Bottom Up vs. Top Down Selling in the Enterprise with ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair

Siddhesh has an incredible presentation prepared for everyone, and he also is going to have plenty of time for Q&A. So make sure to have your questions ready. You can drop them right in the chat below. Without further ado, Siddhesh, take it away.

Thank you, Taylor. So a long time ago, in a land far, far away, a farmer, his wife, and his teenage— their teenage son decided to go shopping for a donkey. They wanted to make sure that they have the best deal, and the market is far away. So they got up early in the morning and started the journey. And their perseverance paid off because they were able to find the best donkey for the most attractive price. They spent some more time and had lunch and decided to start their journey back home. So they were about to start the long journey back to the farm, and the son says, you know, look, 3 of us are walking and the donkey's anywhere there. Why don't one of us just ride the donkey back home? And mother says, you know what, that's a good idea, son. Why don't you jump on? So he hopped on the donkey and they started the journey. Everyone is happy. A few minutes in, a person who's standing, just a stranger on the side of the road, says, What sort of a boy are you? You know, your father, the head of the household, is walking and you are riding this donkey. So the son is like, you know, that's true. He jumps off, father jumps on and says, you know what, that makes sense, let's just do this. A few minutes in, guess what? Someone else says, what sort of a man will ride a donkey when the wife is walking in this hot sun? Shivler is dead. Now the father jumps out, has a small family conference. And then they decide, you know what, it's better to sort of have both of them ride the donkey anyway. Son is teenager, he's a young boy, he can walk. So mom and dad are riding the donkey, the family is happy, everything goes well until half an hour later when they see somebody else yelling at them. How much more can you add on this poor donkey? There's such animal cruelty going on here. I can't believe I'm saying this. Now the family gets together again and decides what's next to do. And then what they ended up doing, he said, you know what, let's just carry the damn donkey all the way back to the farm. And that's what they did. Look, I think our industry is going through such a massive change. We used to sell software to our customers as products. Now, instead of selling it as a product, we don't sell anything to them. We rent services. We lease service, a software as a service, so that they can have it for a certain period of time. So fundamentally, we have changed it. Obviously, when things change that much, every single function should be part of that change. For example, if you are in accounting, you have to think about how to run the business on ACV instead of TCV. Products team needs to figure out how to get closer to customers. Engineering needs to figure out how to release code every weekend. Of course, sales and marketing need to be much better in figuring out how to sell services instead of selling product or lease services. So it's not a surprise that this topic of what's better, top-down or bottom-up, bottoms-up, have been a hot one. In fact, you know it is hot because all VCs are talking about it, right? They are writing blogs and papers and everything going on. Investors, founders, and they're all talking about it. And in fact, the idea is that somehow the decision has been that it makes sense for us to imagine that you need both. So if you think through how the decision is progressing, it is ultimately coming down and saying, okay, you need both. I believe that even if we agree that we need both, it's not good enough because the challenging part is how do you do both. I mean, that is the harder thing than anything else to do here. What I want to do is not to add to that noise because there is a lot of conversations happening, and since I'm going to be adding to the next half an hour, adding more to it, I want to remind you that ultimately it is your family, it is your donkey, it is your farm. You know what is the best way to get your donkey back to your farm. But instead, I wanted to talk a little bit about how we at ThoughtSpot transformed our business. So if you don't know ThoughtSpot, we are a 9-year-old company. We started with this idea that business intelligence in its current form is broken in the sense that dashboards and reports that analysts build after a long lot of work is the culmination of a data discovery journey. And that's wrong. That's like the cul-de-sac. We wanted it to be the beginning of an explorative journey for business users. A dashboard that talks to people and they can explore more. The data was on-prem for the first 6 years of the company. We built everything on-prem, and the last year we released our cloud. And as part of that, the entire company had to reinvent itself. Today, almost 93% of our business is cloud within 12 months of— a little more than 12 months. And that business is growing around 273% year over year. Off a really good base as well. So what we learned is that instead of telling people what to do, it is better if you can give more of a template, a blueprint. So that's what I'm going to do. What I'm going to do is talk about our thought process in the form of 9 questions, and every question when you answer will take you to a fork. On the road. And every fork will take you to more options. At the end of it, you will have a complex sort of decision framework, decision tree. Yes, it is complex because no one said enterprise SaaS business is supposed to be simple or easy, right? So let me walk you through the questions we asked and the options that come with it. Everything starts— if you watch CSI or any of these shows, that every time a crime is committed, the first question investigators ask is, cui bono? Who benefits? I think that question is relevant here. So we start with that. Who benefits with whatever you are doing? Now, instead of taking the standard personas, I like to sort of put them in these 4 buckets because these are universally applicable. So let me quickly drive you through that. The first one is gatekeepers. Gatekeepers, think of them as personas, people who are who are