Get Amplified

Breaking Down Silos for Seamless Customer Success

• Amplified Group • Season 6 • Episode 10

Share episode

This episode explores the evolution of customer success in the SaaS industry, highlighting the shift from a cost centre to a key driver of revenue growth. 

Bob Burke, whose journey from the heart of San Francisco's dot-com boom to a Customer-First thought leader, shares insights on aligning customer success with sales, breaking down silos and adapting to market changes in order to sustain durable growth within SaaS organisations. 

We delve into the:

• Necessity of breaking down silos and aligning roles around the customer journey, ensuring a seamless experience for clients. 

• Challenges of transitioning customer success from a cost center to a revenue driver.

• Concept of collaborative "pods" that bridge sales and customer success teams.

• Insights on measuring customer success effectiveness.

Bob sheds light on how customer success has transformed from an afterthought to a vital component in modern business strategies. 

We discuss the complexities of aligning customer success with revenue generation, especially in today's scrutinised financial environments, offering insights into evolving strategies and the critical role of customer success.

We hope you enjoy listening!

We would love you to follow us on LinkedIn!

https://www.linkedin.com/company/amplified-group/

Sam:

Welcome to Get Amplified the podcast about teamwork in the tech industry. Vicky, it's as gloomy here today as it was on the last one that we recorded. How's the weather looking in? Deep Stocks, oxfordshire?

Vic:

Funnily enough, as gloomy as it was then.

Sam:

I'm ready for this drizzle to disappear. Yeah, it's not ideal, is it? Oh well, so I'm sure. However, we have a wondrous guest to brighten up our Tuesday.

Vic:

We do. We do indeed. So we have with us Bob Burke, and Bob is a SaaS leader. He's worked in tech for plus 20 years and I was fortunate enough to meet Bob when we worked closely with Okta. So you may remember, if you've been a podcast listener of ours for some time, that we've had Andy Bryars on here a couple of times. Andy Breyer's on here a couple of times, Jamie McDonald and Tony Roberts all were in Andy's team and Andy reported into Bob and for all of the organizations that we work with and talk to customer first and getting the SaaS piece right. And I think, Bob, you're going to talk about durable growth, this sustainability of sass organizations. It's really not an easy thing to crack.

Sam:

Wow.

Vic:

The work that Andy's team was doing. Working for Bob really felt quite like they were breaking new ground and for me it's best practice of customer success. So, Bob, I know so much of that was under your guidance, so I'm really, really looking forward to hearing your perspective because

Vic:

Bob I'm sat here in North London and it's just as gloomy here as it is, I'm afraid, for the two of you as well, and I'm also quite missing a bit of warmth.

Sam:

Yeah, no kidding, yeah and a bit of vitamin D as we say yeah, absolutely. But here we are. Where in California are you from? I spent five years as a kid in Costa Mesa, oh yeah.

Sam:

Okay, well, originally I'm actually a Midwesterner, so I grew up in the state of Ohio. We can play a bit of US geography here for a couple of minutes before we get started. Grew up in the state of Ohio, sort of rural Northwestern Ohio, very typical small town, middle America, and sort of the Rust Belt to that part of the country, not too far from Detroit and automobile industry. All of that Went to college in Chicago and that was my sort of escape from small town life to the big city. And then, after Chicago, moved out west to California and spent a couple of years in Southern California. I was in San Diego County for a bit, I was in Irvine, so that was about as close as I got to Costa Mesa.

Sam:

And then, very strategically, I was, I was a, a, so my background is I'm a literature, uh, major in university oh, okay, interesting well, I'm, yeah, classical literature, in my case latin and greek, and stuff oh, wow, okay, no, I was english literature, uh, with an emphasis in creative writing.

Bob:

I mean, just a guy you know, yeah, and taught school for a couple of years after uni and realized that was not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, because that's a bloody hard job and as vicky found out and so very strategically moved myself to san francisco in 1998, when everything was just kicking off and the whole dot-com thing was exploding and San Francisco was, you know, really establishing itself as the tech capital of the world and just was very fortunate to sort of be in the right place at the right time.

