3 Secrets CROs Need to Know Before Going to Market with Talend's CRO Ann Christel Graham

Good morning, everyone. I'm Anne Christelle Graham, CRO of Talend, and I'm excited to participate for the first time at SaaStr. I hope those of you able to join in person are enjoying a great conference, maybe meeting and reconnecting with a few people that you haven't seen in a long time. I wish I could be there in person as well, but I'll be joining you here virtually today and share a few tips based on my experiences as CRO that might help you as you think about going to market. I've been in software sales for more than 20 years and specifically worked at companies and with companies who went through or are going through the transition to become SaaS businesses. And today, I'm responsible for the worldwide distribution teams at Talend. You may not be familiar with Talend. Talend's here to help organizations achieve data health. Achieving data health enables companies to collaborate more easily, make smart decisions, and, and make decisions with confidence instead of, well, kind of the traditional, uh, doing— resorting to guessing or gut feel as you're making decisions about what to do with the organization, um, and, uh, and, and big changes that you might need to make in the organization. We, you might be thinking, data health, what does that really mean? How does this tie back to today's session? Well, data health describes how well a company's data supports business objectives. It's amazing how much data is available in most companies today, but at the same time shocking how useless that data actually is to most companies due to a variety of different challenges that are, they're different in every company. But it was that exact finding of how difficult it is to actually use data that we learned about through some of the research that we conducted over the past 12 to 18 months, which shaped Talend's own path to transformation and how we view our opportunity to help our customers with their effort to make data useful. And today, I'm going to share some of the tips and tricks we've leveraged and that I've found useful as a CRO especially considering some of the things that we learned as a business as well. Number 1, having a continuous and maniacal research validation of customer needs ongoing at all times. Number 2, a really clear focus on the customer lifecycle in its entirety to help create predictable revenue. And number 3, the need to plan for scale. Before I go into the first of my 3 secrets, You may have heard companies describe themselves as product-driven or as a sales-driven organization. No matter what culture your business has today or what you strive for in the future, one thing is for certain, and that's that customer centricity always wins. According to Gartner, by 2023, organizations that take an outside-in customer-driven approach to innovation will deliver 50% more business value than those that take a traditional inside-out IT-centric approach. What does business value equate to? Well, ultimately, it should equate to revenue. So let's talk about secret 1, which centers around the need to validate and champion your customers and their needs, that customer centricity that I was talking about. Validating the customer and customer need when entering a market is relevant, whether you're a new startup or also for established companies that are bringing a new product to life, bringing a new product to the market. Possibly even established companies who have kind of reevaluated their market and might be entering it in a different way. Consider for a moment the impacts of the pandemic on businesses around the world over the last 18 or so months, and the numerous companies that really needed to reimagine who they were, reimagine their relevance or unique value in what quickly became a completely different world. Imagine the companies who, for example— this is a good example— service schools with breakfast and lunches for kids. With no kids in school, the need changed, but it wasn't that the need itself went away, it just became different. And I spent some time with a couple of companies that were in this position last year. They realized that they needed to rethink their relevance and how they went to market a little differently. Their clients were still in need of their services, but they no longer needed to bring food and staff to the schools. Instead, they they needed to change their distribution model to focus on supporting the communities in the various forms that were still needed because those kids still needed their lunches and their breakfasts. It's just that they needed it at home or maybe needed it to be delivered through, you know, other, other means in which that would be able to get access, that they'd be able to get access to it. So I bring up this example, not just to remind us of all the challenges that we faced over the last couple of years, but to remind us of the opportunities when you place focus on the customer and their needs in the design and the delivery of your product to market. And in early stages of a company, many might say, I've got this great product idea, I'm gonna go pitch my product. But ultimately, the success of the go-to-market comes down to a clear identification of the problem being solved with the product, and importantly, the customer's perspective of the value and outcome that your product uniquely creates. So one of the first things a company needs to do is identify their ideal customer. What's the problem they're trying to solve? And is the problem big enough? Or put another way, is the solution valuable enough for the customer to spend time, money, resources on solving with your unique solution? Keep in mind that ideal— that word ideal in describing the ideal customers can mean many different things at different stages of your company's evolution. An ideal customer could be a