LIVE from SaaStr Annual 2024- Partner Stage - Thursday

Please welcome to the stage Jamie Dalporto, Head of Account Management at Adyen.

Hey everybody!

Hello everyone, good morning! How's it going? Good, thanks for coming this morning. I welcome you to move up if you'd like to move up. With this small crowd. So how was the parties last night?

Good.

Everyone has their coffee?

All right, great.

Ready for day 3?

All right, great.

Hey, my name is Jamie Dalporto.

I am head of account management at Adyen, where I look after strategic growth and partnerships for our platform customers. I'll explain platform in a moment. Prior to Adyen, my experience is 28 years at Visa. Where I was able to do a lot of payment innovation initiatives. So very exciting time. I am a payment nerd and geek by trade, so very happy to be here to talk to you about that today. And I'm no stranger to SaaS and startups. I spent 5 years at a cybersecurity startup. And when you really think about it, we're all in SaaS, aren't we? Yes. Great. Awesome. I'm gonna make sure I'm not standing in front of my slides so you can see everything great. So, uh, today I'm gonna talk to you about embedded payments and financial services. Uh, what does that mean for you? What does it mean for your users and customers? Why does it matter? How can you take advantage of it? And considerations for getting into this space within your SaaS business. Okay, so embedded payments, what is that? It is embedding payments, so integrating payment solutions into your SaaS software. And how many of you are doing this today? Anyone? Anyone? Oh, that's awesome. Great. So you have a first step there. So actually integrating into your software solution. Embedded finance is the next step of that. It's offering services to your customers also within your solution. So what are those things? Things like capital. So offering a loan or a cash advance. Offering a bank account, or offering cards to actually do transactions with. So that's, that's what we mean by that. What's the keyword here? It's embedded. So we're not talking about that you have a provider and your transactions all go somewhere else. This is actually integrated within your actual SaaS solution. So it is truly a one-stop shop for your customers when it comes to payments and financial solutions. Make sense? Great. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Why is this important now? There's great stuff going on here. It's a very exciting time. I walked around the last 2 days. There's such great SaaS solutions out there today. But what's happening is things are evolving. You're all looking for profitability. You're all looking for new revenue streams. And your customers are looking for utility and service. So it's evolving to where companies like yourselves, SaaS service providers, are actually embedding payments and financial services into their solution. Why are they doing that? Said it already. Additional revenue, incremental revenue opportunity for you, utility and service for your customers, making it really sticky, giving them one-stop shop. And what we're seeing is the addition of payments is we're seeing these financial services solutions that I mentioned. So like the loans, the bank accounts and so on and so forth. And some of our larger platforms have even said that they're making more money on payments and services than they are with the SaaS itself. Let me explain that word platforms. I said it a few times now. So what am I mean? I mean you, companies that offer services and solutions to businesses. Make sense? Great. Why does it matter? What does it mean for your users? We did a study with BCG and this is what we're finding. These businesses are struggling with their finances. So over half of them have a problem with cash flow, which is obviously really important. Almost a third of them— over a third of them are getting rejected when they apply for credit by their traditional providers. Okay, and this is a crazy number, but almost 90% of them actually have to rely on their personal information in order to get credit than how their business is doing, which, which is is crazy. So they're, they're ready for this. And what we find is that they want it from you. They trust you. They use your services. You make their lives easier and better. You offer them simple solutions. And it's just a natural evolution that they want to see this from you. That's a pretty big number there. And when you do offer it to them, you're driving their satisfaction with you as their provider. That's, that's a huge number. From this survey. Like, 97% of these businesses say you increase their satisfaction with you as a provider when you can offer this utility to them. Pretty amazing. But there's more. What does it mean for you? There's even more benefit for you. 70% potential uplift, and we'll talk about this in a moment, by offering financial services, payments, etc. Does that sound good?

Yeah?

Lots of thumbs up on that.

That's awesome.

Great.

So what are the considerations? That's what we're gonna talk about. What's working, not working? When I think about that, I know that's in the title of my presentation, but when I think about that, I'm thinking about what the considerations are for getting into this space. The first is that you're thinking about it. So if you're here, you're thinking about it. You've already made step one into thinking about this important initiative. But let's get into more detail. What does it really mean? What are the considerations for customers? I know everyone here, I would like to see a show of hands, who's focused on the customer experience? Should be everyone, right? So what does that mean when we get into this and what are the considerations? Your customers' businesses want and need fast, fast funds, right? That's what they need. They want control over their finances, and they want visibility into where their money is, where it's going in, and where it's going out.

Right?

Does that make sense? Customers— I saw that statistic, I showed it to you— they can't always qualify for financial services. They are excluded from that, and you can be the person that can offer that to them. Also, businesses run into things. They sometimes run into emergencies where they might need something.

Maybe they have a—

inventory shortage and they need something that they need to order quickly, you can be that solution for them by offering financial services to them. So one-stop shop here is really important. Again, you, you're offering the utility, you're building the cool SaaS solutions by offering payments and financial services. You're really giving them one place to go for everything to run their business, which can be very impactful. What's not working here or what the considerations are? Customers are starting to expect this from you. And from everyone in the space. And if you don't start to think about it now, you could lose out. You could not retain your customers. They can go elsewhere because they're not offering the utility. You're not offering the utility that they need. Make sense? Of course, we're all focused on this middle section, which is increasing revenue, right? And profitability. But you can really drive some incremental revenue streams here beyond your SaaS revenue. Not only in payments, but really in financial services. And this is all really just starting to kick off, this component. Let me explain how you can make money in this space. First, I mentioned a capital loan. So you can make revenue by offering loans, and you will get a share of revenue of that from the fees that is charged between you and their provider. Make sense? Great. Who knows how we make money on bank accounts? Anyone? [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Interest, exactly. So offer a bank account, you can make that interest directly. Third, by offering cards where someone can then access those funds, you can make some of that revenue on each transaction off that interchange fee. But let's put that all together. All those things together, 1 1 actually can equal 3. Let me go into why that matters. So let's say you offer a loan to your customer, right? So you're gonna make the fee off of that loan. You gave them a bank account. They put that money into the bank account. So now you're making interest, right? And now you offer them a card to access those funds, and now you're making the fee off of that every time they use that card to make a transaction. So that first dollar that you invested in, that you gave to them, now becomes $3. Does that make sense? Can really, really compound. And that altogether is a very comprehensive solution, which is very sticky for you, for your customer, and offers them utility that they're really looking for. What's the consideration here? Leaving money on the table, additional revenue that you might be missing out on, and potential impact on retention because customers are starting to want this and need it. Make sense? Yes.

Right.

Lastly, competitive advantage. This is new. It was great to see some hands in the room. We saw some folks that are offering payments. Fantastic. Is anyone that's offering payments also offering financial services like I mentioned? Oh, great. Couple people. Excellent. It's new. It's coming. So it can really be an advantage for you if you offer these things, right, against the competitors that are in your space and the utility that the customer customers' needs. So it's really something that is great. You can be on the forefront of it right now if you're thinking about these things. Okay, how do you do it? Sounds great. How do you do it? I think the number one consideration is your partner. Choosing the right partner in this space is extremely, extremely important. So what does that mean? First, you're gonna wanna work with someone who's really experienced in payments, understands the industry, has a lot of experience, knows what they're doing, and is very established. Second, you're gonna want technology. You're all technology folks. You're gonna want the technology. You're gonna wanna know that what they're putting in place works, that they're innovative, they're thinking about payments, they can offer these things like the financial service products that I mentioned.

Very, very important.

Second, even on the tech stack, how do they work with you? What's that plug-and-play? Trust me, You do not wanna build this yourself. You wanna work with someone who, who's built this and it's really easy for you to integrate with. But everyone's different, right? Do you like, I, do you work on APIs? Is it components? How do you integrate into technology? Choose a partner that has the right thing for you that is enabling you to focus on what you do best and you don't have to really have the big tech stack. Make sense? Great. Third, understanding the support model. Really important. If they need to be able to support you, so that you can support your customers. So that's everything from reporting they provide to how they handle reconciliation, to how they handle your questions, which are coming from your customers, et cetera. So very, very important that they have the right model. So that gives you the peace of mind that you can focus on what you need to focus on, and that they're supporting you in the best way possible. I'd say the one probably most important aspect of this is Regulatory and compliance. So, right? This is a highly regulated space, payments, right? Payments, financial services, banking, etc. So you really want someone who knows how to do that, is on top of it, that you trust, because you don't want to deal with that. Trust me. You do not want to deal with it. It's something that you want to make sure the person that you're working with really knows what they're doing in this space, has your back, and knows how to deal with all the compliance and regulatory things that come our way. And this is evolution, like every, like, you know, senator that comes in, president, whatever, there's always some regulation that's gonna happen, right, in the banking industry. So you want someone that takes care of that so you don't have to do so. Take that burden off. And lastly, you really want a partner. Someone that understands your customers, someone that knows those industries that you support, someone that is gonna help you do what you need to do where you need to do it. So whether that's what countries you sit in and, and offer payments and financial services to, what kind of payment methods your customers and their customers want to pay with, all of those things are super important. And you really want someone who's gonna work with you on that, take all that burden off of you so you can focus on your innovation within your SaaS and create a really holistic experience for your customers. So choosing the right partner, very, very important. Let's see this in real action. I wanted to bring a couple examples of customers that have told us their experiences so that you can learn from those. So let's start with a company called Tessitura. Has anyone heard of them? I don't expect that you have. So they are a software provider in arts and cultural space, but I'm sure you will have heard of one of their customers, which is the Met Opera in New York City. Yes?

Great.

So they're supporting and providing SaaS for, like, ticketing membership for museums, arts and cultural centers, things like the Met, et cetera, right? So really great customer. In fact, they care about customers so much that they call their customers members, right? Super, super important. So they actually have done payments. They embedded payments, but they had many providers. and it was really, really difficult. It was very fragmented. There was a lot of friction, and that experience was really boiling down to their members, right? Again, members, very important. So because of that, they also lacked the innovation. They couldn't really do anything. They had to go to 5 different people or whatever the number of providers they had, and the seamless experience was not there for their customers. So from a support perspective, from like just getting They actually have physical locations. So getting point-of-sale terminals out to a location quickly, all these things were not seamless, which means they were not providing a great experience for their customers, right? And then on top of that, they wanted a robust solution with global payment solutions. So someone who can really meet their needs around payment methods, where they were providing payments, et cetera. And lastly, they want someone that's really gonna take care of that regulatory and compliance. With, right, with the security that they trust so they don't have to do that, all out of the box. So that's what they did. They chose a partner that offered them an out-of-the-box solution, which is really, really important. They did not wanna build that infrastructure that I mentioned. Like I said, you don't either. So they picked someone that was really out of the box that could really give them that seamless perspective, and they consolidated their processing to that partner so that they didn't have to worry about all this fragmentation. As a result, they were able to streamline their payments from the reporting that they're looking at with the support they're providing to their customers, reconciliation that comes with payments. All those things got streamlined because they chose the right person to do so. And this has allowed them to really focus on their innovation, right, with their members, which is a great story. Converse to that, ePos Now. Has anyone heard of them? Again, don't expect you to, right? And also because their customers, right, don't even know who their providers are. It's all embedded in their solution, right? But they're a provider in the POS space, and they do retail and food and beverage. And we're seeing a lot of embedded payments within that food and beverage space. It makes a lot of sense. So think restaurants, fast food places, things like this. So that's their customer base. Today we're looking to expand to multiple regions. So US, UK, Europe, Australia. Who here is also looking at those kind of markets? Probably all of you, right? Those are the big ones. So they were looking for, again, a provider that could really provide this service and actually more, give them even more utility later. So that was really important. But what was even more important was that customer experience I mentioned, right? These are restaurants, fast food places, et cetera, right? Speed is key. The money in and out is key. So faster settlements. Fastest settlement possible, right? They do a transaction at a fast food place, they want the money quickly. So they needed someone that really could do that, really could offer the control and visibility on the finances that I mentioned, and they needed a simple solution, right? But all within a good customer experience. Who's all been to a fast food place? Do you want to stand there while you're waiting for your payment to go through? No, right? It needs to be fast or you're probably not going to go there, right? It's fast food for a for example. So they chose a partner that could really give them the utility in every market that they wanted to and more, which means they could expand even further when they were ready. And they actually— this, you can see this particular type of customer really was hungry for these financial services that I mentioned, right? The loans, the cash advances, the bank accounts, the cards, right? All of these things. They actually picked a partner that could do that. And what was most important about that is that their partner actually had their own banking license. So first of all, they didn't need to get a banking license to do so, and they didn't want to rely on a partner that had someone behind them, right? So cut out the middleman, go directly with someone had the banking licenses so that that direct offering was direct from them, their partner, to them, to their customer, which enabled them to really move quickly offer these kinds of loans to their customers, right? Many of which are underserved and weren't gonna get these kinds of things from a traditional bank, right? Or were denied credit, right? Makes sense. So really exciting. They've been able to do that, which also has made them really, you know, a great partner for their customers, and they're gonna really retain those folks going forward 'cause there's a lot of trust. In case you're interested in more details, of either of these, here's a QR code. I only popped this up for a minute, but you can come see me afterward. I can get you the key QR codes to these stories. There's a lot more detail here in case you're interested. And there's other stories that are out there as well, similar to these. Again, these are all people that started with SaaS just like you all and have added these services and payment methods to be successful with their customers. So I think everyone got that. Cool. So what are the key takeaways? Space is evolving. You made the first step. You're here thinking about it. Really important, right? Uh, you, you can be at the forefront of this right now, both in payments and financial services. You can differentiate yourself from your competitors so you can offer more utility and service to your customers. You can see from that survey, they're ready. They're ready for this. And at some point we believe it's gonna be the norm and they're gonna demand it. So the sooner you can kind of think about it, you know, work through it and pick, pick the right partner is key. And again, that partner is so important. Look for someone who's got the experience, understands the space. Again, regulatory compliance, so important. Takes that right off your plate. No burden. Has the latest technology, is innovative, and offers the things to your customers where you need them. right? And that— those conversations are very important with whoever you choose. So I encourage all of you to look into this. Obviously you've made the first step, uh, so continue to check it out. I think it's the perfect time. I thank you for your time, and I'll be available for questions afterward. Thank you so much.

