LIVE from SaaStr Europa 2024: Workshop Stage- Tuesday

So trust is like oil in a car. With very little of it, you can start the car, and it'll grow— sorry, it'll grow— it'll go for a while. You can start it, you can drive along, and you think, "This is great." Then, with the absence of oil, a.k.a. trust, things start to creak or clunk. Or squeak. And then a part might fall off, you know, down the road. And eventually the car will stall altogether. The tricky thing about trust is that it's intangible, like oil. You know, if you're a driver in the car, you're not seeing the oil in your engine. And yet it's so important. So my hope here is that I've unpacked trust into something which is really tangible, which is measurable. And if you can measure it, you can work out where you are on the dial, and you can deliberately cultivate it in your relationships, your working, highly productive relationships. So the, the 6 things here all relate to organizational yields in your business. And so each of those components will have a response in your organization. Back to the idea of being an organizational engineer. Explicit, transparent, constructive, and vulnerable. Those 4 descriptors is the way that you sustain co-founder, co-founder relationships. Even if you're friends and you were maybe school friends and you got together and you've known each other for a long time, the danger trap even in that scenario is that you might assume how the other person's going to react. We assume, but we don't know, what will make this person wildly successful in this startup. We assume, but we don't know, how this person is actually going to respond and react under the intense heat and relentless pressure that is the startup life. Cultivating explicit and regular communication and conversations about any one of these topics, asking the questions of each other, will enable you to understand yourself and understand others explicitly as opposed to implicitly. And it's kind of as simple as that. It's absolutely not money. It's about the conversation and about the ongoing curiosity to ask the question, of that other person. Now, I was reading, um, The Hard Thing About Hard Things last night, and, um, I know, geeking out on my bedtime reading. And, um, uh, and, and there was this paragraph where Ben had talked, uh, about his co-founder relationship, and he said that the thing that got them through it, or the thing that they started doing, um, Ben and Mark, is that they would basically challenge the hell out of each other every single day. [Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] Now, if you were to challenge the hell out of me every single day, I mean, I'd be fine, but I'd probably need a bit of validation and a bit of softness and a bit of recognition. That's me being vulnerable. So if you were to— just because one of them wanted it to be like that, they might assume that the other does too, and that might not necessarily be the case. So it is, you know, and here I'm talking about healthy conflict. So it's asking concrete questions about how you want to be treated, and what you assume is right for you might not necessarily be right for the other person. What happens when you get this right? Well, all of these things happen. The clarity and the predictability increases. You also amazingly role modeling vulnerability as a leader, authenticity as a leader, listening, great listening and, and, and, and great feedback, uh, skills as a leader. And that permeates through the rest of your team too. It becomes okay to do that. Obviously, if things go a bit wrong, if you've got that regular cadence where you're talking about any one of those 6 things, you will get further. So that's the, that's the sort of the turnkey here, is that to talk about trust in the abstract is really hard. Just, you know, let's talk about trust isn't as easy as, okay, let's talk about how, how you know, bounce, or healthy conflict, or any one of those 6 things. And it gives you an in, it gives you a way to start the conversation if things have gone wrong. Investors love it because it means we deliver, it means you deliver on the promises you make to us. And that's really important to us in our business as well. So I mentioned before that hard skills and soft skills are really important. And what I thought I'd share— I know I said I didn't have the answer to that, but what I thought I would share is some experience that I've— or some observations from the experience that I've had in being inside the tent with co-founders for the 25 years. And I thought I would just share with you this model. It's my model and it's my view, but what I see as a force multiplier amongst co-founder groupings is that there's complementarity. So as a co-founder or as a founder, first it's important to understand understand yourself, know indeed what your super strengths are. And ideally, they should be one of these circles. And then you, you're finding the complement in others around you if you are thinking about embarking on a co-founder journey, or you're thinking about starting a new company. And it's this ability to be able to create 1 1 3, or 4 in this case, and create that force multiplier where you're able to achieve more with less. And so the commercial vision piece, the ability to be able to sell, to persuade others, to be able to inspire and aspire, is really important to know what's going to make money. In many of our technical-oriented businesses, having the ability to be farsighted in your innovative thoughts and beliefs on what is coming next is really important to understand the technical endeavor, especially in deep tech companies. That, that skill set's really important. And the two aren't necessarily in the same person. Then you've got the GSD, the desire and the know-how to be able to turn a vision into reality, to integrate it, to get things done, to create systems and processes and behaviors which will sustain delivery. And finally, the piece around people skills. Having a radar, a nose for what's going on culturally in your organization is really important. And all of those four force multipliers in that co-founder group help you to avoid rabbit holes. They help you to go further, for faster— further, faster. You've got this resourcefulness about you. And so if you— I would challenge you, if you don't have that in your co-founder group, then that's a, that's a really good framework, a really good methodology to hang your hat on. Is that true for you? Do you notice it? Yeah. Is there anything missing there? Would you add another?

I think it's quite complete.

Yeah, sorry.

Yeah, okay.

So I, I feel that part of us, uh, I mean like my co-founders My skills are more like around the commercial vision, people skills. My CTO is around technical innovation and the execution, and the other co-founders somewhere around the commercial vision and the execution as well. So yeah, I think it's quite complete.

Yeah.

So you wear many hats.

Yeah.

Do you mind me asking, did you design it that way or was it luck?

No, I think it was luck.

It was luck.

Yeah.

Okay, so, and your name is?

Uh, Zbigniew, or just Z.

Z. Okay, I'm gonna go with Z. Thanks, Z. Jane, really nice to meet you, and thank you for your contributions. Massively appreciate it. So now you know how to be lucky next time. Last thoughts, and then I'll open to questions. Over the last 12 months, we faced all of these challenges with co-founder dynamics over the last— over, I say, of the last little period of time. And what I presented here is the, is the, is there is a solution effectively to the problems that we've faced because they come up. And so again, this is a very personal, you know, Jane belief system here, born out of lots of experience of being in the room with founders, with co-founders. It does help if you haven't got a 50/50 equity split, or 25, you know, 25. It does help if you can decide, if you can be brave enough early on to say, I'm the dominant leader. We find it very difficult when we come along, when we come across co-CEOs at Albion. We just— there's something about our, our what we see in over hundreds of— collectively, we've got over 100 years of experience— it goes wrong more than it goes right with co-CEOs. So if you can, choose one CEO and give a title, give a different title to another co-founder, and agree who the dominant leader is. Secondly, whilst in the early stage, phenomenal when you can interchange those hats, and you can change— you can take one off, and you can sub for each other, and you can do it on a dime. You can spin on a dime, and you go here and I'll go there. Over time, especially when you're into that scaling phase, it causes more confusion and delay. It does help to agree a specific role scope that at least stays true for 6 months, 'Cause it's the impact on everybody else as well as the confusion that you're facing internally, and we found that it can just stymie growth. It slows down decisions particularly. I'll go to point 4 first. In a relay race, the first lap is as valuable as the last. It's so hard to do, but if you can maintain that self-awareness, and those trust conversations will help you to stay self-aware and know when actually it's best to pass the baton to someone else, for the good of your— for your company and for all of your blood, sweat, and tears, to hand it over to the CEO who's going to take it on to the next level. And the way that you get there is by having those very open, explicit, honest, vulnerable conversations about trust. Thank you. Questions? That was amazing. Thank you so much. Um, I wanted to ask a question about the dominant leader. Question. Um, this is my co-founder.

Hi!

We're school friends as well, and we're in a really exciting growth phase at the moment, and that's a conversation we haven't had in terms of like a dominant decision maker. Yeah. Um, I just was wondering from your perspective, I mean, we would always want to make the decision that's best for the business, and I think both of us would be very like able to put ego aside with regards to that. But from, from your perspective, what are the most important traits or like really strong skills that would help you define who that person should be? Oh yeah, great question. Well, if I go back to the— if I go back, I'm gonna go back. Oh, I see they're gonna do it. OK, you know those four circles?

Another one?

Sorry. OK, thank you, thank you. The four circles. So if you plot yourself on that— are there two of you? Yeah. So if you plot yourself here on that quadrant, have you spoken about who's naturally better at these? Yes. OK, great. Okay, amazing. So first off, have that explicit conversation, because you— just to check, just to align, you probably are, but you might not be. And that is the thing, right? It's human, we assume, but actually we don't know. So, uh, if, if whoever fits in the commercial vision should be the CEO in a scaling environment Blunt. It's blunt and it's crude, but it works. And it works because you will spend— by the time you are scaling, you will spend most of your time raising money or selling something to somebody like this. Definitely. Now, that's not to say if the person doesn't have the technique, isn't the technical innovator, that they can't be an evangelist. They absolutely must be an evangelist. We, as a— yeah, the headline, and to make it clear for you, and I'm really happy to talk about it offline, but the more dominant leader is usually the commercial visionary, and, and that's the more natural seat for the CEO. That's what I assess when I look at a team at Series A. Yeah. Now, the, uh, maybe the second point to that is, um, work on the skill of disagreeing and committing. Challenge each other in a room and present a unified force externally.

Hello. Hi, hi, John Redmond from ASBOSCO. In the VC community, and particularly things like YC, there is an obsession with having co-founders.

Yeah.

What's wrong with a strong founder with a strong management team?

Nothing. Do it. If you prefer, do it. Is that you?

Yeah.

Yeah. Why do you worry about that?

It just, you can't apply to YC unless there's two of you.

Yeah.

Right?

So that sucks, right?

And I've got a friend who was the original founder, introduced a co-founder, got into YC, and has now fallen out with the co-founder.

Yeah.

Go somewhere else.

Gave away 30% of his business in the process.

Yeah. Sucks. I love that. Um, I mentor a female founder who's a single founder. She would— she, she like, she just did not want to be a co-founder. And, and, and, and I totally agree. It solves the dominant leader point. But yeah, I don't know why. I actually don't know why the— that you get blocked. I'm really sorry to hear that. You would definitely not be blocked, uh, by us for investment.

Okay, thank you.

Yeah, um, I loved what you said afterwards though, which is make sure that you can demonstrate that you've got a strong leadership team around you. That's key and core when you get to scaling, definitely. I'm, I'm right on time, my cue to leave. Thanks everyone, that was awesome.

Please welcome to the stage George Hansaras, Director of Engineering at MongoDB.

Hi everyone, thank you for joining me in this session about building an enterprise SaaS and how you can navigate innovation at scale. Before we get started, I will— some— a couple of ground rules. I will try to, to make this as interactive as possible. So if you remember at uni or school, you had this professor who didn't want to do the lecture and you did all the work. I'll try to do that. So there's, there's gonna be a mic going around, so please wait for the mic before you speak because we have the cameras to record the audio. So I'm a director of engineering at MongoDB taking care of two different things, one of which is our enterprise advanced customers and But most importantly, kind of, what, what do we, what do we mean when we say enterprise? Oftentimes we try to overuse this term, but in very simple terms, enterprise, we mean large-scale organizations, very complex IT landscapes, features that matter, very targeted features, and of course high level of quality. Quality in terms of security, robustness, reliability, and so on. And all of these come with the last part, which is custom pricing. And we're going to talk about this a bit more, that we often see, you know, in a SaaS business, we're going to see plans where we have like individual, pro, and then always you're going to see it in every website that enterprise is always custom. You're never going to see a price tag in enterprise because that always comes with hard negotiation. And the reason we care about enterprise is we've spent the last few years talking a lot about how B2B SaaS is what scales well, and we want to get, you know, tens of thousands of customers. But what we have seen in reality is that all of the, the B2B SaaS in a very large scaling business, the B2B SaaS part is the long tail from a revenue and especially from a profitability perspective. The enterprise SaaS is what makes the huge difference. Those are the big accounts where we can actually do the land and expand, and we can actually get large accounts that make a difference. And doing that in enterprise SaaS, we see a few, a few significant challenges which are— we can see them across different verticals. Anything that, that falls under enterprise is gonna face some or all of those challenges. So first of all is finding a balance between moving fast and being being reliable. So balancing innovation and quality of, of the output is very important. Oftentimes in B2B SaaS, we're okay to move fast, to give a lot of features, and compromise some of our quality characteristics. In enterprise, that's, that's a no-go. The sales cycle changed significantly, so we have complex, long sales cycles. And multiple user personas. So one thing that, that we have been discussing a lot lately is that, you know, the example of MongoDB is that we were selling to the developers who wanted the best user experience in a database. Now we are selling at the C-suite, we are selling at the data analyst, we are selling to, to a lot of other people. So within the organization you have to address the need of many different personas. The feature expectations, the platform expectations that the company has, as we said, there, there are many features that are again non-negotiable. So the, the minimum viable product is much bigger in enterprise SaaS than it is in B2B SaaS. And of course, a very, very complex IT landscape where you just have to go there and be ready to integrate with with anyone. So first point is balancing innovation and stability, quality, and security. In the case of MongoDB, we are now doing what we call the Big Four. And the Big Four is a set of initiatives that focus on security, durability, availability, and performance. And we kind of rank those as the four factors that an enterprise needs to see before they even start talking to you. So no matter how innovative you are, no matter the amount of features, if you don't have a specific set of quality— of qualitative characteristics, the door is not open anyway. And this is the first point. I would like to open it up if someone wants to discuss cases where, where you've seen something like that, where innovation was a secondary case to your case, or you want to ask something? I know we can see one hand at least.