customer of a specific size, or maybe a quantity of customers that you're trying to get access to in the early stages of your company's evolution, while a customer's growth potential with you, or maybe their profitability factors in— factors more or play more heavily into considerations later on. There are many great tools and techniques out there that you should expect product marketing or product management to support you on as a sales leader, such as ideal customer profiling, market insights, customer insights, all those things. But those assessments still need to be validated to see if they pass what you and your leaders know to be true. The sales teams are front and center talking with customers and prospective customers daily. Nobody knows better the nuances of problems that need to be solved than that group. So as a sales leader, you need to not only know, know the voice of the customer, but you have a unique perspective into the sales performance, how you're able to, to take these products to market, are they a good fit, and the reasons behind it. And you need to bring those things back into everything that the organization does, from product planning to go-to-market to customer journey designing to pricing and packaging. And it's important to make sure your teams are communicating in the spaces they care about. Make sure everyone in your organization is fully engaged and aligned on what matters to the customer. So, What does this all boil down to? Boils down to collaborate and validate like mad. Use your network and your team's networks to connect what you know about your customers' needs to potential solutions. Don't just listen, bring that information back to the organization because it's so much more than that. This is amazing intelligence that can really inform how you go to market. Partner cross-functionally to get the solutions that you know your customers need, and that you know you can sell into market, and then expect alignment from everybody involved. That alignment is so critical in order to drive product-market fit, which ultimately leads to growth. So I mentioned earlier, as I was introducing myself, that talent was going through a transformation as well. And our relentless focus on solving customer problems led talent to a broad survey last year, where, among other things, we learned that companies were struggling with predictability of costs surrounding the use of the very assets that we were focused on enabling for our customers in order to help them achieve data health. So we took a step back, thought about how we could help solve this problem, especially for our SMB customers who are more cost sensitive, and designed pricing and packaging that allowed for unlimited row usage in the effort to move data to cloud. And without that continuous evaluation of the market and customer needs and the validation internally around and across departments around whether this could make a difference or not, we wouldn't have been able to go to market recently with this unique offer that creates predictability for our customers. So speaking of predictability, I talked a little bit about secret number 1 around research and continuous evaluation of market needs and customer needs and reassessing your ability to to meet those needs. Well, all those things were great in terms of, in my story here, being able to deliver to something that was uniquely a problem for our customers. But let me talk a little bit about predictability of revenue as well. Because let's face it, as a CRO, predictability and consistent revenue is one of the most important jobs that we have. Companies sometimes go out of business because they don't think about what they need to do to be able to sustain and grow their go-to-market model. So how do you build upon what you have today to create a sustaining, growing revenue stream? Well, early-stage companies will often place a tremendous amount of focus on landing right, on the acquisition. And of course, that's extremely important. You've got to build your base from which you're going to grow upon. However, it's also important to think about the entire customer lifecycle and how you build to grow and create continuous value. Let me share a couple statistics with you. It costs up to 7 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. And 82% of companies agree that customer retention is less expensive than acquiring a new customer. Existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more than new customers do. Yet 44% of companies have a greater focus on acquisition versus the 16% that focus on retention and have strategies associated with that. For most industries, the average customer retention rate is below 20%. So just think about that in terms of what the impact is on revenue with those types of stats, depending on whether you focus on the acquisition or put in place some plans associated with retention. My advice, after having built sales motions that focus on expanding the customer to exponentially grow revenue is to build a product and go-to-market strategy that not only thinks about that, that early stage land, but really holistically thinks about the customer lifecycle front to end from the start. Think about the end goal and the evolution potential. What is the customer's potential? How do you want to get them there? How do you lead them to that? Understand why your customers chose you to begin with and what they need and their definition of success. Set concrete expectations at the start of the engagement, deliver on those, satisfy your customer's needs, delight them, and then innovate on how you can provide unexpected extras that go above and beyond. Continue to measure satisfaction, improve the customer experience, make it easy for the customer to continue to do business with you, to see how you can continue to deliver additional value throughout their customer journey. When you