Please welcome to the stage Randy Wooten, CEO at Maxio, and Julie Newman, CMO at Maxio.

Hello everybody. Day 3 of SaaStr and you all are here. Thank you. Super excited to be here with you guys. We're going to be talking about the latest Maxio Institute Growth Report. QR code, obligatory QR code is here. We also will be passing some out and we'll have them at our booth if you want it afterwards. I'm Randy, CEO. I came here last year and I'll talk a little bit about it. Since then, we've had Julie Newman join us as our CMO. I'm really excited to have her here. Together, we're going to walk through the slides and some of the insights we're seeing. But first, let me set the context. Last year I came, I talked about a growth report. A growth report is based on anonymous data, about 2,000 customers. We aggregate up, we split into lots of different segments and parse the data. And what we saw was that in Q1 of 2023, there's a significant drop-off across our 2,000 customers to 14%. We came here in Q2 and said, hey, it's come up to 16%. Is this the sign of the recovery? The answer is maybe. What we're seeing broadly in the VC market is there's been a real downturn in terms of total number of deals being done in the VC market. And SaaS, as you know, is funded VC, PE mostly rather than just bootstrap. We are seeing the average size of deals increasing. So VC companies are being more picky about who they're investing in, but it's starting to come back. So when we look at that and fast forward to 2024 and see what the average growth rate is through Q2, what we're seeing is it's bumped up and sort of in that 17% today, it was 19% in Q1 of last year. So I think what we're seeing is it's, it's normalized. We're going back to the mean. Now, this is great news compared to the S&P 500, which on average over the last 5 years was 6.5% growth. This year they're expecting it to be 5.5%. Growth. Ray Reich has done an analysis of the Cloud 150. They're growing at about 12%. So B2B SaaS is still doing better more broadly. It's a great space to be. It's just not the heady days of the 30, 30% that we saw back in 2022. So with that, let's break it up a little bit. So Julie, can you talk us through a couple of different dimensions that we looked at and the, the impact of the company?

Yeah, so, um, I think that one thing that we've seen over the past year, past couple of years, is that growth has not been equal based on size of the company. So one area that we've really seen some acceleration is in sub-$1 million companies. So these smaller agile companies that are coming into the market right now, as Randy had shared with the, the investment in VC, these new companies that are coming up and really starting to hit their stride now, some of the stronger ones, it's a very similar trends to what we saw in 2008 coming out of tougher economic times. The people that are coming now are looking like strong survivors that are really getting up and running quickly.

Yeah, just one data point for that. So we look closely at all of our customers and break it out by segments. When we look at our smallest customer base, our number one churn reason over the last 12 to 18 months has been declining or going out of business. So a bunch of small companies have been running out of the money. The VCs haven't been investing more and they're flaming out. What Julie's talking about is, hey, there's a whole new round of investment happening. We'll talk a little bit where we're seeing that growth primarily, but the good news is, like Julie mentioned, in 2008 coming out of the recession, you saw a whole growth Cambrian explosion. We think coming out of this last B2B SaaS recession, there's another wave of investment and growth happening, and agility and speed are the keys to success.

And we're particularly seeing this based on industry. So I think if you look at this graph, some interesting interesting things that we're seeing. The number one area where, like, I don't know if anyone wants to raise their hand, who is what they would consider themselves to be sort of that the must-haves, right? So people that are in logistics, transportation, supply chain, cybersecurity, these must-have companies are the ones that are growing the fastest. So you can see that on the dark blue line. You can see that on the yellow line. They're the ones that are really starting to ride the wave. Back up. One thing, B2B AI has been super hot, right? So who here is at an AI company?

Right.

So we have lots of people riding that wave of investment. It's actually started to normalize a little bit, though, is what we've seen in the growth rates over the past couple of quarters coming back down to earth a bit. But all of these three industries very hot right now in terms of how they're growing.

Yeah. And if you just look back here at the You see different color lines. The light blue line is the B2B AI. Even back in Q1 and Q2, right, Q1 and Q2 of 2022, the yellow line being cybersecurity, cybersecurity was kicking AI's rear. So infrastructure must-haves, companies saying, hey, we need to create secure applications, we need the infrastructure to support future growth. Those companies, the ones you might say, hey, those aren't the sexiest in the world, they're the ones enjoying growth because people are retrenching and saying, I got to invest in the infrastructure for the future.

Okay.

So to me, some of the most interesting trends we saw was around pricing models. So this is particularly— you'll see we split this into two slides. If you guys get the full growth report that we have, this really breaks it down into a bunch of cohorts based on ARR that I think is really fascinating. But what we've seen is for the sub-$1 million companies, keep it simple. Coming into the market with more of a fixed rate price, like everybody right now is talking about usage-based, it's generally the hotness, right? When you're actually growing your business, if you look at that yellow line, that's the growth rate of fixed rate companies, sub-$1 million. So the consistency, being able to get cash in the door, cash up front, understanding how your customers are paying you in a consistent and repeatable way, that's really fueling growth at this this lower end of the market when you're building and growing.

And if you want to go ahead, I would just say, which is really surprising, right? I often think that we think about early stage companies, the, the go-to-market motion, sales-led versus product-led. Early stage companies often have usage-based pricing as the model associated with their PLG offering. There are PLG companies that have fixed rate subscription, but when you look at this and say, gosh, the early stage companies are benefiting from the fixed contract model, PLG versus SLG. It makes sense. Why? They're getting cash, right? They're getting paid. They don't have that volatility going on when you're only a usage-based model. So getting out of the gate, as Julie said, with that core platform fee can really make a difference for your long-term growth. However, when we hit the inflection point, what do we see?

So, um, this is one particularly, uh, dig into the report on this because there's some great graphs. But when you start to hit that product market fit, so this is showing particularly, uh, $1 million and above in revenue, but we really see this accelerate at the $10 million and above point. You start to see that that blue line, the usage-based companies, they're growing faster. So once you start to layer in that usage-based price, you have product market fit, you understand how users are using your product, you understand what they need, how you can monetize better. That's really when to start leaning into usage-based pricing to have that be an accelerant to growth.

And I think the dirty little secret is it's not usage versus fixed. The future is hybrid. You're going to have both, right? Half of our customers are usage-based. Half of our customers are subscription platform-based primarily right now. The usage-based customers, there's a lot of volatility. In the good days, you love it, right? 'Cause usage goes up, your NRR goes up, you're like, oh, this is the greatest thing in the world. When you have contraction or any sort of compression, usage drops and it turns into really interesting board conversations, like what's going on with your business? So what I would say and recommend is, as you look at the different pricing models, as you think about what are you trying to monetize, the value that you're trying to deliver to your customers, is it some combination? Is it a platform plus a usage fee? How do you secure them and then also demonstrate value over time as they grow and be able to take a benefit from that as well as a company? So with that, let's roll into the key insights. Number 1, if you're an early-stage company, it's a bright forecast. The clouds are over, right? But it's about agility, speed, product-market fit, ensuring you're aligned with VCs who are believing in where you're going. Number 2, AI is grabbing the headlines, and we're writing a lot about this. We have more than 100 AI companies in our, in our customer base. I've interviewed a bunch of them trying to find out what's going on. There really are 3 different types of AI companies. I write about this on LinkedIn. We can chat more, but getting clear about what you think is AI for your company and how you're going to monetize that is really important as part of your business model. Number 3, as we talked about, fixed-rate pricing still seems to be the best model to start with. So you all early-stage folks out there, if you're just wholly depending on usage, you might want to think about, hey, how do I adjust my pricing model, get a little bit more predictability, cash flow coming in? And then finally, this idea of expanding into usage-based once you have the foundation in place so you can figure out how to monetize new offerings. We call that the monetization ecosystem or the monetization strategy. How do you think about the offer that you're putting in the market? How are you then getting clients on board, how are you analyzing the data to better inform your go-to-market strategy going forward?

And I think, Randy, especially to your point earlier about hybrid, thinking about how you combine those models as you grow. So figuring out the right fit, especially as you are hitting that $10 million ARR product market fit point, really starting to get clever in how you're mixing your usage and your fixed rate pricing. And it's a more complex model, but I think that's where you really have the levers for growth and that's where we see a lot of people really able to accelerate.

Yeah. And so my last 8 seconds, that's the advertisement for Maxio, right? What do we do? We do billing and invoicing, RevRec and reporting. If you're taking on usage, it's super complicated, hard to get it right. You can get the benchmark report here. We're at booth number 206. Who knows how you can tell where the booth number is? Find the Maxio knot and we'll give you the report. We'll talk about what you're doing in terms of your go-to-market motion, your pricing motion. And be delighted to chat about if we could work together.

Thank you all.

Have a great SaaStr.

Please welcome to the stage Andrew Berger, VP of Revenue at Capchase, and Maria Parada Erlich, Berg, Head of Partnerships at Capchase.

Alrighty. Hey, everybody. Good morning.

Oops.

Let me back up. I probably should do some intros. Good morning. Thanks for joining us here. My name is Andrew Berger, the VP of Revenue at Capchase. Capchase is a fintech company focused and dedicated of empowering SaaS companies to grow as fast as possible. Our Grow product has enabled $2.5 billion of capital funding, and while our Collect and Pay products enable companies to increase their revenue, close deals faster, and improve the cash collections process.

Hi everybody, my name is Maria Pereira and I lead, lead partnerships at Capchase. And over the past few years, working with thousands of SaaS businesses, we've gained some really good insights into what drives SaaS success. So over the next few minutes, we're going to be talking about one, what are some of the largest pain points that we see SaaS businesses experience today and some of the strategies that you can implement to maximize your top line.