No?

Thanks. So working with really risk-adverse customers, which obviously you're going to get much more of in the enterprise, that balance is really difficult with innovating. Normally in software, we like to release quickly, release small chunks. So how are you doing that in the Mongo world? Are you sort of separating out and having actually different products for enterprise to help you achieve that? Yeah, so exactly that. So although from a code-based perspective we have some similarities between the cloud business, the SaaS business, and the enterprise business, the way we build and release the product is much different. We have different release cycles. We have different processes, different testing certification for enterprise, and different for SaaS. You're able in SaaS to release faster. You might see even some features that you're not going to yet see in enterprise. And that's the balance we're trying to keep. So if I can follow on, so they're still connected products. It's just you're going through different levels of testing certification, for example, before releasing out into the enterprise market. Yeah. Well, testing not from a feature set testing, but more from a compliance and security testing and reliability testing, yeah. Thank you.

Thanks. Oh, hello. So yeah, again, very, very interesting topic. How at Mongo do you guys bring your customer community into this picture?

Have you got releases to a beta testing group?

Is that internal or is that external? What does that feedback loop look like for you?

So again, it kind of falls back to, to the different release cycles. So something might go faster to the cloud where we are going to be able to get faster feedback, we're going to be able to see some metrics, and then that's going to reach the enterprise customer base where we kind of have fine-tuned it, sort of say.

So it's fair to say you wouldn't then bring those enterprise customers into that kind of early-stage customer community, not to kind of show them the early release stuff, the early-stage stuff?

Well, we would be happy to. They wouldn't be happy to. So the enterprise customers prefer to be the ones that are moving a bit slower. They don't care to be ahead of the curve. They just care about when they actually get the feature, that feature is going to be there for a very long time, and it's going to be reliable. Viable.

Thank you. Hi, uh, I'm Raj.

Actually, it's an interesting topic because we are in a process of moving from, uh, the SMEs to enterprises, and, uh, we've been trying it for years because as we progress, we realize there are so many challenges than just the idea, uh, starting from our existing architecture. So is it really scalable? So we have to go that way and stuff.

So when we talk about SaaS for enterprises, from your experience, what do you suggest or prefer for the enterprises?

Do you think that enterprises are cool about adapting SaaS, where we have all the infrastructure on us and we assure them the uptime with our services? Or they are more towards the self-hosted options, considering the legal liabilities and uptimes and other flexibility for their teams to manage. So where do you see the enterprises have that comfort corner when it comes to products like this?

Yeah, so, well, it highly depends. So we used to hear a lot that we cannot move to the cloud because of compliance reasons. This is a typical thing a bank would tell you a few years ago. Now, even in jurisdictions where regulation doesn't require them to keep data locally or anything like that, you see them still not wanting to make the move. So I would say the answer is there is a very big part of enterprise companies, the very large companies, still prefer to self-manage. Yeah, so— One thing that we are trying to do now is provide this SaaS experience for them in a self-managed way. So they wouldn't want you to manage everything for them, but they would like you to give them all of your stack and all of your automation so they can have a SaaS experience hosted by themselves.

On their infrastructure?

Yeah.

So this is better from the compliance perspective or also from the tech liability on you as a company? Because you have to ensure the uptime. You have to make sure your infrastructure is scalable enough to keep supplying their demand. So it serves both the purpose when they have it self-managed.

Well, the compliance perspective in most cases doesn't apply anymore. You have programs like FedRAMP and G Cloud and so on where you can actually move to the cloud with no implications. It's more of what we call— there are two different things. There is real compliance and perceived compliance, or real security and perceived security. It's more about perceived rather than real.

Thank you.

So we now focused a bit on the technical stuff. We can also see how sales change. You know, as Raj mentioned, making the move is a bit complex, going from an SME B2B B2B model to an enterprise B2B model changes a lot. So you have to have a very targeted go-to-market strategy. I really like this, this quote that says, you don't catch a whale just by getting a bigger net. You have to change the way you do things. Your marketing strategy has to be much different. There are tools like account-based marketing or Even something that we think doesn't work but works a lot, which is personal networking. In the very large deals, if you want to land a 7 or 8-figure deal, you will see a lot of people just playing golf over a weekend, and then the deal closes and you, you try to understand what happened. Self-service is something that goes away. In SaaS, we wanted to invest in self-service and this high scalability model, but in enterprise that that's less relevant. You have a lot less inbound, you have to chase and you have to go after a lot more of the bigger deals. The bigger deals don't come to you. This is just an image of how complex a sales cycle can be, and I don't expect you to be able to read all of this. And as I said before, there are multiple roles involved, so it's not just one developer you have to convince, or it's just just the decision maker, the payer that you have to convince. You have to convince all of the different personas. And again, this is what I mentioned before. So this is a screenshot from Slack, if I'm not mistaken. So you can see kind of all of the different tiers up to Business Plus. You can see a fixed pricing model, fixed feature set, but then when you go to Enterprise, you have to talk about customizing the deal, customizing the term, customizing the feature set. So pretty much go to a SaaS website and you're probably gonna see something like this for the enterprise deals. And again, this is a part to open it up in cases where you try to sell something to a large enterprise and they started asking for new features, and before they start paying, before they sign up with they signed with you, they wanted you to add XYZ in your platform. Anyone wants to share a story or even questions? I can still wait a bit.

Thank you. It's an example that we're experiencing right now which I find quite entertaining at the moment. We have a range of enterprise customers, some still going through the sales cycle, and we've heard feature requests from quite a lot of them for wrapping of text elements in our tables. The other half of the clients have asked specifically not for the wrapping of text in the tables. So as with all of the features, we're in a really interesting position where kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't. We can't please everybody, but there's a number of people—

it's one small example—

who are kind of highlighting this missing feature as a reason not to sign, even though previous customers have said, well, if it does do this, we're not interested and we won't buy your product.

How do you win?

Yeah, what's your approach been up to now? You have some customers pulling towards the one direction, a few towards the other. Have you made the decision on how you want to proceed?

Yeah, as always, it's a blend of who shouts the loudest, which kind of deal, which customer represents the highest opportunity for us, and kind of the volume, the frequency of those requests. So our poor product development team have got a lot of shifting priorities.

And usually the most vocal ones and the bigger wallets come with enterprise, so, so usually that's the direction you would, you would have to go. Another option we see a lot is feature flagging, so you can try and have some features enabled for some and some features enabled for others. So specific user IDs or specific customers' IDs can see you text wrapping, and others might not see you text wrapping. So that's something we see a lot lately. Feature flags has been very relevant lately.

Thank you.

Thank you. Okay. And last thing is the very complex IT landscape that enterprises have. So If you imagine of a very big enterprise company, and no matter what software you're building, you're gonna have to land somewhere where you're gonna have to integrate with some of their other tools. A great example for that is a few years ago, 8 or 9 years ago, I was, I was a founder and CEO at the startup where we automated workflows and document signatures and and so on for commodity trading. One of the very, very old-school industries. Commodity traders, shipping companies, financial institutions, as enterprise as it gets. The biggest part of the questions we've got, the biggest friction, the biggest reason to lose someone was your ability to integrate or your non-ability to integrate with their existing system. And that's— Most of the enterprise cases, this can be a go or no-go solution— not solution, but case. And again, this is our last slide, so I can open it up for anyone who wants to share a story here or question.

Yeah.

Definitely, this is very important. I mean, last thing any CIO in any big enterprise would want is adopting a new solution, right, that is a concern to some of the end users, right? Because again, they will have to deal with the risk that this solution might actually introduce, the finance and related matters has to do with it, as well as where this solution is going to fit in, in my overall stack, right? So in our story, for example, like we're building a specialized procurement software. Most companies, they have, especially enterprise companies, they definitely have some sort of an ERP system in place that covers partially of what we offer, but we we are specialized and we are more advanced in a specific area. They definitely wish to have that seamless integration between how this specific module or offering that you have is going to fit and, I mean, be orchestrated across all the different solutions that I have so that we don't leave data in isolation, right? And data residency also is one of the requirements that big enterprise companies have. So it's really important for you when you basically try to— I mean, if you want to scale to enterprise sales, to take this in mind and look at how your solution can fit within the overall picture of enterprise solutions, and then try to identify identify the most popular elements, whether it is from the intake side or the outtake, right? And try to integrate two— I mean, create two-directional integration, I mean, with the different solutions that enterprises uses. And there are companies actually that are specialized in this. You don't need to basically create this from scratch yourself. And integrate with every single ERP solution or payment gateway solution that is available out there. You can just use one of the available, I mean, system integrators platforms that is out there. Yeah, and I want to emphasize two points that you made, which I think are really important. First off, you mentioned about kind of understanding where do you fit in this landscape, one of the things that can make you win one of those contracts is you coming up with a blueprint where it says, you know, this is System A, you are using this, this is System B, you are using it, and this is kind of where do we fit, and this is how your operational model will look afterwards. So that's very important when you try to do the sale. The second part, you mentioned the financial aspect of this. Which is to try to understand how important this is for business. We have whole startups and whole businesses building upon only this narrative to create a whole business out of it. So just being the, the software that integrates the two parts that are disassociated in your operational model, doing integrations, or just providing an end-to-end workflow in something that your business does, that's enough to make a sale.

Hello.

Yes, here.

Hello.

I was looking at the other microphone.

Thanks a lot for the great insight. I'm actually interested to have the answer to your questions on what do you do when you have feature requests for enterprise customers. What we have seen from experience is that generally it's a pushback from buyers to not put us in contact with the decision makers. So when we have a feature request, we try to commit when the contract is signed to develop it up until we can include the opt-out clause in the contract to say if it's not delivered by this date, you can opt out. But I'm very curious to have your experience and insight on that.

Yeah. So in our case, I think kind of Mongo overall, that's not something that my team did specifically. In our case, one thing that has been proving very beneficial is that we have our customers very close, which means the product managers who actually work in our teams, they are in direct contact with the customers. And even, even myself, who I'm, you know, I'm part of engineering, even engineers talk with the customers directly. So we always have the ability to kind of get their feeling how important it is, try and understand. You know, usually when customer is gonna make a feature request, they're trying to solve a problem themselves by telling you what to do. Sometimes if you understand the problem, you can propose an alternative, something that's gonna help help you kind of find a different solution that works better. So we try to have a couple of steps until we end up at the place where, you know, you end up having the discussion— either you implement this or I'm out of here. But when it comes to it, at the end of the day, you just have to, to think how big that customer is and how big of an opportunity that is. If it's a customer paying an 8-figure contract, you're probably gonna end up doing it.

So just a bit of a general question, but 5—

as you look across your customer base that you work with now, 5 years from now, do you think at an enterprise level they will have more or less workload in the cloud with hyperscalers than they do now, or will it remain on-premise?

Like, where do you think that distribution is going to is going to move?

Well, so earlier I mentioned the work that we are doing now to kind of on the enterprise-grade features, kind of improving reliability and security and all of those things. The reason we are doubling down on that is because we see enterprise customers investing more on self-managed. And they kind of— there are the customers that are now self-managed. Most likely are going to stay self-managed for the next 5 to 8 years. Thanks. We have like one more minute.

Thank you. I wanted to ask a question. When you— actually, it's two questions. First one, when you started hitting the enterprise sector, how did you go about it? Direct sales or channel? Because you talked earlier about the partners. And secondly, you spoke about your sales engineers delivering, you know, solutions to clients. At the same time, you mentioned the system integrators and service companies. How do you manage the two? Like, how important are those third parties in successfully kind of unlocking the market? Thank you.

Yeah, so the first part I can answer it A better answer than giving you the Mongo answer is when we were running the startup a few years ago, the first thing that we did to hit enterprise sale was personal network. What I used to say back then is no, everyone wants to be the second customer. So nobody wants to be the first one who tries an enterprise feature or an enterprise platform. So in order to sign the first one, you have to leverage some kind of personal relationship. It's very hardly gonna come from another place, so it's very direct. The second part about partners, I would say in enterprise they're very important, especially we kind of in, in the software world we have some very big names like, you know, I don't like— IBM is a sponsor, so I will say their name. IBM has a lot of relationships with large customers, government customers, Building a partnership with such a company can open doors that otherwise they wouldn't trust you because they trust IBM, but they don't trust you yet. So partners are important. We've been cut off. Thank you. And yeah, thanks for making this session fun. Please welcome to the stage Macon Lotka, founder, managing director at Founderpath.