measured on are they protecting the business, how good are they in protecting the business. So think InfoSec as an example. Business users are people who are directly responsible for moving the needle for the business. So it depends on which business. It might be different shapes. For example, if you're retail, this person could be a customer support agent. If it is an insurance company, there could be risk management specialists. An enabler is— think of them as the people who are responsible for making others productive in the organization. HR, payroll, sometimes IT. They are more engine oil than gasoline, without which obviously the pistons will crank against each other and fall apart. And the last one is leaders. Leaders, I don't mean every people leader. Think of them like maybe it's 2, sometimes 3 levels from the frontline. These are people who have more time to think strategic things than tactical things. So they're measured mostly on growth. Are you able to drive the business forward? Once we have done with that, let's think about how do they benefit. And it comes down to this. Like I said, I'm going to make it very prescriptive and simple. In general, gatekeepers, when you sell to them, they are not going to get a lot of credit for making things more secure because they are expected to make things more secure always. The question is, can you do it? More efficiently. So they almost always think about doing same thing or better, but doing it with less cost. Business users— this is an important one because business users sometimes will be able to find more dollars as long as they can deliver more for the business. So you can already see if your product requires share shifting, that is a dollar that customer is already spending and you want to take that same dollar back without adding to it, or hopefully maybe shrinking it, Gatekeepers appreciate that. However, if you have a product that you're selling where you believe that customers have to go find more dollars, new dollars, in those kind of motions, business users might be able to appreciate that as long as they are able to deliver better productivity or ROI, which we'll come to in the next slide. Enablers universally— think of an HR person who's trying to go from, let's say, Bamboo to Workday. Almost always they know that the biggest value that they can add to their business is by learning and improving. So learning comes number one for them. And as part of that, obviously their earning potential goes up. For leaders, it's pretty simple. You can't say that I learned a lot of things. Most of the time it comes down to a simple metrics of growth. Okay, now let's go to the next level. You know the person who benefits, you know how they benefit. Now the question is, in absence of product sales organization, let's say you don't have sales and marketing, can the product in itself evangelize and sell into each one of these functions? This is a good thought experiment, and if you do it, what you will realize is gatekeepers are usually empowered users in the sense that it is very difficult. If you've ever dealt with an InfoSec person, you know they are not the kind of people you want to mess with. For them, it is about clear ROI. They want to make sure that things are simpler because what they have done. So if I were to take an example, think Okta is a good use case of how you can drive it through Gatekeepers. If you're a business user, there are advantages and disadvantages. Advantage is that they are more focused on delight and productivity. Beautiful thing about this part of business is that you might land small in a one user or something, but every user is a potential demand gen machine for you because as they are using your product to communicate with others, share things, every person who's coming in contact with that is potentially a new prospect for you, fully qualified by your primary user. Miro, I love this product, it's an example of that. If you go through enablers, you have to understand, This is a decision that is made by a few people and others cannot appeal it. Imagine if your company decide to go to Workday, like I said. As a salesperson or an engineer or developer, it's not like you have a lot of saying which tool HR is going to deploy. And once you deploy, the users are going to use it. This is an advantage. However, you got to understand the reason why they do that is because they want to now get more scale. So the right timing will matter a lot if you're going after enablers. And the last one, sometimes you got to understand that leaders in general are more focused on efficiency. That is, the growth will come, but growth is more than numerator, they're focused on denominator. Can you deliver more efficiency? Can you do things in ways that actually move the needle? And Medallia is a good example of a product that, you know, directly connected to those sort of aspirations of leaders. OK, let's go to the next question, which is, now you know that. Now how does this persona buy in general? Again, these are all generalizations. Gatekeepers, the products usually are going to sit in between a lot of adjacent product, which means it's a large surface area. While it will be a central deployment, the process of deploying will require others to collaborate. So guess what? It requires sort of convincing others, collective decision-making. All of those things will have implications on what sort of sales motion you're going to build. This large surface area, managing that sometimes will require help. So a product like CrowdStrike is a good example for something like that. And business users, these could be individual decisions. Very small footprint. But like I said before, the power of reference selling, the power of experience-based selling can become a huge tailwind. However, every land is only going to incrementally add to a minuscule of your overall growth portion. So you've got to figure out how to scale this universally if you want to build something of massive value. I want to talk enablers. Like I said, while it is interesting to know that they are empowered, more often than not, this will be federated deployment. So imagine you're a large bank, and a product manager decides to use Intercom as a way to deploy in-app experience. Now, while that product manager may control that product, and through that you will get a lot