Yeah, and just a little bit about us. We've been in business for about 5 years since 2020. We've worked with 5,000 customers across North America and Europe. So we got some reach and we're here to provide some insights for y'all. So So what is stopping you from maximizing revenue today? I'm going to be very brief here. We probably have all seen this. Marie's going to dive into the details and the stats. Number one, we see a lot of different stakeholders involved in the sales process today. There's a fun stat by Gong used to say a few years ago that by every $25,000 increments, the deal sizes, the number of stakeholders involved exponentially increased by a power of 2. Now that has some sort of limits of plateaus a bit towards the end. The second thing is we're seeing a lot of discounts, and the reason I talk about discounting strategies, ACV upfront versus monthly payments. And the third point here is that there's a lot of overdue invoices. Now, revenue leakage is probably a huge issue for a lot of companies. Maria's gonna dive into those stats in a few minutes. And the last thing which we're gonna touch on in the end is retention, retention, retention. It's so hard to bring on a new logo, and the market's getting even harder to renew these customers that you spend all all this time and effort bringing it on board.

Great, so let's talk about what are the 4 things that we're seeing SaaS businesses are doing that are really helping them maximize revenue in today's market. And the very first one is offering flexible payment terms. Something that we've seen a lot in this market, and this is probably no surprise to you, is that buyers have a lot tighter budgets. And this is driven by a tighter fundraising environment, driven by higher interest rates. So it's, it's becoming a lot harder for buyers to convince their finance teams to buy any piece of software. This is creating two main big shocks in, in for SaaS businesses. One is sales cycles are lengthening. We're seeing an increase of 50% of sales cycles becoming longer and longer because it's just taking a lot more time for buyers to really convince their teams to buy a piece of software. And as a consequence, we see a a lot of vendors discounting their software. They're discounting their software up to 20% to get the buyer to commit faster and also to be able to close at all because a lot of them, they're not even closing any business, right? So what are the things that you can do to counteract this, right? And one of the things is now is the time more than ever to lean into product marketing. Make sure that really focusing on and you're selling based on value that you're delivering and think about, okay, how are you pricing your product? Are you pricing it based on value? Are you pricing it just based on just closing the deal based on your competition? And understand what are the objections from your buyers. Is the objection based on value? Is it based on price? Or is it based on pricing terms? What we've seen that a lot of SaaS businesses are not realizing is that a lot of the objections are due to pricing terms. So one of the largest solutions and one of the more impactful ones that we're seeing SaaS businesses have is implementing innovative tools for flexible payment terms. And today there's a way to do it in a way that you don't impact your cash flow health. So buyers today are actually able to buy enterprise software as seamlessly as you would buy a consumer good, right? So in a way where, you know, you can— vendors are able to collect annual upfront upfront, which is great for your cash flow health, and buyers are able to pay in flexible payment terms where everybody wins. This allows you to close the deal and actually sell more expensive deals because they're able to pay flexibly over time with no impact to your, to your cash. We had one customer, a $160 million ARR business that was suffering from longer sales cycles and lower conversion rates, and they implemented flexible payment terms and they saw in just a few months a 50% increase in conversion rates and $2.5 million in pipeline being added, which tells us, okay, it never was about value. It never was because there was no need for your solution. It simply was because it was the pricing terms.

Awesome. So if I asked you all to raise your hand, who has asked you to cut spend and do more? I bet everybody would raise raised their hand in the past 3 or 4 years, right? So let's focus on our favorite topic about GTM efficiency. So a couple graphs here for y'all to look at is that gone are the days of growth at all costs, and what we're really seeing is that the dollar today is not stretching as much as it used to. So a couple years ago, our CAC to LTV was over 5. Now we're starting to see the past 2 years like 2.8, and this is from this rather statistically relevant analysis from some of our partners. And what does that actually mean? It means that the more money we're spending now is we're getting less in return. So growth at all costs, we all probably have heard that term and we're kind of moved from that era. And how do we have like pragmatic growth and how do we focus the company, maybe the board, maybe the exec team on one key metric that we can all rally the company behind? And that metric is ARR by FTE. So if we think about maximizing the revenue moving forward, How do we actually leverage internally, get the company rallied behind these type of efforts? So we're going to dive into some of these recommendations here. So number 1, we kind of back up out of the way. If we think about efficient customer acquisition costs, think about the segmentation, the markets, the customers you want to go after. Everyone can talk about, oh, we want to reduce our cost and acquire more customers. But actually, how are you going to do that? By analyzing your existing customer base. Understanding what matters to them, leveraging that analysis for net new logos. Number 2 is an interesting one, is some companies sometimes find themselves in this doom loop where we're gonna cut GTM spend, we're gonna cut GTM headcount, but you have to hit a bigger target. So how do you actually infuse non-dilutive capital basically into the business to focus on getting out of that doom loop? Because you cannot cut your way to growth. You just pure and simple cannot do that. Third is incorporate some tools. Like, we're at SaaStr, it's fantastic. There's a lot of great vendors back there. I've been super impressed by some workflows incorporating ChatGPT to Gong data to Edgar's and SEC to file in all the SEC filings. All of a sudden, instead of 20 hours of research that a rep on my team has to do, instantaneously to get the insights and data to actually have a proper value-added business conversation. These tools did not really exist in the market for production value like they did 10 years ago, or from 10 years ago. And the last thing is, what I like to talk about is, in SaaS, it's amazing. Anyone around the world can buy our tools. There's different mechanics buying behaviors from different markets. And different markets require different price points. I've been, unfortunately, in my past lives, pretty hard and fast on price points. Like, this is the price in the US, this is the price in Latin This is the price in India. People buy differently. Don't let price be the barrier. Go capture market share, adjust your mechanics, learn from your customers if you want to actually grow yourself out of this kind of held belief that we can still grow our business, which we can right now.

All right.

So let's talk about minimizing revenue leakage. One of the biggest low-hanging fruit that we see today to reduce revenue leakage is to actually have better management of invoice collections. We're seeing some big, big impacts in the SaaS businesses that we work with. We see a 30% increase in days sales outstanding. This means that it's taking you a lot longer to collect from your buyers, and this is going to tie up your cash, it's going to create some working capital issues, and it's going to limit you how fast you can really reinvest that capital into the business. We see cash conversion conversion cycles also increasing, which makes— means it's taking you longer to turn from investment into cash. And that is forcing a lot of these SaaS businesses to bridge that gap with alternative financing or by cutting down growth and marketing investments, which is really not ideal for your top line either, right? So what are some of our best SaaS businesses doing to counteract this? And quick answer is You know, there's a lot of, a lot of innovation and a lot of new solutions out there that can help you automate your invoice collections and streamline the whole process and look for solutions that leverage AI and data analytics to make sure that you're automating your collections and you're streamlining the whole process. These solutions are able to integrate with your CRM and with your financial software to have a centralized view of all of your data and allow you to have real-time view into your cash flow health, which is, which is really great. And this allows you to essentially have your finance team focus on more strategic initiatives and less so chasing payments, reminding customers, and making sure that you're having a healthy cash flow picture in the business.

All righty, well, take us home on customer retention. Who does not want to retain more customers and get more value out of your customers? Let's set the stage a a little bit, we're seeing monthly churn increase 3x from 2 years ago, 1.1% to 3.4%. All the weights and the headwinds to actually bring a new logo on board, now your renewals team, post-sales teams, customer account teams are facing the same type of dynamics with elongated sales cycles by 10%. So you face headwinds to bring on a new customer, more customers are churning, and it's taking longer to renew them. How the heck are we gonna fix that? So let's talk about a couple of key things.

2 things.

I'm a firm believer that you earn the right to renew a customer at the point of activation. Our friends at Winning by Design and the fancy bowtie model talk about the moments that matter, right? The moments that matter is as soon as you close one deal, how's that handoff process? And the moments that matter in the delightful process that you engage that account through their duration. Gone are the days to set a reminder in your CRM of T-minus 90 days, send out a ping for the automated renewal. Like, who wants that? The market has a ton of vendors. It's how you show up and how you engage your existing customers. The second thing is, are we obsessing over our existing customers? Do we have an exact alignment strategy? I worked at a previous organization that had an OKR of 40 executive calls from the CEO to every single customer a quarter, top to bottom, high ACV, low ACV, everything in the middle. That should be the focal point of investing your time in your customers. The last slide here, I know we're kind of short on time. We'll wrap things up in a second. Number 1 piece of recommendation: look at your, your stagnant deals. Look at your closed loss deals. Potentially look at an alternative financing solution to meet buyers how they want to pay for your product. Number 2: nobody wants to chase or be chased like a debt collector. Use tooling, subscription billing, all the automation to handle the back office work. Number 3: bring on some awesome tools. You can go find a bunch over there. To engage your sales team to help you prospect and close more deals. Make sure you understand the ROI and what you're getting out of. Nobody wants to buy a bunch of product and not use it. And the last thing is, NPS is a fantastic point in time, but what's your engagement strategy? If you focus on the leading indicators to your customer, you'll start to see your NRR and really your GRR increase. Your GRR is that North Star metric. Are we renewing our customers? And eventually NRR will flow from that. That's all we got today. If you want to learn a little bit more about Catchy, come to booth SG-201, and thank you all for your time.

Thank you.

Please welcome to the stage Andrew Davies, CMO at Paddle, and Vivian Shao, pricing consultant at Paddle.

Hey, how we doing? Good to see everyone. Third day, a few hours left. My name is Andrew, this is Vivian. We are going to dive into 10 short, quick minutes of content. We would love to go as deep as possible at the booth after, after this. We've got loads of data we'd love to dig through. We're going to talk about some of the current benchmarks on growth in the industry and how pricing can accelerate that. So I'll do a bit of hand waving up front, then Vivian will dive into some data-backed— okay, cool. So what's going on in the current market?

We—

Paddle sees behind about $36 billion of ARR for our metrics product. So we see a really interesting portion of the SaaS market. For context, we deal with international payments, tax compliance, about 4,000 software companies, but we also have about about 20,000 that use our free product, and this is how we get this huge dataset that we're able to look through. So across the last few years, we can see the macro happen in real time through our data. We can segment this in lots of different ways. We publish it on our website every month if you want to dive into detail. And you can see here over the last few years a few things that happened, and there's definitely a virus we're not allowed to name, otherwise it hits our YouTube rankings. That's what we were told. You get blocked. Anyway, So what's going on? Well, right now growth has stabilized. So if we flick to the next slide, you can see very clearly that there's an impact on these interest rates and then our growth rates. You know, we've talked about this lots. We don't want to labor the point, but in our data you can see when the rates dropped, very significant growth happened. And then when the rates rose, growth stabilized. And if we pop to the next slide, what we mean here— and we're imposing here 2023 on 2022, you can see that growth is lower but it's more stable. So there's wins and there's losses, there's good things and there's bad things. We're definitely growing slower than we saw before, but it's more stable. So in this context, what can we do about it? Well, we've only got a few short minutes here today, and we'd love to dive into any of these topics you want to discuss. There's big and scary topics like where do you sit with your narrative and your story How does that sit within an ever more competitive market? Your ideal customer— how narrow can you get to go and win those next few? AI and the impact it has. Or we could get really specific. We could dive into pricing mechanics. We could think about localization, something that we deeply care about as we help thousands of software companies localize around the world. We could dive into specific tactics to inflect your NRR upwards. But for the next few minutes, what we're going to do instead is deal with pricing because it's one of those things that's big and complicated. And with us today, we've got someone from our Price Intelligently team, that are a team of consultants who have helped companies like ADP, companies like Intercom, companies like Adobe, and they've seen behind more pricing studies than anyone else in the SaaS market. Now we've got loads of data we could show, but given time, we'll do that at our booth afterwards. If you want a live pricing page teardown of your pricing, we'd love to do that too. We'll put Vivian on on the spot, but for now, why don't, Vivian, you give us just a few key top-level recommendations?

Yes, thank you, Andrew. So the first piece I'm gonna talk about today is working on expansion revenue. As many of you know, it's much easier to grow your existing customer base than it is to grow a new customer in a low-growth environment. So there are two ways to do this. The first is through price increases, and while this may be something that is pretty intuitive to most folks, folks, what we believe in is value-based pricing. And so what that looks like is going out to the market, going out to prospects and your current customers to understand what people are actually willing to pay for your product. Of course, the competitive landscape is really important in this. So making sure to layer in a competitive element so that you're pricing in line with what the market expects to pay is going to be important there as well. The second piece, however, I'm going to focus on a little bit more here, and this is creating good feature differentiation to promote upgrades and upsell opportunities. And so by understanding what functionalities to your product your customers consider to be core, value-driving, or more niche, and layering that on top of features that people are willing to pay more for, you're able to create thoughtful differentiators between your packages that are tailored towards different ICPs or different stages of your customer journey.

