How SaaS Companies Price, Bill & Get Paid (Without the Headache)

Frank, it's so good to have you on the podcast. Thank you for joining us. I've been following you on LinkedIn for some time. I feel like I've learned a lot from you just by way of LinkedIn. And so it's great to have this opportunity to connect with you here. You're a founder, you're an operator, you have a very deep background in quote-to-cash and monetization architecture in SaaS. You've been a solution architect for Livana, for Aircall, for WePro. You founded your own consulting business to help companies architect quote-to-cash, which is, I think, such a fascinating area. It's got so much change going on within it. But step back and get us up to speed. How did we get to now? Tell us your career journey in your own words.

Okay. First of all, thank you, Fynn, for the invitation. I'm really glad to be part of this podcast and hope my answers will help a lot of people here. So my journey started in the financial industry. As a back office in the financial industry, like a market industry, typically in Luxembourg for a small year. But I didn't really like it, but it was at the heart of a transformation. They were moving from an obsolete tool to a cloud computing tool to put some financial orders in a system. So this is where I've seen how a company can be transformed through tools. After that, and I will avoid a lot of details, but I moved pretty quickly in the consulting industry, but more as an IT advisor on the functional side. Back in 2017, maybe, this is when I moved to Paris. And one year after that, I had an opportunity to join the Salesforce industry. This is where my code-to-cash journey started. Because I've been trained and skilled up in, on CPQ directly. So Salesforce Revenue Cloud Suite, including how to sell and how to bill for a company. My first projects were not in the software industry. They were more in the manufacturing industry and with big size companies and French companies as well. But really quickly, I moved from like a functional consultant to lead architect, manager as well internally, and also helping on deals internally. So as a pre-sales consultant and then some account manager throughout the year. So this journey lasts maybe 6 years in total as a consultant. And last year, now 1 year and a half from now, I've decided to move internally. So this is why you can see on my LinkedIn that I've joined Aircall. Aircall, that was my customer when they started their quote-to-cash journey. And then I moved internally because a strong business systems team was built by really passionate people and really smart people that were wanting to scale the business, building a strong structure internally to be able to launch any product when they want in an easy way and to bring operations at the heart of the company. And now I'm in another journey where I have my own business, my own consulting business, where I try to help software, so software industry company to grow, to structure in the code to cash area focused when they raise funds, when they face new challenges such as optimizing costs, creating new products, including new teams in their tool stack or in their approach of doing operational tasks on a daily basis.

It's an impressive journey. And so just to make sure I fully understood, you were with Aircall for the last year, year and a half. Are you still with Aircall and running your consulting business on the side, or have you left Aircall to run your consulting business full-time?

So just for some background, Aircall has been my customer for 2 years to build this code-to-cash project and put it live. Then I moved internally to structure the teams inside Aircall on the quote-to-cash department. And now since 4 months, I'm their consultant again. So I'm not internal, but I still work with them because we have a lot of projects internally, but the projects are a bit smaller than the huge quote-to-cash project I used to work in the past with them.

And for those that, for listeners who don't know, Aircall is, it's effectively like an integrated phone system for sales teams, correct?

Yeah, that's correct.

And so from a pricing perspective and from a monetization perspective, I imagine it's got a ton of complexity. I imagine you've got multiple tiers. I imagine you've got like a seat-based model. I wonder if there is some level of usage-based model, but can you paint a picture of how the business monetizes, how it prices, how it packages?

You have three types of sales. You have the self-service part. Maybe we will go more into details of the self-service opportunities in this industry later. The sales-assisted part, of course, where AEs or customer success are helping customers to just choose the right offering. And it's like either direct sales or indirect sales through partnership or resellers channels.

Okay. So already we're dealing with a lot of complexity because we have a self-service model, we have a sales model, and we have a channel model. So we have three distinct go-to-market motions.

Yes. And in terms of offering, it's even like, this is where it's also complex. Even if the product is not the most expensive on the market, but on its industry is kind of a leader. You have seats, of course. So seats price model, simple as everyone knows, but you have different levels. Like if you will pay upfront for a year, if you are not committed, it's not the same price., it's not the same level of discounts. You also have usage products. This is where the crypto cash journey becomes interesting because to capture usage, it's never an easy, an easy way to, an easy job, let's say.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think what's so fascinating about already, like we're kind of into the meat of this from a complexity perspective, but you've got a business that has 3 go-to-market motions, a primary billing model, which is seat-based, but the introduction of usage-based features and/or products, which effectively mean a hybrid billing model. And then you've got like all kinds of permutations around that, as you mentioned, from do we, you know, if you pay upfront, you get X, if you decide to go monthly, you get Y, things like that. I'm also interested, is there kind of a third vector of complexity here, which is multiple products? Or would you say that the company is fundamentally offering like a single product?

