How to use Data to Make Your Content Meaningful With Crayon Data CEO Suresh Shankar

We believe, Eric, that digital irrelevance is the mosquito in our digital lives. It's always hovering around and buzzing. You know, you're seeing something, there's so much spam coming at you in terms of ads, in terms of choices, in terms of things that are being thrown at you which you don't want. And eventually you want to buy something and you end up spending 45 minutes surfing the web and looking at lots of irrelevant stuff. That's the problem that we want to solve. We want to help companies kind of say, hey, listen, can I simplify consumers' lives by making everything relevant to them.

What would be a practical example of a customer using Crayon data, and who are your customers?

So, we work largely with traditional large enterprises. So, consumer banks, airlines pre-COVID, hotels, and, you know, people in the travel business, retailers, etc. But consumer banks tend to be the largest user today and our main customer base. And I'm going to give you a typical example of what happens today with a consumer bank. I presume sitting in California that you might be No disrespect to any name that's being used in the podcast today, but you might be a Wells Fargo customer, and I'm sure that they're sending you lots of different offers, lots of stuff over the years that they've known you. And I'm also pretty certain that you don't open any of those communications and you don't use any of them because they're completely irrelevant. My favorite example is I've been having 4 credit cards at one bank in Singapore for 20 years. They still send me offers to eat at steak restaurants. And after about tens of thousands of transactions, I would have thought maybe they'd have figured out I'm vegetarian by now, but they haven't, right? And that's the problem. How do you actually help these kinds of companies that have data? They have huge amounts of customers and data, but they're not able to operate the way— I mean, imagine that data with a Netflix or Spotify. They would just be killing you with personalization.

Got it. Okay, that makes all the sense in the world. How does it— how do you guys make money? And then is it only reserved for How big does a company— you said larger enterprises, so you got that part. How do you guys charge in general? How do you make money?

So I think it's a fairly simple thing. We've obviously been through a journey to get here. We started off saying we want to democratize this whole thing. We try to work with mid-sized companies, lots of that. We've done a pivot, and I'll come to that later. But to answer your main question, how do you make money? It's fairly simple, right? We have a 2-sided platform. So what we tell a bank is you have customers, you need to connect to the digital world of merchants, of people who have products to sell. Our platform will sit in between, profile your customer, help engage them in a personal way, and help them transact with all these other people in the marketplace. And all of this is coming out of one single full-stack solution. And the way we make money is 3 things. One is long-term annual subscriptions for the platform. Typically, this is based on the number of customers or the portfolio value that you have. The second one is a share of incremental income. For example, today, merchants are prepared to pay for getting traffic from, let's say, bank customers. So we'd say we will take a share of the incremental income that we will generate. And the third one, and this is very important, I think, in Crayon's journey and a learning that I've personally gone through, is professional services, integrations, and customizations. Normally a bad word in the SaaS world, but I think we have our reasons and our learnings that we've gone through in getting there.

How long have you had a career in sales for?

You don't need to give an exact number, just a range. I'm okay. I'm not afraid of this. I think I'm still quite contemporary for when I look at some of the other people around me. So I've spent 35 years, Eric, doing one thing, which is enabling companies to understand their customers better and how to serve them, create experiences, products, price better. But if you interestingly look at that 35-year journey, it's been a steady, what I call a backward progression. I've gone further and further away from the customer. I started off in frontline sales. You know, I used to sell sewing thread in my start of my career. Go out there, go and sit with tailors, people who do use sewing thread, right? That's what it was. I'm more into product management now. You're trying to say I want to abstract something and take some research and do it. From there, I moved into advertising, saying I'm going to take what the marketing guy is telling me and I'm going to convert it into a message to move consumers. Inside advertising, I moved to the media business, which is— I said, okay, now it's really about finding the customer at the right time and giving that message to them. I moved to international roles from national roles in India to international roles in Asia Pacific. And then as I worked in media and I worked and I saw the first internet banking thing that I launched in Asia Pacific for a bank out here and first personalization and data warehousing projects in this part of the world, I had an epiphany. I said, if you really want to understand customers, it is going to be a data and tech-driven world. It's not going to be the right-brain world where I started, but the left-brain world of data and tech. And this is about 20 years ago, Eric. So it was about 2000. So rather stupidly quit my nicely high-paying bank job and became an entrepreneur in 2000. And that is to set up an analytics firm. And Eric, again, while you are young, you'd appreciate in 2000 analytics wasn't even a thing. It was rather brave of me to go out there and do that. But I think we evangelized, bootstrapped that firm, but it was built on the basic belief that the voice of the customer is already available to you. It is deep in your data. You're not looking at your data, right?

And that's what started my entrepreneurial journey Can you walk people through, I mean, people that want to sell to enterprise, you know, what are the keys to locking in a $1 million enterprise deal? What's the sales cycle look like? Because I often don't get to talk about that too much on this podcast with people.

That's an absolutely great question, Eric, and it's part of the existential struggle that we went through with Crayon. Like with all companies that said we want to be SaaS, we said, no, no, we want to have 100 clients, we want to have 200 clients, we should go out there, we should sell for $5,000 to $10,000 $10,000. So we're an 8-year-old firm, right? And it sounds like we've not done that, but we spent 2, 3 years actually building the platform and working with lead clients to make sure that this stuff worked. And then we went into this model saying we want to sell to the large enterprise market. Everybody should be able to download and install and use it. It's $5,000 to $10,000 a month. And it's $100,000 to $200,000 a year, which is not a bad number in SaaS ARR, if you will. And then we realized it doesn't work. The reason is that when you're talking about doing something like personalization, you're touching literally every system in a company, and you're either taking data or you're sending some signal back into it. And not every mid-sized enterprise, even in the banking thing, was open to that kind of change because it was the change management process inside the enterprise of getting people to do things differently, that was hard. Now, obviously, we didn't want to embrace the whole services model as well. So we said, how do we do this? And at the same time, Eric, what we discovered was that large enterprises which were innovative leaders— and before COVID we did a fantastic project for Emirates Airlines, right, where we were— they wanted to create a completely— a vision where they said, if you think of travel, you should think of Emirates. They have 100 million customer records. They have 60 million passengers. And they said, listen, we love your capability, but you really have to work with us to integrate this deep across every system. We love the platform, but unless you actually come in and work with us, we don't want to work with you. Right? And that's a mental switch, right? Because if you're a SaaS entrepreneur, you want to say, no, no, no, I don't want to do this. But that's really huge bucks. and you're embedding yourself. I mean, it's like putting a needle inside something, right? It's hard for people to take the needle out. So what I'd actually tell people is the same thing, right? I think when you go into the large enterprise, I think we have to understand the fact that large enterprises are complex. They have multiple buyers, they have long sales cycles. You've got to embrace that. If you don't like that and you're getting impatient with it, it's like wanting to play a basketball game with one quarter. No, this is a 4-quarter game. You're going to win it in the last minute. You've got to have the patience to go through that 4-quarter game, right?

Suresh, this has been great. What's the best way for people to find you online?

LinkedIn is good. I— Suresh V. Shankar, which should be fairly easy. I am reasonably, you know, I have my own podcast. I hope to, like I said, get onto that. It's called Slaves to the Algo. And I think that has all my contact details. Slaves to the Algo. And it's all about AI and demystifying it. And if, you know, I mean, I think the LinkedIn profile has all my contact details, my mobile, my emails, everything's on my LinkedIn.

Great. Suresh, thanks so much for doing this.

Thank you so much, Eric. And we really hope to be, you know, following in your young footsteps.

Appreciate that. Take care.

Take care.