Customers.

The next piece I'll talk about is revisiting your pricing structure and your value metrics. So what is a value metric? So this is essentially the metric that you're charging your customers by for using your product. And a good example of this is users or seats. So this is pretty much what every SaaS defaults to early on. The reason being is that it's easy to understand. And it's very familiar to the market. However, in our experience, it's not necessarily the best lever of monetizing your product, especially when you're starting to think about apps or websites that focus on automation or process improvements. In theory, the better your product works, the less users you'll eventually need. And so what we look to do here is implement some level of usage-based pricing. That grows with your product. A strong value metric has, has 3 things. The first is that it's simple to understand. Your customer should be pretty easily able to figure out which package is best suited for them, and you should be able to easily measure and implement that growth. The next is that it's aligned to the value that your customer gets out of your product. And lastly, it should grow and scale with both the size of the companies that work work with you and the usage that they're getting out of your tool. And the last piece I'm going to talk about here is localization. As Andrew mentioned, growth has slowed in a lot of regions, including here in the U.S. However, there are some regions like Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, and Southern Europe that has seen a little bit more growth than we have here locally. And so expanding into those areas is a really good way to go after additional opportunity. There's two ways to do this. The first is through cosmetic localization. And that's something as simple as changing the currencies, the language on your website to make sure that buyers in those regions can pay and understand what they're purchasing. And doing this alone can contribute to about 30% growth from what we've seen. But the next piece that I'm going to talk about is true market localization. And this involves going out and doing research and understanding the willingness to pay of buyers in different regions. This is really important because the dollar goes a different amount of ways in different areas. And so understanding what willingness to pay looks like and what the competition looks like in different regions is going to help you stay competitive as you look to expand your product and your services into other regions. So with that, I'm going to give it back to Andy. Andrew to talk about our key takeaways here.

Cool. So some top-level summaries here. The first thing is we have said that growth has slowed, but none of us in the room want to settle for less. Maybe we have a raise of hands for everyone wants to settle for less. None of us want to settle for less. You know, the average age of someone wearing diapers in the US is 22. The average is not so helpful, right? There's a bunch of young people and a few very old people. So when we talk about this average growth rate, that's not what we should be focused on. Because actually we see a really bifurcated story. There's people who are adopting these strategies and growing really fast, and there's people who aren't and for a bunch of reasons are pretty flatlining. And so don't settle for slow and steady. Aspire to make sure you can be one of those who are growing at significantly above clip. That's the first thing. It's a mindset. Um, and there's lots of bad news out there. Let's make sure our mindset is set on things are possible. Second one, build this pricing muscle now. We we see in our data that if you just simply make pricing experiments, pricing changes, then you outperform on a revenue and a growth perspective if— than if you don't at all. So actually our data shows if you change your prices once every 3 months, you'll outperform a company that doesn't change their prices over a 3-year period by 103% of your average revenue per user or your average revenue per account. So it's not even whether it's a good price price change. It's just something you're doing to build the muscle. So set a meeting in your diary to discuss how you can challenge yourself to change pricing. Build that pricing muscle now. And then finally, chase international growth. Vivian's spoken about this. We see areas around the world which are still seeing solid growth. And you know, you'll have heard many talks across SaaStr this year, last year, about sales-led and product-led, about blending these bodies models. And one of the beauties about a product-led model is it's born global. You can serve the entire world very, very quickly from that product-led motion. And so we really, we love working with companies who have that blended motion and they're able to serve the entire world because actually you build resilience into your business model. Because even when there's slow growth in your home territory, you're able to chase higher growth around the world. Anyway, we'll stop there. There's loads of content throughout today, so you don't hear us anymore. More. But if you'd like to dive into loads of detail on any of this, the data that sits behind it, we'd love to show you it. If you want to get a live pricing page teardown from Vivian, please come and do that. And of course, if you want some nice swag, come to our booth next door and have a great final day. Thank you so much.

Thanks everyone.

Please welcome to the stage Colby Farber, Director of Product and Customer Acquisition at Justworks.

Hello everyone, I am Colby Farber. I'm excited to be here with you today. I work at Justworks, an HR tech company that provides small businesses with access to payroll and benefits and global HR support. For our first decade, we served customers through our PEO product, which through the power of co-employment and aggregation offers entrepreneurs the ability to offload compliance risk and offer rich benefits to their teams. And for the past 3 years, I've worked on launching a new business line at Justworks, Justworks Payroll. Our charge was to extend the Justworks value prop of providing a simple and intuitive user experience and pairing that with expert support so that small businesses can access Justworks beyond the PEO model. Within 3 years, we went from an idea to a fully launched product and have over 800 customers signed up to date. And earlier this summer, we took what we had built out as this separate labs endeavor and integrated it into into our core business. And in doing so, we unlocked more innovation across the broader company. So let's talk about how. I'm here to share 3 questions that we grappled with, with you all today, for you to keep in mind if considering launching a new business line. First, why do it? Second, if you choose to do it, do you innovate within your core organization or do you set this up separate And third, if you set it up separately, how do you think about integrating back into your core business? So first, why do it? Why start a new business line and why Build? To start, consider whether you can reach your entire target market with your existing business. For Justworks, we focus on serving businesses with less than 100 employees who are looking for an HR partner like us that is easy to understand and enjoyable to use and reliable to access. But only about 15% of small businesses in the U.S. today seek out this co-employment PEO model. So we needed to launch a new product in order to reach our entire target market. Next, consider whether you have the core competencies in-house to build or whether it's it's worth considering an acquisition. For us, we did. We build our technology in-house, and we know well what it takes to successfully run a payroll business at scale through our PEO offering. But before moving forward, there was a third consideration that we didn't want to take for granted. Would our value prop resonate with the broader market that we were newly considering? We understood the needs of white-collar and high-growth businesses. But now we wanted to reach more types of businesses, blue-collar businesses, businesses with undesked workforces. Did they want what we had to offer? Are they tech adopters? Do they value this around-the-clock, we got your back type of support at both the end employer and employee level that Justworks is known for? Next, we had to— think about not only did they want what we had to offer, but could we extend our value prop under our economics of our new payroll business line, or would we have to twist the customer experience to such an extent and dilute why small businesses love us in a way that it would no longer complement our brand? Only by first validating that yes, small businesses were hungry for a payroll partner like just Yes, we could extend our existing value prop under the new payroll business lines economics. Were we ready to move forward and consider our second question? How do we go about this? Why build it out separately versus innovating within our core organization? To start, consider how you empathize with your current target customer. Now, how would you go about doing so for a or a new target customer who you don't currently serve. For us, we needed to set out on this learning journey to not just understand the mindsets of our new target customer, but really empathize with them. What does it feel like to run a small business living with this insecurity about whether you're able to take care of your teams appropriately? Or wondering whether you're correctly navigating the ever-changing employment regulations where your business operates. This is a stress I'm sure many of you are familiar with. I can see some sweat beads forming. But this was not a mindset that we had with Justworks' existing customer base because our PEO offering offloads the stress for entrepreneurs. So we needed to look elsewhere. As we built out our new payroll business, it was paramount that we could similarly offer this peace of mind to our customers, but in order to do so, we needed to deeply internalize this anxiety that small business entrepreneurs face. So we set up our own small business. We spun up a new entity. Our team members became employees of this new entity. We built out a new office, Justworks Labs. We created this scrappy environment alongside other business lines that Justworks was incubating around international capabilities and new benefits. And we became our own target customer, our own first customer. We dogfooded so that we can catalyze this empathy that was so important to us before we had other customers to learn from. Second, consider the risk profiles of your new and existing business lines. If they are markedly different like ours were, That can be a signal to set up your new business line separately. With Justworks Payroll, we were optimizing for speed of development at a time where our core business was implementing more compliance risk controls, very much appropriate for a business serving hundreds of thousands of members. And beyond this compliance risk, we faced a real risk of distraction. We did not have a validated product. We did not belong going head-to-head with our core business for resources and priorities when they were focusing on continuing to grow a higher margin product. So we decided to set ourselves up separately, but from day one we did so with integrating down the road in mind. We did not build out teams that we could easily tap from our core business. Think G&A teams like legal and finance. Our leases were short-term in nature. We did not invest in long-term investments that we couldn't get out of on a dime should our company priorities change. We built brand new tech platform from the ground up, but we did so adhering to the data model that our core business held, which gave us a ton of leverage. Because as tech companies scale, there become moments where it makes sense to replatform, speed up development, launch more innovation, but doing so often requires that you sidetrack your product roadmap or double build. Instead, we went about building our new payroll product while modernizing our tech with full intention to extend that to our core business down the road. And that was only possible because we built from day one with integration in mind. So that brings us to our third point. Why go about integrating? We decided to integrate when two things became true. One, when proximity to our core business would accelerate growth of our new business line, and then two, when our new business line had developed capabilities that would benefit the broader company. Okay, we had a few considerations here. One, our risk palettes were starting to converge. As we brought on more customers, customers, our risk appetite dropped. Meanwhile, our core business had looked to us for lessons learned about how to responsibly take on more innovation risk, and so they were looking to move faster at a time when we were looking to slow down, and so our risk palettes started to converge. Two, our window for optionality with how we scaled the teams was closing. Bringing on more customers necessitated that we would start to build out larger CS and operational teams. And so our decision became either merge now or lay this inflexible duplicate foundation of hiring a redundant team. From a tech perspective, the sooner we integrated, the sooner the core business can benefit from our modernized tech stack without sidetracking their roadmap. From a go-to-market perspective, our sales and marketing teams were ready for a new tool in their toolkit. Our value prop The product was the same. Small businesses just now had more options with how we could fulfill it. And so our sales teams had more ways to win. Conversion goes up. Our sales reps can now close more deals. And so they were embracing this new product. And then finally, from a culture perspective, while we very much built out our new business following the values and culture of our broader business line, we'd also developed new practices along the way that our core company taking note of and looking to benefit from. We centered our team around delivering tangible progress on a weekly basis, and we did so by emphasizing urgency and visibility. One way we did so was with weekly demos across the whole org where the only rule was you cannot demo finished product. Prioritize progress over polish. We have since brought this practice to among others into our wider organization. And we now have weekly demos with hundreds of team members where everyone is showing off work done that very week. And we've expanded the spirit of showing movement over perfection. We've unlocked a lot of the innovative spirit that was in our broader core organization through new practices that we were able to build up with our business line. So that brings us to where we are today. As you think about whether to launch your own business, as a recap, here are 3, 3 questions to keep in mind. First, why do it? Can you reach your target market? Do you have the core competencies in-house to build? Second, how do you do it? Are your risk profiles of your new and existing business markedly different? If so, you may want to build separately. And third, how do you think about whether to integrate? When does proximity to your core business accelerate growth of your new innovation? And how can practices you've cultivated in your new business benefit the broader company overall? We would love to chat more with you. Come find us at our booth. Thank you.

Please welcome to the stage Jason M. Lemkin, CMO at Customer.io.