more footprint, the fact is there could be another app, another product manager who is going to use something completely different for them. So the ability to have inorganic growth, that is, people who— salespeople that you are not paying selling your product is a beautiful thing. That potential does open up with embeddability and Intercom and things like that. However, you have to make sure that a product alone may not be able to jump from a domain to domain. You might need people behind it, which again is a factor when it comes to top-down or bottoms-up. One common mistake that sometimes founders and salespeople in general make is that leaders, once you get to leaders, the game over. In reality, it is not that simple. Oftentimes, good leaders don't like to mandate things because they cannot. In this new economy that we are all operating in, unless the product itself does it work, it is not that leaders can come in and just mandate a new product into the company. Oftentimes, what happens is the leaders will have severe interest and aspirations to get a product in, but it will require others selling around and so his or her organization is becoming champions or are becoming champions for that. So usually leaders are powerful influencers. And just like the old story of Icarus, if you fly close to the sun, when you're selling to leaders, you gotta be careful because if you don't deliver, chances are you may not get back into the organization again. So it is fail or fly. And this is, you know, our ThoughtSpot's old model of sales. We perfected this. Which we are leveraging as we are moving into the new world of cloud-based selling. Okay, now go to the next one. We have created all of those things, and now the question is, how does the deal naturally move? And this is a complex one. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use examples of waterfalls, different types of waterfalls. Imagine a deal like a plunge waterfall, something that moves really slowly, peacefully. You can't even tell the river is actually moving until it reaches the point point of fall where it just comes out massively. This is a very traditional kind of move for large-scale organization. You can see some of our customers who actually went through that process. You gotta have the patience, you gotta have the infrastructure, you gotta have the people and experience and tools for multi-touch attribution, amazing field marketing, unbelievable product marketing. It requires all of those effort. However, it is worth it. So they're like the plunge waterfalls. The other one, slide waterfalls are interesting in the sense that they happen very quickly, but you're not gonna find another fall for a long time, which means that this is extremely dangerous if you don't understand how it is differing from cascade, for example. Because a deal comes in and after that, the sales and inside sales, you know, they know there are no more opportunities there. So they will move on. If you have not built, for example, a really vibrant community, if you don't have good inside sales for renewals, or if you don't have you don't have good customer success operations. What happens is you will not— they will go away from your memory until it comes time for renewals. And guess what will happen? They will churn because you didn't pay attention to them. Somebody else came to you. And churn, as you can imagine, is an extremely painful thing to do in the new world of SaaS selling. So you got to make sure that you don't confuse slide waterfall with the cascade waterfall where you can land And you will get more and more and more as you can expand the scope of the company, the scope of the project, the use case, so they all come together. Here, you have to imagine the entire team going after it because it is not just about a sales team. It's a product marketing team, the field market. They all are responsible for sale along with the product managers. Product managers could move the needle in the case— in case of cascade waterfall. So when you think about the sales motion, You have to think about, are you building the right kind of product management? Sometimes if you don't have that there, your choice might be nothing but to build a top-down sales organization that can pay for it. Now imagine that you do have a sales organization that's already inherited, or you're in the process of building. I like to put your sales organizations and the people and the personalities to two buckets— limelighters and land grabbers. Lime lighters, it doesn't mean that people who like limelights and they're full of ego. In fact, it is the opposite. Lime lighters, the way I like to define, are people who are, when they see a problem, they will jump in with or without knowing how to solve it. They like being in the limelight to solve the thing for the company. However, if they fail, they don't care. They'll learn from it, move on and keep doing the next thing. They are the kind of people who are happy to be measuring the input rather than output. They know that output will follow if I just focus on input. If you have those kinds of leaders and talent, it is an asset. And that gives you more option when it comes to whether it's top-down, middle-out, or bottoms-up. Land grabbers are masters of their trade, basically, in the sense that There are times where for them, while data is important, they are the kind of people who can shape with feelings and then decide with the data. Imagine how many times have you seen a deal that's gone sideways, but a seller will say, you know what, I'm going to turn it back. But the data says that you can't really turn that back around. Somehow these people can go and change things. And that requires tremendous amount of experience and skills, and they will cost. And they are the kind of people who don't talk a lot about input rather than they focus on output. So for them, it is not that exciting to say that we have 100 M0s. They care about how many S1s, S2s were converted. So that's people side. Now, let's be real. You might want something, but can you afford it? I like to think of this and put them in two different buckets, garage rollers versus high rollers. I mostly picked this picture because I wanted to put my friend Keetra Bose's face somewhere on the slide. But in reality, garage wall is the way I think of it is imagine that