You Need Marketing and Customer Success, Now with Duo Security VP of CS + Head of Marketing

And thank you everyone for joining Jeff and I today. We're super excited to talk to all of you. And we gave Jeff and I a moment to have some fond reminiscing about when we were in this stage of growth from Duo's perspective. And it was a nice time of reflection to think about what were some of those lessons learned, what would we do differently going forward? So we're excited to share some of that with all of you. We were also excited for the opportunity to really share the, the journey from a marketing perspective and a customer success perspective. There's lots of different avenues to learn about how to, how to think about sales at these different stages and, and maybe not as many opportunities to talk about the two other legs of that go-to-market three-legged stool. And so today's that opportunity. And so we're going to kick off with Jeff. Sharing a little bit about marketing and how to get started and where to head as you're growing. So, Jeff, I'm going to advance the slides here and do a little intro while I do that. One second. All right, here we go. All right.

Terrific. Hi everyone, my name is Jeff Wyss. I came to Cisco through the $2.35 billion acquisition of Duo Security. At Duo, I was Vice President of Marketing. I joined them in 2014, and we were acquired by Cisco in 2018. And I've been at Cisco ever since and now head up SaaS demand generation for Cisco's security business group. So let's get started here. I'm going to talk a little bit about the marketing pillars And when Lisa and I were talking about this presentation, it was an interesting presentation because we're talking about marketing, which is at the beginning of the journey, and customer success, which is towards the back half of the journey. But we're not really talking about sales, which is in the middle. And, but when we were thinking about it, we thought, well, this still makes a lot of sense because marketing is here to attract new customers while customer customer success is to keep those customers year after year after year. So going back to talking about the pillars, the first pillar of SaaS marketing is velocity. When in doubt, err on the side of velocity and think critically about any decision or tool or process that will slow you down, because your job is to get leads into the sales team's hands as fast as possible so that they create opportunities and make sales. Second marketing pillar is simplicity, and here we basically start with the simplest approach and then build in layers of complexity as needed. Probably our advertising is the most specific example about this. We basically spend 75% of our budget, our marketing budget, on paid search via Google AdWords. And 95% of our spend is across only 3 networks: Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And so we prefer to start small and simple, find something that works, and then focus on optimizing that thing that works. And then the third area is measurable, predictable, and repeatable. Everything we do needs to be measured, and we measure everything. We don't spend money on kind of broader awareness type of advertising or awareness marketing, so you're not going to see a lot of SAS companies advertising on the Super Bowl or sponsoring golf tournaments. All the activities we want to do is to actually drive leads and convert those leads into opportunities for sales. So if we go to the next slide— oh, I do have some builds in there. I wasn't even aware of it. So I want to talk about building teams to accomplish these pillars. And these teams are what I think of the order that you actually hire people. So you really want to hire marketing operations first, and the reason for that is because of the first statement I made about measuring everything, and so you want to make sure your data is clean. You want to make sure you have all the reports in place that marketing operations would create so that you know what's working and what's not working. Second area, which probably would be a little bit of a surprise, is I always think of the next thing you hire is creative and content marketing, and the reason for that is if you're a SaaS company, for instance, that has a trial, that's going to be a great source of leads. Somebody who does a trial is a good prospect for you, but a lot of people don't want to jump into that trial immediately. They may want to do some research. They may want to read some guides on top 10 considerations before purchasing this type of product, et cetera. So you really want to get a pretty good content pool that people would register for to become leads in addition to your trial scenario. So once you've got content, then it's really the demand generation. How are you going to get people to come to the site? How are you going to get them to register for things, etc.? And so typically demand generation for SaaS companies tends to be more digital demand, so it's online advertising, it's social advertising, etc. And then also field marketing, which I have towards the bottom there, will eventually play a very strong role in your demand generation with events, virtual events like the one we're on, etc. And then the fourth area is really public relations, and I'm sure you all know what public relations is, but getting that press validation of the product and the category is extremely important. So we can go to the next slide. So the tips for marketing operations: hire the best, you know, and I think the important thing there at Duo, we were extremely lucky when we hired our marketing operations people. Our marketing operations tool or our marketing automation tool is Marketo. and we were searching for Marketo people, and we actually hired the best in the world. Her name is Kimmy. She is recognized by Marketo as being a Marketo champion, which is typically the top 50 Marketo people in the world, and she was Marketo champion of the year, so she was literally the best. Have them choose the tech stack that they are masters at. You know, you You don't want to say, "Oh, you're a Marketo person and you're awesome Marketo person. Oh, but you're going to have to use Eloqua or some other marketing automation tool." Next is definitely keep your data clean. Nothing hurts you more and it almost becomes impossible to dig out of dirty data, so keep your eye on as clean data as you can have right from the beginning. Measure everything. You know, it's everything from where your leads are coming from, you know, are— how are they converting? How long does it take to be turned into an opportunity? How long does it take for that opportunity to close? And report on the metrics that matter. You know, sometimes it's interesting, like how many people are, are following you on social media. Or it's interesting on how much traffic you get to your website. But the things that really matter are those leads. And are they actually marketing-qualified leads, meaning they have a propensity to buy? And when sales accepts the opportunity and the pipeline, and then what gets closed and won. So those are what I look at as the major metrics that matter. And we can move to the next slide.