Bob:

And you know, I think it was a time for people of my generation where, if you had a decent education, you could no matter what it was in like people in tech companies were just looking for educated human beings that they could bring into organizations and teach them to do whatever they needed them to do. There was no such thing as like an IT course that you could take at university back in the day, and so that's what I did. I just sort of I found my way into this little startup with a guy who was like okay, you seem like you can speak and write and do things and so come in and join us, and that launched my career in tech. And I was there from 98 until 2015, when we moved here to London to help launch Okta in the UK, and what was supposed to be a two or three year expat gig here we are now literally almost 10 years to the day. It was February, the 5th 2015.

Sam:

We've been here now for 10 years, so it's been an amazing. So you were there right at the beginning. You almost invented software as a service.

Bob:

but I mean it was you know, I saw so many different sort of phases of the tech trends over the years and from the boom to then the bust and the really sort of weird quiet sort of days in 2002 and three and four when, you know, all those companies had blown up and people city and it was a really strange time.

Bob:

And then when things started picking back up again in the late 2000s and then obviously the economy crashing and then starting again in sort of the early 2010s, really in that then incredible growth journey that the entire tech industry went on from, you know whatever you want to call it 2012, with, really with then the explosion of the cloud and SaaS and just a rip roaring economy in the US and globally that fueled an incredible decade of growth. That was, you know, a phenomenal time to be working in tech and in a company like Okta that then was riding that wave and achieved so much in that period. So it's interesting to look back now and where we're at today, and I think we're going to come on to some of that in our conversation. But it's a very different world today than the one we were in.

Sam:

It does feel like the SaaS wave, perhaps that you've been riding, or maybe even driving. Certainly driving has just sort of come off a little bit, is that fair?

Bob:

I think it's totally fair.

Bob:

You know, I think, obviously with the pandemic, and then you know, I think, the conflict in Ukraine and just sort of the way that the global economy was impacted and sort of you know, starting from 2020.

Bob:

And you know, we're five years on now from COVID and it still doesn't feel like we're anywhere close to where we were in 2019 in terms of the way that businesses were still aiming for, you know, 40, 50% year on year growth targets. And SaaS has certainly cooled down and look, it's obviously we all know the buzzword of AI and it feels like I can't get away from it anymore. Quite honestly, as exciting as it is, it's also exhausting at the same time, because it's every news angle. But but you know, and lots of you know, the CEO of Microsoft talking about how AI is going to sort of kill the cloud and SaaS and that SaaS is just going to become sort of a back-end database and AI is going to be the interface for everything going forward. So I do think that there's been a cooling off in terms of what we thought of was the latest sort of bleeding edge and a shift from SaaS to AI.

Sam:

Interesting. That then has an impact on the market and how businesses resource and what they do, which I guess brings us on to our topic for the day. You've worked across sales and you've worked across customer success, and those two are clearly intrinsically linked. Have you seen that change over the years?

Bob:

Absolutely. I think the biggest impact that we're seeing right now is, in particular, across customer success organizations. Customer success is one of those things that's sort of. It's still sort of a new function, isn't it right? Yeah, so when I was working in corporate.

Vic:

in VMware, customer success didn't even exist and I only left corporate world in 2017.

Bob:

Right, yeah, yeah, and so it's still one of those things that I think people are trying to figure out. What is it? Sales has been sales for a long time. Right and sure that you know. You've got different sort of structures and alignment and segmentation, so it can look a little bit different from company to company. But at the end of the day, everybody knows what the job is and knows what good looks like, and there's a machine that's pretty well established there and people know how to run those teams.

Bob:

Customer success is still so wildly different from any one business to the other that it can just mean a lot of different things. You're not guaranteed that you're going to land in a role that feels familiar when you move from one company to the next, and so you know it was this industry that was really born out of the SaaS boom. Right, suddenly you had all this reoccurring revenue that had to be looked after. Gone were the days that sales could rock up and sell some mega deal and then not care about it anymore. They could come back once a year and sell some sort of support renewal or minor sort of license entitlement, the add-on that came with it, but it was basically a one and done. Now, obviously, we had to care about that recurring revenue, and so thus customer success was born.

Sam:

We used to call it drive-by licensing where the Microsoft rep or other software vendors are available would turn up, pitch this EA customer would buy into it, and then they'd come back in a year's time for the renewal. We'd be left scrabbling around trying to get the customer to actually deploy the damn software that they paid for, which is kind of customer success, isn't it? To Microsoft's credit, they did put in place all sorts of schemes and reward mechanisms and so on to incentivize people. But you've been at the sharp end of this stuff though, right.

