Secrets to Turbo Charging Sales in 2021 with Keyfactor, Checkout.com Contentstack & Insight Partners

Uh, the secrets to turbocharging sales in 2021. Um, like I said before, Pablo Dominguez, uh, with Insight. We are a venture capital private equity firm that focuses on B2B and B2C, uh, software scale-ups and, uh, have a really awesome lineup of hit panelists today. Uh, first up, uh, as introductions, uh, Gordana Vukovic, G, why don't you introduce yourself? And as you talk about yourself, your role, the company, and what they all do, I would love you to also share what did you want to be when you grew up, and did you ever think you'd have a career in sales?

What a great question. Hi everybody, this is Gordana Vukovic at DoGo by G. I am the Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Partnerships here at Contentstack. We are a modern content management system. What I wanted to be when I grew up was actually, I wanted to teach people in third world countries how to sustain themselves, how to make money, basically. So absolutely not planned to be in sales whatsoever. And took a little bit longer route there too, because I started as a software engineer first. Different story. But nonetheless, I'm here today in sales and really enjoying it and actually found that I kind of combined my passion for diplomacy and psychology and technology in actually in this sales job. So it did all come together, but not planned at all.

Awesome. Thank you. Next up, Brooke from Checkout.com.

So I am head of sales operations at Checkout. We are based here in London. So I'm dialing in from dark gray rainy London right now. But I hail from the San Francisco Bay Area. And what I want to be when I grow up, I knew I wanted to work in Silicon Valley because growing up, that's all you read about. I figured I'd be in sales, which is how I started my career, and nearly everyone in my family is in sales. And then decided I wanted to get into kind of the nerdy side of sales. So that's the sales ops side, like how do you optimize, make things better. So So I kind of ended up in a roundabout way where I thought I was going to be, but it's fun nonetheless.

So that's awesome. And Ellen, what about you from Keyfactor?

Hey everybody, Ellen Kinley. I'm the Chief Transformation Officer at Keyfactor. We're a cybersecurity company centered on device identity and cryptography. So whether virtual or onsite, we're focused on keeping your devices secured across your organization. And so I'm similar to Brooke. I like the nerdy math side. My background is in operations, but when growing up, I wanted to be a meteorologist. Loved weather and I still do, but I wasn't great at the part of science that got a little bit squeamish. So I pivoted and ended up in operations.

That's awesome. Hopefully your forecasting is better than the meteorologist.

I think it is.

Like the only job where you can be wrong every day and not lose your job.

Right, yeah.