Hello! Excited to be here. For those that don't know me, my name is Jason M. Lemkin. I'm the CMO at Customer.io. Customer.io is a customer engagement platform, so we help marketing teams and growth teams— we help marketing and growth teams build automated journeys that help drive engagement and impact. Uh, today we have about 7,000 companies that use our platform to send over 35 billion messages across email, in-app, push, and SMS. Uh, so given that context, we have really strong visibility around what types of campaigns work and what types of campaigns don't. So today's focus is really gonna arm you with some best practices that you could bring to bear in your business to deliver more impact. So with that, let's dive in. Uh, in marketing, there's a saying that, uh, the right message, the right time, and the right audience is how you deliver the most impact. While helpful, uh, in concept, it can be a challenge to figure out how do you actually implement this. And I think this is especially true in the SaaS world where the market is pretty dynamic and constantly changing. However, the best brands have been able to figure this out, and as a result, they have developed some best practices around how to effectively apply these concepts. So let's talk about some of those ways now. So when you think about the right message, it's important to understand that personalization is going to be the key. If you think about your own experience, you're likely being bombarded with messages messages today, and as a result, many of those messages get ignored. So it's important that you figure out how do you stand out, and if you're able to stand out, it can deliver huge impact for your business. A recent survey by Dynata found that 84% of customers are more likely to purchase with a vendor that offers a personalized experience. Next, when you think about timing, the key here is to understand that context is super important. Um, and the part about context that people tend to miss is the role that a marketing channel can play in delivering that context. Uh, Salesforce released a survey that said 71% of consumers, uh, prefer different channels of communication depending on the context of the message. So what does that mean for you as a marketer? It means that your channel, your marketing campaigns need to be omnichannel from the very beginning. If not, then you're likely missing out on the impact that you can deliver. And then lastly, when, when you think about the right audience, it's important that you build those audiences based upon the interactions that they've had with your business to date. In a, in that same In a recent survey, Salesforce identified that 64% of customers expect campaigns to adapt to those changing preferences. So what does that mean to you? That means that you need to be data-driven, not only in how you create the audiences for your campaigns, but those audiences need to be dynamic. So you need to be shifting customers in and out based upon the actions that they're taking. So in thinking about these concepts, we went back and looked at all the campaigns that are run on CustomerIO, and what we found was is these themes were consistent across the top performing campaigns. And so what we want to do is walk through some practical examples so that you can see how these concepts are applied. So let's first start with Notion. Hopefully a lot of you, uh, are familiar with Notion. Um, it is an AI-driven workspace where you can write, plan, and organize as a team to deliver more impact. They've gone through massive growth over the past couple of years and recently crossed 100 million users. Um, and while this was amazing progress for the business, it created some challenges for a young lifecycle marketing team. And so they were really focused around driving product activation of all of these new users that were coming onto the platform. So they became really opinionated around what are the most important features that we need to be promoting, and how can we deliver a personalized experience to drive more activation? The campaigns that they built generated open rates of between 49% and 51%. And click-through rates of 1% to 1.5%. And the way they were able to do that was by applying these concepts of personalization, being multichannel, and being adaptable. So when they thought about personalization, for them it was key to build campaigns that align to the unique user persona. And so that way they were able to customize the copy, the examples, and the value prop to make sure that it aligned with what they cared about. And then they were able to look at the success of those campaigns by geography, and then they quickly localized those campaigns to become even more impactful. Notion did, did an amazing job of moving from a single channel to an omnichannel approach, using both email and in-app to drive impact. And lastly, they made sure that these campaigns were adaptable because they only triggered the campaign once you started using the feature. A lot of times companies want to talk about their, their new features, so they just blast it out broadly to the base of users, versus Notion made sure that those communications were aligned with how they were actually using the product. And as a result, they were able to generate incremental millions of dollars of incremental revenue by driving new users onto the platform and pushing them into higher-priced plans. Next, I want to talk about Les Mills. For those of you don't, don't know Les Mills, they're a global leader in group fitness. So they manage a portfolio of digital and in-person experiences. As you might suspect, their business is very seasonal, and so they tend to see a lot of churn that happens in the early part of the year. And so the team wanted to be proactive in getting ahead of that, and so they built very targeted churn mitigation campaigns that were targeted at inactive users. And as a result of these efforts, they were able to convert 8,000 accounts that they— that were predicted to churn through their efforts, and this represented over 53% of the, the audience of this campaign. And for those customers that did, did renew, 80% of those customers renewed into an annual plan. And that's really important because it gave them a lot more time to build value with them and make sure they were a customer for the long term. Les Mills was able to take this concept of personalization personalization and apply it in an effective way. They looked at the activities that those users had used in the past to inform the recommendations of the campaign. Additionally, they were able to provide personalized offers that were based upon the lifetime value of that customer. So they could be more aggressive with high LTV customers, less aggressive with lower LTV customers. They were able to launch this across 3 different channels. It was a wonderful mix of email, in-app, and push notifications. And the campaigns themselves were adaptive based upon the current activity levels of customers. So they used a data-driven approach to identify the initial wave, and then they monitored their customer base going forward. And so when they identified an account as being inactive, they were dropped into this campaign. So what became a one-off effort is now an evergreen approach. Last but not least, I want to talk about Zen.com. Zen.com is a fin— fintech company that offers a really unique in-app experience where they streamline purchasing, money transfers, transfer and budget management. And they were able to actually generate over 500,000 downloads of their application in a really short amount of time. But naturally with that high growth, the emphasis became then focused on how do I drive activation and conversion. And so they applied these principles really successfully to deliver a 15% increase in activation activity levels and conversion rates also increased by 10%. The way that they were able to do that is they effectively used personalized offers to get customers to that aha moment more quickly. So they looked at their user base across the European region, and they identified offers that were local to that user. And so that was what they were prioritizing in the, in the campaigns that they were leveraging. Additionally, the campaign that they replaced was primarily an email-only effort, and as a result of these changes, they moved towards an SMS, email, and in-app approach, which drove better awareness and better conversion of these new— this new messaging. And then last but not least, they made their campaigns adaptable based upon their sophistication with the app. So if they had used the app before, they were given a different experience than those users that had never used the app in the past. So when we, when we step back and look at all of these examples, hopefully it's clear to you that in order to land the right message at the right time with the right audience, you need to make sure that your campaigns are personalized personalized, they need to be multichannel, and they must be adaptable. And this is the new way in which SaaS organizations need to execute from a campaign perspective to be successful. So I'm really passionate about these concepts. We'd love to talk more about them. Please come visit us at our CustomerIO booth. You also can connect with me on LinkedIn or on social. We hope to chat more about, about this with you in the future. Thank you.

Please welcome to the stage Anthony Owens, CRO at Prismatic, and Libby Stengel, VP of Customer Success at Prismatic.

I think the applause is 100% not necessary.

Hi everyone, I'm Libby Stengel and I'm the Vice President of Customer Success at Prismatic. Prismatic is an embedded integration platform as a service that connects your product to the product your customers, customers use. And I'm joined today by Anthony Owens, the CRO at Prismatic. And Anthony has extensive experience building sales teams from startup all the way to private equity-backed sales teams in the hundreds.

And Libby has very similar experience with size organizations. She's managed all versions of customer success. That's everything from support to technical account management, commercial account management. And we're excited to talk to you today. We're going to talk a little bit about how to shorten your sales cycle and increase your customer stickiness. Just real quick, how many people here represent CS?

Woo!

All right.

Sales?

Yeah, there we go.

All right, I know who my audience is then. All right, cool.

So, you know, at Prismatic, what we've found, and I don't think this is probably uncommon for any of you, you know, in today's current age of selling, our customers are coming to us relatively informed. What you really need to do to make it impactful is you need to kind of shift the perspective to your buyer's side. And so I think the 3 different ways that we've approached making our sales work better is that we focus on the problem that our customers are trying to solve. We connect to the rest of their technical ecosystem. I apologize. Is there any way we can get the monitor flipped over to presentation view, not speaker notes?

Nah, we're cool. All right.

And then lastly, in order to increase that stickiness, we're going to talk a little bit about optimizing that transition from sales over to CS. Where did our product not enough part go?

This is it?

I'm going into it?

All right.

We're going into it.

So, you know, kind of focusing on the customer's perspective, I think one of the very first things that we found when we started demoing our product, and we tried to do a broad stroke demo, it just didn't hit. It did not resonate with the prospect. And so what we found is that focusing on a specific use case and making that demo about that use case is what made the biggest impact. And so focusing and understanding what that use case is, is gonna really help you demonstrate your product as the right solution. And then when you are solving that, or when you are showing that use case, showing specifically how your product only solves that problem and not all the capabilities of what your product is able to do. Lastly, in order to make sure that that handoff goes seamlessly, is to document everything you can from the sales process. Process. That's from the discovery, through the demo, through the POC. Have a really well-documented process to understand, so when you hand it off to the CS team, they're really capable of being able to run with it. And then lastly, obviously, we think these are what's going to help you win more deals. You can weed out the unqualified opportunities early, know if the goals of the customer are, and what is going to be most important as you hand them off, obviously all leading to reduced churn.

But, there's a big but, a great product isn't enough, no matter what that sales team says to you, no matter how awesome they think they are. Let's talk a little bit more about that. So this is no surprise, and you've probably seen this in the market over the last couple years. You've seen that there is a greater spend on SaaS applications, and you can see this by the chart over the last couple of years. We've seen a lot more spend over a lot more apps over the last couple of years. We've also seen, and you've probably noticed, that the sales cycle is shortened. And what that means for you is that your customers are coming in a lot more informed. And also, you've got to show your time to value with that product really quickly. And that kind of lands on the average— the average number of SaaS applications that your customers have is around 112. And so thinking about a product not being enough, you've got to start thinking about integrations because your customers sure are. But don't take our word for it. G2 recently came out with a report that talked about what are the top buyer considerations when they're going to market to find a SaaS application. And the number one consideration when they went out, when they go to market, is integrations. You cannot come to the market with just a great product. You've got to have a seamless and easy approach to implementing your integrations, like via a marketplace, where they can come in and have a really nice experience for their customers. So how do you do this? How do you— first thing you've got to do is figure out what their tech ecosystem looks like. And we're talking about 112 apps here. Figure out what is important to them in this those apps and make sure you make that integration demo and experience by your customers a first-class citizen with your product. If you have ability to demo integrations, do it. Talking about it's great. Demoing your integrations with your product, super impactful.

All this really kind of, again, not disqualifying yourself early in the sales process because you don't connect to the other tools that your customers are using for. It helps them realize value faster, obviously increases adoption, it reduces or creates a moat around your product, which is enhanced, going to in turn help you reduce churn. And so when you've got this perfectly navigated, well-executed sales process, you hand it over to CS to do the easy part, right? Yeah, there's no real I know there's still no CS people in this room. You would have responded to that.

And then I try, as it's being thrown over the fence, I try to catch this flaming hot mess that sales put together for us. I'm kidding. Not really, but maybe. So you have to really think about that optimization from that sales process to CS. You want to make sure that you've used that data that sales put together, and the sales team has a ton of data around that customer, what's important to them. Your CS team, your onboarding team understands what problem is at their core. And then that customer feels like the onboarding process is a continuation and not a restart. Nothing's more annoying to a customer is when you come into an intro call and say, tell me what you do. Can't get any worse than that. You also, when you're talking to that customer, you'll probably already know what their high priorities, what their high-value items are and what they're looking for outcomes. But reiterating that and confirming with that, right in the onboarding process, builds early trust, which comes into, comes into play when you're talking about ROI and renewals. And then as you're onboarding, you have to promote your wins. And this is often missed in the onboarding process. The team does something easy or completes something hard. You celebrate that win internally. You acknowledge it to that internal team or to that tactical team. But you also make sure you're reaching out to the stakeholders and letting them know about that win. 9 times out of 10, their team isn't telling them. So you've got to take it on yourself to go out and make sure those stakeholders know about that win. And guess what that stakeholder does? He turns around and thinks, is this ROI? Am I getting ROI out of this product? Sure seems like I am. My customers, my employees are winning with it. Last piece, all of this comes to make a positive, trusting experience, and that it'll increase stickiness as well as reduce your churn risk.

Again, same things we talked about at the beginning— focusing on the problem that they're trying to solve, make your solution specific to them, identifying what that use case is in a way to demo that effectively— I think is, is single-handedly what's contributed to our success over the last couple years. Being able to connect your products to the products that your customers use. That is the differentiator in today's marketplace. Being a great product again just isn't enough. You've got to be able to show how it connects to the rest of their ecosystem. And then having a great CS partner like Libby and her team optimizing what that handoff process looks like, giving our customers the same feel through the sales process that they get the post-sales process, simply helps you guys win more deals.

We did it.