Bob:

Yeah, absolutely. And so there's always been, I think, a really healthy, healthy debate in the industry about what's, what's the purpose of customer success? Why does it exist Ultimately, what's its sort of, what's its North Star? And again, that's meant very different things at very different sorts of of companies. You know, and if I think about, for example, the early days at Okta companies and if I think about, for example, the early days at Okta, we defined it very clearly as a non-revenue carrying role. It was in no way responsible for driving revenue. In fact, that was kind of seen as dangerous waters for CSMs to get into, because the point was CSMs were meant to build a really close partnership with the customer. There needed to not be any sort of whiff of, oh, we're trying to sell you something else here. Mr and Mrs Customer, we were, you know, meant to be their partners, their working partners in terms of driving.

Sam:

They're advocates in a way.

Bob:

That's it, yeah, driving ROI, driving adoption. And ultimately the feeling was if you did that, good things would happen.

Vic:

Right, that's it, yeah, driving ROI, driving adoption and ultimately, the feeling was, if you did that, good things would happen. Right, yeah, yeah and that's how I think about the work that I'm familiar of that team doing was the number of opportunities that came your way because you were doing the right things.

Bob:

Exactly, yeah, and I think we did and it did benefit. You know, and at the time you know the guy that was the president of field operations, charles Race. You know he used to say it all the time happy customers buy more software Right. And so if we all do the right thing, if we sell the right thing, if we deploy the right thing, if we look after the customer in the right way, if we treat them fairly and with respect, and when it comes time also for the renewal, and when we have pricing that comes out, when we have new products that come out, ultimately they're going to be happy and they're going to reward us for that. And I think that's true. I think that was a large part.

Sam:

I absolutely 100% subscribe to that way of thinking. Yeah, do you think the ownership of a structure of a company affects that? So VC ownership, public ownership, post IPO or whatever, because if your CS team is not a revenue or a profit center, they're effectively a cost center or could be looked at as such. Now you know I'm with you on. You know your stance of it. Happy customers buy more stuff 100%. So you know, if I were an investor I would be very happy with that. But that's my background at Softcat, where we had a similar kind of approach. But do you think that affects the way in which companies approach it?

Bob:

I think that's the biggest change that I'm seeing right now, sam, in terms of where the VCs are at and what the board is expecting, and it's really interesting. I've been out at a couple of different conferences over the past couple of weeks and I keep hearing the same thing from CEOs, from VCs up on stage, which is look, the days of cheap money are gone right. Zero percent interest rates, where you know money was just, you know, going around left and right back in sort of that the 2015 to the 2020 era. Those days are long gone, right, and so now it's much harder for businesses to raise money. It's much harder for them to throw money at problems.

Bob:

And so you know, what we were doing when we were building customer success at Okta was we were going out and hiring really talented people, many of which that you spoke about earlier, vicky, who were experts in their field, had quite a bit of sort of experience in the industry and didn't come cheap right, like these guys have been around for a long time and they cost some money, and so it was a big cost for the business, but at the end of the day, it was worth the burden to sacrifice for the growth that's gone now, right. So now boards are actually leaning in to try and understand what percentage of their revenue are they spending on the cost centers in their business on the cost centers in their business, right? And there's a general feeling that somewhere around the order of 5% to 10% is the target of what boards are interested in trying to drive that cost basis down to. And so there's a very sharp eye looking at the cost of customer success these days and what they're actually delivering.

Sam:

That didn't exist six or seven years ago right, yeah, and you know that's good discipline, isn't it? You know you need to. You don't want to just throw money at these things willy-nilly, but at the same time I sort of appreciate your stance of not directly connecting CS to revenue, even if you and I both know it is absolutely 100% linked.

Bob:

Yeah, absolutely, and so you know, I was at this event here in London a couple of weeks ago and a guy who's CEO of a company called Churn Zero, which is a customer success software platform His name is Yuman Tseng Really interesting and insightful discussion that he was having as part of a fireside chat. His analogy was look, customer success sort of grew up like a kid on sweets Like they were born, and grew up in this period of time, this land of plenty and lots of cash and not a lot of oversight of how it was strictly being spent, necessarily. And now those days are gone, right, but the industry in itself is still sort of used to operating in that model, and so now it's got to get fit. Now it's got to find its way towards a certain degree of efficiency that boards are happy with, and ultimately what that means is moving out of being a significant cost center and something that's much more aligned to a revenue generator for the business.