Well, awesome. Thank you. So we got an awesome session coming up here. And one thing we wanted to do first is recap back to 2020, right? So before we talk about what these three leaders have to share in terms of how to turbocharge, uh, for next year, I wanted to give you a big recap. And we pulled some data from McKinsey, from Iconiq, from the Alexander Group, and here's what we're seeing, right? And I think everybody— this resonates with basically everybody. So, um, as we know, COVID hit globally, right? Sort of the first global event to impact basically every theater versus sometimes we have events that impact Europe, the US, Latin America, APAC, etc. Everything's basically shifted to digital, right? The majority have shifted to digital. There has been an ability to do some selling recently, but that seems to be changing now given that COVID's spiking again. And when we poll people even within our portfolio, but based on the data that we're collecting, not everybody feels that the digital model or selling remote is necessarily as effective as sort of being in front of customers, right? But we've seen a lot of more focus on enablement, on training, on technology to really enable people and let them know how to sell more effectively. And I think also prospects and customers are getting used and adjusting to having sales reps to reach out to them in a different way. The impact, though, has been very different, right? And so you're gonna hear from obviously 3 leaders here in very different businesses, and I'm sure everybody else that's listening in comes from different, verticals, et cetera, you can see here that, you know, in Q2 when COVID first hit, the direct-to-consumer and the e-commerce sector really wasn't hit that hard. Why? 'Cause everybody was at home. Digital sales sort of spiked through the roof if you were purchasing online, right? Versus other sectors, more front office solutions, when companies are thinking, do I really need to spend money on this now? I don't know how this is gonna impact me, saw less growth in Q2, right? So there's really, a pretty wide distribution in terms of what we're seeing in terms of the verticals that are doing well and that are not doing well. And one interesting fact, the last point here is the majority of companies, about 80% across, you know, what the Alexander Group saw here was there was a change to compensation plans, to quotas, right? Obviously, as reps are not able to perform or aren't hitting their number, they're not able to make money. And so as we know, sales reps, very important to keep them motivated. So whether you reduce quotas, adjusted quotas, reset quotas and gave different targets, or just adjust your compensation plan, the majority of companies did do something. Specific to the Insight portfolio, so we have 220 companies, I think we saw about 60% of our companies actually take action. Again, because some verticals are doing well, some verticals are not. And regardless whether you're in a company that actually did very well or not in 2020, we all experienced change, right? Whether it was good change or bad change. And so really what we wanna share today is, as you think about 2021, what are some of those things that you can do to make sure that you hit the ground running, that you can get your sales engine going? And so while these aren't the panacea to everybody's ills, I think you'll hear from 3 different companies with different go-to-market models and very experienced leaders who have some awesome ideas on how you can scale that. So let's go to topic number 1. Very interesting here, since we were just talking about verticals that can do well or not, right? One of the things the team came back with here is how to pinpoint high-growth verticals. So, Ji, let's start with you and talk about what you guys are doing at Contentstack.

Yeah, for sure. So this is, I mean, for us really about the account prioritization, right? This year, things have changed, and prior to COVID, we all knew which verticals perform well. We aligned our accounts, territories, go-to-markets to those trends, right? And things change almost overnight, right? So we had to pivot, we had to redo some of the territory planning kind of midstream. And as soon as we did that, things kind of changed again, and we saw that some of the accounts and verticals have started to come back and some recovery. We had saw some new verticals that emerged and so on. So what I really learned this year is just to be more agile and more observant of this process, especially as we're preparing into the next fiscal year, I'm not only relying on past data, even the data from last summer. I'm looking at the now. I'm looking at what are the trends now, what is going on now, and establishing that as the starting point. Frankly, all along in the back of my mind, I am preparing for another change. And luckily, I think the other thing I've learned this year is to make that change and make it quickly with the team. And that's what I'll be preparing them for next year as well.

That's awesome. Where, where are you getting data from to tell you which verticals are doing well or where to focus and not to focus?

So a lot of it is from our own data. We use also Demandbase and kind of track the surges. We use StackTarget as well. And like I said, we are kind of following what's happening in our pipeline, honestly, and seeing kind of what's, what's, what is surging there and relying on that information too.

Awesome. Ellen, what about you all at KeyFactor?

Yeah, so I think Ji said it best. It's really all about putting time and effort into rethinking your target account identification, that prioritization. Your traditional ideal customer profile might look a little different now, so you want to apply a combination of like the firmographic objective data points, like, you know, even mapping to stock tickers in your Salesforce, little tricks like that. You want to look at that firmographic, but also subjective feedback based on your sales intelligence experience. Experience by industry that your sales team is having. I always like to look at, when you look at verticals, it's really about two questions. So what is the likelihood that they're going to buy a solution like mine? And what is their spend potential for a solution like mine? So if you're pinpointing the correct verticals that can play and answer well to both of those questions, you're pointing your sales team in the right direction.

That's awesome. A question that might come up, um, how do you reallocate your resources to a specific vertical, right? So vertical X isn't doing well and you're realizing that vertical Y is doing phenomenal, do I need to go hire new people? Do I just train them real quickly? Do I align with marketing on like playbooks? Like, how do you all think about that?

So I can, I can take it from, from my perspective, which is we, I don't have actually yet kind of specialized vertical teams, so it's been a little bit easier, I think, to go across team, but it certainly does take the realignment with marketing. It does take looking at the messaging and seeing, especially for the new emerging that we have seen, like in education, online education, right, entertainment and so on. Aligning that quickly with marketing has been key.