We did it in under 10 minutes. We have 1 minute 51, 50, 49 seconds left. Are there any questions? Anybody want to just shit on salespeople for a while? I love those jokes.

All right.

Fantastic. Thanks, everybody. Really appreciate it.

Please welcome to the stage Derani Pitts, Vice President and Business Partner Manager at Fidelity.

Hello everyone, my name is Derani Pitts. I've spent the last part of my career working with a lot of private companies, helping them get their cap tables ready for big moments. So today I'm going to talk to you about how you can optimize your cap table for those moments. So why is this actually important? Like, why do you need to optimize your cap table? Well, if you've been out in the marketplace lately, you will know that, uh, it's changed a little bit. Deals are taking a lot longer to get done and less deals are actually getting done. And what What you may not know is that your cap table is one of the pieces that gets examined a ton during any type of deal. So it's very important that you are ready for those instances and you're not doing a ton of scrambling to get things done at the last minute, okay? We wanna make sure that you're prepared, so we're gonna go through a couple of things to help you understand why this is necessary and show you a couple tips of how. So I'm gonna take you back to a day, maybe junior high, that you might remember Remember this function on the board, y f(x)? It just lets you know that y is determined by what happens with x. And if you don't actually remember those days, we can actually make it a little more salient for you by saying that, hey, maybe the apps that you build are a function of the code that you write. And as you change that code, so does the app and the way that it functions. So why am I bringing this up? It's because your cap table is actually a function of legal documentation. And not a lot of people look at it this way, but this is really what the cap table is. It's a numerical representation of a ton of agreements that have actually happened to show who owns what. Now, not only is it that numerical representation of legal documentation, but investors look at this and they go, see, it's actually who you hang out with. It's the company that you keep. Who have you allowed on that cap table? They're also looking at how detail-oriented you are. OK, is the cap table very messy? Are there a lot of holes? Are there a lot of things that we have to fix? And then last, it's really a representation of how you will allocate a very scarce resource. Your equity is one of the most most expensive things you have to give in your company. And if an investor's giving you money, they want to understand how you're going to allocate that resource to help us all reach the goal that we're looking for. So two ways that you need to optimize your cap table. The first is for due diligence. As we talked about it, investors are going to be looking at your cap table. They're going to want to understand the ins and outs of what the ownership is. Okay, so you have to make sure that your cap table is airtight, okay, that there aren't huge discrepancies in the cap table, and make sure that during a diligence process it doesn't take you forever to locate the legal documentation that's associated with the transactions that we're talking about. Okay, that is where they do the diligence. It's not just looking at the cap table. They're going to look at the legal documentation documentation, because they want to be 100% sure that when they put their money into your company that they're getting the percentage of ownership that they desire. Right? Now, another thing that you may need to be aware of is as your company grows, cap table management doesn't just become something that your law firm deals with or you as a founder actually deal with. It becomes more of a team effort, I would say. As you grow, you start to have heads of finance, you start to have heads of legal, heads of your people team, okay? And all of them will have different instances where they need to touch the cap table. The finance team is going to be looking at what's called ASC 718 and all of the expensing of stock options. Okay, your legal team's gonna make sure that you aren't breaking any regulations, right, or going awry on any sort of securities laws. And the people team wants to make sure how are we incenting people to stay with the company, and how are we providing incentives for people to join the team and the vision that we have. Now, many hands make light work when it comes to a team effort of managing the cap table, but it also can make a humongous mess when the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing. Now, I can share one experience specifically where I worked with a company that was going through a transaction. And for that transaction, we actually had to manipulate some of the equity grants of individuals. And that manipulation of those equity grants caused an acceleration of expense accounting, which isn't a big deal because it's something that you can fix afterward. But the legal team that was driving the transaction wasn't aware that we were going through an accounting audit at the exact same time. And one of the areas that they were looking at was expense accounting. And expense accounting blew up and went awry. And at the 11th hour, I had to tell people, hey, you're gonna need to calculate this by hand, 'cause there's nothing that we can do. We have to leave these things separate to go through this audit. Calculation. Now I've never seen someone's face turn white as quickly as telling them that they needed to actually calculate expenses for someone's stock options by hand. It can be done, but it's not a task that you want to do often. So remember, the left hand has to be knowing what the right hand is doing, and if you have all of these different areas working into your cap table, you need to designate one person to have a global view and understand what everyone is doing so that you don't run into issues like this.

Okay.

One note to jump back in on due diligence. Just know that the macro environment can change really quickly. Let's say, for instance, you got a term sheet and it was January of 2020 and you got a question from an investor that took you a lot of time to figure out. Well, we all know that within a month the entire world shut down and a lot of investment went away. So there are some companies out there that through the course of their due diligence actually went out of business, okay? So this is very important to keep your cap table tight and have everything in line so that the legal documentation that you have is very well connected to all of the transactions on your cap table. So, key takeaways. Again, remember, the cap table is a function of your legal documentation. Don't forget that. And make sure that you're able to map all of your transactions, okay, to the legal documentation. You will need to find those in diligence exercises. Those are the things that are going to be looked at when you're fundraising, when you're getting, having an exit. Especially if you're going public. And then as you grow, remember that there needs to be a coordinated effort for managing the cap table. And you need to have a schedule of maintenance that makes sense for your company to make sure that it doesn't get totally out of whack, okay? The best way that I can describe the cap table maintenance is if you think about, you know, every 6 months going to the dentist and getting your teeth cleaned, after that, as I They're probably as clean as they'll ever be. Well, that's what your cap table is like after going through a fundraising round. It is pristine. But over time, transactions come in, maybe you don't brush and floss every day like you're supposed to, and your cap table gets a little bit out of whack until you have another event where it needs to get cleaned up. So if you make sure that you're doing the right maintenance on your cap table throughout time, you won't have a painful visit to the dentist or a painful visit during due diligence. Okay.

Thank you.

That's my time. If you don't remember anything else here, just remember this phrase: if you stay ready, you don't have to get ready.

Thanks.

Any questions?

Sure.

You can go there. Do you have a question or you do not?

Later.

Oh, for later. Okay. You can have a question one-on-one if you'd like. Anyone brave enough to ask a question in front of everyone?

Sure.

Applications that keep cap tables up to speed and manage it. Well, Fidelity Private Shares actually has a cap table SaaS platform platform that will help you do it, but there is still some manual maintenance that you have to do on your own. There are services and individuals that offer what are called cap table equity administration, and those are services where they'll actually do it for the company and they're very well versed in the different platforms to help you do that. Generally a law firm would help you do that as well, but most people don't like to pay their law firm to do those type of things and get the bill later. Other questions?

All right.

Well, thank you everyone. I appreciate the time.

Please welcome to the stage Nam Lee, SVP Embedded Sales at Workato, and Hannah Peacock, Director of Solutions Marketing Embedded Platform at Workato.

Wow.

Oh, it's too far.

We got to get a little closer.

Too far?

Bring it in.

Everyone, thanks for having us and thanks for joining. Today, Hannah and I are going to talk about why our customer success organization is the most important organization in our business unit. You wanna— Oh, is this my intro?

Mm-hmm.

Terrific.

For those I haven't met, my name is Nam Lee. I founded the Embedded Business Unit here at Workato. So what that means is that we're an integration platform, and our business works exclusively with other software companies to power integration solutions to their customers. So obviously, it's been a really easy 18 months for us.

Yeah.

And I'm Hannah Peacock. I joined Workato about 3 years ago, and I'm the head of solutions marketing for the embedded platform units. That means everything from the first half of the customer journey and through advocacy and retention. So we're starting a little question here, and Nam kind of gave it away in the beginning, but what role is most essential, right, in driving the long-term success of your business? And the answer to that is customer success.

Yeah, so why did we send a marketer and a sales guy to talk to you guys about the customer success organization? Because that's kind of the point. We've talked to a lot of you guys this week— founders, small companies, large companies— and everybody has sales on their mind, but particularly right now in this economy with everything going on, what we've learned and what we've understood in our ecosystem and our customers' health is that resilience is probably the key trait that you need to understand that you have to be able to gain from your entire customer journey. So today we're gonna go over what we do to create a good customer. Internally, we call this finding a deal versus creating customers. I think it's really small down there, sorry. We're gonna talk about why customer success builds resilience, and then we're gonna go through very specific things that you should be doing in your entire customer journey to make sure everybody's making make the customer success manager's lives a little bit easier. All right, why don't we go next slide.

Terrific.

So first and foremost, good sales is about customer success. So when I first started the business unit at Workato a little over 5 years ago, I was obviously the sales guy. We hired a sales engineer because I'm not smart enough, but the next person that we hired with pressure to go hire salespeople was a customer success manager. And the reason why we did that even 5 years ago was I knew I could sell the product. I knew the value that it brought to the market. What I didn't know was how come all of my competitors were failing after 3 or 5 years. All of them. MuleSoft used to have embedded. They're all a bunch of small players, but they kept going out of business. So the one thing I didn't want to do to do was tell my wife I got another job 18 months into this job. So the first person we hired was a customer success manager. We had 3 customers on board, and I leaned on her expertise early on to understand what makes a good customer for you. What do you care about? What she taught us is first and foremost, she needed somebody who can get on the platform and go live quickly. So time to value became the most important metric that we had, and we knew— look, everyone knows that you're gonna need to land and expand your customers. One thing that I learned in my sales career was that salespeople are lying to you. It takes almost no work for a healthy customer to spend more money with you if your product works. So I wanted to test the hypothesis and make sure we put all our calories to make sure our our customers love what we did and how we did it and not emphasize so much on our salespeople trying to get expansion deals out of there. I'll talk about them more later.

Cool.

So in nurturing that long-term success, right, you got to look at the customer success organization. And the reason being, right, Nam hit on some of these points, ensuring your customers achieve their desired outcomes should should be number one and foremost. Like, like he said, it's not hard to expand, land, and keep a deal if your customers are happy and they're reaching their goals with you. A thriving customer success team is gonna lead to the retention, the loyalty, the lifetime value that you're looking for. And that makes my job on marketing a lot easier when I have these stories and these happy customers that I can go to and leverage for references and you can grow your customer base. And lastly, so investing in that customer customer success team is gonna lead to that sustained growth, right, and the competitive advantage overall. Happy customers equal renewing customers equal more customers. And so investing in your customer success team is critical in making sure that the long-term health of your business is sustained.

Let's see here. All right.

So how do you make customers successful? Here's the 3 strategies, right? Starting with number 1, this is at the beginning of the stages, the beginning of the engagement at the beginning of the customer journey. So it starts really with managing expectations. And what that means is, I know as a marketer, we have a tendency to want to, I would say, embellish, amplify, kind of make things look a little bit better, a little rosier, right, to tell these stories. But ultimately, that can hurt you in the long run, right? So the key here is having clear and honest communication from the get-go. About what your product can do and what, what the scope of what they can achieve actually is. The strategy for that really is having marketing work with their customer success team early on, similar to having sales work with customer success early on to understand what an ideal customer is for the product fit. And you can kind of reverse engineer your ideal customer from that. So taking a look at what kind of profile they have, what are they looking to achieve, their pain points, and understanding that you you can foster that through the entire marketing cycle and kind of match what your product can actually do to what they're looking for. So techniques for effective expectation management, I think really starting with the assets themselves whenever you're looking to share. So transparent product demos, show what your product can do, not what it will do. You know, be very honest and upfront about what it can actually achieve. The case studies and the testimonials as well. Talk about the ROI data points that your customers can achieve today, so that they can level set those expectations from the beginning and understand where that's gonna come. And then collaboration, right? Collaboration between marketing, customer success to build out those kind of, those profiles for what customers should look like and how many we should be attracting. And then collaboration between sales and customer success as well. So making sure that sales is qualifying those leads along the cycle so that they're looking for the exact kind of points along the customer journey.

Journey.

Benefits of this, right? It's gonna reduce churn. You got the right fit for the right product at the right time, but you're also gonna build trust and credibility from the onset, so they're gonna look to you and trust you.