Yeah, it's definitely multiple products that are possible to sell. You also have the professional services that are more one-off products where the process is not the same. Overall, we could say any process are the same. We just need to send the code for signature and close the deal. But in between, sometimes you have to have more control, more delegation of authority. More views for leaders on given sales process can be due to the deal size, can be to the size of your customer, or simple on the level of add-ons you need to update to activate to your customer.

Yeah. Okay. So let's, that's a great sort of picture of the complexity that you have to support. But step back for a second. For people who kind of have heard the term quote to cash, but may not fully understand what it means. Like it sort of makes sense conceptually, but what is quote to cash? How have you come to think about what it is?

So I will answer with a funny, I think, answer or a typical one. For me, quote to cash is one of the best means to bring in the same room most of the team in your company, including leaders. Starting with marketing to product, sales, finance, legal. And of course, the most important to link everyone is the operations team. When I mean operations, it's not only RevOps, FinOps, it's also system team. Because for me, when we talk about code to cash, it's not only a technical solution to find, it's also understanding exactly what are the objectives of the business. So quote to cash for me, it's really, really the mean to bring all together in the same room, these important people in the company. And it's a real challenge to have everyone in the same room and focus on the project when we mention all that teams.

Do you think people should think about quote to cash? By the way, I love that answer because I think what it suggests is something to the effect of quote to cash is business strategy. It's, it's another word for business strategy because of how cross-cutting it is for a company to design how they go from an offering to a customer to they've received money. Like, I love, I love that definition because it sort of speaks to how cross-cutting it is. But should people view quote-to-cash as a business process, as a business function, as a suite of tools? Help us understand it even better?

That's a good question because if I had to understand, to really answer this question, I would say it's a combination of everything you've mentioned because it's exactly a combination of tools because it's difficult for a code-to-cash challenge to have one answer with one product. I mean one solution. For example, I have Salesforce. I put Salesforce for my marketing, my sales. My quote-to-cash journey, and even for the data. It's possible, but I have not seen this in any of my clients' tool stack. So this is a combination of tools, of course. It's new process, new ways of working for your employees internally. But on another side, it's a new view for your customer, at least an opportunity. To bring a new image to your customer of your product and their journey with you in the company, because it opens the door for self-service, which is for me really important. Providing to your customer the ability to purchase or cancel their contract or do whatever they want from their dashboard, and they have the control of everything they do and to see their invoices and everything. But as well, it helped internally to bring in that guidance for any employee that are using, or at least impacted by the quote-to-cash processes. So salespeople are impacted, success people are impacted, operational also, because they help all along the process to close deal, to review things and activate maybe product sometime, the services, they need to be checked. Onboarding is also included. And And the last piece is the financial teams that are sometimes split into two. So we have the financial ops, more billing, and then accounting.

I think one of the things that, a little bit of a story here, but I had a global director of RevOps at a large SaaS company recently tell me that he believes RevOps, the mandate of RevOps is to deeply understand the entire customer journey from pre-purchase through post-purchase. Break that journey into its sort of individual kind of mechanics or variables and optimize that journey where it may need optimization. And what's interesting about the way you're talking about quote to cash is that it reminds, it sort of in some ways elicits kind of this idea that quote to cash is the customer journey with the way they buy your product. But I think what you've also added is it's not just the customer journey, it's how the business actually receives, recognizes money, revenue, and reports on that. And so there's kind of two things that are kind of standing out to me about your definition. It's this idea of customer journey and sort of the financial controls of the business.