You know, I would just say, looking at that list, that concept of clean data really applies to all of your data. So whatever CRM system that you're using, your marketing automation, your CS tools, start good practices right away. My gosh, it takes so much more effort to clean that up later. So don't skimp in that. Be really mindful there. So I know that's a learning on our side as well. So Let's get you to the next slide.

So next slide is some tips for your creative team. Um, one of the things that worked for Duo extremely well was we did the opposite of what our competitors were doing. And so in security, a lot of security companies just like to scare you. It's like, oh, you're going to get breached, and that's why you need our software after you get breached. Or, you know, you'll go to a trade show and the booths have aliens in them or scary clowns. And, you know, typically the colors of the security companies' logos are red. And Duo did just the opposite. We went with a very Zen approach, very much of a help approach. Our colors were green. And the opposite of red in many respects. And so it really worked well for us. It made our brand stand out in a sea of red. All of a sudden, like, what's that green booth doing over there? So demonstrate elegance, simplicity. You know, I think you don't need to overcomplicate. You don't need to have very complex, you know, marketure or architecture drawings that people are never really going to understand. If your product's simple, then make the rest of your marketing very simple, and then next is do the unexpected, and if you go to the next slide, we had something was right under our nose for years before we had realized it, And basically anytime a customer talked to us, they would often use the word love. And really nobody loves security products. But with Duo, they really loved us. And I'd get on an airplane and I'd have a Duo jacket on and somebody come up to me and they're like, "Do you work for Duo?" And I'm like, "Yeah, I work for Duo." And they're like, "We love you guys." And then they have to pull out their phone and show that they have the Duo app on there. Et cetera. So all of a sudden it hit us and we decided, why don't we do a campaign called Most Loved Company in Security? And if you go to the next slide, you'll see that we did this at the RSA conference, which is the biggest security conference there is. On the booth, all we had was the Most Loved Company in Security. And then we had quotes, some of those quotes you saw previously of people, customers saying, "We love Duo." When we first did that, it made me super nervous. I'm like, "But we don't have any product things on the booth." And sure, there were demos and literature, et cetera, but the booth itself really didn't even say what our product was. But it worked like a dream. It was really amazing because people who knew us would come up to us and say, "Yeah, we love you guys." It'd be like, "Great. You want to do a case study with us, or can we do a video of you?" or that type of thing. For people who didn't know us, they would be, "Yeah, tell me why you're the most loved company in security." And you could say, well, take a look at this. And the Duo demo, or at least the initial demo, takes about 5 seconds. And people are like, wait a minute, show me that again. How do you do that? And so it was a great way to get the conversation going. On the next slide.