Well, it's good to see you guys. I'm very excited to be here today. Those of you who we've never met, looking forward to meeting over the next 30 minutes. We're gonna focus on 9 different tactics these CEOs use to break $100 million of revenue. Before we jump in, just a quick pulse on the room. Raise your hand if you're one of the founders at a software company, first 5 employees, own at least a little equity. Raise your hands. Okay, you're past your 1-year cliff. Okay, good. That's nice. And then raise your hand if you're marketing and sales purely, not a founder of marketing and sales. Nice mix, okay cool. Well look, we're gonna have a lot of fun. Let's jump right into the content. Now, this content is nothing that I came up with. Over the past couple of years, I built a software company, sold it, and then I've interviewed about 3,000 software founders on my podcast. Has anyone listened to any episodes of the podcast? Raise your hand. How would you describe it here in the front row? Useful, one word, Albert. Insightful, one word. Amazing, you can say negative stuff too. The negative stuff is good too. I'm like, ah, I'm, Flowers, bouquets are being thrown at me. Some people would call me the most sued podcaster in the world because I get data and then the boards don't like that the data got released. But that's why you listen to the episodes. And so on the podcast, every 15 minutes I ask founders, what's your fastest growth channel? So over the past 3,000 episodes, I started keeping track of the most common tactics used by the fastest growing founders. And I put together the mental model you're looking at here on the screen. Each white bubble represents a go-to-market motion or a growth tactic. But what's most important when you study the fastest growing founders, it's not which growth tactics they use, it's how they sequence them. It's what you start with and then what comes second, what comes third. And so that's why the black bubbles you see on the screen are way more important. Let me ask you guys a question. If you're trying to grow your revenue, do you prefer to find cheap growth channels or expensive growth channels? Just cheap or expensive on the count of 3. Yell it out. 1, 2, 3. Come on. In America, we're cheap. We like cheap. And do you want fast or slow tactics? On the count of 3. 1, 2, 3. Fast as hell. We like cheap and fast in America. That's the upper left. So the way you want to move through this graph is upper left, upper right. So stay cheap whether it's fast or slow, and only after you're at $5 or $10 million of revenue do you want to move below the line and go start experimenting with more expensive things that are both fast and take a longer time to pay off. So this is the mental model, and here are the buckets. That you can put these in, ranging from influence, paid, outbound, BD tactics, content, and engineering. Now if you see something on these slides that I move too quickly, you can just shoot me a message on LinkedIn and I will send you the full slide deck at the end of the day, but as backup it's good to have pictures, so I totally understand that. Also makes me feel like a celebrity, so you also love that, so feel free to take shots. Here's what I'm gonna talk about. I've got 22 minutes and 25 seconds left, so we're gonna spend 8 minutes on each of these 3 sections. Column, we're gonna focus on 3 companies that have done a great job building their influence. Section 2, the second 8 minutes, we're gonna focus on content and go-to-market motions. And lastly, we'll talk about outbound in the last 8 minutes. So we've got section 1, 2, and 3. Just on your finger, which section are you most interested in? Just hold it up. 1, 2, or 3? Okay, I see 1 over here, I see a 3, outbound 2, sort of a nice mix, nice mix. Okay, good mix. Some people are like, just all of them, give me all of them. Let's jump into influence. Section 1, this is SEMrush's revenue growth curve. Pretty healthy revenue growth, right? Went public and when you study how they grew back in the early days, this was their original affiliate program launched in 2010. Now those of you guys in the front row or in the back, can you guys read that blue highlighted area? Do you see the percentage there they paid affiliates? Adrian, can you yell it out loud? What do you see up there? 40%, right? 40%. Raise your hand if you're doing some kind of affiliate program today, something out there. What are you paying commissions-wise? 30% for the first year only or in perpetuity? In perpetuity. In perpetuity for now. Who else? Any other affiliate programs? What are you guys paying out commissions? 10 to 30% first year only or in perpetuity? In perpetuity. Okay, great. Anyone have any ideas about the problem with paying affiliates if they're your number one channel 30% in perpetuity. What's a good gross margin in SaaS? 80%, right? If you're paying affiliates 30%, well by nature, even before AWS costs, your max gross margin is 70%. So you lose a little bit on valuation. How do you change this over time? This is what we talked about sequencing your growth channels over time. When SEMrush passed $70 million of revenue, which is at this dotted point, 40% of that revenue had come from affiliates. So what's 40% of $70 million, call it $30 million of their total revenue. If they're paying out 40% of $30 million, how much is that? It's about $12 million a year in affiliate expenses alone. You've gotta change your affiliate model over time as you scale. Now today they pay out $250 one time per free signup that you send them and $500 one time for each paid customer you bring in. But you've gotta start paying these juicy fees, to your point, 'cause you wanna get the affiliates to actually promote you and you're new. And they're going, you gotta pay us a lot. The point is though, make sure you build your affiliate programs where over time you can buy back margin. That is a trick. You've gotta build a clause in there where you can buy back your margin over time. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] They don't do 40% in perpetuity anymore. Today, if you go to SEMrush today and search SEMrush affiliates, what you will see is these one-time payments. It's basically a cost per acquisition, no monthly recurring revenue commission in perpetuity anymore. Section 2 here, Section 2 here, ZenSight's revenue growth, or previously known as LMS365. They play very heavily in the LMS space, specifically in the Microsoft AppExchange. This is where they get most of their traffic from. Does that look familiar to anybody? This is where they get most of their traffic from. Now, what is this? Now, I like to call this OPT, other people's— what's your guess on what T stands for? Other people's— traction. That's a good guess. Any other guesses? You got to guess. What's your guess? Other people's— Traffic. Who said traffic? Traffic, time, traffic. A lot of people talk about OPM, other people's money, VC money, other people's money. I would argue in today's world, you can't use money to buy attention. It's too competitive, you have to earn it. So OPT is more valuable than OPM. OPT is using marketplaces like Zensai to piggyback off Microsoft's app exchange and their traffic. Most of their customers come from here. So if you're not playing in one of these 14 app exchanges, you're not, in my opinion, actively using other people's traffic. Don't go try to be in all of these, but you should be in one or two of them, right? Now what you're gonna say is, well, Nathan, we can't rank high in the HubSpot AppExchange or Salesforce because there's 10,000 other apps there with a million reviews. How do we compete? Well, most those apps that rank number one for core keywords and categories in your sector, the reason they rank number one today is because they launched it 10 years ago. So what you want to do is look at these 14 and look at the brand new ones. OpenAI is pretty new, Zoom's pretty new, the Stripe Marketplace, it's Stripe's a $100 billion company, there's only about 90 apps in their marketplace. If you touch anything related to payments, you should be in the Stripe marketplace today, 'cause it's gonna be your number one growth channel 4 years from now. This is OPT. Lastly, webinars. Raise your hand if you give webinars to get customers, it's part of your growth strategy. Raise 'em high, raise 'em high. Okay, in the white suit, what was the title of your last webinar, do you remember? Yeah, nobody does, right? Nobody does. I don't remember my last webinar, but we all love them, we see them, we sign up, we have the best intentions, we put them on our Google Calendar, we're going, this is gonna be great, right? Then we forget about them. Most webinars are boring. This is our number one growth tactic at Founder Path. You can see here on the bottom left, we have 14,000 people. These are CEOs of SaaS companies that come to our webinars every month. It's a monthly webinar. It went from my basement studio to now a full studio. You see me using it there. The trick is though, most people fail at webinars because they don't think like a Disney animator. You have to tell a story on a webinar with a crescendo, a hero, a villain, a winner, a loser, a resolution after the crescendo, and then the pitch. And so this is what that framework looks like. Bottom left is minute 0 of your webinar. Bottom right is minute 60. Let me pick on someone up here. Kleap Technologies, what do you guys do? Website building? You build websites? I'm gonna give like, as an example on the webinar, right? So, welcome to Kleap's webinar. Here's a little bad thing about website building, it's too hard. You want more customization than the website builders give you, we help you Customize that with our brand new fancy schmancy object. Minute 12, the next worst thing about website building is this, the biggest pain point. Here's how our second feature solves that. All the way up to minute 45, which is the biggest dip on this graph, which is the thing we hate most about building websites, or the biggest problem is X. The what we believe about the future of websites is Y. Shiny new link, call to action. Ah, do you see the goosebumps? I just gave myself goosebumps selling a product I have no idea what it is. Right, that's like the crescendo, right? This is what you want, this is the story. The problem with the story is once you get this right, people then minimize your windows, right? You guys have all done this on other people's orders. You minimize, you mute. How do you keep people engaged visually, with their ears, and also kinesthetically with their muscles? It's called LWI framework. I've done it on you guys today. I just did the first section. Those of you looking down at your phone, when I stopped talking, you looked up, 'cause you said this guy's a speaker, maybe he forgot what he's gonna say, it's gonna be a train wreck on stage, lemme watch. I just broke the pattern of what I was doing. You have to do that on webinars. Break your voice up every 10 minutes by unmuting somebody else, having a co-host, or playing an embedded video. That's how you keep people listening. Second is watching. How do you get people to maximize your slides? Say, here's SEMrush's revenue graph, I'm not gonna read it to you, but look at the purple bar. See where my mouse is? You piquing curiosity to get them to maximize again, to reengage in your slides. Lastly, keen aesthetic is answer the Zoom poll with your fingers, take notes, clap your hands if you agree, that kind of thing. That's the LWI333 framework. So to summarize section 1, we talked about affiliates, we talked about other people's traffic, and we talked about webinars. Give me a quick clap if you learned at least one thing from section 1. Little bit. Okay. The more you clap, the more data I share. That's kind of how it works, right? That's kind of— and I like a small audience. You can be more open. Nobody's recording. It's not going online anywhere, so it's great. I've got 14 minutes and 55 seconds left. Let's jump into section 2 here. We're going to talk about content, ZenBusiness and SEO, ClickUp and free tools at the top of the funnel, and inorganic growth like Brandwatch did at BuzzSumo. Let's start with SEO. This is ZenBusiness's revenue graph. They're competing with LegalZoom, a well-established player to help companies launch companies, right? Launch their own companies. This is what their revenue is at. Their number one go-to-market motion is this. Now do you see any repeated words in their website URLs? LLC, what else? Repeated words, just yell them out. Front row especially. Names, business. You see catchy up there a couple times. What you see is they discovered that top line, LLC, was a core keyword for them. They then said, how can we maximize on this? And they launched what we know as programmatic SEO. Programmatic SEO is taking a key anchor term like LLC and multiplying it by some other variable that will then generate 50,000 landing pages. The variable that ZenBusiness multiplied by was geography. That's why you see California LLC. That's why you see Texas LLC. That's why you see those combinations up there, which are their number one back-channel landing pages. That's programmatic SEO. You can also see they're testing additional programmatic SEO formulas because you see you see the word catchy and then an industry and then names, right? So catchy names, industry in between, multiply catchy names times 50,000 industries, you got 50,000 landing pages. This is programmatic SEO. Here's why I'm excited about this. Most marketers are lazy. They're all going to use AI and they're going to do automated blog content. The people that will win 5 years from now are the creative geniuses that invent the things that LLMs were never programmed on, the programmatic keyword combinations that no LLM is going to give some lazy marketer that's only relying on ChatGPT and automated content. So your creatives in your company will win. Promote them, celebrate them, encourage them to think creatively if you want to beat OpenAI and all the organic content your competitors are putting out that is programmatic. Let's jump into section 2. ClickUp. How many ClickUp users in the room? Anybody? Some ClickUp users? You see their ads on buses in the States and airports. They're everywhere, right? Well, how did Zeb grow? You can see his revenue graph here. and I want to show you one of his landing pages. Now, this has to do with Loom as well. How many of you guys use Loom, the asynchronous screen sharing tool, right? We love it. What happened to Loom like 5 months ago? It ends with almost a B, almost a B. What happened? Yeah, he's like, I don't know. They were acquired, right, for $940 million. I think it was Atlassian, right? What happens when a big company buys a smaller company? Do they typically increase the pricing or decrease the pricing? Pricing? Just go like this or this, increase or decrease. They increase the pricing. And so what happens if we all love Loom and we don't want to pay more money after the Atlassian acquisition? What do we start searching on Google? Alternatives. What's the headline of this website on ClickUp? It says replaces Loom. I was told not to go all the way over here, but I'm going to do it anyway. ClickUp replaces Loom. What's funny is if you go into SEMrush or Ahrefs of ClickUp and you look at all their landing pages, if you look at the past 5 years, like clockwork, 3 months after every major acquisition, they launch this landing page. Every acquisition in sort of the tool space, the Basecamp space, that kind of space, they launch this. This is the idea of free tools at the top of your funnel. The one we all know is Website Grader from HubSpot. This is a more creative version of that. Think about these free tools at the top of your funnel. These are the engineers at your company that you wanna turn into marketers. That's how you can get them thinking. The last section here of section 2, before we wrap up, about 10 minutes left, is Brandwatch and inorganic growth. Now Giles did a great job building Brandwatch. You can see his revenue growth here, but he had a big problem. His average ACV was about $18,000 per year. Now out of curiosity, just poll on the room, I'm curious what your guys' ACV is. So think about what you charge on average per customer per year. I'll give you a second to get that in your head. I just want you to sort of yell it out, maybe not yell, but just say it out loud on the count of 3. 1, 1, 2, 3. Okay, so an average of about $21,500 is what I heard. I'm a data guy, you know, I'm a data guy. Brandwatch tried to launch a PLG motion. They kept trying to launch a bottoms-up, high ARPU, sorry, low ARPU, high-volume motion. Every time they tried, it cannibalized their enterprise revenue. It cannibalized it. The enterprise would say, "I wanna use your PLG free thing," right? Didn't work. What did they do instead? Giles went out and bought a company called BuzzSumo. When he bought BuzzSumo, BuzzSumo was doing $5 million of revenue. He purchased it for $15 million, so that was a 3x multiple. About a year and a half after that acquisition, Giles sold for this multiple. Now, if you buy something for 3x and you sell for 4x about a year later, yes or no, do you make money on that? 1, 2, 3. Okay, that's easy math for a morning at a conference, right? Yes, you make money on that. Why do I say this? You're seeing M&A happen a ton. A lot of people, oh, you're buying a team, you're buying a product. People are buying motions as well. They are buying company for the motion as well. So one way to think about if you're trying to sell or get acquired in a year or two to a bigger company, build the exact same product but the opposite motion. Or vice versa, if you're a big company, $10 million revenue, trying to launch a PLG motion, buy your exact same product but the opposite in motion, right? So just consider motion-based M&A, I think, will be a trend moving forward. It's very hard to build internally from the ground up. Now, think about that ACV that you guys just thought about. I'm not gonna read this whole graph to you, it's a lot of data, but put your ACV on the left side and put your customer count across the bottom. These dots represent all the interviews I've done and the combination of what the CEOs told me their average customer pays and how many customers they have. You put them on this graph. The takeaway here is that price point's gonna drive your go-to-market motion. Can you afford field sales? Well, you better have $100,000 ACV. You can't afford to fly sales reps around if it's cheaper than that. On the flip side, if you're Hootsuite and you're charging $8 a month or $8 a year, you definitely can't afford field sales reps and quota-carrying AEs. It's gotta be no-touch, effectively. So just get this order correct. You can't say, I just wanna go hire AEs, if your price point point won't support the margin profile required by AEs. So just always make sure that price point comes before your sales model.