your product market fit is still questionable and you are absolutely focused on cash flow. Maybe you haven't raised dollars yet because you want to optimize for valuation. Maybe you believe there is more time before you have to scale and the ecosystem doesn't exist. If that's the case, your route is going to be very different from high rollers. High rollers doesn't mean seek growth at all cost. I said that, but what I'm trying to say is that seek growth as long as you know that the go-to-market part of your P&L is finding efficiency. So magic ratio is more important than OpEx or burn. Imagine the magic ratio is reaching 0.7, 0.75, which means that you have figured out what it takes to scale the business. And you know the market is big enough and you are unafraid to spend on R&D and others, but this one has to bring back in the right kind of ratio. Companies like DoorDash and Uber, they perfected this before they went for the world domination and that they're currently showing. The next one is, this is something that I passionately care about, that is sometimes we, Recognize and appreciate mastery more than repeatability. I'm a huge fan of repeatability. If you wanna build a business of lasting value, you gotta figure out how to make things repeatable because only when things become repeatable, you can find leverage. And if you don't have leverage in the business, why would investors invest in your company? Imagine you get Michelangelo to come and paint your house. Odds are it is gonna be a massive masterpiece. There is no question, but it might take 7 years for him to finish it. And there won't be another one. And that is how sometimes product deployments go. You have this marquee customer that you spend all the efforts and time, and maybe you didn't even get a lot of money, but you can talk about it for a long time. However, what you did there are all bespoke, complex pricing, complex agreement. It took 12 months with wrestling with the legal, that use case just came together because planets aligned. Compare that with Thomas Kinkade, who is sitting at his home or garage, probably painting pictures after pictures and then doing mail order to every single home that wants it. The pricing and the distribution is figured out. You don't even negotiate. You don't think too much about any of those things. And then it is built in ways that you know, it's for reference selling. You walk into someone's home, you see it, where did you get it? Oh, I can afford it, let me go to the website and buy it. And doesn't necessarily have to have use case. You can put one of these paintings in your bathroom or in den. You don't put a Michelangelo in the bathroom. This is an area a lot of startup founders sometimes get confused by. That is, as you're building the product, you realize that, you know, there is a veil that is going to come and make your business, and it could be a multi-million dollar ACV deal, and you throw your entire resources making this masterpiece, and you realize one day that you're finding yourself in no man's land because your direction was lost. Watch out for Michelangelos. Which brings me to my other pet peeve when it comes to axioms. I hate this axiom where people say, go find the pain because it is better to sell painkillers than vitamins. Why? Why is that? Painkiller business in US is like $7 billion, vitamin business is almost $36 billion. Candies are actually much bigger than that, it's almost $70 or $80 billion at least. It's not that you have to find the pain and give, if you keep poking for pain and only sell painkillers, you're missing other options. What I found is a much more nuanced conversation, a single product from a single vendor for a single use case in a single opportunity. Potentially could require different motions that comes through all these three different— what these three products can teach us. Let me explain what I mean by that. Instead of just accepting at face value painkillers are better, let's dive deep into it. What does each one of these things do? Candy is simple, makes me happy. Vitamins are supposed to make me stronger, and painkillers are supposed to make me better, right? Who do they target? It makes no sense to target the mom or a dad if you're trying to sell candy. You want to go directly at the kid, the user. How about painkillers? Painkillers are simple. Oftentimes— sorry, vitamins. Oftentimes vitamins are prescribed— sorry, recommended by your friends or well-wishers. Sometimes it's your spouse or significant other Sometimes your parents, your brother, somebody is going to recommend and say, hey, you should take this. Painkillers, simple, the doctor prescribes. Why do I buy? Because of the look and smell, you know, the packaging, the color, that's why I buy candies. Vitamins, word of mouth, oh, this vitamin brand is pretty good. And painkillers, again, prescribed to me, I got to do it. How do they sell? Story. Candies are always stories, like Christmas time opening this and this amazing candy comes out. Vitamins, they'll say, have pain benefits, and painkillers, facts. Think those things through. If you have the breadth and the depth in your storytelling part of your organization, that is the product itself, that is a product manager, so storytelling-friendly, and the product marketing is good enough to weave these stories through, what you will find is for a single opportunity, your single product may have to take multiple of these motions to land. And if you have that level of sophistication, you have more options in opening up when it comes to top-down versus bottoms-up. I know this can be a somewhat convoluted way of thinking. I could probably talk about just this slide for half an hour, which brings us back to this spaghetti chart. This is one example of everything I just talked about laid out. And then having a glass of drink, I decide to, let's say, draw the line on where it naturally takes me. I know that at least some of you probably are thinking right now that this is looking pretty similar to Charlie trying to figure out who Pepe Silvia is and where is Carol from HR. Look, I think the point is not that based on what I said, your fate is already sealed and it's a foregone conclusion that you'll end up in. The point is, can you use something like this to redraw and understand where you want to be? So for example, if you