That was a perfect slide you picked because do you see the next booth over with the big red circle? Oh, the big red— To make that point.

That's true.

Okay, all right, let's go to the next slide.

All right, um, with creative, I always think of content marketing. Um, the, the things that we think about when it comes to content marketing is basically the concept of reduce, reuse, and recycle. And so the, the guide in the upper left-hand corner there. We produce that guide. It's called the Trusted Access Report. We produce it annually and it is one of our biggest pipeline generators we have every year. It's got great data. The press love it. Every year, they're waiting for it to come out so they can write articles on the new data that's in there, It tends to generate over $1 million of pipeline every single year. In fact, our 2018 Trusted Access Report is still generating a huge amount of pipeline for us. And so you don't necessarily need a lot of things. You want a variety of things that's going to address your, your audience and their needs and the type of information they're looking for. But the other secret to success with content marketing is you just want to reuse it and recycle it. So you might have an ebook come out, and then you might do a webinar on the same topic, or you might do a talk at a conference on the same topic. So one piece of content can really serve multiple purpose for you, and you can keep it alive and evergreen. For months, if not years. On the next slide. The true guide of demand generation really is how much pipeline are you building. And so we track, as I said, we track everything. So we know exactly how much pipeline is coming from LinkedIn ads or an ebook on Perimeterless. Easy for me to say. Or what Google's producing for us, or certain webinars, etc. And so we know the exact numbers that these things are doing so that we can actually decide, oh, we'll do that again, or we'll do more of that, or we'll say, oh, that didn't work so great. So we learned a lesson and then we move on to the next thing. On the next slide, public relations. It's always interesting when you're in a company and the CEO starts asking you, "So when are we going to be in the Wall Street Journal?" And it's like, "Well, maybe when we're a publicly held company." Or maybe when we have some earth-shattering news or whatever. And public relations really is about the relationship. And I think the key tips to remember as a marketing person is journalists hate hype. So they, they're not going to love words like the best, the newest, that type of thing. They just want to know what's true news. And what the facts are. They love to have proof, so it's one thing for me as the marketing guy for Duo to say, "Duo is awesome," but what's more important for people to hear is customers speaking on your behalf or facts and statistics or unique research that you're providing to the industry, and when you get that level of credibility, They call it in public relations rapid response. So let's say when Target was breached, all of a sudden the press started coming to Duo to say, you know, to get our response as to what we thought was happening, you know, why it would happen, etc. And so we never were in a position where we would ambulance chase, but the press would actually come to us because we were a trusted source for that type of thing. Then, when we get to the next slide, field marketing. I think sometimes this should be common sense, but I'm surprised how often it doesn't happen, is align your field marketing people with the sales organization. So if you have a sales organization that has East Coast, Central, West Coast, you should have 3 field marketing people that cover those same states, you know, or across countries, etc. You also want to be aligned to whatever verticals are most important in sales. So each of our field marketing people, they have a territory and they have a vertical, so one of them will have the East Coast and will have healthcare, which is a very important vertical for us, and they'll do healthcare on a national level and not just within their territory, or we have another example where it'll be the South Territory or the West Territory and education, So we try to team up a specialty so that they get to know the important people in that specialty, but also support the territorial needs of the sales team. And if we move on, we go to Lisa Paul.