Yes. Yeah. And all of that helps also the company to take decision. Differently. Maybe it's a way to increase collaboration internally as well. I will give you one example. You can have the financial department, so FP&A, trying to figure out what is the pricing of this new product that has to be launched. But if FP&A decides on its own without including the business, so sales and even success, because they will work on the lifecycle of the journey of the customer once the product is purchased. If they go inside a room, or at least they have the discussion together to define the strategy, it will be, at least they will increase the chance to have more success by launching the product than doing things on their own and, you know, working in silo. And working in silo is something I've seen in a lot of companies. It's not an issue, a problem, it's a way of working. That I can fully understand. It's you have a lack of some time of time to spend to collaborate internally between teams. But when you want to streamline any process in the company and it has a direct impact on revenue, I think you need to go through this like high level of collaboration, bring all together people to define the pure strategy they want and each stream inside the strategy is owned by the team, by the dedicated team.

What are the biggest mistakes you see companies make as it relates to quote-to-cash? Is it not collaborating effectively enough?

So the first mistake is to underestimate the level of effort that will require implementing automating, building automation around quote-to-cash. Because sometimes The first thought are, okay, I have this, this, and that in terms of tools. So Salesforce, I have Ironclad for the invoicing, and in between I have just manual action, and I need to connect both systems. But then when the code-to-cash project starts, it opens this magical box where you have everything inside, where you are like, wow, I need to review all my pricing strategy. I can reduce my SKUs by 2, maybe divide by 2 my number of SKUs, or by 10, depending on the complexity of the product catalog you had before. You open the door for who is owner of what. So same here, the mistake sometimes is, okay, historically my product has been owned by X, it cannot be owned by Z. Why? It's a question I've always faced. If you want me to help you to streamline your process by implementing salesforce CPQ, please take CPQ as your product, your owner of the product catalog and pricing, because we will control it with no code. If the downstream system, so the financial systems, are owning the product catalog, it reduces the flexibility I can offer you while building an offer. So try to be a bit more synthetic. The challenges I faced and the common mistake I've seen is not having the right people involved at early stage in a project, difficulty to define pure ownership. I would have like thousands of mistakes or challenges. I prefer to call it challenges than mistakes because it's always a way to figure out a solution. The last piece is also the data. Streamlining this type of process requires a data migration for sure. And I think some of my friends who will listen to this podcast will really laugh at this standpoint because we faced we really spent some funny time doing some data migration, especially at Aircall, but data migration is sometimes underestimated and tackled at the end of a project instead of before starting the project.

I want to dig into something that you talked about briefly, which was product catalog. So I think that non-SaaS businesses are really familiar with product catalogs. I think SaaS businesses are increasingly familiar with them, but SaaS businesses don't have sort of a lexicon around product catalog from like the very beginning. Like that lexicon starts to develop as the company gets really robust and goes on a multi-product journey. Well, let me stop there. Do you think that's fair?

Yeah, definitely. Because if I define it at early stage, a company, sometimes to build an offer, a quote, it's on an Excel sheet.

Yeah, right.

And then to activate services is just ticking a box, a feature flag somewhere.

So So product catalog is a really interesting concept to me in SaaS because sort of isn't this thing companies are all that aware of early on, but it becomes this thing that they must care about should they be really successful. And they go on this multi-product journey and they have different go-to-market motions and they have different billing models. And it seems like what you said is the product catalog often ends up living in different places. Like it might live in the sales stack or the quoting stack. It might live in the financial stack or the billing stack. And when it lives in multiple places, I assume that's sort of a root cause for a ton of complexity. And I wonder if you can help us better understand how the role that the product catalog plays and where it can get really messy and where companies may sort of have an opportunity to avoid the complexity.

So having a product catalog, big catalog, sorry, which is not aligned between system A and B, For example, Siebel CRM, not aligned with the financial, the ERP. It increased the risk of error. You made mistake by inputting some data because everything is manual. It increases it a lot because you are not sure of the data you send. You're not sure of the pricing. Even if you receive an information to input in the system, but the manual error is always here. So having ownership living a bit everywhere and not aligned, and systems not aligned. Increase this first. Also, it's a real struggle when you need to launch a new product or to bring some more dynamism, flexibility into your offering. What I mean by that, and this is something I mentioned earlier in this, in our discussion, is a self-service part. If you want your customer being able to push a button and purchase something from somewhere, like an e-commerce experience, you need all your systems impacted that are aligned. Otherwise, they will still push the button, but would the service be activated straightforward? Would you be able to invoice them in a decent timing without including 10 people in the loop? For me, if you are not aligning your system, you're not closing the door to do this, but the level of effort will be higher. The scalability won't be here in your company. And when you will face such question internally, like we should launch this new product, we should build this new contract design for our customer. When the question will come, It will be easier when you have all your systems aligned and your ownership clearly defined because you will know where the data is, the pure data, who to ask when you need something, and you'll be able as well to define timelines that are realistic.