are, let's say, naturally top-down and you want to add middle-out, do you have product managers who can build stories that connects with Thomas Kinkade? Do you have customer success teams who can support a cascade waterfall? As you start redrawing, so for example, if my runway doesn't afford me anything but product-based selling, because all I can do is in product, what something like this will give you is when you connect it, where are the other areas that you should be investing? And I think that is critical, because if you don't get those investment metrics right, then what happens is your takeoff, your runway that you require will become so much longer because it is inefficient. And that's the point of taking an approach like this where you take all the decision forks and then have the flexibility for you to decide which direction you want to go and what sort of investment you want to prioritize. I'm ending almost at the finish of my talk. So what I'm going to do now is close that complex Charlie's chart. And then I'm gonna talk you through a few best practices, no matter what you do, I think are universally applicable. If you are in the modern sales ecosystem, modern entrepreneurial ecosystem where you're building companies, make sure that you break silos. What I mean by that is you cannot have people, leaders of companies, or functions who are so full of ego that they are holding on to their domains. If you have, for example, a sales leader who refuses to take any input from anyone else when it comes to how the incentive for salespeople are done, because it has traditionally been a sales leader's plan, you might rethink. If you have a marketing leader who sort of goes AWOL, you know, goes underground when there's a bad quarter but shows up when there's a good quarter, to take credit for the top of the funnel, you wanna make sure that you rethink that strategy. If a product manager don't know really how to talk to customers and learn from them and interact with them, that silo needs to be broken. Silos need to go because remember, we used to build products and then throw it over the wall to the sales and marketing machine to sell. Today, we are not throwing anything. There are no walls, which means product, engineering, Finance, marketing, and sales need to be truly in it to figure out what does the customer want and how do we deliver it. And there it is important to centralize operations. At ThoughtSpot, for example, recently we removed sales operations, uh, and we created a central function under which we have finance, product, marketing, and sales operations together. Remember, sales operation used to be deal desk and Salesforce administration, that's old school thinking. If you want to have the pulse of your customer at your hand so that every decision that you make is driven with the signals from data, you need two things. Number one, you need to build the structure. Number two, you need the right tool. I am going to pitch ThoughtSpot a little because we are built for this. In fact, internally, we have built some data apps for using our own tools, which we use internally. In fact, our sales and marketing leaders are some of the— top users of our product because we built these tools where we now have signals from the product, the field, the partners, and the sales coming together that gives us ideas in terms of what to do, what not to do, which brings me to the next point, which is you gotta map the customer journey 100% properly. In fact, you know, our internal tools that we have built, the data apps using Java UDF and others, we are gonna productize and sell it. To our customers, particularly cloud-native startups. If you don't have a really good way of mapping your customer journey and making quick real-time, near real-time decisions, you will miss out. So you gotta have the structure and the tools, which brings us to stop talking about company numbers inside the company and sometimes even with your board. It means nothing because aggregates are the enemy of excellence. I call it the tyranny of averages. One of the reasons why I hate the traditional BI is because it is built to cultivate tyranny of averages. Do not talk about productivity for sales as an aggregate. Talk about productivity for segments. Mass market versus mid-market versus majors. Attrition, retention, investment. Because if your one segment is not functioning well and you remove investment from that others are suffering. This is the sort of issues why you have to stop talking about aggregates and then start talking only in segments. If you're a public company speaking to public market, go for it. The last thing is you gotta tie the community directly with your product leaders. You don't want SCs or CS standing in between and bartering all this. In the modern world, your customers, your community should be part of your Slack or your Teams or whatever you may have. My last slide is the takeaway for me, it's very simple. Blend everything, because this is not the time to sort of imagine that you're going to have maniacally or dogmatically thinking that you're going to be a top-down or a bottom-up. But to do that, you got to be able to understand every single connection, the connecting tissues in your business, and then map what something might be a unique what I call Pepe Silvia chart. And the last but not least, it's your donkey. It's your family. It's your farm. Only you know what's the best way for this donkey to get to the farm. And no matter what you do, trust me, there will be people standing on the sidelines, yelling at you, telling you things, opinionating, pontificating, criticizing. So it is good to listen. But don't listen to any one opinion and think that is the right one, including this talk, because it is your journey and it's your journey alone. And if you are putting your ears close to the ground, you will know what to do. Thank you. I'm going to stop sharing, and if there are questions, happy to take them. All right. I'm not 100% sure whether should we take questions from chat or if there are—

Yeah, Sidhesh, it looks like we've had a few questions come in through the chat. And Cindy has been so wonderful to answer a lot of them from your team too throughout. So thanks so much, Cindy. But it looks like there's a couple that just came in, or one that just came in from Monmit. Into the chat.