All right, thanks, Jeff. All right, so we talked a little bit about how can you attract customers, how can you build awareness. Then we're going to jump over and we're going to assume that you grabbed all of those leads and turn them into customers. And now we're sitting in post-sales. And the first thing I'm going to say to you is customer success isn't about just post-sales. It's a, it's a mindset that needs to start start with your product organization. You need to be thinking about how do you bring simplicity into how you trial, how you actually use and deploy the product. Customer success needs to be what everyone in your org thinks about. Now, you're going to see a lot of articles that say this, and I mean, it is really true that every role in your organization needs to be thinking about, am I making this easy for the customer? Even those folks, whether they're in accounting or, you know, something that you think of as not customer-facing, has an impact on that customer journey. Think about how a customer— if you're working with a certain organization, the easier it is, the better, because you're not forcing that customer to take that mental energy to figure out how to work with you. So that's really important. Now, Jeff actually mentioned this a little bit on his slide when he talked about making marketing simple. I think he said elegant and simple. That's perfect. Let's reduce the amount of mental energy required to take in that marketing message, to understand how a product— what a product can do for you. So this is really, really important. And if it isn't sort of one of the things that you've started off within your organization to really talk about, Make sure you're bringing this into the conversation. Make sure that when you're thinking about decisions, whether it has to do with a product or any part of that customer journey, and you're making decisions between two options, that you're thinking about what's going to be best for the customer. All right, so I'll set you off with that. Now, yes, these days we call post-sales— we've named our department Customer Success. And so I'm going to share a little bit about how we got started, because we all know there's not a bunch of funding there in the beginning. So, so where do we get started? So one of the things I'd love you all to, to think about is who in your organization is responsible for sales right now? And think about who that person is, or that group of people, or maybe you're just a founder and you're wearing all the hats. Put that face there. And really, the concept I want you to take home today is that If you've got someone who's thinking about sales, even for a little bit of their time, you need someone else who's thinking about success. You need to start thinking about these programs right now. The power of SaaS is keeping those customers, is that recurring revenue. And so you need to put equal focus into thinking about marketing and sales and CS so that you've got a really— this repeatable cycle of customers staying with you. And so if we look at this, you know, I wrote down, pick a person, any, you know, even if it's part-time, have them be the person in the meeting that's saying, hey, let's think about this from a customer perspective. Talk to customers. I don't care what role you're in. Talk to customers. Think about, you know, whatever it is, sort of a niche your product is in. Talk to customers and hear how they talk about their problems in their own words. Now, why this is important for post-sales is that you need to learn their language in order to effectively communicate and put together post-sales programs that really connect with your customers. Now, similarly to what Jeff shared with you, really important to think about those metrics right away. So, and I've got internal metrics and external metrics. And so how I like to think about this is when I'm thinking about the Duo practice is, what are we doing for customers? What's our role? And so we talk a lot about value generation and adoption, and then I think about what's the role of our team for Duo as a business, 'cause we, we play a joint role. And so what are those metrics that I'm gonna ask my peers on the leadership team to hold me accountable for? And so that's really important to set out right away. I've talked to a lot of different peers that maybe don't do this right away, and they're— and if it's an organization that is trying to kind of put CS in at a later point, it's really important for everyone to understand how you're providing value. And then really on this journey, it's about specializing as you grow. You know, bring in some great people that are willing to just jump in and learn along with you. They'll discover areas that they're really focused on or that they're really passionate about, and so how do you harness that? So we'll talk a little bit about that next. Alright, so you're growing. That's awesome, and so where do you head next? And, and this one, you know, maybe isn't something that you, you've heard a lot. Maybe it is. It's not something I've seen in a lot of literature, but where I would really encourage you to start right away is an area that I call customer enablement. And this is thinking about what are those assets, what are those pieces of content that you can surface on your website so that customers can