Shashi Bellamkonda, B2B Marketing & Research Leader

Hi everybody, my name is Shashi Balamkonda. I'm a Principal Research Director at the Infotech Research Group. I've been in the SaaS customer success marketing product management for a very long time. I've known Bob also for a very long time. I was at a recent session that Bob had at the big RYG event and attended his session. Now, a lot of people come to conferences to learn something different and not necessarily to be told or repeated what they already know. So Bob's session was very eye-opening. As I told you, I know him for a very long time, but I always take away something new every time. Now, the analogies that Bob uses especially when you're talking to customers, can be applied in real life everywhere. But very specific to how companies talk to their customers, I think you will find that you become a follower of the philosophy that customers are human beings and whatever systems you build are probably not going to work if you have a very structured methodology without taking into account what the customer needs are. For example, we call them discovery questions. We probably have a checklist that we give to everybody and say, here are the questions that you should ask. But from what I got from Bob London's session is like, what if the customer is worried about something else? And not necessarily the PowerPoint that you're going to present. So, uh, relationship building is something that Bob teaches quite well. I wish everybody should follow Bob