Let's—

and this is, you know, when you do this, this is how you keep optionality. Now before we jump into section 3, we've got about 8 minutes and 30 seconds left. When you follow these first 6 growth tactics that I've shared with you, or at least maybe some combination of them, this is how you keep your optionality as founders. Now I asked earlier how many of you are on the founding team, but how many of you guys are actually the founder or on like the A co-founder? Raise your hand high. Raise your hand high. Optionality is the name of the game. You never want to be forced into a decision. You love your customers, you want to build forever if you can, but you also want to make a lot of money, which is great. I want to tell you a very quick story about Eric, who built SolveMate. He's in the center bottom of this video. Don't worry, tech team, there's no video embedded, just a screenshot. But that's Eric, bottom, bottom center there. The upper left is Mads, who is building Dixit. Mads went and raised $43 million from a VC. He used a bunch of that money to buy Eric's company, SolveMate. And how much did Eric make on the sale? Well, the way to figure that out is, well, how much equity has he raised, right? How much of the equity did he keep? Did he have co-founders? Did he give up 20% in his seat or not? Well, he kept all of his equity. I'm going to let you read this for 10 seconds and I'll move on. This is the fund I manage today. It's what founders told me they wanted from the podcast. They said, "Nathan, you gotta raise a debt fund. We wanna keep optionality, please do it." So that's what I'm now building today. Happy to chat after about it. This is the section 2 summary though. We talked about SEO, talked about free tools at the top of the funnel, we talked about inorganic growth like BuzzSumo. Let's jump into section 3 here. We've got 7 minutes left. Outbound tactics. Whippy with cold emails. Visipay with door knocking, which you think would never work in SaaS. I'm going to show you how. And then lastly, call centers based in the US, not a third world country. How does this work? Let's jump into it. Here's Whippy's AI revenue growth bootstrapped. How does he do cold emails? Now raise your hand if you've sent a cold email in the past week, at least one. I know we're not proud of these. It's okay. We're not proud of them. You send the button, you hope somebody replies. They don't work well. A lot of us call it mass marketing or it's like 1 to 10,000. The way to get email and cold email to work is to actually write it one-to-one first, fully custom, and only after you find yourself copying and pasting it over and over do you then embed merge fields and do a blast, right? 1 to 500, 1 to 10,000. So how did Dave, who, by the way, is a risk guy, he won the World Series of Poker when he was 19, $3 million. That's how he launched Whippy, right? Part of that capital went into Whippy. But here's how he sold his company to the first customers. He competed with a company called Zipwhip. Zipwhip required JavaScript embed code in all of its websites. Dave was able to use a tool called BuiltWith and say, "BuiltWith, show me all the websites in the world that have this JavaScript of my competitor." That then gave him a target list, florists, florists that use Zipwhip. That target list you can see there was about 470. He then said, "I want to get more specific so I can write a better one-to-one email, more specific, higher reply rate." He said, "Show me only the ones based in New York and Texas, right? Now that's another merge field to add to the one-on-one cold emails, right? You see how that works? That ended up working well. I put it in Apollo, does the email sends. This is the only way that he gets customers today, nothing else. It's still cold emails. So the takeaway here for you is try to resist the urge to sort of spray and pray. Do one-to-one first and then expand from there after that works. Next, Visipay. Now I'm not as familiar with the European marketplace, but think about the last time you guys checked out at a convenience store locally with credit card. Do you guys remember the POS system you used? You just have to educate me because I have no idea. What's the most popular POS system over here? What is it? Lightspeed? IZOD? IZettle? SumUp? Yeah, so Visipay is that. It's a POS tool for SMBs and they make money on percentage GMV and SaaS on the backside. He's bootstrapped to this revenue, right? Based in the middle of America. Nobody knows about this. This guy, right, incredible story. I said, Austin, how did you grow so fast? The next slide I'm not gonna read you, there's a lot of text, so I'll just let you study it. All I will tell you is the left side is fixed expenses and the right side is variable. As you're scaling your company, fight like hell to keep as much of your expense variable as possible. The worst thing you can do is hire people. These are fixed expenses, they take time to ramp up, they're a pain in the ass to fire. Keep your fixed expenses as low as possible. His right side, 1099 contractors, same way Uber has 1099 drivers, right, but this is SaaS version. They make more for him than the full-time sales reps you see on the left side, which takes 6 to 8 months to ramp, right? So just consider variable versus fixed with your people and your talent. Lastly, let's wrap up here with ReviewWave. ReviewWave scaled to over $15 million of revenue, again bootstrapped. They just did a big debt round actually, but bootstrapped into until then. Now this was his first call center he launched in 2020. Are any of you guys experimenting with call centers? Anyone making outbound calls? You have a little 2, 3 person team. Where is it set up? What country? Switzerland. Any other countries? Call centers? What country? Where? Czechia. Oh, Czech Republic. Czech Republic. Where else? Any other call centers? Philippines.

Yeah.

From the, I don't know who said it, Philippines. What do you pay a call center rep on average?

How much do you think they make per year?

13,000 per year in the Philippines, right? Many people think this is sort of how you have from call centers, and for most people that's exactly right, that's what they do. It's Argentina, it's the Philippines. He said, I'm gonna put this building up in San Diego and hire 2 reps. And these were the metrics that he told his first reps they had to hit. Now that one sale at the bottom is an $18,000 ACV. You guys might be thinking, this won't work for me because I'm too expensive. This is an $18,000 ACV these reps are selling. These are the metrics they have to hit. You tell me based off the picture from last week, is it working or not? This is the team now at that call center in San Diego. This is not $13,000 a year labor, this is $150,000 a year labor. So if you've written off call centers, rethink them. Rethink them. Think about the metrics, think about the ACV. This is our section 3 summary. We talked about how to make your cold emails still work. We talked about door knocking fixed for the first variable. And we wrapped up again with those call centers. Can you make them work? As we go into questions, if you take a picture of this shot and you DM it to me on LinkedIn, I'll send you the full deck. This is your way of sort of proving you were here at the session. I'll hook you guys up with a deck and the Excel file that goes along with it. But we learned about 9 tactics these founders have used to add millions of dollars of revenue, ranging from influence, content, and outbound. My name is Nathan Latka, running Founder Path, $150 million debt fund for SaaS founders. Guys, thanks for being with me today. I appreciate it. Thanks so much. Over to Rich. Make it a good one. Make me uncomfortable. Go ahead, up front here. Just put the pressure on one of these guys in the front. Philippines. Philippines call center. What's your name?

My name is Fahad.

Fahad, nice to meet you. What's your company?

It's Clue.ai.

Clue.ai.

Yes.

All right, what's your question?

So, um, we're in this stage where we've use the call center guys.

They make phone calls. All they do is make phone calls and book meetings. Most of those meetings are booked for me, and I do the demos.

I'm the founder.

So like doing this, we've gotten to about $2.5 million in ARR.

Hey, congratulations! Round of applause! Now hold on, wait, wait, you haven't raised like a billion dollars, right? Sorry, how much have you raised?

None.

Okay, round of applause! Round of applause! Round of applause! I love a founder that's capital efficient. Under 1x ARR, I call capital efficient if you've raised less than that. So incredible job. Go ahead.

So now we're at the point where, um, we're at this weird stage where that channel is sort of drying up in the sense that, you know, the, the target market that we have is relatively small, and we now need to make a jump to, uh, either a larger or different target market different ICP, or we use another strategy, another channel where we can get a higher percentage of the market that we have. So my question is, if you were me, what would you do to experiment on both those fronts?

What's your average price point? It's about $25,000. Per year?

Per year.

Okay, and you're— and I have no idea what you do, just like 3 words or less, what do you do?

We sell recruiting AI.

Okay, recruiting AI.

Executive search.

Executive search. Okay, let me see if I can come up on the spot. $25,000 per year and you want to have a PLG motion or you want to go more enterprise?

Ideally more enterprise.

Okay, so more expensive.

Because we have a high price point.

Yeah, and call centers are working, but you're tapping that out. Find me after this pod, we'll come up with something. I don't have an exact answer right now, but I'll think about it and come up with something. All right, I think we're out of time. Guys, thank you again for having me. I really appreciate it. Take care.

Please welcome to the stage Sébastien Leroy, partner at Serena Capital.