Yeah, so I think some key points there that Hannah had touched on— you can go to the next slide. One of the key things I want everyone to kind of at least take away from this is that from a sales perspective, I talk to a lot of you guys this week, new products, new ideas, even new products in large organizations, you have to remember that you still bring a perspective that's valuable to everybody, right? There was a lot of almost apologizing for the newness of your product. That's not the point. You are the expertise in this, and it's your responsibility to represent your customer success in that way. And so really, from our sales standpoint, when we think about our top of the funnel to the early parts of the journey, we make sure that we set the expectation of you're going to be a customer that onboards in the first 8 to 12 months. You will be proficient on the platform and you're ready to go. For us, not only that, you're going to get your first customer live on it. So you got to go live and we're going to get one of your customers live. And we start that conversation at hello, right? It's important for me to me that our customers understand when my customer success managers are working with them, we are all rowing in the same boat, going the same direction, and it helps the entire journey along the way that they understand now it's a value-based customer journey from beginning to end. I know we gotta hustle.

Okay.

Yeah.

So I trashed salespeople earlier, and I'll talk about a little bit why. When we talk about resilience, Your salespeople, us salespeople here, we do have a superpower that no one else has, and it's the ability to continue to give our companies an opportunity to be successful. Having that type of talent working on an expanding contract from a healthy product and a healthy customer is a waste of that talent. So what we did is we changed the fundamental makeup and structure of our own sales team, and we started to understand organic expansion is phenomenal for everybody. So we made sure everyone kind of had a little bit of that. And when it came to our sales team, some of them are here in the room, and I'm talking about their trauma in front of everybody, and my apologies. It was about Can you go and find new avenues of revenue and growth? And we've seen our entire go-to-market change. We've seen our entire ICP change. You've heard the cliché, we've had to build a plane while it flew. We took a plane and we built a rocket ship with this. And the one common denominator that we used was you had to make sure as a salesperson, as a marketer, whoever you were in the ecosystem, when you wanted to bring that deal will the CSM fight over that deal to take over that customer from you? That's been one of the common denominators that's really helped us grow this business unit.

Yeah, so key takeaways then. Absolutely, so that customer-centric approach, right? First and foremost, looking at your customer. It's critical for sustained business, making sure that your customer success team is successful and anchoring your sales team, your marketing team, Everyone in giving customer success the best customers. And then we gave you the 3 strategies, right? Setting those expectations early, reducing time to value, and that path to expansion being very organic, very fluid, and very clear and honest. And lastly, prioritizing your customer success team is really going to lead to all of the things we want, right? As a business, the reduced churn, the higher CSAT, better customer lifetime value, trust, advocacy. For years and years to come.

Good.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right.

Oh, we're done. Good question.

Good.

Rohan Vijay, co-founder— please welcome to the stage Rohan Vijay, co-founder and vice president of growth at UnifyApps.

All good to go? Thank you. Thank you everyone for dropping by. I'm Rohan Vijay and I'm really excited to talk about a topic that is very close to my heart, which is how to build products for large enterprises. Just to give you a brief background about me, before co-founding UnifyApps, I was VP of Product and Product Owner at Sprinklr, where built a lot of products for large enterprises only, right? Because, and I worked with a lot of customers paying us multimillion dollars in revenue there, and I scaled a lot of businesses there, right? So today I'm hoping that I'm able to share some learnings with all of you, whether you are starting out or you're looking to grow into the large enterprise world. I'd like to share some learnings out there with you. Perfect. Before we deep dive into what does it take to build for large enterprise, let's paint a picture of what really it means to selling to large enterprises. So think about a global organization spanning across continents with C-suite at the top. You have regional, regional teams out there and a maze of departments— marketing, engineering, sales, HR, right? And each one of them will have different needs, requirements when it comes down to your products, right? So while this might look, look a little complicated and you might feel a little overwhelmed selling to large enterprises, I think it's it's very nice when you are able to actually crack it because it opens up doors for high-value, long-term contracts. Moving on. So what are these stakeholders that you need to address to? So you start with your end users who are actually going to interact with your product. Then you have the business teams who are looking at ROI. How, how does your product really fit into the complete org? Then IT team is the one who is sort of scrutinizing your tech integrations and all of that. And security and legal team are the gatekeepers to all the adherence and security compliance that you might need, right? If I go a little deep into it, end users are looking for how easy is the platform to use, what are the personalized UX that they are getting, and can they scale it to different teams out there. Then business Business teams are looking whether your platform can come in handy and fit to complex workflows and integration needs. IT team is looking for do you have strong governance, role-based access and all of that when you're scaling to different teams, departments across the globe. And then whether you are able to scale through the things, right? And then on the security and legal team, they're looking at whether do you have all the other and say like GDPR, you have ISO certifications and everything that is needed for you to get inside that organization, right? So if I move on, right, how do you solve for this when you're trying to build for large enterprises? There are a few principles that I've sort of learned throughout my journey while building for large enterprises. You need to start approaching this enterprise-grade mindset from day zero when you are building products.

Products.

What does that really mean? The first is you would need to take a platform-first approach to building products instead of a feature-first approach. What does that really mean, right? It means that you need to start making a platform in a way where it is flexible enough so that it can evolve to your customer needs. Think of it almost like a Lego block wherein you're building a set of components which you can just assemble instead of a one-size-fits-all solution. The other thing that I realized working with a lot of these large customers is a standard solution doesn't really scale for everyone, right? So what you really need is every customer will come and say, hey, I want these changes, I need to look and feel like this, do you have these workflows, how do you do it? So instead of going back to coding every time a new experience for every customer, you need to go down down to an approach of configuration, right? Wherein you are able to assemble these Lego-based components just through, through configuration when it comes down to working these tailored and bespoke solutions. Another thing that I would like to sort of highlight is when you are working with large enterprise customers, you cannot build in silos. What that really means that I would always advocate whenever you're building a new product, find a partner that you can work with who is believing in you, start working with them because a lot of consumer products might work in silos to start with, but enterprise products are a whole together different beast, right? So I would always suggest start with a design partner when it comes down to that. These are, I would say, high-level key capabilities that are sort of needed when you're building for large enterprises, and these cater to all the different stakeholders that we are talking about. So when it comes down to your business teams, people are looking for whether are you able to handle all the complex integrations and automations, right? Because they will have complex workflows and how are you able to adapt to their workflows out there. Then from the end user point of view, are you able to configure your platform in a way that it can resonate with different personas? And they are looking for multilingual platform because they are multi-continents and across different regions that they are operating. And, and they would do— and custom reporting, I'm specifically calling that out because a lot of time you would go with standard reports and standard analytics, but customers would be like, hey, we need this. So you need to start building out your capabilities from a custom report builder which people can come in and configure their own reports, right? On the enterprise side, when it comes down to the IT teams, right, they're primarily interested in whether there's proper role-based access control across, across your platform so that different people— so that the things that are relevant to different people is controlled easily, right? Do you have concepts of workspaces for different teams? And then obviously the audit and version control across, right? They're also looking for concept of auto scalability, load balancing when it comes down to the scalability part, right? And last, I would talk about security and compliance. This means data encryption, IAM, disaster recovery, building out all these things. This is not a definitive list, I would say, but this is something that can, that we can start with when thinking about the key capabilities needed to build for large enterprises. I'll quickly wrap up the conversation with key takeaways. Always start with a platform-first approach that we talked about instead of building just individual features or products. Second is when you're building anything, you will have to keep in mind all the different stakeholders that you have across so that when you're going and selling them, you are making sure that everything is working for each one of them. And third is you need to think about enterprise-grade features from day one, or I would say day zero, instead of it being a second-order thing that you start doing after a certain point in time. Yeah, thank you. I hope this was helpful and hope you have a great day. We are at booth number 209, so if anyone has questions, I'm happy to connect with anyone. Thank you.

Please welcome to the stage Ben Ashworth, VP of Marketing at Zeni, and Lina Soar, Director of FinOps at Zeni.

Hello, hello!

Super excited to be with everybody here today at SaaStr. I hope you've had a great event so far. As mentioned, my name is Ben Ashworth and I'm the Vice President of Marketing at Zeni. At Zeny, we unleash the power of AI bookkeeping and we give you a dedicated team of financial experts. So if you have any questions more about that, please feel free to come to our booth at booth number 216. We would love to help. But today we're going to be talking about data-driven dominance, which is a blueprint for exponential growth. I absolutely love data and I'm super excited to be able to share more of that with you today.

Hi, I'm Leena Suar, Senior Director of Finance at Zeni. Thank you for joining us today.

Fantastic. So let's go ahead and let's dive in. So we're actually going to be looking at 3 key steps when it comes to driving data-driven dominance. Number 1, you've got to be able to measure and analyze. Number 2, then you take that and you're able to strategize and design. And then step 3 is where you're able to take those learnings, you implement it, and then you take those learnings and you share them amongst the team. So we're gonna dive through these steps individually starting right now. So first and foremost, at Zeni, one of the terms that I use quite a bit, quite often with my marketing team is you absolutely cannot, you absolutely cannot optimize what you can't measure. So you need to make sure that no matter what, if you don't have a way of being able to measure your performance, first and foremost, make sure you get those key data points in place. So I wanted to first kind of walk through and define, and how you actually define and you measure your growth funnel kind of across the board. So as a marketing leader, on my end, the thing that I'm looking at is really that funnel through and through, and there's really kind of 3 core components that I really break this down into. So first and foremost is looking at the counts. So you want to understand the counts of each individual stage of the funnel as you're walking through that. Then natively next, you're looking at those conversion conversion metrics. So how— what is the conversion of moving from one stage to the next and making sure that that's super heavily defined. And last but not least is really understanding how much does it cost you to be able to generate each and every single one of these individual steps that you have within your funnel to drive that exponential revenue growth.

To drive the SaaS business forward, there are 5 key areas you need to focus on. The first being growth.

It—

to track your new bookings, your expansions, how your customer base is growing. The second is retention. It's basically how your customers are sticking to the business. The third is sales efficiency. How are your sales investing converting to a long-term value? Fourth is margins, basically tracking your profitability. And the last but not the least, the capital efficiency. How you're using your capital to fuel growth. Let's take an example of a top-of-the-funnel approach where businesses track qualified leads to opportunities converting to customers. Now put this together with the metrics where you put them all end-to-end to give a holistic approach of any business. Continuously work to improve these metrics in your business to have a great growth in your business. Now, data points are very important and how you measure them. It is very easy to track like the vanity metrics, which are very MQL, SQL, MRR, ARR, but looking at it in silo is okay. But if you look at it in a holistic view with the value metrics, it paints the entire picture of the business. Together. It tells the investor and demonstrates the value of your business by showing these metrics. So this is very important for you to track your growth, and this is going to be a data-driven experience to, you know, continuously monitor and improve your business.

Fantastic. So after you're able to measure and you're able to analyze that data, you then want to be able to build out a strategy kind of across the board. So really allow the data to tell the narrative of what you should be doing next, and then define a strategy that's cohesive that you can be able to go after and create a plan of attack. So with that being said, every business goes through a life cycle. So a growth life cycle, that is what I kind of call it. And you have to be able to incorporate the testing methodology mindset. So anything that you're gonna approach with, whether it be a campaign, a new strategy, whatever it is, that you're bringing to the table, you want to make sure that you can measure appropriately, but also have that testing methodology mindset of introducing new A/B tests, different ways of being able to introduce new variants, and so on and so forth. So here's kind of a quick example of a lifecycle, traditional lifecycle when it comes to driving revenue growth. So first and foremost, you have your introduction phase. You then move through matured— or you move through growth. You go into maturity, and then inevitably, inevitably there's a decline. Now if you're measuring this, you'll be able to identify when you're within maturity, so you can establish a brand new baseline of knowing, hey, this is where my business is at today, and I want to make sure that I'm moving it back into a new trajectory of growth before it moves down to the right. So this is where you introduce new variants, and you open up a brand new growth phase for your business once you have this strategy put in place.

So in the strategize and design phase, you need to have an actionable plan. So there are 3 steps involved. The first being pinpointing all the steps that are required to achieve your goal. The second is figuring out which departments are required to make it successful in the execution and achieve your goals. And third is basically keeping track of the progress and making improvements along the way so that you are very close to your goal.