help themselves? How do you train them right from the beginning that they can come to you and they can find answers? Many of us, particularly engineers or other more technical folks, if that's your, your sort of your administrator is that bent, they're, they're, they may find that fun to do it themselves or interesting, but a lot of people want to do it themselves. Now, Jeff talked about, hey, take a piece of marketing content and you can surface it many different ways. I would encourage you here over time, you know, not in the beginning, but think about learning styles. Think about folks that like to learn via YouTube. I know I'm not alone. I'm not the only one that's used YouTube to learn how to do something. And so There are people who like to learn over video. Super. Like, find someone who thinks that would be a fun part-time job and have them do some how-to videos. Think about folks that like to read and, you know, maybe a longer form doc. Or think about folks that really are going to kind of give it a go, but they may have questions and answers. And so how do you, how do you help them with the knowledge base? So what are you doing here and why, you know, why really start here? Well, first of all, going back to that concept, you're training your, your customers to find their answers. A lot of folks like that experience, and we'll talk later, and that's not for everyone, but that's OK. But you're starting there. The other thing that you're doing is that you're building a content repository that you can use not just for your one-to-many or your long tail, but you're going to use that content for— to train your internal folks. So we use a lot of the context on the CSI to train organizations across Duo, our departments, on how to use the product. We want everyone to have that information. And you're also gonna use it for your high-touch customer success programs that you're gonna grow into. So maybe you're gonna staff some CSMs. Maybe you're gonna have some technical folks that they partner with to help customers. All of that content, all that product content that's provided in different learning styles can be reused across all of your practices. So really valuable to think about that right away. So I'll leave you with that. Give some thought to how you can start that, and maybe you start with your product and engineering folks. So I, like Jeff, joined Duo in 2014, and our engineering team had an individual who was a great writer and already started us on this journey. So give some thought to that. All right, so you're going down, you're growing a little bit more, sort of, you know, where, where do you head next? And, you know, one of the questions that, that I get quite frequently is, gosh, you know, how do we feel about charging for customer success? And this is another area where Duo did, we made a pivot and we said, hey, listen, we as a company aren't interested in, in necessarily making a lot of revenue here, but can we cover our costs for CS? And so this gets you in a position where if you are putting out a valuable product, that's really putting great resources in front of the customer to help them get deployed, to be that trusted advisor, to be with them through their subscription, there, if you set this up right, there will be folks that will, that will pay for this. And what you're going to like about this as a CS practitioner is that I don't know about all of you, but it was easier for me to get COGS dollars than it was for OPEX. So OPEX has always been really precious. And so how can I scale my practice? Well, if I'm covering my costs, through providing a valuable product to customers, it's a win for both of us. The other reason that this is really nice for, for SaaS companies in particular is that you can set this up as a subscription. And so you're in, you're driving increased ARR as well. And we know that's really important for evaluation. So just something to think about there, you know, sort of in that $50,000 to $75,000 and And I kind of picked that range because if you get much bigger, then you get in a little pickle with customers and expectations. And, you know, what we did on our side is that we grandfathered folks that we had been giving a CSM and a technical resource, we grandfathered them. And, and then as we grew, then we had another group of folks that were paying. So something to think about. So don't be afraid to think about that. All right. And just a few final thoughts, and then we can jump into Q&A. You know, at this stage of growth, being scrappy is still super important. And that concept of launch and iterate— don't be afraid to put something out there and test it, see how it goes, make sure you've got your metrics so you can measure it. But I think one of the things that, that I know I've really learned over the last few years is have that long-term vision in mind. You can be scrappy and you can take small steps forward, but make sure that they're in the direction of where you want to go from a vision perspective. So if you want to go this way, don't do scrappy projects over here. Still orient your actions toward where you want to head, and, and you'll get there, because this, this is the time of being scrappy and having fun. So with that, That is the, that's sort of final thoughts there, and it's a great time to open it up for questions.