Bob:

And that's now the conversation that's happening in, you know, in conferences inside of organizations is how do we set targets, and this is a really interesting one. How do we set targets and incentives for customer success teams in order to drive behavior that puts them much more sort of in alignment with driving growth and revenue for their organizations, and it's tricky. I don't think anybody's even close to having figured out a magic bullet. I posed the question to one of these things, which is who's actually putting quotas on CSM, and like it was as if you know I had launched a tirade of profanity in the room. Everyone was aghast at the idea of quotas for CSF, but I think it's more the word than the idea, because everyone is quite comfortable with saying targets, but it feels like quota is a word that only can belong to sales, and so we're still evolving how we even talk about these things.

Sam:

It's difficult, isn't it? You know, it's almost like it needs to have a target or a quota at an organizational level, but maybe not necessarily at an individual level, so that the behavior is still customer centric rather than sales centric. I don't know, does that make sense? You know, you've obviously done some thinking about this. You know what's your, your ideal, what does good look like?

Bob:

done some thinking about this. You know what's your, your idea, what does good look like. Yeah, first of all, I'm really excited that boards actually now are interested in hearing about what's happening. Success, right, that's a great that's exactly.

Vic:

It was an afterthought before, wasn't it so?

Bob:

yeah, it was an afterthought. It was never even really talked about in board yeah, right, yeah so.

Bob:

So now, the fact that they do want to hear at least something about what's happening, uh, I think that's that's great, right. And the thing that it seems that they are most interested in hearing about is and this comes back to the that post that we were talking about earlier how do you get from ARR to NRR as quickly as possible, right? And NRR just for our listeners who may not be familiar with that term the net retention rate, which is ultimately the dollars that you're renewing plus any incremental growth on that renewal as part of the renewal right. So you know what sort of industry good looks like. Is anything above sort of 110%? Nrr is good, is healthy. Above 120% is really good, and I think that's the thing that boards want to talk about.

Bob:

So how do we get there then? How do we drive our teams then to be more focused on NRR and not just GRR, which is the gross retention rate right focus perspective rather than, well, how many additional are you actually able to add on to the contract, which is some more sort of optimistic growth perspective? And so finding ways to bring, I think, nrr targets into post-sales teams' compensation models is an interesting one, you know. For example, you take a CSM's book of business. You look across those customers that they're managing. Can you incentivize them with an NRR target which I know is one that lots of companies are starting to do to help get them to start to think proactively, managing how many qualified leads a CSM might be able to bring back? You know, I think there's always been a kind of a soft handover of opportunity. When it goes into a meeting and customers starts wanting to talk about something new that they're not doing. Of course they would have brought that back, but it was never really measured. The CSM in many companies was never given credit for that either.

Bob:

Yeah, so measuring those things, rewarding them on those things? I mean, look, we're all in sales like why should they not benefit financially as well, for for those activities that they are driving that are very much sales related?

Vic:

so it is just starting to to measure and compensate them on things that they've been doing for a very long time as well I was just thinking that, as you were talking, I was thinking actually everything that you're describing, other than actually measuring them on it, your team at Okta, that's what they were doing.

Bob:

So so much of it, you know, and we flirted with trying to measure some of these things and it was always tricky because we didn't have that muscle baked into our operational model.

Vic:

Yeah.

Bob:

And there just wasn't a lot of you know sort of support behind it. So we never really got it off the ground. But you know Andy Bryars you mentioned earlier. You know Andy was a champion and Andy's an ex-sales guy. You know he came out of enterprise sales, andy, the best hiring job I ever best sales job I ever did apart from my wife was getting Andy Bryars to leave sales to come into customer success.

Vic:

Yeah.

Sam:

So you know. But yeah, that makes sense as you blur the lines between sales and customer success, which you know, which I guess leads to another question here Does that create any tension between the two organizations? You know who gets paid the guy who brings the new logo in, or the. You know the guy who.