OK. How do you deal when internal data science team becomes blockers? For example, we can do this internally versus buying a software on recurring license. OK, I think there are two questions there, actually. One is buy versus build. The other one is internal functions not willing to change. So the second one is more of a cultural thing. Buy versus build, I'm pretty simple. I think if it adds— if you got to put yourself in your user's point of view, your customer's point of view, why do they come to you? If they are coming to you for delivering value on an area, and this is core for you, you have two choices. Build it now or build it later. Sometimes you cannot build it now, so it might be opportunistically you can partner with somebody else. But having clarity that at some point in time you're gonna go after that market yourself. If it is not, if it is a supporting function and it might be technically cool, it might look attractive, it might look a bigger market, but it takes you away from the Polaris, the true north that the business is going towards, then the answer is simple. Go partner with somebody. I'll give you my own example, ThoughtSpot. When we were building on-prem, we didn't have the kind of interactive performance that we needed. Because remember, what we were doing is instead of people looking at AAA maps, we were giving them Google Maps. That is printed stuff, dashboards and reports, we were turning that into interactive analytics. Wherever you want to go, you can take different routes and all. That requires tremendous performance. So to do that, we built our own in-memory database and everything to enable SAP Teradata to work faster on-prem. But when Snowflake and Redshift and Databricks and others came with so much performance, There's absolutely no need for us to do that. While it is extremely interesting technologically speaking for database people to go do things like that, number one, it is not what customers want from us. They want Google Maps. They want interactive experience, user experience and delight and AI. That's what we are supposed to do. Every time you're spending time here, we are taking away from it. So we decided to walk away from that business and focus exclusively on partners to deliver our value, what we are capable of doing. So that's number one. Culturally, I found this coming up, Manmeet, that particularly when it comes to analysts, oftentimes the companies will say data analysts are actually holding back. What I found is data analysts are not holding back. They are burdened with stuff that really doesn't add value. They don't— remember I talked about enablers? The number one thing enablers want is to learn. If you have a data analyst group and all they're doing is incrementally making your reports better, they're not learning anything, the job is monotonous. Either they're going to leave or their spirit will be broken that they're not adding value. A good data analyst organization will be so close to business that they know the pains, the questions, the challenges before the business even asks them. So some people— I mean, I'm not saying universally everybody's willing to embrace change, But the reality is in the world of enterprise startups, when it comes to SaaS, it's not a calling. Not everyone needs to do this job. If you're not comfortable with learning and growing and changing, probably this is not the right place for you. So if the culture doesn't allow it, if the people are not aligned with it, the best option might be to go find different people. Daniel, let me see. Are you suggesting that repeatable template-based SaaS companies no longer require the typical enterprise salesperson, and are land grabbers better in this type of business? Repeatable template-based business. Look, I think businesses change. They're a living organism. What I'm suggesting— again, I am intentionally prescriptive in my talk because we have like 40, 50 minutes. And what I want you to do is to at least start thinking. All I'm trying to do is provoke your thoughts. I'm not prescribing exactly what is right for your business. But having said that, I believe that template-based selling could be a starting point unless you are not ambitious enough or you're not operating in a market that can support massive TAM. If the TAM is big and the SAM is accessible for you, and if you have the team to go after the SOM, What I will recommend is that start the first act of your Horizon 1 product with one form, but you should always explore either middle-out or top-down in that because you may realize that there are significant opportunities and low-hanging fruits out there if you were willing to try it. So I will not take anything away when it comes to options, but like I said, horses for the courses. That is, your donkey keeps your farm. I'll take, I think, a few more minutes. So let me take a few more questions. Susie is asking me, what was your GTM journey like when you started out to this point? Which parts of the market are you focused on now? At ThoughtSpot, initially, we wanted to be everywhere, but it became very clear that it was Michelangelo painting. That is, we could end up in a startup company where they are only going to spend $100,000 a year, but it is going to take 6 months and we have to bring the most, you know, masters and experts to deploy this, whether it's a small company or global 50. So painfully as it is, one of the first decisions I made when I came on board as a CEO 3 years ago was to pull out of mid-market and mass market and focus only on majors. Because it was impossible to change the product in a short period. You can, you can change direction but not destination overnight. So we decided to change the destination and slowly make directional changes. Today, ThoughtSpot is for everyone. That is, whether it's a massive customer or a major customer or a mid-market customer, as long as you are on public cloud data warehouse. If your data is in public cloud, if it is in Salesforce, in Snowflake, Redshift, Synapse or Google BigQuery with Presto, Databricks, Stardust, whatever, we are half an hour away from Google Map experience to data. So we are now going out. There are a lot of things we are learning, Susie, that it is much easier for you to design the journey as opposed to the journey being dictated to you because of circumstances. Because if you are designing and you decide that you are going to start from bottoms up first, and then go middle out, and then top down. And then in that process, you're going to complete each one of those circles that I drew in my chart. That could be fantastic. But oftentimes, you may not have that choice because of external factors. By the way, if I'm answering those questions, and if it creates more questions for you, feel free to write it. Or if you're allowed to, you can also ask me using voice. Let me take a couple of more questions. All right. Arun, what is Arun saying? Let's say, cloud adoption is very poor