Got it.

Awesome.

Cool.

All right, let's go to the second question. This one was around focus prospects on compelling events, right? Obviously, the environment that we're in, we know, has slowed deals down. Right? We know time kills all deals, but luckily because of what's going on, deals seem to be pushing out but not necessarily dying, right? So how do you all think about getting me to buy or think about like, I should do this now versus waiting later when there's so much uncertainty in the market? And obviously that's improved right over the summer and the fall, but now as we go into the winter months, how do you think about that? Brooke, let's start with you.

Yeah. So, um, Checkout is— so we are a payment processor. We help companies, or we facilitate taking payments online. And so for us, COVID had a— it was a double-edged sword for us. There were merchants such as travel, the travel industry, that obviously had a massive decline in the amount of payments they were taking online. And then we saw a huge uptick in other industries such as fintech, entertainment, like the likes of Netflix type of companies, as well as gaming. If everyone's probably read that gaming has done, had a huge increase this year. So we had to do a quick pivot as far as what were the industries that we were going to focus on. And as other companies were slowing down in the summer months, Checkout was really continuing to go full steam ahead. So for us, it was there was no taking our foot off the pedal this year. We went into March or April where, you know, we weren't accelerating hiring, but for those, everyone that we had on board at checkout, it was, it was full steam ahead. There was no slow days or taking the day, ending the day at 4. There's a lot of, there's a huge opportunity for us to, you know, capture a growing market. And there were some competitors of ours that either were you know, shut down for regulatory reasons or such that we really wanted to take advantage of capturing that market share. So we now, you know, Singles Day has passed and Black Friday has passed. We're in a very slow period for our business. But the, for us earlier in the year has been, we were going like gangbusters just because we needed to capture the momentum that was being driven by COVID.

That's awesome. Alan, what about you all?

Yeah, in 2020, we saw more than ever deals losing to the reason of no decision or no change. And what that means essentially is that the addressable market gets a little bit smaller because companies are being conservative with their cash, as they should be. But if your offering isn't identified as business critical, there's a mindset with your prospect that it can wait, and you can spend all the time in the world trying to convince them that you are business critical. In a lot of cases, it's just out of your control. So what is in your control is where you spend your time. And so we kind of focused Q1, Q2 timeframe on those prospects that had compelling events. So reasons why they had to make a change. We knew that there was not going to be a no decision. They're competitive deals. So when you have, you know, 10, 12 hours, you know, for the mark, people that like to work really late at night, working hours in a day, you know, you've got to make the best use of that time. So When you're tied to a corporate objective, like a digital transformation, maybe a cloud-first initiative, maybe they're coming out with a new product line, whatever it is, if there's a corporate objective with a timeline, you need to be sure that you win that deal. So that's kind of was our mentality. It's like the ones that are going to make a change, we better win that deal. And we better use all our resources, you know, maybe our executive relationships, even our board relationships in some cases, whatever it takes, we wanted to give them the most cross-functional attention that we could.

No, it's awesome. How do you ensure that a rep doesn't, you know, they hear from the customer like, yeah, I really want this, but just come back to me in 6 months when I've got some more certainty, right? Like, right now budgets are locked. How do you keep that customer warm and not just go, yeah, I'm gonna get this deal, just like, and forget the typical, you know, nurturing that you would do because you feel confident, then a competitor comes in? Like, like, what are you all telling your reps to do?

Well, you want to have scheduled check-in points, and then those are the ones where you want to have like a nice cross-functional process where you've got marketing involved, you got SDRs involved. Also, there's no harm in reaching out to somebody above that person. There's no harm in reaching out to multiple people at the company. So, uh, definitely have those check-in points, but also be talking to everybody, uh, everybody else that could be in the sphere of influence.

Cool.