You also talked about ambiguous ownership. Have you come to believe that quote-to-cash should live with a single functional owner like the CFO or the CRO? Or have you come to believe that it really depends on the company? What's your point of view at this point on where, on ownership related to quote to cash?

I think each company, even if they work in the same industry, they are unique. So they have their own way of working. There is a company where, for example, you are not allowed to send invitation to meetings like Google Meet or Zoom or anything without a pure subject, you have companies where you can send an invite now for the next 5 minutes to start. The ways of working are really different everywhere. And this is what I've seen. This was, that surprised me as well when I started my journey. So I would say it depends on the culture of the company, but my opinion is clear. For me, it's a cross-owned process. We always need someone on top to support. Sometime also to sign the budget allocated to something. But at the end, go-to-cash should be owned by the team I mentioned earlier, and it's a lot of teams. But at least sales, finance, and operations that are in between them. For me, it's really the good opportunity to link all these teams together in something common. Because at the end, you need also to work with product. We didn't really mention product yet, but product has a real role to play this quote to Cash Journey.

Let's dig in there, say more about that.

I did mention the feature flag earlier with this simple picture by saying you close a deal in Google Sheet and you ask someone to activate a feature flag somewhere else, which is a picture, but I think it still exists in some companies. And I hope there are still small products sometimes and often in an organization owns the strategy around new features to launch, new approach to sell. When I say sell, I say sell is how the customer will, how we can empower the journey for the customer. But it often opens the door like, should we give more discounts? Should we enable trials for a longer period? Self-service trials? Can we enable our customer to cancel their contract automatically and without asking someone by opening a ticket or or whatever from a dashboard. To answer, to address all these topics, if you have a code-to-cash process in place, it's impacting it at some point. I will take the last example for the cancellation part. If a customer wants to churn, it will have an impact on the contract and the invoice, the last invoice. So all the teams internally, then the tools, need to be informed about this action. This is where like a product team working closely with the engineering team, the ops team as well, is the key of success for me.

It feels to me that quote to cash, and I think you could also just say pricing and packaging generally in B2B SaaS is effectively governed by systems that sit across multiple functional stacks. And I think those stacks are effectively, you've got the sales stack, which is often focused on facilitating quoting the customer and the initial contract. You've got the finance stack, which is often focused on managing the subscription, invoicing, and collecting payment. And then you've got the product stack, which is often focused on facilitating the fulfillment of that contract. And in some cases metering usage. Anything, first of all, is there anything that you would edit about that description of the systems that govern quote to cash?

In terms of system, you've mentioned everything. And just one piece is the next step after the customer acquisition. So their first contract, how do we amend a given contract? How do we renew avoiding churn, like renegotiate tacit reconduction?

Yeah.

This lands—

Like subscription lifecycle is what you're describing, right?

Exactly. When it's not negotiable and everything, it's in the financial systems. But when it has to be renegotiated, it goes back to the sales system, CRM. But the process is not always the same as the acquisition process. So it can involve different people, so different teams, not AEs maybe. Success or post-sales team, or both. But if we have these 4 bricks, I think we cover all the quote-to-cash process.

So, and just to try to really paint this picture for listeners, you've got these 3 big stacks that sit across the business, product, finance, sales. You know, in product, you have like, how are we going to provision the customer? You know, how are we going to use feature flags? How are we going to use entitlements? And the billing stack, you've got your billing tool, your subscription management lifecycle, like all of the many jobs that go into subscription management, invoicing, payments. And in the sales stack, you've got everything associated with effectively quoting and contracting. Can you paint a picture for how those systems, and if whatever you feel comfortable sharing, the tools specifically, how those systems interact at Aircall and how you focused on designing quote-to-cache across those stacks at Aircall?

So if we still focus on the Aircall example, connect all these stacks, we use Celigo. Celigo is an integration tool.

Okay.

It's a low-code integration tool. So it can be administrated by still technical resources, but it requires some effort at an initial stage and then some monitoring all along the way.

Do you need to use an engineer for that or can you use a more like technical ops person?