Bob:

Yeah, 100%.

Sam:

Who does the upsell effectively?

Bob:

Yeah, and just to make it even more complicated, sam, let's throw Renewals Managers in the mix too.

Sam:

Yeah, and you've always had. The terminology has always been sort of hunters and farmers, you know new, new business people and then more account managing people, and some people can operate in both spheres. But yes, um, it's a difficult one that. How have you given that any thought in terms of how you diffuse that tension?

Bob:

loads of thought. Um, I don't know that I've necessarily found a silver bullet for it, but one of the ideas that I've been playing with is trying to create pods inside of organizations where you align teams of people. You've got mid-market and you've got that in customer success too, but I like the idea of creating some kind of team outcomes or objectives that enforces a certain degree of collaboration.

Bob:

But also reward at the end of the day as well, because I've thought about things like well, what if you had a common manager that looked after a handful of salespeople and a couple of CSMs that supported those customers you know, and maybe even then a renewals manager, and you put that team together and that's one sort of pod that looks after this portion of your customer base. I think that that's where it starts to get maybe a little bit tricky if you try and organizationally align it too much, because they're inevitably there's still some areas of separation functional a lot it gets tricky, but the.

Vic:

I don't know. Tell me sorry, but the the what you're describing there is is, uh, is making me very excited, because the biggest challenge that we see in any organization that we work with is the silos. Yeah, yeah and you can still have that vertical reporting line into corporate. But but one of the things that we we endeavor to work with organizations on is how do you look like one team in front of the customer?

Vic:

yeah and that's what. That's what you're talking about here. So all of those different functions coming together to do the right thing for the customer and ultimately driving that sustainable growth yeah, yeah, that's it, you know, and uh, it's, and yeah, how do you incentivize those teams to collaborate?

Bob:

how do you incentivize those teams, how do you reward them jointly when all of their efforts combined efforts, you know pay off in some great expansion opportunity? Or you know, really you know, fantastic long-term renewal or I don't know. I mean, I like the idea of also thinking beyond just revenue and into things like what we we managed to get this customer to come and speak at our event.

Bob:

You know I mean stuff that you do. It's everybody's business. Customer advocacy is so valuable but that doesn't happen just in a. I mean again, it's a lot of work to make those customers love you.

Vic:

I can remember that. I can remember Tony Roberts actually working and spending a lot of time with. Can I remember who the client was? Yes, I can, but it was to. It was, if you come to mind. Yes, yeah, because he did quite a few of, but it was the amount of work to get the talk track right with the client, the customer, to be on main stage in the us.

Bob:

Yeah, tony was great at building champions and, yeah, tony was great at building champions and Tony was great at collaborating across with sales as well to drive champions, because he knew he wasn't going to do it alone. He needed everybody working together. You know, in Tony's background was a sales engineer, right. So again, another guy who had a commercial mindset, who stepped into the world of post-sales and CS and really flourish and was able to bring all of that to bear and understood how to, how to look after and how to work with an AE. He'd learned that as an SE and he brought those skills to bear as a CSM as well.

Vic:

Yeah.

Bob:

Yeah, yeah, lots, lots of interesting things to think about here. And you know, we need folks like Am, like amplified, out there helping build these strong, harmonious teams and building trust. And uh, you know, I don't know. I'd love to hear are you guys doing anything like this cross-functionally, not just in silos, yes, ds teams or ps teams or what have you, but are you doing it cross-functionally as well?

Vic:

yes, we are, um, and that's where we're seeing the biggest difference. That's what excites me the most. We're not doing enough of it, quite honestly, bob, but the organizations that have grasped that this is the way forwards are the ones that are accelerating for sure, yeah, yeah, that's cool. Well, it's really exciting.

Bob:

It is exciting, yeah, thanks.

Vic:

And it's good for the customers it's great for the customers.

Bob:

I mean, who wants to be operating in silos? Who wants to like buy something from one person and then have someone else turn up and deploy it, and then have someone else turn up and take care of you and look after you and manage, and then have someone else turn up and manage your renewal contract? I mean there's all of these different touch points that for the customer, if all of those people are not operating in sync behind the scenes and are all on the same page, it's a nightmare for the customer. And what a joy when somebody turns up and says, yes, mr Customer, I understand that you bought this, I understand that you deployed that, I understand that you're getting X usage out of this, but you feel like you could drive more value in this way as well. I mean, what a pleasure. And I think that's ultimately what we're here to do is delight our customers, make them super happy and then yeah again, hopefully earn the opportunity to sell them some more software along the way.