understand the customer's needs and expectations and create delighted customers, it will pay off. You'll reduce churn and inspire loyalty. And all those things then together with the other strategies around acquisition will certainly generate growth. So let's talk about the third secret as well. One of the things that I have learned is that you can plan like the best of them only to be impacted by curveballs. That create a complete set of unpredictable chaos around you. And we have many examples that we can look back on in addition to the impacts of the pandemic over the last 12 to 18 months. Take a look at the transportation industry that was completely disrupted by Uber, or the retail industry disrupted by Amazon multiple times in different iterations. We can all remember back in the day when they only sold books. And then there's the economic instability, such as the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, that create immense disruption of the status quo. So how do you adequately, adequately prepare for any of those things that might come your way? It's difficult to plan for the unimaginable, but what I've learned is that you can much better adapt and adjust when you built with an end goal in mind, when you've had a plan. Once you have a vision for the future and plan for, then you can really plan for where things might go wrong. You can plan for maybe that unexpected competitor that comes along from behind and that, or that unexpected downturn. If you don't plan for that to happen, it just kind of hits you in the face. So as you're thinking about your go-to-market, think about where you want to get to, what's your end goal with your customer, and work backwards from there. Try to measure everything becomes a distraction. Instead, zero down on a set of really clear winning choices. Identify your 5 "this needs to be true" metrics to measure success and tie it back to the customer lifecycle. Validate the approach and the metrics, how and when they're being reported in the operational model, to learn and remove the obstacles to your opportunities. Now, it's also important, extremely important, to think about the systems and processes that support the business. Invest in the right set of systems and technology to track and document early on. I can't underscore this enough. Don't let processes get in your way, but allow them to guide and support even during that time of early scrappiness as a startup. Think about customer lifecycle tracking. What are the kinds of things that you need to learn and know so that you can, you know, use that information as you continue to evolve your go-to-market strategies? Create a single source of truth for rules, guidelines, FAQs, et cetera. Make sure everyone has access to the documents. Be transparent about what you're trying to do. It's not just about the rules itself, it's about creating a company's overall philosophy that will lead you through to where you're trying to go. And like I said before, once you've got that plan, you're much more capable and much more able to adjust. When needed, when something comes at you that you just weren't expecting. So as you continue to grow and plan for growth, that foundation will allow you to scale and pivot as the market or industry or customer needs adjust around you. And enables you to do so while keeping the customer success at the forefront of your— in your focus. So in closing, as we think about extremely successful people and companies that make this look really easy. This quote from Marc Benioff stands out to me. As we go back to that first secret that I shared about successful revenue growth, around really understanding the customer and their definition of success. Constantly research and validate the customer's needs and keep that focus on the voice of the customer, building a go-to-market approach that contemplates the land and the expand through the full customer lifecycle. And how you're gonna do that? How you're going to bring your company around it, deliver a product and a model that keeps the customer and their success front and center, and the foundation will be there to allow you to scale and grow predictably. So thank you for listening, and I'm excited to take some questions now. Here we go. What is one challenge you didn't anticipate in your first year as CRO? My first year as CRO was also my first year at a new company, and I didn't know the employees, our customers, or our partners, obviously being new to the company. And when the pandemic hit, you know, it wasn't all that strange for me to go and work from a home office. I'd done that for years prior to this change, so that switch just wasn't very foreign to me. However, what I quickly realized is how challenging it would be that I didn't— when I didn't have the opportunity to get out to the field in front of customers, sitting alongside my team across from customers, having very open dialogue about the present and future, understanding their biggest challenges. There's just something to be said for being out in front of a customer and hearing directly from them what their challenges are day in, day out. Though I'm grateful for Zoom and other similar platforms, They've been extremely valuable during this time, but this really reaffirmed for me how critical it is to be in front of customers on a regular basis, to be in their day-to-day, to fully understand their challenges. And I think that's extremely important as a sales leader, as a CRO, to be able to be that voice internally, as I've described before, and being able to really be that voice and be that advocate for their needs. That was probably one of my biggest challenges over the last year and a half or so. And I think we are at time, so we'll go ahead and take a look at the other questions that have come through here, make sure we address them with you all. Thanks again for your time, and have a great conference.