Typically it varies between the type of resources you have in front of you, but engineering are really, really a good fit, but the technical ops as well. It depends on the level of curiosity, the willingness to learn more in terms of new technology for the resource to then define who owns what. In my side, when I face this type of challenges, my way to recruit people internally or externally, Aircall or somewhere else, was always like, what is your first background? Are you more engineer or business? But then it's more, what is your level of curiosity? What do you like about new technologies? Because all the solutions I'm mentioning, they are no code. On my side, I've, I'm graduating from business school. So I'm not supposed to code anything. And I've learned how to build Salesforce solutions and understand all the architecture between all these tools. And at the end, I'm sometimes more identified as a technical person than a business person. And I did both jobs, in fact. Yeah.

By the way, just as an aside, I love that idea of it could be an engineer, it could be a technical ops person, but it all comes down to the curiosity they possess and how much energy they get from really leaning into this architecturally and understanding how to support what the business needs to accomplish. But take us into the belly of Aircall. You use the no-code tool to integrate these systems, but maybe take us into like a self-serve deal and a sales-assisted deal. What happens?

A self-service deal starts from the dashboard where the customer or the new Newly acquired customer purchase the solution by choosing the plan. Then it flows into systems and they are activated like maybe 20 minutes later maximum. And they receive the invoice based on their billing frequency and the billing cycle that are defined later on. Or they can even purchase with credit card. So it depends. For a sales-assisted flow, They go through a negotiation stage where an AE, first SDR, BDR, do their job in terms of qualifying, prospecting. But then the AE takes the deal to close it and to negotiate with the customer. They send a quote to show the customer what would be the offer and the pricing and the terms. Once the customer has accepted the big picture of the deal, we move to the contracting part. So sending a pure contract with all the terms, detailed, specific terms as well. We can mention like, for example, payment method, specific condition. I don't know, for example, you say, I will commit for a year, but I don't want any tacit reconduction. So I want to remove the clause saying I will renew automatically every year based on this contract.

Yep.

We built this level of dynamism and then the customer receives a document to sign through a tool called Ironclad, which is seamlessly integrated with Salesforce without any code again. It's pure tool that we can connect in a few clicks. I'm not saying we can build them in a few clicks, but we can connect them. And then it flows to financial systems and products to enable the services. Yeah. A bit more longer, but still the, you know.

So the rep sends a quote using Salesforce CPQ. The customer accepts the terms of the deal that kicks off a contract with Ironclad upon signature.

Yeah.

That kicks the, effectively the contract to the financial system. For the creation of an invoice based on the terms in the contract and the subscription to be created on the billing system and everything.

Yeah.

And it also kicks off to the product for provisioning in the product.

Exactly.

And on the provisioning side, is that happening automatically via like flags and entitlements are being turned on in some admin dashboard, or is it happening manually via like a professional services team?

You have a mix of both. So professional services, for example, for the example of Aircall, they have a part of onboarding, explaining the tool, use the tool and activating a few services. But most of it is automated. The automation built in when it's impacting at least two systems, it's in Seligo. But when it's something, it's only on the admin dashboard, for example, it's the product team that is in charge of this. Yep.

Thank you. That's super helpful. One question I want to try to dig into a little bit more is you mentioned there's a lot of work and companies often miss, they underestimate how much work goes in upfront to designing and implementing this architecture. But once implemented, it's a process of ongoing monitoring. What is the ongoing monitoring process like today at Aircall? And, you know, is it, have you gotten it to a place where you're really happy with it? Like the business is getting better at quote to cash on a monthly basis, quarterly basis, or do you still think there's work to do to build the muscle?

Good, good, good question. In the different companies I worked with, it was either you already have a team in place to administrate the systems. And to work on the future projects. At Aircall, we were building this team, the reason why I joined them and all that happened, with still the same challenges we can face in the software industry. Strategy changes due to economic crisis, due to leadership changes, due to a lot of factors. So even with that, it's important for a company to maintain a strong team in charge of projects because at the end, projects have to be delivered no matter what is the strategy. But to be delivered, you need a scalable tool stack and processes in place. So if we go back to the example of Aircall, by building this team, we are and we were and we are still able to address projects, to deliver them on time, with the right resources because we have this structure in place with scalable tools. But there is still some procedure to follow because building a quote-to-cash process internally brings at least more complexity to deliver a solution. But when I say complexity, I don't want to say technical debt because it depends on your strategy. If you want to build end-to-end automated flows from the product to the finance, going through the sales process, you need to have strong tools and processes and everything calculated automatically and stuff. So it requires time. So I would say if you want to address this type of project, you need a strong team, of course. So skilled people. And ramping up on the go some juniors as well to make sure if you have any turnover in the company, you can still have some backup. But it's still challenging.