Sam:

Yeah, the opportunity to sell them some more software along the way. Yeah, it's a really different scenario because you know we were a reseller service provider rather than a SaaS company, but we would leave an account manager in charge of an account for the duration. Yeah, everything that went down. You know they would make first contact, they would hopefully win that account. They would then look after that account forever and a day until you know they moved into management or, you know, change role or something, you know something like that. And then there would be a handover. And we felt that that was really important, because every time you get someone new into an account, they've got a learning process to go through and the weight of that learning process is on the customer to teach them Completely, whereas you know, and as soon as you sort of lose that that sort of institutional knowledge of that customer, it becomes hard work for the customer to say, oh, this is painful, and then they start to think about a change.

Vic:

No just that, though, sam. Coming back to the fundamentals of what we believe in, it's the trust you're starting your relationship again yeah building the trust, and that goes whether it's inside an organization or from an organization to to your customers.

Bob:

That trust there is is incredible and powerful yeah, absolutely, and that's what builds champions, that's what builds customers that want to come to your events and speak about you, that when they leave and they go somewhere else, you know you immediately are put into their budget and they, they want to be a customer for life. Um, and it's just really, it's really critical, and so you know, it was important, it's always been important and I think, even more so now, I guess. Coming back to this topic of like, how do we drive tighter alignment internally to for the benefit and the growth of the, the business? It's. It's all the more crucial now, and I think of some of the other silos that need to be broken down. I mean, you know, this is, uh, this is kickoff season, right, everybody's gone somewhere in north america and, uh, they're having their big annual kickoffs in vegas or san francisco.

Sam:

It's always either end of the country, isn't?

Vic:

it.

Bob:

Yeah, you know vegas or maybe san francisco, yeah, or florida, yeah a bit, yeah, a bit in Orlando, maybe some Atlanta or Austin from time to time as well. But all these, you know all these teams, all these companies spending a lot of money to fly their people back, and they're all getting the sales pitch for the year. And here's the exciting new stuff that we're going to roll out and these are the big goals that we're, you know, we're going for. And here's the five-year plan and everybody's getting really excited about it. And then they all break up and they go into separate rooms and sales gets enablement, and customer success gets enablement and marketing gets enablement.

Bob:

And look, there's a bit of that that's got to happen. Right, I don't want to poo-poo it too much, but there's very little then of especially if we want to think about how we align a true revenue strategy not just a sales strategy and a retention strategy, but a true revenue strategy. Well, why aren't we also, then, bringing our CSMs into those sales enablement meetings, right? Like, csms need to be able to speak the language of sales. They need to understand the business's sales methodology, whatever it is medic, med, pic, you name it if it's some thing the company's built, they need to know that thing inside and out, because that's the language that's spoken internally to understand where you're at in a deal and how it's progressing and how you think about managing a sales opportunity.

Bob:

Right, and you know, I think some organizations do that. My guess is most probably don't. Right and uh. And so how do you? How do you align an enablement strategy so that everybody is operating against the same information, expectations and speaking the same language? Really, really, uh, really important. And then, I think, coming back to these, this concept of some amount of shared uh reward, how do you align compensation targets so that people are motivated to do the right thing?

Sam:

you know, yeah, that makes sense important I think the the techies are also important here. You know, with the people who get out that you know, in the event that this stuff has to be deployed or customized or whatever, you know I ran softcats tech teams for the major chunk of my career there and I, you know the major chunk of my career there and I you know it was always made clear to the guys in my team that you know it would be looked upon positively were they to bring back opportunities for stuff that customers talked about. Because often customers will not. You know they won't let on to a sales person because they know they feel that like they're going to get sold to, but they will let on to a, to a techie yeah, yeah, it's true.

Bob:

I mean, they have sort of a bit of that trusted advisor relationship exactly yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah and in many ways the, the technical person really most deeply understands the customer pain and the challenge that they're trying to solve and how they're going to solve it Right.