All right, let's go to the third topic. Um, Whoops. Make it easier for customers to grow with you, right? So obviously, um, a lot of, a lot of potential for making the customer journey very complex, right? With or without COVID. Um, with COVID in the mix and, uh, you know, everybody being remote, there's a whole extra layer of how do I make it as simple as possible for you to do business with me, right? Because I'm more likely, I'm virtual, I'm not gonna get to see you, demos are different, a lot of different elements there. Ji, would love your thoughts on this in terms of what did Contentstack do to help the customer buyer journey here?

Yeah, I mean, certainly, you know, when COVID hit, I've kind of seen our market, and by that I mean the software market, software business, really responding rather quickly with kind of discounting measures, free offerings, and getting creative there. Personally, I'm actually not a fan of either because it's very hard to recover from those. But the reality is, is that our customers and prospects, right, their financial outcomes have changed unpredictably. I have seen more rigor around considerations for new investments. And I'm personally always looking to speed things up, to speed the process. So what we did is recently, actually, and kind of with the plan of going into the next fiscal year, we really decided to lower the barrier to entry by, you know, packaging kind of what we call a start tier. And really with the intent to making it easy to start for our customers, also looking to remove a lot of red tape that goes on, especially with large decisions. And of course the product, you know, needs to be pretty sticky for this to work and, you know, churn should be manageable. But for us, by doing this, what we've really started to see is that customers are making decisions faster. They are signing on now versus later or never. And you mentioned, right, time is never on our side. And paper process, we're able to get it actually simpler and faster because frankly, for the lower, you know, kind of tiers, we're not, you know, entertaining a lot of back and forth and so on. So it has been Showing really good results so far, and so we're planning to continue that into the next year.

Awesome. Brooke, what about you all at Checkout?

Yeah, so we've actually embarked on a project this year where we're focusing on what do we want the merchant experience to be in 5 years from now, and then working backwards from that. So we've done a bit of vision boarding of like, what would, what would an experience look like where a merchant can reach out to Checkout, be onboarded, that sort of thing. And we've been working backwards from there and then kind of chunking out, okay, so what, what would it look like in FY21 for us to improve that merchant experience? And a lot of what we're focused on is, as the volumes of merchants are increasing that we're onboarding, investing in systems and process to make it an incredibly frictionless experience for our merchants. So for us, it's getting a merchant approved, making sure that they meet all of the compliance requirements, making sure that they meet all of the scheme requirements. And how do we do that in a way where it's, you know, a couple clicks, they can fill out a form, we can get them approved very quickly, get them up and running and processing quickly. So we have a lot of KPIs around this that we're focused on, where we have SLAs for different departments, KPIs that we're built, we're working towards. So for us, it's, you know, what would it look like if we were to 10x the volume on something, and we're stress testing every function of the, um, the company, which is if we were to 10x the way— excuse me, excuse me— 10x the way we're doing things today, would it continue to work? And, you know, when we identify that it's not going to work, all right, let's get moving, we got to fix it. So, right, yeah.

So follow-up for both of you. So I'm, you know, I'm running sales somewhere and, um, I'm thinking this sounds great, how do I How do I know if my customers, you know, like, are you guys collecting information via CSAT, NPS? Did you do customer journey mapping to understand where those pain points are? Or like, what, like, what, like, what should I be doing to figure out, is the customer journey not as optimal as it should be? And how do I, you know, simplify it?

Yeah, so I've been looking at it from a touchpoints perspective. So how many different touchpoints does a merchant have to go through with checkout, whether it's via an online application or via email, offline, that sort of thing. How many total touchpoints is it? And how do we get this down to essentially, you know, single-digit numbers, as frictionless as possible? We do want to roll out— we don't do a continual NPS, but it's something definitely on the roadmap for next year. It's more— I often— as we're all consumers of purchasing things online, and so now we're in the inverse relationship where people are trying to sign up with checkout online, you know, how do you optimize that journey? And some of it's just, you know, how does it feel as a— when we're in consumers and making sure it's the same for our merchants, which is a good experience.