Yeah.

Because you also have like sometimes hiring processes that are longer, budget topics where like you don't have enough budget to recruit people. And external resources in Code2Cash are not really Easy to find.

I think what you're describing in some ways, it sort of suggests, it reminds me that anything that is cross-functional is often subject to a lot of fragility ultimately in a business. And so despite quote-to-cash pricing and packaging, these sort of concepts being, I think everybody could agree, massive growth levers for companies. Because they are cross-functional, they end up being fragile. It ends up being extremely difficult to build real practices and disciplines and muscle around these concepts. Whereas basic selling, it is a function, you get good at it, you never stop doing it. Basic billing, invoicing, same thing. It's the cross-functional work where it easily falls through the cracks. It easily shifts, it easily loses momentum.

So on this topic, trying to find a way to say it because I have a lot of thoughts about this level of complexity you bring into companies when you build such solutions that are really tied to the strategy. So if you want to streamline all the process and just simplify your business and do straightforward stuff, is code to cash automated go-to-cash solution is a solution. I don't, I'm not sure. It depends really. But then if you put the effort and the budget in all the resources internally, and maybe it will reply to your remark, enablement would it be a lever you use internally for go-to-market people, but as well for operation people to make sure everyone understands The process is internally either on the way to use and the way to build, so GTM or operations. If you bring up all these ingredients to have the best cocktail, I would say it's perfect. But if you miss one piece, for example, you miss the enablement for the end user, your operational team will be flooded by tickets all the day. So they won't be able to address any project.

Yeah.

And if you take the opposite and user really, really, really familiar with the tool and operational team not familiar with the tool, how would they be able to collaborate on a given project to understand the future need?

Yeah.

So I don't have the proper answer to all these, but these are my thoughts.

Yeah. I think for me, it comes back to if you believe that pricing, packaging, quote to cash is a real lever on the business, you create the conditions for it to constantly improve. Yeah. And if you don't do that, the implication is that you don't believe pricing and packaging and quote to cash is a real lever.

And maybe you are more on the short-term strategy and that's it. But this is difficult, difficult when you are in the operations and not in the leadership. To understand the real strategy behind in a company.

Yeah. I want to zoom out for a second. There are so many startups competing for market share in what I'll call the broader quote-to-cash space. There are a long list of new billing products. There are a long list of new quoting products. There are companies trying to consolidate quoting and billing. There are new CRMs. I mean, there's just so much change happening, so much innovation launching. Why do you think that is? Why are there so many new entrants? Why does Quote to Cash not have— and by the way, Quote to Cash obviously has strong incumbents like Salesforce CPQ and others. So what's driving all the innovation into the space?

If we focus on the B2B SaaS industry, any software industry today, when you go on the website, not every, but a lot, it's really, really competitive. When you go on the pricing page to build your own offer on your own, sometimes it's really, really powerful. So this for me, it means that behind that, you have to offer a good experience to your customer. And if you are sales looking to apply for a company, for a job in a company, and you are on the website and you see this fanciness in the website and the way to play with the plans and the features, you expect as well strong processes in place if you already are experienced. And quote-to-cash is the earth of it— of it— fit, sorry, because it's it has a direct impact on revenue. This is the difference between other tools or processes like marketing, for example, top of funnel. It has an indirect impact on revenue, in my opinion. Quote to cash, this is where you have all your pricing and your products and all the process to sell it and to keep your customer alive inside your company and to make sure you collect and you recognize the revenue. If you streamline all this process, your company cannot be weak, in my opinion again. But building this process is not only the tool, it's the people, the combination of the people and the tool, and the strategy of the company, of course. So basically, quote to cash opens a lot of opportunities in the market today.

And what I really liked about what you said is it sounds like one of the things that you were sort of implying is that a ton of the innovation, why is there so much innovation? A lot of the innovation is coming because of competition, but competition is really sort of a second order effect of customers have come into quite a bit of power, right? Like the customer is more empowered. They are demanding to be able to buy how they want to buy. They're demanding to be billed for how they want to be billed. They're demanding for modular feature access. Like the customer has so much more influence and power over the standard SaaS vendor. And now the SaaS vendor has to go respond to that. And you could respond with, hey, we're going to keep it super simple. Like we're one product, we're one billing model, you get it all. But that ends up being not very competitive when all of your competitors around you are delivering all this flexibility.