Bob:

I mean, interestingly, my last role was as general manager for a company called BenchLink Really interesting company, fascinating product, purely focused into the life sciences space. So it was an opportunity for me to step into the world of vertical SaaS, where acquiring customers and retaining them long-term is all the more important because, you know, suddenly you don't have the whole world that you could sell to. You've got a more limited TAM and segment of customers to go after. But you know, you know we were selling into. You know, scientists who were deep experts in their fields, right, and in order to have the right people on our team who could speak their language, I mean, bench thing had hired phds and people out of laboratories to to go in and sort of you know.

Sam:

Advise or consult.

Bob:

Sell, advise, you know, build the solution, deploy the solution. You really had to have people with deep domain expertise to be able to go in and do that, and CS and sales had to at least be able to grasp it deep enough to have intelligent conversations. But yeah, I mean again. I think this comes back to this interesting topic of how do you build these teams or these pods that have all the right characteristics and makeup in order to drive a successful outcome at the customer. The thing that I've learned is it's it's even more important in the world of vertical sass, where you're very deep in one specific domain area yeah, yeah, not something that's within my experience, but I can totally see why that might.

Sam:

That would be the case, yeah I.

Vic:

I think the vision that you have bob is gosh is gosh. I'm absolutely bought into it. Let's do it.

Bob:

Let's do it, vicky.

Vic:

It's great, and actually the speed checks that we do that. You've had experience with running. We run them across cross-functional teams. So what does your cross-functional team look like and how effective are you working together? So we have a measurement for it and we've got a measurement across the industry now, which is really interesting.

Bob:

Yeah.

Vic:

Yeah.

Bob:

I'm curious where you're seeing. I mean, maybe I can turn your question back at you, sam. You asked about is there some natural conflict between CS and sales? And now that I think about it, I don't know if I actually answered that question, but it's still a good one for us to talk about.

Sam:

Well, we at least talked about it. I don't know whether there is any necessary answer up there.

Bob:

I think historically there always has been, because CS would suspect that sales was just interested in closing a deal at whatever cost and leave them with the pain of having to deal with whatever weird thing was sold that was impossible to deploy or make the person successful on whatever. But I'm curious maybe, vicky, you can speak to what do you see, as you're working with post-sales and pre-sales team and you're running speed checks and you're doing the calibration exercises and all of that Are you finding some breakthroughs? Are you finding I mean, it's trust right. Are you finding ways to build trust between people, groups of people who inherently are not incentivized by the same employer to always collaborate together based upon the financial structure of their compensation package?

Vic:

Yeah, I think we're in a fortunate position because we are engaging with organizations where the culture is that they have the appetite to team and therefore, where we have worked with cross-functional teams that have been in silos and they've been brought together.

Vic:

Their appetite to make it work together has been phenomenal. So we've done an initial speed check, for example, and the score has been pretty abysmal because they weren't working together, not because the rub was there necessarily, just because they hadn't intentionally done it. The rub was there necessarily just because they hadn't intentionally done it. Done some work to bring them together, to give them a common purpose, to understand that, actually centering that on on the customer and the customer journey, and even doing a racy of rules and responsibilities super simple stuff. Yeah, going through that for six months and then coming out the other end and doing another speed check. That correlates with the revenue and we can see that. So it's very rewarding. We're ready to scale that actually now because we've got proof that that works. So, yeah, but I do think I'll caveat that with we're working with organizations that have got the vision that this is important.

Bob:

in the first place, we've not tried it where there's been a resistance to it yet. Okay, all right. So at least you had some initial uh yeah, motivation. People were aligned, there was a culture that was already in place that was, uh, that was allowing them to come together and be open to these exercises or they'd hired the right people to do that yeah I think is the critical piece it comes down to we.

Vic:

We can't do this stuff on our own, but one of the things and it always comes back to me I remember working with one rather large organization and they'd got all the different functions on this diagram and it was going to be used at kickoff. They got all the different functions route and in the middle they'd got what sales to which? I looked at it and I went where's the customer?

Vic:

yeah, yeah I mean to be fair to them. They rectified it within a couple of days. The customer was in the middle and sales had moved to one of the. But that was just the mentality and I thought that was actually that's. That's how it used to be viewed, that's interesting.