So I'm gonna open it up. Yeah, Lisa, I've got a few that I can hand you here.

Oh, great.

One of them is, "What are Duo's customer success metrics?" Yeah, okay, super.

So a little bit there. So from an internal perspective, so how do we support Duo? So there's going to be some common ones. So GRR, now this is our gross, this is our renewal rate. Now, you know, it's an interesting one because renewal rate really is a team sport because you need to have the right expectations set from the marketing perspective. You need to have a sales team that's selling what's on the bus, not what might be on the bus. And then you've got to have a great customer success practice. And so what are we doing in customer success We're thinking about adoption, and that should translate to GRR. The other thing that we're doing, though, is that particularly with these more subscription-based CS practices, you're in there with the customer, and you have the capability to ask some strategic questions to them to understand where they're going, and possibly understand, is there an upsell here? Is there more use cases that we can solve? And I have found that even though at Duo we've had very much value-based relationship sellers, every once in a while you'll run into someone who's going to be a lot more open with their CS person as opposed to their sales executive, and so there's a little bit of info. Your CS per— your CS folks, again, just like Jeff mentioned, align them regionally. You want really good relationships there so you're actually working as a team with that customer. So GRR, NRR, or net retention rate. And then the other thing that, that you need to think about in your practice and how you measure this is that happy customers will talk to neighbors, will talk to peers in the industry, and they will actually help you win new business. So your CS practice is keeping customers but also driving new ARR. So something to think about. And we also look at case studies and those types of of things. Now, for customers, we're really looking at, are we fulfilling their outcomes? And we've got a variety of measures to do that. So if we're working with you directly, we understand what those outcomes are. If not, we've got great product telemetry that we partnered with our product team to say, what are the core value— the core use cases our product solves, and how do we use data to understand if they are receiving that benefit? and then we use that to guide some of our digital efforts so that we're being really efficient with our long tail. So on the customer side, we do measure NPS and some of these sentiment-type metrics. I would encourage you to maybe not over-rotate on any one of those, but think of those as a, as a set of metrics to look at trends over time. I'll stop there. I can tend to go on and talk about these forever. All right, whatever. What other questions do we have?

I have another one that I'll direct to you.

Oh, wow!

People don't think of Cisco as a SaaS company. They think of it as a networking hardware company. So, so what role does Duo play within Cisco? And what's Cisco's thoughts about software as a service?

Oh, that's awesome. That's a great question. And, you know, very much the journey that Jeff, you, you and I are both on. And so we came into Cisco about 2 and a half years ago now, and Cisco was already on a journey of understanding how to transform into a SaaS organization or more of a SaaS organization. And so in addition to Duo, there's other acquisitions and other products that have been launched. And what's, what's been really, I think, fun for me, and Jeff, I think fun for you as well, is that we've been able to bring a lot of our Duo practices forward. And so Jeff and I are actually both playing a role across Cisco Security now, and there's actually quite a few products within that Cisco Security portfolio that are SaaS products. And so we're helping to bring all of those SaaS motions to support those SaaS products. So whether it's, you know, our Umbrella product or, well, I won't sit here and name drop, but Cisco actually is on a very specific journey of really moving into a SaaS model and has many, many valuable SaaS assets right now. So it's, you know, it's been, really nice to come into an organization and see how much SaaS is already there and the interest of upper leadership, executive leadership, to really making this pivot. Jeff, what are you seeing here? I know you're part of this journey as well.

Yeah, no, I, I'm seeing the same thing. It is really refreshing to see a $50 billion company take a look at little old Duo as this is our future. And so it's exciting. It's one of those things where you just have to admire the executives for the company because it's a new territory for them. And again, for a lot of the Duo people who have moved into bigger and broader roles. It's just created great new challenges and new interesting things to do.

Yeah, yeah, but a real willingness, like a really, a real interest in, in understanding and driving forward. Yeah, so great question. Expect to hear a lot of more things, but there's a lot of SaaS at Cisco already.

Um, this one we can answer, probably both can answer this one. Yeah, um, this one is about, um, going international. When and how did you decide what countries to go into? So I'll talk about it. Again, it all kind of starts with sales. Often you see you're doing great in the US, but your growth opportunities are going to be in new countries, etc. The way we did it at Duo, we were probably What was it? Probably 2 or 3 years after we joined that we looked really seriously at it.

I was afraid you were going to ask that. I thought, oh gosh, what year was that? Yeah, yeah, about that. Yes.