in the third world country like Nepal, and people are afraid to use latest software which is offering only in cloud SaaS. Yeah. So Arun, I used to use the word third world country. I don't use that anymore. I hate that. Developing nations versus developed nation is what I like to use. Look, I think I would make a case, Arun, that cloud is the biggest equalizer for developing countries. Because remember, when infrastructure on-prem becomes the— you can make differences in the sense that if I have more money to deploy something more fancy than you, then I am already at an advantage. Cloud, on the other hand, because of the pricing model and the fact that whether it's Amazon or others who are building high-quality stuff that you can rent on demand, it makes it easy for anyone to bring things up. So if your last mile internet connectivity might be an issue, but you are still probably one, if not two hops away from the backbone of the internet. So it might look painful. But I'm a huge believer that just like renewable energy, for example, where you're not depending on whether your country has nuclear versus hydro, the fact that cloud is accessible to most companies, at least if not one, if not two hops away from, could be a good equalizer. As far as ThoughtSpot is concerned, I have no intentions of turning it back into on-prem because I strongly believe that companies die out of indigestion, not starvation. It is so critical to figure out what not to eat before you decide what to eat. And we have decided that our value prop will be much better served and much faster iteration possible if you are sitting on top of amazing companies and technologies and ecosystem. Like I said, whether it is Snowflake or DataRobot. Feel free to ask any other questions. I'll take maybe one more. All right, let's take one more here. Things moving fast, I got to read it. Do you think in-memory technology's days are numbered with cloud? Speeding up. I am not the best person to answer that question. Our co-founder and CTO Amit, you know, is, I would say, one of the best experts in the world. So I don't want to attempt that. What I can tell you is that in-memory, it's like a— it's a tick-tock, you know, you make an improvement and you go to the next. For a CPU versus GPU conversation is still going on, isn't it? So I don't like to assume that any of these technologies are perishable in any sense, because there are smart people trying to invent and innovate and create value for each one of these things. The more things change, the more things become same, because you could make an argument that cloud is actually going back to the world of IBM mainframe, because it used to be that mainframes used to process to dumb terminals. Now it's cloud processing to an iPad. And now even browsers used to be distributed on the local CPU. People are talking about running browsers in the compute of a cloud. So the more things change, the more things come back. It might come back, smell, look differently, but the core technology itself, I don't think in-memory is going that far away because the closer the data is to the compute, the better user experience is going to be. It might take a different approach, but like I said, I'm not the expert to answer that question. There's one more question. How do you get the first 10 enterprise clients while building an MVP? Very simple answer to that. Qualify out. You come to a— there's 3 things that you got to do. When a prospect comes to you, I know how it is. I've actually done 0 to 16, 4 or 5 places. And when you are sitting, you're launching something with all the excitement and your phone's not ringing, your inbound is not coming, the ones that are coming out all over the place, your anxiety level increases and you're more and more desperate. And I'll tell you, desperation is a really bad cologne to wear. So what happens is you are going after the wrong thing. You should hold fast, have very clear idea of what ICP is going to be, ideal customer profile. Define your ICP and anyone who's not into that, respectfully qualify them out and put them in two buckets. One, no way in hell I will ever talk to them again. Other one, 6 months from now I might be the right place to do it. And the other one, these people can do it no matter whether they can pay or not. That's the second thing. Once you identify an ICP and you decide that these are the sort of customers you want to have in the entirety, don't make price an issue for 0 to 10. Instead, give value and get value in return. That is, we'll give you technology, but give us referenceability. Give us— go to conference like Saastr and talk for us. If you can get those sort of things from the first 10 customers, that is magic because the dollars that you collect from them means nothing. VCs will fund you if you have 10 customers who genuinely access, I mean, activated about those customers. So I've always found that the reason why the first 10 customers lag is because you get so distracted, you go after all shiny objects instead of just holding you back. Oh, JP Morgan called, if you do XYZ, I'm gonna get these features. So let me just refocus the entire product organization to do that. That's how companies die. So I'll take— so Taylor, I can take one more question. OK, I'll take one more then. How do you transition from corporate sales, business user, garage dweller, Kim K, to enterprise sales, leader, high roller, Michelangelo? Well, it has to start as a company-level function, that is, when you decide that it is the right thing. So remember that Pepe-Silvia chart that I drew, he's asking, where is Pepe-Silvia? And the strings are connecting. In this process, the first thing you have to understand is there is cost associated with that. That is a sales productivity map for a product like Miro, for example, which is growing gangbusters. You might think like, oh, well, they don't have sales and marketing people calling me, which means that they should be like swimming in profit. Reality is not. It is going to cost you whether you're paying your salespeople or you're paying Facebook. That's the only difference. So the dollar is going to be there unless you have figured out the system, the machine, the mechanism of how are you going to scale this business and where are the leverage points. And I'm a huge fan of flywheels. That is, if you're unable to find that one button, when you press, 10 things happen, you have to keep trying. So you don't want to invest in people-centric business until you figured out product-market fit, and the machine. I know that this might be somewhat confusing as I'm going through a number of different metaphors here, but, you know, unfortunately, we don't have a lot of time. These are all topics that, you know, we could discuss for half an hour to one hour, but ideally, you don't want to invest in people until you figured out product-market fit and the machine leverage points. Taylor, am I out of time, or can I take one more?