Sam:

That reminds me, and I'm sure I've talked about this before on the podcast, but the Softcat org chart was the other way up. So you know, normally you'd have the CEO at the top and then all the you know, the C-suite and then the directors and the you know whatever we had the customer at the top, then the account managers and then all of the people including the you know, the exec team there to support the account managers and therefore support the customers. That's nice For those who are listening and not watching. I'm doing a lot of gesticulating. Won't come through at all on the podcast, but you know, I always thought that was obviously that was symbolic for the customers, but I also felt it was symbolic for the organization because it meant that we all knew that we were supporting the commercial efforts by doing the right thing for the customer. And if we did that, you know happy customers buy more stuff.

Sam:

Yeah, yeah, that's fantastic, it ain't rocket science.

Bob:

That feels like the perfect note to wrap things up on. I don't know. Yeah, probably.

Sam:

It doesn't do it. Have you got any takeaways for us, Bob? I mean, I think, this.

Bob:

is it right? I think it's just how do we continue to break down silos and structure our field teams in a way that, ultimately, are aligned to common goals around driving growth and revenue? Everybody's trying to get to profitability. Everybody's trying to get to this durable growth that you mentioned at the beginning there, vicky, and it just means that we've got to. It's all the more important that everybody is rowing in the same boat, in the same direction. Yeah, because we can't get there just sort of expecting sales to sell our way out of it. And once you've got a really healthy book of business for any SaaS business, you'll tip over into that point where the majority of your revenue will start to come from the recurring part of it, the renewal and we all know that it's much cheaper to retain a customer than it is to go out.

Sam:

and find a new one.

Bob:

Right, a dollar renewed is a dollar you've kept, as compared to a dollar that you a new business. You've got to take the cost of sale out of that, you've got to take tax out of that, and so it's just all the more critical as this industry continues to mature. And look, we didn't touch on AI, which I'm really glad of. We didn't mention it, all of this but inevitably it's going to play a really key role, also in terms of figuring out how we drive efficiencies and in collaboration. But ultimately, I think that that's that's the key takeaway for me, guys thank you that makes sense and do you?

Sam:

have any book recommendations for us?

Bob:

You know that's a good one, I think anything that for CSMs that gets them interested in thinking about what it's like to sell, sort of the sales methodology books that are out there I'm blanking and so I'm trying to remember the name of the qualified sales leader is one in particular that I enjoyed. That I read before I moved into sales and I think it's a really easy read and it really it's a book that tells a story. It's not just all data and facts and anybody who's ever sat through a QBR a sales QBR in their life will love the book because it just tells the dialogue of what it's like in those worlds and and and how to evolve the, the thinking from sales leaders.

Sam:

So, qualified sales leader, that's my suggestion great excellent, great stuff, thank you vicky, anything to add?

Vic:

no, I've just. I've really enjoyed this, bob. Thank you, thank you.

Sam:

Yeah, I know that's fab, that's fab, so can we do a shameless plug on Bob's behalf? Hopefully this will age really quickly because I'm sure you'll end up in gainful employment once again very soon, but you're on the market at the minute aren't you?

Bob:

That's right. I am on the market actively looking for my next gig.

Sam:

Listeners, you have a limited transfer window in which to acquire this magnificent specimen of SaaS expertise.

Bob:

I love the football analogy.

Sam:

We're in the transfer window.

Bob:

I'm an Arsenal supporter myself, and they're in desperate need of a strategy.

Sam:

You're in the right part of London then and I am.

Bob:

I am in that part of London, so if if this doesn't work out, maybe I can go score some goals for arsenal yeah, absolutely, absolutely good luck.

Sam:

I hope so, I hope so, and in the meantime I'll carry on trying to be a rock star and hopefully I'll pitch up at the garage near you soon you.

Bob:

If you're there, you need to let me know, because it's literally just around the corner from me.

Sam:

I will absolutely come down that'd be amazing perfect I mean, I suspect we'd be first on the bill these days, but there we go that's all right.

Bob:

I'm getting old, so the earlier I get in and out the better.

Sam:

Yeah, fab, perfect, love it, brilliant. Thanks, bob, really appreciate that. I thought that was, that was fab. So it just remains for me to say thanks, as always, for listening to get amplified from the amplified group. Your comments and your subscriptions are gratefully received.