Got it. And then, Jean, another follow-up for you, um, because you mentioned discounting before. So a lot of prospects might be, you know, they have leverage, right? You want me to buy now, give me an extra 5 points, 10 points of discount. At what point do you not make this sale, right? Because you want to ensure your product is perceived to have value, or does it depend? And sometimes a dollar is better than no dollar at all, right? Like, what are your thoughts there?

Yes, so I mean, I am a firm believer of really being comfortable to walk away from deals. I think that it does come back to, you know, from the very, very beginning, right? How you got to that conversation to begin with, right? If you haven't had an opportunity or you haven't done a good job in really demonstrating the value, then that's gonna be a very real conversation and very real opportunity for a customer. For us, we really do focus a lot on that customer journey. We're a little bit different, not so much about, you know, signing up and using, but just the interaction with customers from the beginning. So when we do get to that, you know, point of negotiation, the value is there. And that's really what I stress with our team. And like I said before, discounts, I think, are very tough to recover. And you're trying to renew, you know, contracts. And pretty much no matter what you said in the language, if there was discount before, people would want it again. So I actually look to get more creative so that it benefits both sides. I said upfront, we actually haven't been doing a lot of discount. We're also in a digital space powering digital experiences, so that has helped us, right? With COVID kind of being the right place, right time. But I have done things more like free months versus a discount. So I'm really, for me, I'm personally really focused on keeping our pricing where it is and keeping it stable and so on. But also being creative, right? Because there are times you need to be creative.

Yeah, no, I think you said it earlier, like, it sets— it'll set really bad precedent, right? If you start to discount excessively and then we come out of this and you— the market's like, oh no, I thought it was 70 cents off the dollar because that's what you've been offering, right? Versus, like, I like, I like sticking to your guns, right? Like, this is the value, this is the product that I have for you, and I'm willing to walk away. It's funny, sometimes when you walk away from a prospect, they'll still buy because then they realize, okay, this is like real, right? It's not— I'm not getting discounted heavily. So Awesome. Let's go to number 4. You know, and an insight, the majority of our companies have some sort of channel model, right? They're leveraging channel partners to help them sell. And this is another, you know, lever that companies have to reach the market, to get broader lift here. So Ellen, would love your thoughts here in terms of how do you strengthen that existing partnership, or when should you think about, hey, Should I be leveraging channel partners to, to help me sell?

Oh yeah, a key factor. Most of our customers are large companies, they're in the Fortune 2000, and so for us, the channel strategy is hugely important. And just in general, even if smaller companies, you know, your channel partners are the ones who have the ear to the ground at your most strategic accounts. So they're the ones that are going to know who's gone on budget cuts, freezes, what the corporate objectives are for 2021. How your offering might map to it. So I think now is really the time to get tighter with partners on a granular level, not just like, I have a channel team and we have paperwork in place and they're going to give us deal registrations. You want your sales reps to be talking to the channel sales reps. You want them to go through account mapping exercises. Here's my most strategic accounts. Who do you know? What's the org chart look like there? What are their objectives? How can we work together? You really want those teams to have relationships. And when you think about like ways that partners bring value to your deals, You've really got to sell that to your team too, because sometimes a channel margin is coming off their quota or coming out of their paycheck. So you got to make sure that your team believes that a partner is bringing value. And the way we think they bring value is, you know, through people, more relationships, through deals, like, you know, net new deals, and through paperwork, maybe they're going to help you through procurement. So you've got to make sure that your sales team really understands the value that the partner is going to bring, and they want to engage partners proactively.

Awesome.

Thanks.

Ji, back to you.

Yes.