Hi guys, thank you very much for being with me. I know it's almost lunchtime, so thank you for coming, and I will try to keep it short. I'm Sébastien Leroy. I'm a partner at Serena. Serena is a tech fund. We are based in, in Paris and we invest all over Europe. We raised a total of €1 billion and we mainly focus on seed, Series A tickets from €0 to €15 million. And we love SaaS from day one. We invested in a few companies that became today market leaders on their industries. To name a few, we are first investor in a company called Dataiku in the data space, another one called Electrize in the EV charging, or Descartes Underwriting in the insurance. And today I'm super glad to unveil the European SaaS Benchmark, which is a companion tool we built 3 years ago to help SaaS entrepreneurs compare the metrics that Matom was for them. A few of players, a few players others in the US made a great job, such as Iconiq, OpenView, KBCM, but they were mainly focusing on US companies, or public market, or very late-stage companies. That's why I decided 3 years ago to launch the benchmark dedicated to European entrepreneurs and focusing on companies that have an ARR from 0 to 50 million euros. Today, super glad to use it and show you the framework used at Serenite to analyze a new investment. So just a few words on the methodology to show you the framework that I will use today. We interviewed around 700 companies all over Europe from seed to Series D on 30 data points. And when we prepare this session with Suster, Suster suggested me to focus on the concept which is capital efficiency. Everyone today is talking about capital efficiency. We, we hear capital efficiency is key everywhere. Entrepreneurs, press, everyone is talking about it. But I would like to focus on what does it mean for entrepreneurs in SaaS, and I will show you the framework I use with 5 North Star metrics to monitor depending on your, on your stage. The first metric is obviously growth rate. When you're building a company, growth rate is still a very important KPI because it helps you demonstrate you're validating product-market fit and gaining market share. So it's key to focus on growth rate. And, and we see for, for early-stage companies from 0 to 5 million euros that last year growth rate was the same as the two editions before. So it's quite impressive growth rates, doubling or tripling ARR each year. However, when we look at more mature companies from $10 million and plus, we saw that the growth rate has been drastically impacted by the current context, mainly in the enterprise industry. And we can see that the growth rate for companies with more than $10 million in ARR are fixed 64% for best in class, and what we call best in class is the top quartile in Europe, while it was 90% last year and 105% the year before. So it has been drastically impacted in this edition. The second metric we, we love to take a look is Rule of Forty. So Everyone knows what is Rule of 40. It's to compare the growth with the EBITDA margin you can generate. And in the two first editions, nobody took a look at the Rule of 40 from 0 to 10 million ARR. And this year is quite new, because for all the entrepreneurs, from 5 million in ARR, told— talked to me about, uh, rule of 40. And we are really measuring the rule of 40 and comparing with our peers. And what you can see is, if you want to, to be best in class in Europe, the rule of 40 is 36% from 5 to 10 million in ARR, and it's more than 40% for 10 million and plus, and it's more a rule of 60. And it's, it's quite normal because when you look at the public market, um, companies with premium valuation are mainly companies that are a good rule of 40 and even a good 50 or a good of 60. And that's why starting at 10 million, people focus more on this metric. The third metric I'd like to show you today is the burn multiple. This one is quite simple. The burn multiple is how much do I need to burn in cash to add €1, $1 in UARR. So very simple, if I need to burn 1 million to add 0.5 million in In new ARR, your burn multiple is around 2x. So when you're building your company in the early days, it's quite okay to have a burn multiple of 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, because you're focusing on your tech, you're focusing on your product. But when you try to scale your go-to-market, build your sales machine, and start to be efficient, the goal is to get close to 1x, because because every dollar you spend to attract a new customer will have a good consequence if I align with net retention rate. The fourth metric I'd like to focus today is the net retention rate. Personally, I love this metric. I think it's the beauty of the SaaS business model, is in the net retention rate. If I have a net retention rate of 120%, to give you an example, it means that when I acquire $1 of ARR the first year, the second year it will be worth $1.2 in ARR. So it's quite compounding and quite, and quite powerful. To show you the impact of the NRR on your, on your company, if you do not sign any new customer and you have a net retention rate of 120%, the ARR doubles every 5 years. So quite powerful. If you have a net retention rate of 110%, the ARR doubles every 8 years. And if you have a net retention rate of 100%, if you don't sign new customers, you stay flat. So very, very, very powerful, especially in the enterprise enterprise industry. And in the last, in the last 18 months, net retention rate has been quite impacted by the market in the enterprise industry because a lot of corporates and a lot of big accounts have frozen their budgets. So net retention Net retention rate reduced from 120, 125 to 110 for the best in class in Europe. Another metric I don't have on the slide deck, but I'd like to share it with you because it's quite simple, is the ARR per employee. So you take, say, ARR, you generate, and you divide it by the number of employees you have in your companies. And it's quite simple and quite efficient because you can align all your employees and all the strategy and the operation on this matrix. And to give you a few perspectives on it, when you're very, very early company building your product, building your technology, it's okay to be between 0 to 100K on this metric. When you are building your sales machine and spending money to expand, it's okay to be between 100 and 200. And when you try to get efficient and you try to become breakeven, it's more between 200 and 300K on on this metric. So it's not the deck, but I'd like to share this one. Now let's talk about valuation, because a lot of entrepreneurs are quite stressed by the valuation right now and prefer to extend the runways and raise new money. And we will take a look at it right after. We can see that there are been a contraction on the market and valuation. Public valuation and private valuation are quite similar from Series B and Series C companies. So if you take a look at the public market right now, the valuation multiple is around 6 and 8x, ZARR. And when I take a look at the Series B, it's quite That's why it's the same range. So it's— we are back to the 2019-2018 valuation from Series B and Series C.

Sorry, sorry, and what's the benchmark for your companies?

We have 700 companies. 700 companies all over Europe. And the data is from 6 months ago. Sorry, here's a benchmark for, for seed and Series A. So we can see that for Series B and plus, it's quite in line with the public market. And for seed, Series A, it's quite open in terms of valuation multiples. And all of this work except if you're in Gen AI, where we can see outstanding valuation not in line with the ARR. So all of this impacted the entrepreneurs, and a lot of entrepreneurs decided not to raise a new round of capital financing but to extend their runway. And 70% of the SaaS entrepreneurs we interviewed decided not to raise a new round but to extend their runway, reducing costs, raising non-dilutive capital, non-dilutive financing, or raising money from their historical investors. So if I should summarize the the main key takeaway, what we can see on the market today is we had a shift from growth at all costs to efficient growth, and it has consequences on the 5 metrics I wanted to show you today. We can see that for early-stage companies, or what I call early-stage companies from 0 to 5 $5 million in ARR, we can see impressive growth with companies doubling or tripling each year. However, for more mature companies, growth rate has been drastically impacted by the current market and especially by the big accounts that have frozen their budgets and slowing down the ability of entrepreneurs to expand within their customer base and to add best-in-class net retention rate. And there, there has been a valuation contraction, except if you are in the Gen AI space, reflecting the market shift towards efficiency. And we can see premium valuation for companies not growing only at the 2x or 3x growth, but with reasonable growth, but with very efficient metrics, including rule of 40. So thank you. Do you have any question?

Hi, my name is Riker. Just on the multiples slide, on the statistics slide, the bottom line multiples, what is that referring to?

This one? Yes, it's from the interview we made.

All right, thank you.

Yeah, the bottom line multiple.

Yes, all of this.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Seems all right.

For the burn multiples, do you take fully loaded? Are you OPEX, CAPEX, everything on this metrics? For which one? For burn multiples. Yeah, I take it fully loaded. Yeah, that's why it's quite high for early-stage companies, and for $10 million and plus, it's more around the 1x, it's 1.1.

And this 12 refers to IRR multiple, like Series A multiple 12 times, it's average?

It's the 12x is the mean, and the 7x is the bottom line and the 34 is the highest one.

Yeah, and it's for the last 12 months, or you say 6 months back?

It's—

the data has been collected 6 months ago.

Okay.

So, and we are actually collecting the data for the new European SaaS benchmarks that we will publish in September. So we will have a more recent view of on this, uh, in a few weeks.

Hi, yeah, thanks.

Um, wondering around like the percentages offered, particularly from my interest at the seed and Series A.

Do you see there's like an average people are giving 10% away, 20%? And just see the—

is there a common theme across seed to Series C in this data set?

Yeah. Yeah, I can take a look at the, at this slide with the ARR view, or I can take a look at it with a seed stage, Series A. And, and if you have to, to compare, for, for seed stage, it's quite the same as under $1 million ARR. For Series A, it's between $1 and $5 million, and for Series B, it's between $5 and $10 million.

Cool, thank you.

So if you download the benchmark, you will find the exact dashboard but with the stages.

Thanks.

I can't hear you.

Can you hear me?

Yes. In the current environment, if you start to see sales cycles taking longer and longer, yeah, what's your general sort of guidance to Edward wise to companies? Yeah, we can see— so to answer this question, I have to, to take a view on the SMB market and then the enterprise market. So if I take a look at the, at the SMB market, what we can see is there, there is a churn that is higher this year than last year. So it has been impacted like this. For enterprise, say, are more longer. We don't measure it in this benchmark, but they are more longer, and the ability to extend your customer base and to upsell your customer base is quite harder and takes more time. And that's why the net retention rate has been reduced significantly. From the investor side, what's your general guidance to your portfolio companies? It really depends on the enterprise business. Yeah, it really depends on the, on the stage and on the industry of the company. But for more mature companies, a lot of our portfolio decided to focus and to switch from growth at all costs to efficient growth and decided to reduce their marketing budget, reduce their sales budget to focus on their existing and current customer base, trying to make them very happy to continue to have a net retention rate around 110%, 120%. Because just to add a few more words about this, when you're a company— it's not true at 10 million, but when you are more at 20, 30, 40, and more, what is best in class is to have in your new ARR, half of your new ARR from new customers and half from your existing customers. So when you're looking at this like this, it's very important to focus on expanding your customer base in terms of revenue.

Hello. Actually, jumping on what you just said here, um, we had the introduction this morning where later stage companies have leveraged their existing base a lot more than— it basically was very, very hard to get new logos. For later stage companies, do you see NR going higher than 120, or like, how do you see that split between new business and existing change as companies mature? Because it feels really, really hard to add new logos for those types of later-stage companies. Do you see that in your portfolio as well?

Historically, it was half, half, so half new logos and half upsell. And then we see a few of our portfolio companies, but the mature ones, with 40% or 35% new logos and 60%, 65% upsell. Epsilon.

Thanks, Sebastian. This is great data.

I have two questions. Is the burn multiple a multiple of the first year's ARR or the lifetime value of a customer?

It's the first year ARR.

Okay.

We don't take into account the lifetime value, especially for very early-stage company, because we don't really know the lifetime value for these ones.

And then you've done this for a few years now. Have you got any correlation of data going back a few years to the investment that people were making 3, 4 years ago and their growth rates today?

Have you been able to look at that yet on the end of growth rate?

Oh, well, all the, all the metrics.

Yeah.

How different levels of investment, yeah, 4 years ago, you know, what result does that produce today?

Yeah, when I take a look at the data last year or 2 years ago, and for growth rate it was quite the the same from 0 to 5 million in ARR. It has been really impacted from 5 million in ARR and plus. When I take a look at the burn multiple, it's quite the same for very early stage companies. It has not been changed. However, the net retention rate has been drastically improved for very early stage company this year and last year. So when I take a look 3 years ago, net retention rate was around 95% or 100% for €0 to €5 million ARR, and now it's more 115% and 122%. So early-stage entrepreneurs take into account retention and expanding their customer base more early in their adventure.

Great season stats around European companies, so that's great.

Thank you for the presentation.

Two questions: where do you start enterprise from, from an IRR perspective? What level? And then second question, what do you categorize as longer sales cycles in that enterprise segment?

Yes, what we consider SMB is 0 from, uh, uh, I don't have the exact number in mind, but 0 from 35-40K ACV. From 35-40K to 100, uh, it's, uh, SMB. From 100 to, uh, 200, it's around mid-market. And then up, it's enterprise. So we take a look at it at ACV. And on the SaaS benchmark report, you can have a verticalized graph depending on your ACV, depending on your customer target, depending on your business model.

Sorry, sales cycle, what would you say? You said it's a longer sales cycle.

Yes, sure. What is the average sales cycle? I don't have it in the benchmark, but I have the payback, which is less than 6 months for SMB, 8 months for mid-market, and between 12 and 14 months for enterprise.

Anyone at the back? We've got about a minute and a half to go. I can get the mic to you.

Hello?

Happy?

Lovely, thank you very much.

Thank you.

You put your arms around me, I don't stress. Go and lay your head right on my chest. If you are in my life, I worry less. Without you, girl, I don't think I could rest. Don't stress. Don't stress.