Fantastic. Fantastic. So again, as we dive into kind of the last step, the last step is now that you've been able to measure, you've been able to analyze, now you've been able to build out a strategy, you want to be able to implement this strategy with the team, right? And be able to garner those learnings. So what you want to be able to do is make sure everybody within the organization is super rallied around what your objectives are and what your key results are. So this is something that we've done at Zeni, which has been absolutely phenomenal of introducing objectives and key results. And first and foremost, you want to be able to share the overarching goal that you have as an organization with everybody within the organization in and of itself. And you want to be able to manage both down but also manage up. Get feedback from your team members and what they see as pertinent KPIs, what they could drive towards, and the strategies that they want to accomplish. So you have them work with you to translate those metrics and get them tailored to the OKRs that you want to be able to implement. The most important piece is you want everybody to have fun with it. They have to be able to buy into that vision. They have to be able to buy into that strategy. And if you've done it well with being able to measure and analyze, you'll be able to allow the data to tell the narrative of what you should be doing next and really get your team amped around that. And then empower them to be able to take that proactive approach, because if you empower them, They believe it's their idea as well, and you've become one team to be able to help drive that revenue growth that you're looking for. And so the last piece is really being able to implement and learn and share updates with the entire company regularly. So one thing that we say at Zeni is share the news no matter what, whether it be good news or whether it be bad news, share the lose. So share the wins, share the losses, and share the opportunities, because if you can't under— if you can't define where your losses are today, then you can't identify where you can improve. And as you look at those losses, you can define those opportunities that can take you to the next step.

Here I want to share a real customer case study. At Zeny, we help this customer exactly implement all these 3 steps and help them achieve their goals. Company Z had conflating data between their B2B and B2C revenues. Their gross margins were lumpy. They were, they were not aware of their revenue drivers. So we helped them apply the measure and analyze process, and through that process they separated the data with B2B customers and the B2C customers, and also revamping their pricing strategy. In this process, they reallocated the resources from the B2C to B2B, and that way the third problem process, which was the implement and learn, they could make consistent progress and they were able to increase their revenue by 110% over 15 months. But that way, with a data-driven approach, they could achieve the growth they needed.

Absolutely. So I love this example because it goes through being able to look at, being able to measure, being able to analyze, being able to strategize, being able to design, implement and learn and share those learnings through that entire lifecycle in and of itself, which drove an additional 110% in revenue over 15 months. So here are some of the key takeaways. So number 1, you cannot optimize what you can't measure. So that's first and foremost for your businesses, for your marketing teams, for your strategic teams, sales teams. Make sure that you can measure everything within the funnel and that you have clear visibility into that. Number 2, You need to understand the valuable metrics for your business. So understand what is vanity metric versus what's a valuable metric specifically for your business. And last but not least, you can't take control of your growth if you don't share the learnings from the data. If you don't share the learnings, you're gonna continue to chase your tail, and you're gonna continue to work in silos within the organization as a whole. So find a way, have an ecosystem of where you can share those learnings and to be able to have that testing, testing methodology mindset where it's okay to fail, it's okay to learn, share those learnings, and then drive yourself to those new stages of revenue growth. All right, thank you so much. As mentioned, we are Zeny, and so we are unleashing the power of AI bookkeeping and giving you a dedicated team of financial experts for your business. If you have any questions, please come visit us at booth number 216. 216. Thank you very Thank you.

Please welcome to the stage Kevin Kiley, President of ARIA.

Thank you. Good afternoon. Small group of us here hanging on for day 3, but I'm really excited to be talking to all of you. This is, I think, my third or fourth SaaStr, and a really important topic I got to talk about today. So as many of your organizations are trying to figure out how you're going to empower your products, your offerings, your services with AI, there are a number of obstacles that probably are running into today, or if you're not, you will soon. So I get to spend the next 9 minutes with you to talk about some of these strategies for addressing those that we've seen be very effective for us. A bit of background on me: as I mentioned, I've been now part of 3 other SaaS companies that have all participated in SAST at some level. I was part of the early leadership team at AirWatch. AirWatch was a mobile security, mobile device vendor. Management. We scaled very quickly to about $350 million in my organization in about 6 years. After that, a couple of us split off and started building something else, a company called OneTrust. OneTrust also grew very, very fast, $0 to $400 million in ARR in about 5 years, 14,000 customers. So we really learned how to build and scale in a really short timeline, doing that with a lot of velocity. Most recently, I was also part part of the turnaround team at Lacework, joined last year, uh, and of course saw that company through to its acquisition earlier this summer. All of that to say, again, we've seen a lot of what AI can do, especially over the last 2 years with all the growth and innovation that's happened. But I've also gotten to see firsthand some of the things that can get in the way, and those have been a lot of the conversations that we've had this week. So my talk today focusing in on a few key areas. First, what are those key implementation challenges that your organization may be getting stuck with right now, things that are keeping you from— on the starting blocks? Secondly, breaking into what maturity looks like as an organization. What are the benchmarks and milestones to look for in your organization as you continue to progress on this? And then lastly, I'll leave you with some strategies or some key sort of tactics you can take back to help drive implementation in your organization? How do you do better with AI and really embrace all that power and potential that it offers for your products and services? So I want to begin, though, by talking about what are the key issues that so many organizations struggle with. And the data on the screen here, I think, was from an MIT study of what other SaaS companies were doing and where they were getting stuck. Of course, number one is hiring. Right now, there is, of course, a dearth in the market of available talent to hire that really knows this and can do it at the, the level that you're needing. Finding those people and getting them on board, of course, in a very competitive market is not going to be easy. Second, finding use cases, and I'd say probably more prioritizing use cases. A lot of organizations know that there's things that they want to do or could do. They haven't yet figured out what that looks like and where to start. Third, demonstrating some of the value. You've got to make the case for this, whether you're a big organization or small. Getting those metrics metrics in place to understand what success looks like and how you're going to build the business case for doing it. Now, once you get started, of course, you've got legacy tech you're probably building on. Getting the integration work on that is another key issue that I think has come up in several conversations I've had this week, tying that back, making it really work for the way that you need it to. And then, of course, understanding that there's going to be some key differences in the way that this will layer on top of your product. Prompt engineering, if you haven't brought in the team on your side to to understand how to really leverage it and make it, make it work inside of your capabilities. So what we see commonly here is that organizations understand there's tremendous potential, but that value that could be created by AI is being trapped right now. And there's a number of reasons for that. First and foremost, you see the implementation integration challenges that I mentioned before. Organizations not really getting going with it because they're working hard to tie it into their existing systems. This can even be a matter of determining what model is going to be the best if you want to plug one in. Are you going to go open source? Are you going to go with one of the big providers? How do you avoid being locked into that as you build out around it? Getting the integration set up in a way that will allow you to scale and evolve is a real key hurdle for most organizations. The second big one, of course, is security. A lot of organizations understand that, again, as you're loading your data in, where does it go? And could it be manipulated? Is there room for someone to exfiltrate that data through all the doors and pathways that AI opens up for someone to get access to it? Putting in the right controls up front and understanding where you can block some of those doors early on is a key challenge for most organizations.

Oops.

Third, cost. We know that this is very expensive, and the Sequoia team did a big study last year and called this, I think, a $200 billion problem. And that number has now gone up 3x to a $600 billion problem. We know companies are spending the money to build out the infrastructure to support all of the demand for AI, but monetizing it is still yet to be unlocked. And what that means is that most of us are going to see that prices will continue to go up. There's going to be more creativity applied in the way that they bill your organization and how this translates into your product, into the cost that you carry as part of it, is a key concern to get ahead of. Good news is all the innovation is supporting a lot of the— things are getting more efficient, and there may be ways that you could leverage lower-cost models. Some of the, the new releases, of course, are going to be much more scalable, much more efficient, and so you may be able to mitigate some of those increases in pricing by leveraging the right technology. Fourth Legal and IP, still a gray area. If any of you attended the AI conference earlier this week, there was a great debate between the senator from California that has authored the bill that's currently on the governor's desk. Whether that goes into law is still anyone's guess. I think we have a few more weeks before we'll know, but you can be sure that new regulations are coming, and this is going to dramatically impact how the industry grows one way or the other. Are you ready for that, and are you taking the steps today to prepare prepare for some of those things, 'cause there are certain elements that are common across both the European regulations and the new US regulations, namely the California one, in terms of documentation and memorializing the work that you're doing, how you're gonna employ the AI, and the sort of questions that you might be asked of regulators, or more importantly, of your customers. Getting that game put together today is, is a key question. Lastly, I would point to brand and reputational risk. And making sure again that you're mitigating any of the concerns that you may hear from your marketing team. We hear all these stories about hallucinations with AI. Have you taken the steps right now to address some of those questions and again, put in controls that would mitigate any of the impact from that? Now I'll jump on and talk a little bit about what maturity looks like as you get into your program. And very quickly, just to say, build for scale. Many organizations aren't doing this today. You think that this little pilot is going to be a cute little thing on the side, and then it explodes. Are you prepared for the cost, the complexity, the overhead that that's going to require? Getting the proper AI engineering in place and doing this in an evergreen, systematic way is another key thing to prepare for. Third, I mentioned talent before, and I would point to it here again. Continue to build your people. Make sure that you're giving them the opportunities for learning and growth inside the organization. And then lastly, putting in a governance program to really balance some of those risks and stay ahead of concerns that will come. Now, I won't read everything on this slide 'cause it's an eye chart, but again, key areas to start metricing your program, make sure you are on top of these things and that you're setting goals and targets for the organization. As the last speaker said, you can't measure what you can't manage. So getting those metrics in place is gonna be really, really fundamental. Excuse me, you can't— Lastly, we'll talk about how to accelerate. And again, a number of, of areas here that you can keep the gas on once you get the fundamentals in place. First and foremost, I would say the strategic planning. Again, know where you're going, have that destination in mind and the metrics that will support it. Within that, you're gonna start from a key point in each of your organizations, building towards those goals, understanding the key roles and responsibilities across your team making sure that they're crystal clear on what it is they're expected to deliver and how AI is going to empower the products and services you're delivering. Third, keep this iterative. It is not a one and done sort of thing. The technologies are going to evolve very, very quickly. We already see there's sort of an arms race between the big model makers and that's only going to accelerate. There's so much more innovation coming, ensuring that your goals keep pace with that as new potential opens up, that you're continually pushing back and making room for that. Cross-functional collaboration across the teams as these projects become more and more of the way that you work. Have ensured that your teams aren't getting stuck or pockets of silos of information that isn't getting translated. As AI really starts to empower more of the business, you want to make sure that that communication is clear across the organization. And then last point, I would suggest an enterprise sort of management tool. And what this is, is just a comprehensive comprehensive set of controls that allow you to stay current with not only the technologies, the models, but also the regulations, the reporting, and lastly, the accounting. Again, we've talked about each of these as being key concerns for your organization as you start building out with AI. Get ahead of these by implementing a program for it. There's a number of tools out there that can support this. It really starts with getting a secure sort of lifecycle, knowing that the model you're building on today is not going to be the model that you use tomorrow, and that's only going going to continue to accelerate. So think carefully about getting deeply wedded to one model maker. Know that there are going to be tens of thousands of models that might be applicable to what you're trying to do, and you want to be able to harness all of that innovation and power that they bring. So as you architect out your products and services, making sure that you've got a lifecycle that allows you to rotate off of these things, that it's built to scale, and that you've got that integration across your tools so that you're not having to rebuild build or rewrite every time there is a new release. And then again, I'll come back to cost optimization and transparency. You're going to want to have some level of reporting built into it. So your takeaways from today: getting a comprehensive strategy in place, use that to guide the decisions going forward, building for scale and sophistication and complexity that's yet to come, and then lastly, an enterprise AI platform. Uh, I am with Aria, as I mentioned before. We have a tool for this that we can show you. There are several there, but a number of key, uh, white papers and other, uh, informational sort of documents that we can provide to you that might be useful. If you want to come by and get a copy of those or a copy of the slides, I'd be happy to meet you. Thanks very much for the time today. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE]