. Marcus sends outline, I send invite. What's the timescale? Because the next couple of weeks are a bit rammed.
- Marcus BellI can have the outline over to you in the next day or two. And then you tell me what works. I'm flexible, I'm only in Manchester so I can do a lot of it from here.
- Joanna PlattGood. Now, can I be a bit direct about the commercial side?
- Marcus BellOf course.
- Joanna PlattWe're paying twenty-six thousand a year for twenty-five licences. If I'm looking at that and seeing four people a day, I'm going to be asked at some point whether it's the right size. I'm not saying it is or isn't. I'm saying I'd be asked, and I want to have an answer.
- Marcus BellYeah, that's reasonable. I'm not going to get into pricing with you, that's one for Sophie, but I'll say what I can see. The order form and the invoices both say £26,000, so there's no mismatch there, and nothing's overdue. The renewal's not until 29 Aug 2027, so you've got a good stretch of time to get the usage to somewhere you're comfortable with.
- Joanna PlattRight. So it's not a conversation to have next month.
- Marcus BellNo. But I'd rather we looked at it now than in a panic nearer the time. If you tell me the usage is where you want it in a few months, great. If it isn't, then we talk to Sophie about what makes sense.
- Joanna PlattThat's fair. I'd rather that than be surprised.
- Marcus BellSame. Can I ask about the referral side, since you raised it? How are those two scoping clients thinking about it? Is it a use-it-yourself thing, or are they expecting you to run it for them?
- Joanna PlattBoth, honestly. They're nervous about taking on another tool, so they want us to stand it up. But they also want to be able to ask questions themselves afterwards. That's what I'd love to be able to say to them: we set it up, here's how your people use it, and this is what that looks like in practice. And at the moment I don't have a great story for our own team, which is awkward.
- Marcus BellHa, yeah. The best reference is your own people using it every day.
- Joanna PlattExactly. So that's really why the numbers bother me. It's not just the licences. It's that I'm telling clients something I can't fully show.
- Marcus BellThat's a good reason to fix it, and I'd rather fix it than just report on it. Let me think about what else might help, besides the team session.
- Joanna PlattGo on.
- Marcus BellOne thing I can look at is which of the twenty-five licences have actually been used at all in the last few months. If it's a long tail of people who've never logged in, we know where the gap is. And if some of them have logged in once and left, that tells us something about the first experience.
- Joanna PlattYes. Please. And can you split it by who's a consultant, who's on the partnership side, who's management? I know roughly who's who, but I'll need to tell a story from it.
- Marcus BellI can do that. I'll need you to confirm the groupings, because I only see names and emails. I'll send you the list and you can mark it up.
- Joanna PlattFine. Who owns that, you or me? I'm asking because I don't want it to sit in someone's inbox.
- Marcus BellI'll own sending it. You own marking it up. And I'll chase if I haven't heard.
- Joanna PlattGood. Chase me. Genuinely. I'm terrible when it's not on fire.
- Marcus BellHa, noted. Right. Is there anything about the product itself that's getting in the way? Anything that people have said is clunky, or that they can't find?
- Joanna PlattNothing that's been escalated to me. That's the thing, no one's complained. A couple of people said early on they weren't sure what to ask, and I think that's a bigger issue than any feature. A blank box is intimidating if you don't know what's in there.
- Marcus BellYeah, that's a common one. It's something we can help with in that session. I can show a few starter questions that work well for a consultancy. Not generic ones, ones that fit how your teams work.
- Joanna PlattThat'd be great. And if you have examples from other partners, anonymised, even better.
- Marcus BellI'd have to check what I can share. I don't want to promise something and then not deliver. But I'll see what's appropriate and tell you either way.
- Joanna PlattFair enough. Okay, I think I'm clearer now. Can I ask what you think? Not the polite version. Is this a worry for you?
- Marcus BellHonest version: it's something I want to keep an eye on, and I'd rather act on it early. The trend's down, the reasons you've given sound plausible, and the fix is mostly about getting more of your people into the habit. It's not a disaster. But it's the sort of thing that's easier to turn round now than in six months.
- Joanna PlattGood. That's what I wanted to hear, the unvarnished bit. Let's call it a plan then. Can we recap?
- Marcus BellYeah, please. You do it, you're better at it than me.
- Joanna PlattRight. One, you send me the per-person usage list, split by group, and I mark it up. Two, you send an outline for a thirty-minute team session built around handovers and kick-offs, and I send the invitation. Three, we look again at the usage after that session and see whether it's moved. Four, if it hasn't, we bring Sophie in for a proper conversation about size, well ahead of the renewal. Did I miss anything?
- Marcus BellThat's it. I'd add one thing: I'll put the starter questions in the outline, so people aren't staring at a blank box.
- Joanna PlattYes. Good. Starter questions, in the outline.
- Marcus BellAnd shall we book thirty minutes in a few weeks to look at the numbers again? Once the session's happened, I mean.
- Joanna PlattYes. Send me something and I'll accept it. Try to avoid Mondays if you can, they're chaos.
- Marcus BellWill do. Anything else from your side? Anything on the referral process I can help with?
- Joanna PlattNot today. Just, when those two scoping clients get closer, I'll want to loop you in early. I don't let a referral go without following up, and I'd like us both to be clear who's saying what to them.
- Marcus BellAgreed. Give me a nudge when you're ready and we'll sort it out.
- Joanna PlattBrilliant. Thanks, Marcus. I appreciate you raising it rather than letting it sit.
- Marcus BellNo problem at all. Thanks for being straight with me. Speak soon, and enjoy the rest of your sandwich.
- Joanna PlattHa, will do. Cheers, bye.
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