Please welcome to the stage Brett Martin, co-founder and president at Kumho Space. All right, how do y'all— uh, thank you so much for having me. That was a pretty awesome presentation that just went on here, got all my metrics, uh, for the net for all my companies. So I'm here, I wear a couple different hats. I run Charge Ventures. It's a New York-based seed stage venture capital fund. 80 portfolios, so we're using all those metrics as benchmarks. I also teach at Columbia Business School. I teach data analytics and applied machine learning. We basically do a data science class for 8 growth stage companies. Every project, every year they bring a a problem and a data set, and then we basically help them work through it. I spend a lot of time crunching the numbers, but today the capacity I'm here is as the co-founder and president of Kumospace. Kumospace is the world's largest provider of virtual offices where basically 1,000 teams spend their days from 9 to 5 tapping each other on the shoulder, running all-hands meetings, getting quick answers to questions. And so, you know, we actually had a long path there. We started as a consumer app, then we moved into the virtual event space, and then we eventually landed in the productivity space. And I tell you that because today we're going to basically talk about how Sales Assist Motion can increase your inbound conversion. And I think maybe the reason I'm uniquely qualified to discuss this is because our own company, we've actually built and rebuilt 3 times, starting from consumer and then going to events and prosumer and then eventually ending as a SaaS tool. So I've actually had to rebuild a go-to-market strategy for this company multiple times. And I'm here to really give you a framework for thinking about how your sales and your product go-to-market motions can work together. So first we'll talk a little bit about the problem. So I saw the gentleman here in the last presentation talk a bit about this. Unless you're selling infrastructure AI, right, you might not have a totally hot market, right? Actually, growth rates have come down. Coverage ratios have come up. And, you know, in particular for products like mine at Kuma Space, which has historically had started as sort of PLG products, starting in 2023, we started to notice this trend, which was, you know, CFOs really starting to exert their will over purchases. So long gone were the days of kind of just flying under, getting bought on personal credit cards, people were starting to scrutinize kind of every line item of every purchase. And so there was a very active debate going on in the Charge portfolio Slack channel, which was, is this the end of PLG? And it was a pretty polarizing topic. I think some folks that were SaaS veterans and came from enterprise sales, they said, "Yes, that was a short-lived thing. This is the way it's supposed to be. You gotta sell in." I am really here to talk about this as like a, it's a false, it's really a false dichotomy, like product-led or sales-led. There's actually a lot of room in between, and the secret is how do you find the right balance the right place at the right time to get in front of your customers with the right message. How do you create what we call a native sales assist motion for your product? Maybe just a quick show of hands, who's selling enterprise SaaS here? All right, who has a PLG motion? All right, who has something in between? All right, good. We're all aligned here. So I think, and I again came from a consumer background, so in my head I was like, okay, you have sales down at the end. All the heavy lifting is done on your marketing and your product. Everything is kind of viral growth. Sales sort of just guides things. Into the fairway, and we certainly learned this lesson the hard way. I'm gonna give you a 4-step process. Basically what we did was we think of any company as a funnel. Everyone here, SaaS, are obviously quite familiar with that, right? But here's this process to basically create your metrics. Design, assign, measure, and refine. Design your funnel. Whatever you think your happy path for your customer is. Now I think this is a pretty illustrative exercise. When I first did my first analysis of where all my funnel for my product, I saw that I had no less than 20 different paths. 20 different paths where customers could come in and then come and buy something. They could come in through this page, they could come in through product pages, they could come in through they could come in through outbound sales, right? And I realized that I had absolutely no happy path. I had not made any decisions, and I had sort of pushed them all onto the customer. So design your funnel, right? Next step is sort of assign responsibility. Now what I realized was that I had competing responsibilities. I had some groups of my executive team that were on my team that were two different— I had people from sales and people from marketing that were both thought that they owned the same metric, and I had some metrics in my funnel that no one felt any sort of ownership for. So make sure you are assigning responsibility for each step in this funnel. Now this funnel isn't always so linear, but make sure someone is in control. Measure. Measure your conversion at each step. This is obvious, right, but this is gonna help you in the next step is understanding your conversion rates, what are your activation moments, where are people dropping off, what is your different ACV for different motions and different channels. And then once you've designed, assigned, and measured, this is really the crux of today's entire presentation is refine your flow so you know exactly where to insert sales. So what I mean by that is sales, it's obviously always much harder to change your product than it is to change where you, where you touch the customer and where your sales goes. So what I think what a lot of people do is they don't have this realized that your sales team, where you touch customers, a customer can be actively moved up and down this funnel. This is what probably most of us think of a typical PLG funnel, but what you don't realize is that you can actually, and if you look, I'll give some examples, companies are actually move, put their sales in different places on this funnel depending on a list of factors, which we'll go through in a second. What happened to us is We eventually figured out the sweet spot. I won't give it away yet, but we 2x'd our, we basically 2x'd our conversion on our leads in one month, and we, this channel which we call Drop-Ins, which I'll explain in a second, is now 80% of our completed customer sales. Out of nowhere. And so, I'll give some examples of just what I mean by creating different touchpoints for sales within your funnel. So this is SendGrid, email, an email automation company, right? This is, you know, deep in their product, right? They've already gone through awareness, they've gotten to their web page, they've acquired a user, they've activated them, they've signed them up, and now they're onboarding They're actually onboarding someone, and they're throwing up deep in their product an opportunity to get in touch with sales. Now in this case, this is a new product that they're offering, right? And so they're basically saying, hey, we haven't really built this into our product. We haven't really figured out what the right product flow is to do this upsell. And so what we're gonna do is we're gonna do something really hacky. And basically throw up a banner in the middle of our product and say, "Hey, talk to sales." This is obviously not gonna be the end state of this product. They're just throwing up a banner because they have no better idea where to do it and they wanna get exposure here. Another example. So Customer.io, we're a customer. Where do they put this? Customer.io is basically throwing a live demo, pushing sales up to the very front. As soon as they basically have gotten someone to their webpage, they say, "Hey, talk to sales." Now, why is that? I mean, it's pretty obvious. This is a very— does everyone know what Customer.io is?

No?

Customer.io, it's basically email engagement software for your internal customer customers, right? You can set a bunch of triggers based on what type of actions are happening in your product. So great for targeting sort of PLG, you know, PQL, PQLs inside your customer. That's what we use CustomerIO for, right? But it is a very involved product. It is not something that you can just sign up to the website and see how it works, right? You have to do serious integrations. You have to tie it into your— it takes a fair amount of expertise. Right? So they are saying, "Hey, as soon as we got you, we want to talk to you and we want to hold your hand through this process." Right? And so the core sort of framework that want folks to walk away with is that you can move your sales up and down, move your sales assist motion up and down this basic funnel based on a couple factors, right? So increased product complexity, right? As the product's harder, like Customer.io is a lot harder to use than say Kumaspace is, or maybe Notion or Dropbox or something, right? People are moving sales up because you want to hold people's hand. Less developed onboarding. So if you just are, if you haven't figured out, you know, what the right way or what the activation steps are in a product, Obviously, you wanna move your sales touchpoints higher up the funnel so you can hold people's hand as you sort of figure out, okay, when is the right time to get something in front of them? So longer time to— same thing with longer time to value, right? If you don't have that magic moment for your customer, you know, the instant they sit down and the first time they use it, then you might need sales to be in touch with them to stay, keep them engaged with the product long enough to get that value. I'll talk a little more about this, but I think a lot of this comes, I think a lot of the challenge is that, who here wants, can I see PLG folks again? Who's PLG? Did you start there? No, you moved toward it. Okay, who would like to have a PLG motion? All right, now why is that? In large part, it's because it's great if you can get it, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's like the right thing for your business. I think VCs, including myself, have written tons about PLG models, right? Because if it works, it's great. You, you know, incredibly, incredibly viral. It can grow really fast. Some of our favorite, you know, companies have that model, right? But that doesn't mean it's actually, you know, good for most businesses. I think there's a very, I guess, confusion about what makes for a really good PLG product. Can someone throw out some ideas or what are the characteristics of a really good PLG product?

Simple.

Simple, easy to use. Thank you. Good. Intuitive. Intuitive. So you can figure it out without a lot of help. What else? [SPEAKING CHINESE] Some virality. Virality. So a PLG product is something that can be easily shared. It's often a multiplayer product. What else?

Scalable value.

Scalable value. What do you mean by that?

So PLG shouldn't stop after purchase or sign-up. It should keep being pushed in as engagements throughout the application. —to let you unlock more and more of the product as you start using it.

Yeah, so basically it could have compounding value based on usage. Is that where you're getting? Yep.

The curve actually is this hockey stick, like you get more value the more you use the product.

There's also low barrier to entry. Low barrier to entry, right. Compounding value. I heard something from over here. I said low cost. Low cost.

Why? Because usually—

Because you assume you don't need a sales assist to be able to walk someone through and get someone to value it. It can be more of a self-serve. Yes, it can be self-serve, right? And it can usually fit on— it can usually go— it usually slides— it usually can be bought on someone's personal credit card, right? So yeah, I think these are all great examples. I think it could be fast. I think multiplayer. I think single-player use case. End-user utility is probably what I would say the core, right? That an individual IC will use this product because it will make their lives better, right? There's not a lot of PLG compliance software out there, right? Because the end consumer, the end user of a tool really usually isn't concerned with compliance, right? That's someone up top. That is making sure that everyone's being compliant, right? So I think that if you actually think about all of these characteristics that, you know, you need to have a really good PLG tool, it's a very narrow band of products that can fit into that. And they tend to fit, they tend to be some sort of, you know, prosumer-esque enterprise tool that the end user gets a lot of value, that they will pay for off their own credit card that have compounding value when more people use them. They have a lower— they have a low barrier and they have a low barrier to entry, right? That is not the majority of those tools. So whose tool in this room fits that description? Alright, so we have a little bit of a disconnect, right? Now why? Why did the folks in this room, when I asked who wants a PLG motion, why did most people say they want a PLG motion? Scale. Scale. Scale. Because it can grow quickly and doesn't have to basically add headcount to scale it, right? Efficiency almost. Keep going.

Seems like that. People think it's like the magic bullet.

Yeah, I don't have to do sales, right? That's why, I mean, we're at SaaStr, which is hilarious, but we would prefer not to be doing sales. I can assure you that was our initial hope. All right, okay, so we have to sort of acknowledge some hard truths in the room, right, which is that most people's products are probably not a good fit fit for PLG, right? But that doesn't mean that we can't take some of the things from PLG and apply them to our own business, right? And so what I am basically trying to communicate to everyone here is that most of our products are probably not PLG. And that said, we can— we don't need to be totally top-down enterprise sales. We can basically find the sweet spot in our business as a funnel for the right place at the right time with the right message for our salespeople to get in front of customers. And so what I am advocating for is— one, one time I led a Columbia Business School trip to Toyota, the Toyota factory in Japan, and we went to the Toyota factory and and you know, all the students, they were very nonplussed. They were not, they were, it was kind of mid is what kids say today. They were like, wow, I thought Toyota was gonna be so much more automated, right? You know, it was gonna be so much more high-tech because they saw humans on the factory floor that were still bolting together cars, right? And the woman that was giving the Toyota tour, she had a really funny response. She said, well, yes, back in 1960, '60, 90% of the construction of a Toyota car was automated. But what we realized was that was actually quite inefficient. Why is that? Well, what we realized is that it worked really well as long as we wanted to keep doing the exact same thing over and over. But the truth was that we were constantly wanting to tweak and improve our processes, right? And what we realized was that if you automated 90% of the construction of a car, then it was incredibly inflexible and you couldn't adapt to changing conditions quickly enough. And so what they ended up was they realized that about 60% of construction of cars was the optimal amount to be automated, and then the rest was humans because that then let— that let them very quickly move around their processes on the floor to create, to respond to changing patterns. And so what I am advocating for here is for you to sort of flexibly move your sales motion and your sales assist motion up and down this funnel rapidly until you find the exact place where you're gonna massively improve conversion. And the way you do that is by— the way you do that is by basically looking— designing, assigning, measuring, and refining. The refining is moving sales up and down, but then looking at the bottlenecks at each step. So once you've determined, okay, here are my KPIs for each step down this funnel, you're gonna have blockages in different places. The Kumospace story, which I said I would share at some point, was when we started, we were perfectly 100% sales-led. And why was that? It's because we actually hadn't built any of the onboarding, we hadn't built any of the payments, we hadn't done anything. We just wanted to figure out if the core product worked. And so what we did was we basically had, we just brought in sales and dropped people into a product that had no other chrome around it. We said, okay, that's not scalable. Let's build this whole product-led path. And we put sales basically at the end of it, right? We thought, okay, if they need to talk to sales, great, but otherwise they're just going to self-serve and sign up. It was a disaster. We basically, by the time people got to the end of funnel, there was no one left. There were actually not enough leads for sales to even try to convert. Then we said, okay, That didn't work. Let's actually move sales right to the top. As soon as people come to the web, we'll have sales. They can't even try our product. Before it was freemium and we put it in front of the freemium. That didn't work either. Why didn't that work? We hypothesized why didn't that work. Well, Kumospace is a virtual office. Has anyone used a virtual office? Two people. Does anyone else know what a virtual office is? Is? Exactly, right? You have no idea what a virtual office is. If I told you it's a, you know, where thousands of distributed teams, you know, uh, distributed remote and distributed teams do their work. If I told you it was like Zoom plus Slack plus Fireflies plus Loom all bundled together, you would still probably have no idea what I'm talking about, right? So basically people didn't want to talk to sales. They needed some understanding of what it was, and what we realized was the optimal place to put our sales assist motion was right when we drop people into the product. What we did was we started actually, literally, we have this, this is a virtual office, this is what it looks like, people hang out, and what we did was when people would sign up for a freemium account, we basically had our own internal channel where we would get a notification. It would have the name of the customer, it would have their company, basically a bunch of qualifying information, how many people worked at their company, what this person's title was. And then our BDRs would basically look at this real-time list of people coming in. And then when we, when we saw someone that was qualified, we would actually drop them into their space. And I shit you not, excuse me. Half the time people thought that it was a robot entering their space. They didn't realize that they were gonna have something that was freemium, but then have like actually a personal human walk into their space. And people would ignore our sales rep, and we actually came up with a bunch of funny lines like, "No, I'm actually really a human." And so they were a product consulting specialist. Our BDRs are called product consulting specialists. Consulting specialists, and what they do is they help people move into their Kumo space. If they have any questions, they help them. This thing is fully editable. You can move it around. You can change it based on your own company. They would come in. They would basically personalize the person's space in front of them, and then they would ask them, "Hey, would you like a more in-depth product demo from our sales teams to learn more?" Free customers, right? And so for us, that was the right place at the right time with the right message, right? Right after someone had gone through our onboarding flow to set up, they had just dropped in their space, but we didn't have great onboarding, right? We didn't really— like, one of the challenges of Kumospace is so dynamic. There's so many things you can do. It's often overwhelming. And so that was the perfect time for us to get in front of people and hold their hand and ask them, if they felt overwhelmed, ask them if they wanted help. So that works well for us. Why? Because we— here, wait. Shh, shh, shh. We had not very well-developed onboarding. We had a multiplayer product. It really only worked great if lots of other people, if your whole team got in there. Just one person wouldn't really even know what to do with the product. We needed to get more people in there, and sales can help do that. They can be your champion. The time to value, often it takes people spending a week or two with their whole team in Kumospace. None of those things were great for our traditional PLG sales. Sale, right? And so we had to send in sales to help smooth these things over. So that's what worked for us, and if you look at these other products that I talked about, your mileage may vary. Alright, so that is basically the end. I have some specific examples, right, of, you know, for a sales assist motion. I personally think it works best right after product activation. If you don't have onboarding, if your product's multiplayer and you need help getting people in there, right? And then the question is, is how does your product sort of work lockstep with sales? The way I think about it is that sales is an extension of your product, and then they are testing the messaging, they're testing the workflows, and then your product is basically building and automating the things your sales is doing, particularly if you have a low low ACV product like ours. It's only $20 per head per seat. All right, that's it. Does anyone have any questions about their own product? Here we go, shoot.