So I think Ellen said it really well. And for us, this is actually an area where I invested a lot, probably the most this year, given what we do, that we're a content system. We have on one side service partners that are typically implementing, you know, web or mobile or, you know, other applications using our products. But we also— we're an API-first kind of microservices approach to the architecture. So by default, we are meant to integrate with a lot of other surrounding kind of market tech technology. So I also have a tech partner. So I have a service and a tech partner on both sides. And they're equally important. And frankly, I think now, and this year, and beyond, more than ever, we really need to kind of bond together and to amplify our reach. And because I think we're still gonna continue to deal with uncertainty and fluctuation. And what I have actually found really hard kind of overall in monetizing on these relationships and making sure that, as Ellen said, they're not just a database of contacts, and really on both sides, is really mapping and kind of knowing where in the field connections should be made. Typically, this has been done with a very manual process of spreadsheets and meetings and, you know, let's look at our accounts, you know, doing account mapping. But frankly, the moment that you download something from your CRM, it's already outdated. So one thing that we did differently this year is we started using Crossbeam, and there are probably a lot of other technologies like it, that actually connects our CRM to our partner CRM and really It's looking for matches of accounts and reps. So it doesn't really expose any other data. I would never advocate exposing your CRM data to anybody else, but it really just focuses on the account name and the rep, which I think is pretty— it's okay, at least by me. And what we have seen with this is I really have seen enormous engagement. So my engagement has almost doubled in the field. With my direct reps and partners, and that has certainly almost doubled the pipeline as a result. And not only kind of looking to amplify, you know, our reach through partners, but I was looking to actually, you know, amplify my reach internally and use more of my, you know, direct field team with partners instead of just relying on the partner team to you know, to get those, um, that the broader, you know, broader, um, outreach and pipeline and revenue from that.

Cool. Yeah, quick comment on the, on the panelists. I think not everybody can see that, uh, co-sell.io is another one, uh, that people can look at to connect the partner ecosystem. Yeah, and just to thread the needle there, I know before we talked about verticals, right? So if you're leveraging a channel, I think it's also a great way if you've got great relationships with whether it's the VARS or SIs, SPs, they can give you insights into where they're seeing slowdown or pickup, right, because they're touching a lot of different things. So having that unified strategy, I think, is, is very helpful. Awesome, thank you. And our last point, obviously, with everybody being remote predominantly, driving productivity in the field is like monumental and important, right? And I'm sure there's hundreds, if not thousands, of tools that everybody's using to improve your go-to-market tech stack, whether it's for internal purposes, external, etc. But yeah, I would love your thoughts on anything specifically that you've been doing to either optimize process or invest in technology to make it easier for your teams to sell. Brooke, let's see what's going on at Checkout.

Yeah, so we, this year is, we've had a theme in the Sales Ops team, which is first it's, um, transparency, accountability, and then scale— scalability. So we've been focusing on Phase 1, which is transparency, which is get a clean Salesforce org where we can run a report at any given day and know what's going on with who are merchants, um, who are existing customers, you know, what's in our pipeline, what's expected to go live that week. And so a lot of it has been around using tools like D&B to enrich accounts, deduping. We use Ring Lead for deduping records, using Traction to be able to help us automatically link the hierarchies of our accounts. So for us, this year has really been about like transparency, what's going on. And then as we're scaling, we've, we've been in the second half of the year, built a queue for sales to be able to submit requests to sales, to the sales ops team, Deal Desk, So we're using Salesforce to be able to track that. And now we're reporting to the business our SLA, you know, are we meeting our SLAs? This is how many cases we've opened and closed, our response time. And then as we're looking to kind of 2x the org in the next year, um, again, really insane growth that keeps sales ops leaders up late at night. Uh, some of the things next year are like a CLM tool, which will greatly improve the merchant experience, a comp tool, because we're going to onboard another 100 or so people in the sales org, you know, in a short period of time. And, um, and then the third area is around merchant enablement. So how do we focus— how do we get our merchants, um, trained on our product in a way where it's self-serve, they have the content they need when they need it, you know, small courses that the merchant can take and eventually with the goal of, you know, having a certification on checkout. So I'm happy— I don't know if you want me to dive into which vendors we're looking at or—

Yeah, that's helpful. Ellen, what about you at Keyfactor?