Fire away. So you should take one more.

You're good on time. All right, so how to get— sorry, that's— I thought there was one more interesting question I saw. Sandeep, I think that's the same question, isn't it? How to get the first enterprise clients while building an MVP? OK, all right. All right. I can't find it. There was one more question I thought interesting. Is there any other question to ask? Otherwise—

I think there's one, Sudheesh, from Denise. How are you allocating the nurture between sales and marketing?

Ah, Denise, that's a great question as well. So I'll— thank you for asking, because it used to be that sales and marketing are sequentially built. That is, my job is to build the top of the funnel. I don't care what happens in the Sales and sales jobs get them up. And then what happens is they will start pointing fingers at each other. Not have enough pipe or the pipe was crap. That's what sales will say. Marketing will say, we are doing everything we can, we don't have enough money, or the sales is not closing the deal. This is what happens usually. What I found is you got to bring data. Remember, again, I don't want to be ThoughtSpot, but there are no tools out there that can do what we do, which is take 7 or 8 different data points today and make it interactively accessible. So do not sit in front of a dashboard or a PDF and then decide who is at fault or what's actually happening. Have, you know, data speak for itself. So you got to first make sure that your marketing people understand they are in sales. Salespeople need to understand that they are responsible for pipeline gen. There is no daylight between them, and this is why it is so critical to find good sales leaders and marketing leaders who understand that it is their responsibility collectively to make quarters or miss quarters. So in this context, when it comes to dollar deployment, I like to think of them in segments again. That is, think of marketing owning the first part of the Horizon 1 journey of the product. And as it matures, as partners mature, as the sales organization enablement process mature— I did not talk a lot about enablement. Enablement can be the connecting tissue between sales, marketing, and partners. Because they can— the signals will start becoming very clear that the thing is ready for now expanding. So going back to my— persona analogy, if you have a product that can cross from enabler to leader, for example, you might— the data might make it very clear that you will need investment in sales as in people. Now sales itself is also changing in the sense that you can do inside-based sales versus external sales, which is lotus sales, which is partner-driven sales versus OM sales. So high level, I like to think of them in two buckets of organic versus inorganic sales. That is, am I paying the people who are selling or someone else is paying them and I'm enabling their sales process? Once you have that clarity, the distinction between where the marketing dollars go versus the sales dollars will go will become clear as well. Uh, can you talk through the inverse, getting from enterprise sales to Scalable sales, which is the journey that we are going through right now, Johnny. It's a harder thing to do, to be honest with you, because there are a lot of bad things the organization learns as it goes through it. So I can tell you that if you are in that boat, you got to be really, really careful not to give any leeway at the top. If you are the CEO of the company and you've decided that there are certain things that you— for example, whether it's open source or free trial. If you don't have those emotions and you decide to implement those in your product, you gotta make sure that it is not something that you're just mailing it in. It has to be designed properly. It has to stand the test of the best of the best cloud native companies, bottoms-up sales companies have built for their users. The in-app experience, the free trial experience, the self-service experience, these things are really difficult for a company that have not done it from the beginning to learn. But it is possible. Like I said, ThoughtSpot, we have been maniacally focused. We never gave any wiggle room for the company to actually question, are we going in the right direction? So it is much harder. It starts with the calcification of the processes and technologies and the culture. But investment has to come. And you may have to make decisions that you may have to walk away from the business that is funding your transformation, which means that you'll have to go find dollars that currently doesn't exist in your P&L. So these things make it extremely complex if you are taking that reverse route. That's why I did not spend a lot of time on it, but there are companies like us who are doing it successfully. Like I said, more than— we are approaching almost 300% year-over-year growth on our cloud business, but it is not easy. I think that should be it. And thank you for staying 5 minutes longer, and thanks for giving me more time, Taylor. I appreciate it.

Yeah, of course. Thank you so much, Sudhish, and thank you so much