Not a question about product, but how do you make the unit economics work and appeal with having sales in like a PLG motion where it's like low ACV and so on?

100%. So the answer is it probably wouldn't work initially. For us, it was about basically getting in front of the people who work at companies that can have hundreds of seats and making sure their experience is perfect. We experimented with a bunch of different BDR options. Eventually we have our BDRs closing deals and it's a one-shot, one-kill. Kill sale for most people unless it's something with several hundred seats, in which case we're basically identifying, okay, is this customer a potential enterprise customer? Okay, we'll give them extra handholding. It doesn't even work well. This is actually the worst part is that our, what we realized is that PLG motion was terrible for enterprise customers because enterprise customer would come in, They would sign up and they would be like, "Ah, how do I get my executive team leadership in here? How do I get my CISO to approve this?" And then they would be daunted and they would leave. And so we had to send in sales, build a relationship with those people, and then help them sell. So the answer is we segment basically and we ruthlessly, it's not going to have an ACV that works, which for us is under $10K, we basically push them towards self-serve resources and have the BDR try to close them on the first sale.

Hi, my name is Heike. Thinking about PLG, my romantic idea is that it helps auto-detect customers that sort of strongly validated the value the product brings to them and are sort of tapped into their willingness to commit even more to the product by, by the hope that your product can bring more value to them. And what I like about that is that it can help your product team, product management team, to wrap about around the idea to expand the features in a way that it's consistent with the existing solution. And not just like randomly add features, but really think about how it can rather evolve into a suite sort of thing. How do you think about that?

So the question is, how do you evolve an individual PLG product into a suite of features?

Yeah, can help PLG help the product management team to think about the product more in a— how it can grow into a suite, like a consistent set of features?

So, okay, is the question that sort of thinking of products in a PLG, you know, mindset in terms of like a self-serve mindset? Is that what you're saying? Is that where you're focused on the question? Is how do you think about basically creating products that work for themselves, are self-serve, self-evident, and don't need more touch? Is that the core of the question?

[Speaker] That are very close to the initial value.

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] Oh, close to the initial value. Yeah. OK. So the way I would frame that is— OK, so the question is, how do you think of building product in a way that it's quick time to value? You have to make it work for the individual IC. One of the biggest mistakes I see is folks that think they have a PLG product that is a multiplayer sale that requires multiple people to get involved before they start getting value out of it. I think honestly one of the biggest crimes that was committed to SaaS founders is that they think of Slack as a canonical PLG startup. Like, it actually isn't. I think most PLG products, you know, people can— there's a strong individual use case where it works for someone out of the box. They look for it themselves to solve their individual, individual problem. Most, you know, multiplayer communication software is actually not a great example of PLG. It's once you have an IC function that then can scale, right? So if you think about Figma is a canonical example of like a great PLG product, but initially Figma was actually just replacing Sketch, right? And it was basically saying, hey, I'm a designer, I can now use it on the cloud. And then they supercharged the growth by saying, hey, now, you know, non-designers can be pulled in and use Figma to look at assets. But that certainly wasn't the core of product. The core of the product was do designs online. Chu.

So I'm over at Amplitude, so we both help companies with PLG, but we also do a fair amount ourselves. And one question I had was there's actually a spot between web visitors and acquisition, which is customer starts looking through your feature set between plans and also pricing between plans. So working with Kumospace, what have you seen works well to make that actually an aid to a process and not a spot where people get lost in your PLG funnel or can't decide between different plans, etc.?

So look, for most startups, there's usually not a ton of data to do these like, you know, rules-based, you know, product qualified leads or MQL, like marketing qualified leads, you know, rubrics, right? Where, oh, they go on the pricing page and that's worth 1 point and then they have signed up and that's worth worth a couple more points, right? I will say I'm starting, as a VC, I'm starting to see some pretty awesome new products that are using machine learning to basically look at user behavior on site and then start to uncover hidden patterns, machine-readable patterns for, okay, what a truly good MQL or PQL is, and I guess my personal thinking is that that's gonna be highly automated in the next couple years. So basically install software, it'll look at user behavior across your whole site, and then it'll basically say, okay, these are the most actually engaged. Because there's a ton of red herrings, like, oh, they went to my pricing page, they must be a qualified lead, and that's just not actually the case. So I'm looking into basically machine learning -based tooling. So I think that's it. Thank you so much for taking the time. I hope you all have an amazing conference.

I worry less without you, girl. I don't think I could rest. Don't stress, don't stress, don't stress. I don't think I could rest. Don't stress, don't stress, don't stress. Oh no, I don't want to be all on my own. It's like so when I grab your body, pull you close. I need you more than you need me, and there's no shame in that. There's no shame when you Put your arms around me, I don't stress. Go and lay your head right on my chest. If you are in my life, I worry less. Without you, girl, I don't think I could rest. Don't stress. Don't stress. Don't stress, don't stress. When you put your arms around me, I don't stress. Go and lay your head right on my chest. You are in my life, I worry less. Without you, girl, I don't think I could rest. Don't stress, don't stress. Don't stress. I need you more than you need me, and there's no shame in that. There's no shame in that. When you put your arms around me, I don't stress. Go and lay your head right on my chest. You are in my life, I'm Worry less. Without you, girl, I don't think I could rest. Don't stress, don't stress, don't stress. I don't wanna be all on my own. It's like slow-mo when I grab your body, pull you close. I need you more than you need me, and there's no shame in that. Don't stress, don't stress, don't stress. Arms around me, I don't stress. Go and lay your head right on my chest. If you are in my life, I worry less. Without you, girl, I don't think I could rest. Don't stress. Don't stress. Don't stress. I need you more than you need me, and there's no shame in that. There's no shame in that. When you put your arms around me, I don't stress. Go and lay your head right on my chest. You are in my life, I worry less. Without you, girl, I don't think I could rest. Don't stress, don't stress, don't stress. I don't wanna be all on my own. It's like slow-mo when I grab your body, pull you close. I need you more than you need me, and there's no shame in that. Don't stress, don't stress, don't stress. Arms around me, I don't stress. Go and lay your head right on my chest. If you are in my life, I worry less. Without you, girl, I don't think I could rest. Don't stress. Don't stress. Don't stress.

Please welcome to the stage Violaine Wyzakel, VP Global Customer Success at staff base.

Good afternoon, everyone. Um, it feels like it's a really crowded room today. It said 20 people on the website. It's clearly more than 20 people, which is great. I'm glad to see that Digital CS is bringing crowd in the room, especially as the title is very long, lots of complicated words as well. One word is important there, it's practical. If you wanted to hear shiny practices around putting digital CS in place, you can leave the room. It's not going to be about this. It's about being practical. It's about sharing the mistakes I've made to get to where we are at StubBase right now with digital CS. All right, just to start maybe with a quick— Yeah, here we go. With a quick bio, so you can read at your own pace, there's a lot on that slide. Two things maybe that are relevant to this talk today. One is I've been working many years at SaaS companies, starting with Box, Slack, and Salesforce. So I have a quite extensive experience in customer success, which made me work confidently at Staffbase to lead the global customer success team around customer success management, customer care, and consulting for about 130 people in the team. The second element here is obviously I'm very passionate about customer success, and in 2017 I met a bunch of great people in London to create a customer success network, to just create a platform for people to exchange about customer success, to again make it a practical profession because it was very theoretical, and we wanted to make it a place where you could thrive and implement things at work. All right? So those are the two key things in there. Now, let's give a bit more context about digital CS. By the way, who's in the room is in customer success? Okay. So like 30%. Sales? Bravo. Marketing? What are you doing?

Are you all fine?