I mean, I think the tech stack is always last. What I mean by that is it should always support your processes and shouldn't define your process or even worse, your strategy. It's got to really support it. So if there's been any kind of change in process, your tech stack needs to be revamped to support it. You should be very intentional about the way you're setting it up. And, you know, for example, like Brooke is talking about, let's say that you didn't used to have a daily standup with the sales team because you were all there and communicating. Well, now you do. You want to make sure that your tech stack is supporting the data for a report that you want to pull up in that and really drive conversation about the behaviors that's going on. So, I mean, really, you just got to make sure that the tech stack is click by click makes sense for the teams that are doing their day-to-day job. And, you know, that's something that is not COVID-related, right? Like, we should always be doing that. But the, you know, post-pandemic world offers a new opportunity to kind of take a fresh look at the tech stack.

Awesome. And, Ji, let's end with you. What are you looking at for your sales team?

You know, what I have kind of seen this year, and this continues to kind of repeatedly kind of come back at me and and I am probably to blame as well. It's a bit of lack of human component, you know, in all of it. We were on Zoom all day long. We got really good at running meetings, getting— but what I mean by human component, I'm finding that, you know, training is very different because some, you know, in the physical world, you know, you will do the training, you'll do all of that. We have LMS, so that certainly helps. That process, but I'm finding all of those like little moments in the office, etc., where you can just ask somebody and you just, you know, you get the answer and move on, don't really happen. So what we had to do is just— somebody recently told me you have to tell people 7 times in order to remember. So I've kind of been living by that and really remembering. So it's just being more mindful of that actually. And so we've changed how we do training and kind of repetition and through different kind of touch points for the reps. So that's been one thing. The other thing has been also kind of communicating the process. Like, how do you know that somebody that's remote that you kind of, you know, can't really see every day, how do you know that they're getting, you know, and that you are, you know, communicating process enough? So we've implemented Close Plan, I think is in Salesforce, and they just help us actually organize our sales process so that now I do know that across the team, the customer experience same, the process same, and we can track that. And frankly, I've just looked to simplify. So we have in the past kind of been, you know, victims of like, let's just start this spreadsheet and that spreadsheet, and, you know, we're gonna, um, track all of these things in different places. And I really have kind of started bringing everything into CRM, um, for us, and just all the processes and kind of streamlining them for reps just so that they can, um, really focus on the other, um, you know, other things and selling and not be kind of confused about. So yes, it has. I'm constantly being reminded as to how much of those little things of just being in the office and having a side conversation, how much they matter when you're trying to communicate.

No, absolutely. I think we're all missing that. The hallway conversations, the dinner or lunch with teammates, the drink, the discussions that happen, or even at the airport if you're traveling, right?

Yeah.

That interconnectivity is very important. So by the way, this has been awesome. I think you guys have provided a lot of great insights. Just, just to recap for those of you that are listening in, right? So if there's anything you can take away from this, and again, we're not saying that these are the only things you should do, but definitely 5 key things, right? So again, as you think about next fiscal year, definitely make sure you're targeting verticals or putting the right focus on where the growth is coming, right? Obviously some are slowing down more than others and some are growing more. To focus on prospects with compelling events. So back to why should I buy now, right? Third, make sure the customer journey is easy for the person, right? You're not making it overly cumbersome for me not to want to buy. And number 4, and I think we'll talk about this a little bit more right here with the, with the Q&A, because there's some questions coming in on channels. If you're leveraging channels, make sure you strengthen that partnership. And if you're not, start to assess whether you should, right, to give you broader reach. And ultimately, number 5, leverage your tech stack, whether you have a strong tech stack now or you're revitalizing it, huge opportunity to improve the productivity of your commercial teams with that. Hey, well, thank you all very much. I know we're at time. It's been an awesome session. Thank you to Ji, Ellen, and Brooke for all of your insights. And hopefully everybody can leverage our 5 key points here as you think about 2021. It is Q4 for those of you on the calendar fiscal, so hopefully you have an awesome close to December and end 2020 with a bang. And best of luck to everybody in 2021. Thank you very much.