Exactly. If your competitor has like thousands of options but are clearly explained and they can play with the pricing and you have a clear view of what you will pay. You can even sometimes estimate your usage. Then we also can jump on the topic of AI. You need data, good data. So if you have good data, it needs to go through strong processing system to have good data. So this is where Code to Cash can play a role as well. And then it opens the door for, of course, the AI. And AI, I think it's a topic where we could spend hours talking about that and all the opportunities we have with Code to Cash. But—

Well, we should definitely have a second conversation where we go into AI for sure. Two more questions. Just one is when you— and maybe this is sort of the precursor to our next conversation on AI, but when you zoom out and think about the next 5 years and quote Takash, what are the changes that attract your curiosity? Where do you get a lot of energy from thinking about the future?

I will start with AI.

Yeah.

AI will be able to empower automations for sure all along the process, but also in app guidance for both internal resources, but as well customer. And it goes back to small features I've mentioned during this discussion. You can bring to your customer on their own dashboard portal. But on the other side, it can also help in the decision-making process internally. How to have intelligent pricing, how to build a stronger strategy around the product launch because you know way better your customer, the way they purchase, you know, you are able to track all their journey and to score it, to identify all the opportunities you have behind that. The second one, self-service, self-purchasing, self- self-renewing, amending, and self-canceling as well, even if we don't wish a customer to churn, is one of the things I think we will see more and more in the future. And this is what I'm seeing with my customers. And for the past 2, 3 years, this was always one of the major topics we really, we had to target and deliver at some point, but it has to start from somewhere, building a strong quote-to-cash process. But my third pillar is the most important because without that you cannot do anything. It's the data accuracy and the security of your tools. So we see a lot of competition, of course, so more actors in the market, but are they good enough, compliant enough in terms of security? In the company, are you good enough to control your data and maintain it with a good level, the quality level. With these repeaters, I would say like we can see some nice things in the future for the industry.

We should schedule another conversation and dig into all of that. The closing question I always like to ask is, was there a moment in your career, a really specific moment that was most formative for you professionally?

When I did this transition from, it was always on the revenue suite, so quote to cash. When I've discovered the soft B2B software industry, because I was mostly working with manufacturing customers on quote to cash projects, but it was more quoting projects and pricing, but not implying all the entire chain. So in the discussion, I was not in broader discussion than My product owner is asking XYZ requirement. When I worked with software company, an innovative one, I've discovered the way to discuss and face challenges with CROs, CFOs, sales leaders, even if for me at the moment I still struggle to have sales leaders in a room when it comes to build strong process. But this transition gave a new level of excitement in my career. This is how I've landed there because otherwise I don't know if I would still be in this industry as I've decided to launch my own agency to work in a more innovative way than the typical consulting firm, being more, be closer to my customer, having a more human approach with the, you know, this approach where you skill people. You have this transfer of knowledge, this coaching approach, because now I'm not managing anymore anyone because I'm in my own journey. But in the past, I always had a team of 2 to 4 to 6 people to manage and to coach and to ramp up. So this is always part of my offer and I want to keep this and level of not curiosity, but innovation I'm seeing in the B2B SaaS industry. When you meet people internally for such projects, you meet really interesting people that can become even friends. It happened a lot to me in this kind of project because, sorry, French again, in this kind of project because you spend a lot of time painful challenges to solve. At the end, when you have a good result, you need also to celebrate. So this is how I could like. Try to illustrate one of the key highlights of my Code2Cash journey.

It's a great story. This has been such a pleasure and thank you so much for sharing all of your experience. Where can people learn more about you and reach out to you?

So on LinkedIn, simple as that. And then on your different channels where you will record the podcast and not on the professional side, you can find me in Paris or maybe sometime in Indonesia running somewhere or in a bootcamp somewhere. So Depends. Or on the football pitch as well.

Moi aussi. C'est vraiment génial.

Parfait. Merci Fynn Glover. Thank you so much for the invite. I would love to launch this Code to Cash series.

Yes. Yes.

And a real pleasure. Thank you so much.

Thank you again. Thank you so much.