So you're doing everything? Okay, so customer success as well is part of your job. Okay, fine. So digital CS, by the way, I might call it DCS. Digital is a very hard word for a French native speaker. So DCS is a buzzword right now in the customer success space. It can mean a lot of things. It all goes back to scaling operations, obviously to using digital but not just digital. It's a brand, a blend of digital and human touches at the right time to the right persona, right? So it's really that blend that is going to create the right touchpoints and the consistency with the customers. Think automations, think one-to-many communications, think about repeatable processes. So again, back to the title: sustainability, consistency, and efficiency. All right? Now, as I said at the beginning, I'm not going to talk about the shiny things around, oh, we've done all those amazing things and those are the great results. No, because we're not there yet. I joined Staffbase about a year ago and I wanted to put DCS in place as fast as possible. Maybe too fast. You know, you've all, I think, built like an IKEA piece of furniture, right? With a big booklet, lots of steps to go to, the end and have your beautiful chest of drawers in your bedroom. Well, I thought it would be the same with DCS. So starting there, and then at the end I would have a beautiful DCS. The booklet is actually quite big and way bigger than I was expecting it to be. So I made a few mistakes, a lot of mistakes, but I want to share 4 of them today with you so that when you're back at work or when you, you know, working with your team, so as a founder doing it yourself, then you're not making doing the same and you can accelerate the way you can digitalize and also create that DCS motion with your customers from the start. So first mistake, I thought that DCS was something led by customer success and I just needed a leader to drive it and off you go, you're done. Not at all. So at first I wanted to appoint someone in the role as soon as possible. I had someone who was 'We are doing some projects and programs around operations already.' I said, 'Fine, let's do that.' Now, you have to understand that as DCS is a new motion, there's no role as such. We have to define the role on the fly. There's no scope of responsibilities. We don't know where we're going. We have no targets. Sounds— I'm selling the dream here. But basically, you have to be creative. You have to understand that you have to convince the audience around you to craft the messaging depending on who who you're talking to, whether you're talking to sales, to marketing, to your executive team, to your founders. Like, what are you going to tell them? You need to spend time on PowerPoints creating slides and craft the messaging. And again, it can bring you out of the day-to-day processes of implementing DCS because you're actually just crafting the messaging about DCS. And I think instead of then doing this and just trying, I mean, forgetting about this being on the fly, on the fly and trying to scope the role, what it would be. What I should be doing, right? What I should have done is get the exec buy-in from the start, but not just an exec buy-in, having them doing check-ins with us as well along the way to make sure we were on track, to make sure we didn't have competing priorities as well with other departments. Yeah, one good thing as well that I think I would redo, like, for any other job or role like this that is to be defined, is hire fractional functionality leader. That was the best thing to do to just get out of this thing where we could have someone test the water, define the job desk, really understand how we could scope that role to then define what DCS could be, define what projects we could have, what roadmap we could have for DCS. That functional leader, I've converted her into a permanent right now. She understands the pace, she understands what needs to be done, and it's gonna be an evolving role anyway. So again, it's not one CS leader to rule them all. You need to have like a core team to work alongside this person. Again, understand this is not defined and set in stone. It's an evolving role. Second mistake, again, being too quick to launching too quickly. I was really, really eager to launch something. I was a big believer in optimizing processes, in optimizing the way we work. I want my life to be pleasant and productive, and I want my team's lives to be more pleasant and more productive. I want my customers customers' life to be more pleasant and more productive. So I wanted to just launch right away, and I took at first just a few pain points on my radar to just launch something right away back in summer last year. First was the team workload. The CSM team at the time was handling about 90 to 100 accounts each, which was a lot. You cannot be proactive, you cannot have the right conversations with customers when you have so many clients, right? So the morale was low, engagement was low, and they were just overwhelmed that nothing was possible to do then with the customer base. Then I looked at the consistency of touchpoints we were having with the customers, and roughly there was not even one conversation per month with all of the customers. On average, less than one call per customer per month, which is definitely not a consistency you want to see with your customer customer base. Regular touchpoints, whether it's a call, whether it's an email, whether whatever, you need to have that consistency, and I was lacking. Based on those two things, I said, "Fine, let's launch something," last summer, and we launched a few set of offerings. Now instead of doing this, should have done something different. First, I should have identified what the digital offerings were about. Okay? That can mean a lot. Do you have like a support portal? Do you have helpdesk? Do you have articles? You have all those things that are ready to go, that are robust enough for customers to find their way and feel empowered. But also, most importantly, even if you do this, how about other teams being impacted by what you're doing? If you're removing that work from the CSM shoulders or from the CS shoulders, who's going to do the job? Renewals team? Sales team? Marketing team? You overflow overloading a team to overload another one. So again, something to keep in mind on how you can obviously not do that, because it's not the point. So how you craft a message as well to say, fine, we offload a team, but with all those processes, all those digital offerings, that's how we can help you as well going forward. Um, maybe something that might make it a bit more tangible. So on that screen you can see the set of offerings we've developed, like, in a year. So digital offerings at the top, emails for onboarding, welcome emails, some nurturing emails as well, a series around one-to-many communications, whether you have a customer newsletter, whether you want to promote a webinar, an office hour, whatever, like how do you just have those regular touchpoints. Campus is what we call our online education, super, super critical. If you have one thing to start from the start, this is the safe zone. Self-serve content and training to empower your customers. The key thing to do, please think about that. And then the support team and the support portal. Customer care is fundamental, obviously, to be, yes, reactive at first, but also to create those self-serve assets, to create those help articles to get the customers again self-served and empowered. When you go to scale, the second screenshot at the bottom, a few things in there, office hours and webinars, more of the one-to-many type of conversations, whether it's led with a topic or led with some questions from the audience. We've just launched the office hours. Results is like, meh. We have about 7 people join last week for an office hour session. I'm not sure it's like a great result, but we're gonna keep going. It's just the start. Webinars, we're gonna launch that end of Q2, so end of June. So again, still work in progress. Two things that are important for scaling as well, as well is like, how do you do the right inbound request? How do you gather the request from customers and who's going to respond back to them? Whether it's customer care, someone else, you need to respond back to that. Again, creating macro templates, things to make the lives of your teams more pleasant and more productive. Last but not least, what I call success engagements. When you have a scaled motion, which is a bit of a pooled motion of customer success people talking to their customers or engaging with their customers, It's like, how do we identify customers where you can have risk situation, expansion situation? And we're just going to target those customers with that pool of CSM to talk to them and engage with them on a specific outcome, whether it's a stakeholder mapping, whether it's a value-based workshop, whether— whatever you define. Again, we just launched it for the risk motion, so we have so many other things to launch. So I hope it gives you a bit more clarity on what I meant by digital and scaled offerings. Mistake number 3, we're not done. Assume it will be easy. Of course, as always, you feel like we have lots of great tools in customer success and in SaaS Anywhere around your CRM, your email communications, about ticketing, like all those tools, right? And you assume that the flow of data is actually well integrated. Well, you can assume that, but it's not really I'm telling you the reality. You can feel as well, you can assume that data is accurate. You can assume that data is real-time, so you can just trigger some actionable, some actions out of those triggers to get a good touchpoint with the customer. And you can also assume that your cross-functional partners, whether marketing, sales, learning, whatever, they all have the same goals as you, no competing priorities. Obviously, everything I'm saying is wrong. Okay, so wrong assumptions. Instead, Align on the goals and KPIs. That's hard, but keep it minimal. If the marketing team is working on lots of expansion campaigns or whatsoever, then just reduce it to a little tiny thing into their campaign, into their goals, and that's it. At least you have something shared. This is so important. And you want them to get done— not gonna say the word— to get stuff done, sorry. So you want people who can execute, who can just drive things and take accountability. Agility as well as much as possible. I think we can find lots of excuses to not do something, to not deliver something, but at some point it's just about execution at speed and just finding the rhythm to get to where you want to go. Also understanding that your first offerings are going to require lots of manual work. For the office hours, we need to upload the list of registered users into HubSpot, then when the office hours are done, I need to download again and then upload in Salesforce to get the view on the campaigns that was run. It's not something I want to do forever, right? So again, that's something that needs to be automated. So next phase, how do we just automate the things we've been doing in a manual way? And again, I'm not sure many of you have like a customer success platform. We have Gainsight at the moment, and we didn't have like a dedicated person doing things in there to automate and scale and align with what we want to do with digital. Having someone dedicated is just key. So find the tool or the system you want to use to automate, whether it's a Notion, a Sun, like whatever, right? Just find someone who's dedicated to that and understands the flow and the end-to-end flows across systems. Ah, last but not least, my favorite, communications. Not everyone understands what DCS is about, and internally is the same. Like you can talk to, again, sales, marketing, your executive team, your founders, they might say, I have no idea. What's the impact? What's the impact on net retention, on gross retention, on churn, expansion, whatever? Like, tell me more. So you have again to craft the message and really understand how to talk to them with their own words. So white glove support is still something that many companies are doing, and it's still the standard engagement model with our customers, especially when you're starting a company, right? So super white glove, very one-to-one interaction, interactions, no such thing as webinars or one-to-many communications. So again, something that we need to overcome to say actually scale is good. Scale is good because then you can free up time for other teams to do more strategic things, to do something different with their customers. And also a lack of feedback from people. If you're not communicating enough, you're not getting the feedback. It's a two-way thing, right? So if you're not getting the feedback, how can you course correct? Again, everything we've we've deployed so far, some were just not working. But we had to ask on the ground to get the feedback to say, that's not working. How do we course correct? What do we change? If you're not hearing anything, that's a bad sign, definitely. So be a parrot is the advice here. Just talk. You've all read about this thing that we need to tell something 21 times to have people remember that. Forgot about it. I think I did it 1,000 times. I might not have been using the right wording, tailored to the right audience, because it's very different. Talking to a salesperson, talking to a marketing leader is very different. They're not going to hear the same thing. So you need to talk their language. You need to focus on the customer impact as well. What's more for them? What's in it for them? What's less for them? As well, if it's less, let's change something about it. And I think it's also about creating materials to use any opportunity to talk about it. So just a few examples on what we've been creating, right? We've been like, again, not just Powereds, but also lots of content producers in there around creating FAQs for all of digital. We have like hundreds of questions from the teams around what is DCS about, how can we position a scaled offering, how do we position a scaled CSM, or all those things. We have answers for for all of those things. Thanks to ChatGPT, by the way, for helping me craft some answers. Um, we have optional office hours, again depending on when you want to talk to leaders, if you want to talk to account executives. We also tweak it and tailor it as much as possible. We have a space in our— how do you call it— content management system called Highspot. We have a space for all of the content available for DCS, so everyone knows that this is the place to go, if they want to find resources they can share with customers. So whoever's in a customer-facing role can have access to this. And again, on the right, you can see a few slides. Any all-hands, any team meeting, I can go in there and I can talk about it. And again, reemphasize the impact of having DCS and what we can do to make it better for customers and for the teams. Every opportunity counts. OK, quick key takeaways. Few things. As I said, it was not about the shiny piece of it, more about the mistakes, but obviously I've managed to give you a few things to start the motion from the start as well. Definitely, DCS is not just led by customer success, as you all know already. It's a digital strategy, and it's again that blend between digital and human. How can you get the right touchpoints? If you need someone to grab or to pick If you need to pick up the phone and call a customer, do it. That's fine. It's also part of DCS. The best touchpoint will bring more consistency. Never launch too quickly, okay? Don't be too eager. Do it with some good data points. It's not about slowing down too much, just pacing yourself to make it better and stronger. Also, the tool stack. Do not invest in too many tools, as I said. Invest in a few, like a CRM, Slack, for example. You can do so many triggers in there that is gonna make your lives easier as well. And as I said, like, be a parrot. Repeat again and again. Create content that can be reused from a team meeting to another. As always, you might have read on my bio that I'm a big fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger. I read his bio, I think maybe 2 years ago or something, and I was so, I don't know, inspired. I never had like like a role model, but he was like, "Oh." And I guess his bodybuilding journey was quite inspiring to me as well, not that I'm such a bodybuilder. But what I could read is like he was such a perfectionist, but not just about being perfectionist. It was about going until like doing reps and reps and reps to go and reach his goal, right? So he won about 7 titles of Mr. Olympia, and he worked on his calves because they were not symmetric at the time. I don't know if you saw the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger's calves like 30 or 40 years ago. They were massive, right? But he was working on it again and again and again until he could reach the title, until he could become Mr. Olympia. And I think that might be the secret sauce for digital CS. It's painful, right? But it's fun because you do not surrender. It's about how you can just overcome those challenges and keeping a smile as well. And any roadblock is You're going to have roadblocks every single day, but you're going to find shortcuts, you're going to find workarounds, and you're going to put that in place. So I think having this playfulness as well in mind is very important to put this in place. And struggle is good. That's it. We have about 10 minutes left for questions. Do you have any? And I can't— yeah, yeah.

Hi there. Thanks. Uh, quick one, um, in terms of how you're looking to measure the impact of that, like what— and obviously you're talking about senior stakeholders not necessarily buying into it and they want to see output. Yeah. What were the key things you're looking to influence and how are you tracking that over time?

Yeah, so it's going to be— so right now the way we compensate people in CS and in a way in the go-to-market motion is net retention. So net retention is always going to be the North Star for me to look into the correlation of the activities we're putting in place and the impact on measures. Now, is it going to be easy? No. So it's a mix of churn and expansion. So I'm going to have a huge or strong deep, sorry, look into that, but I'm also expecting a dip in that whilst we're putting this in place because it's different, because because customers have to be accustomed, because our teams have to be used to using something different. So I'm expecting that. I've already told the executive team that it's going to happen. By how much? I don't know. And I need to course correct if it's obviously going too deep because we can't afford this. But that's the goal. Obviously, like some lagging indicators is going to be the touchpoints, the engagement. We want to put in place some NPS with customers to get the feedback. So all of those things as well are going to take some time. But that's the idea ultimately. And all—

hi, yeah, that was really good.

Uh, quick question, how do you distinguish between, uh, like digital CS at scale—

sorry, uh, digital CS scaled and then named? You had it on the slide there.

What's— how do you break them out? So segmentation is also a bit of a buzzword in customer success, and it's been there for a long time. The way we've done it at Staffbase is very, very basic, but you need to start with something, right? So the way we do it is like based on annual recurring revenue, so ARR, and the sales segment— corporate or SMB, so small and medium businesses, corporate enterprise, large enterprise. Based on that, we align whether it's going to be digital, like SMB is going to be purely digital. Corporate is a bit of like everything, so based— so below 35K would be digital, between 35K and more, whatever. So you put the threshold in there. For large enterprise, we decided to actually only put high-touch or named CSM in there because we believe this is where we can have an impact and where we need a bit more of a hand-holding thing, right? But again, depends on your business, depends on your industry, the complexity of a product, product-led growth if you have it, lots of things to take into account. One element to keep in mind is the potential of your accounts. If you feel like there's an account in digital or scale that you know it's a big logo, you know you need to win it for your market, then you put an M-CSM in there. You need to have this flexibility. Ultimately, I would love to have something that is more around use cases, for example, or when you have a customer that has the entire suite of your of your product, then you have a wall-to-wall type of motion as well in there. So lots of things that you can work around, but the value piece and the ROI piece is very interesting. I don't know yet how to crack this and how to put that in the segmentation. There's definitely something in mind. Does that help? Wow. Crowded room, but very shy. No other question? Still 7 minutes. Yeah, there's 2 actually.

Yeah, thank you. Hopefully it's a simple question. How do we engage with the community that you mentioned at the start, the customer success community?

With the Customer Success Network? Yes. So there's a group on LinkedIn that you can join, and at the top of it, there's a link to join the, actually, the Workplace group, which I don't know if you know, but Workplace is going to be decommissioned, so we need to find out what we're going to do. But you can join the LinkedIn group. We have about 20,000 or 25,000 members at the moment, and you're going to see all of the things around events we're organizing. There's a conference in September in Dublin as well, so a few things in there. And you can honestly, if you want to connect with other CS people, just, you know, connect with them on LinkedIn. They love to talk. So if you ask for anything, CS people are always going to answer.

Do it. Amazing. Thank you.

Great session. Thank you. I want to know your thoughts around having the digital customer success team creating content versus having, you know, product marketing or marketing or customer education doing that kind of work.

Yes, so actually right now we have lots of people creating content, whether it's products, marketing, we have a product documentation team, we have an enablement team, and then, you know, the more it grows, the, the more complicated it gets, right? I actually don't have anyone looking at digital CSM per se, right? I have CSM from Scaled, unnamed. Okay. Now I have someone, as I said, someone I've appointed to lead DCS. She's leading the scaled and digital motion in a way, and I want indeed this team to at least aggregate, consolidate the content to make it available to customers. Ultimately, I'd love to create a customer hub. We're working on that right now, which is a central place for customers to go and find the right assets and resources, again, for them to feel empowered, to feel enabled. Enabled. So whether it's an onboarding checklist, whether it's articles about how to troubleshoot themselves, about having access to a community of peers, about having access to the learning platform. So everything in one place instead of having fragmented content everywhere, everywhere. You can look at Gong, Miro, Personio, Qualtrics. They have fantastic hub for customer success that you can look at. It's very inspiring as well, the way they've done it. Again, really onto self-serve and creating content from the start. I'm going to repeat it again. Create content from the start. Does that help?

Yeah.

OK, 1, 2, 3. Thank you.

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