And so, you know, one of the things that I had learned from previous roles— and so I've been in SAS for a while. I had also been with Zendesk, which was another success story in the SaaS world, and what I learned from that was let's take a look at the data first, which is, are we getting trials from other countries even though we're not doing any marketing in those other countries? And the answer is yes. Not only were we getting trials, we were getting customers even though we didn't really have anybody in those countries, countries. Second criteria is which ones are easier for us to do, and we decided English-friendly. So obviously UK and Ireland, the Nordics are usually pretty English-friendly, uh, Benelux is English-friendly. So let's start with those countries where we don't have to initially translate the product We don't have to translate the website. We don't have to translate our Google Ads. And those took us for many years and were really interesting to us. And we still got sales in places where we didn't even have the language skills, like initially in Germany. And now we're exploring Asia Pacific. Again, there's sort of that English-friendly rule. So there's the Australia, New Zealand, taking a look at Malaysia and Singapore. Once you get to Japan, it's a whole different world. Your, your product has to be translated, your content has to be translated, etc. So it's— that's a longer-term vision for us, etc. So, but, but that worked out really well for us. And, but again, customer success is so important to this equation. Lisa, how did you start thinking about time zones and getting people in contact, etc.?

It's, it's, it's been an interesting journey. So similar, you know, Jeff mentioned, you know, we're thinking about what are those markets that we can go into, maybe a lower bar of investment, that's kind of put our toe out there. But we did need to think about, hey, we need to make sure we've got support coverage for those hours. We need to make sure that we've got, you know, folks there from our more high-touch practices. And, you know, it was— I would say as a whole for Duo, we took an approach to say, we want these folks to feel part of the Duo culture, and we want to build really a cross-functional team in the location so that they, they feel like they have a community and they're not, say, one-off people in different places. And so not only did sales go, but CS went, you know, we landed people from different disciplines there. And, and that helped us be scrappy because you can have a technical support person maybe they've got a pinch, pinch hit on as an SE to answer some technical questions every once in a while, or vice versa. And so there were some nice synergies there to help us sort of be scrappy in the beginning. So Europe first and kind of figured out what, what made sense there. And then as Jeff mentioned, APJC, so eventually stood up some support operations there. Now we've got Success, really that follow the sun, but all of these are things that we grew into and we thought about them as we were setting up practices, say, in Europe. It made us think through how do we stay bonded as a team, what time of day do we do things, how do we make sure that we can connect as one, one team sort of powering down for the night and the other team's powering up, how do we share information. And I think there's some really valuable lessons learned through that first sort of creation of a new geographic location that we then brought to APJC. And so it's— there's a cultural element here I'd encourage you all to think about, you know, how do you, how do you bring that forward as well? And then just culturally, you know, how do you, how do you make sure that you're educating yourself on different cultures and what interaction styles, and they're just thinking about how to make your employees really comfortable and doing what you have to do there to make sure that you may need to bend your culture in some ways for folks in certain countries to feel comfortable.

Great. Another customer success question. If you were interviewing your first customer success employee, what would be your top questions to ask?

Well, maybe we could talk about— well, let me, let me think about that a little bit. So I'm going to look for, I'm going to look for things like empathy. I'm going to look for folks that are really good listeners that are going to give the customer, get them talking. Again, it's a language thing. It's an understanding what makes them tick because you're trying to develop. And this is for sort of that high-touch CSM. You're trying to develop a connection. You're trying to develop trust. And trust is a really interesting word, particularly in the security space. It's important all of the time. And it, but it's, it's something in security where I'm looking for someone who can form a relationship and build trust and partnership. So how do we show up so that we are coming as, I'm an additional team member for you. I'm not a vendor. So we're always looking for a partnership model, and so can you bring that, can you bring that forward? I mean, those are some of the competencies, sort of great communication skills, clarity. How do you bring simplicity? And, um, I was— I had another one in the back of my mind, but I'm sure it'll come back to me. But those are some of the core things. And then in the early days, there's really that scrappiness because My first CSM, I remember, you know, he did renewals, he did like, we just did everything together. And so you also have to have someone who's willing to get their hands dirty and work at a strategic level. So you're, those first few hires are going to be important because you're going to be learning along the way and you need someone who can kind of go with you and morph as you go.

Great. Let's see, here's a question about outbound. So do you have tips on how to improve outbound conversion? It's interesting, a lot of SaaS companies often have very strong inbound motion. Certainly was the case with Zendesk, certainly the case with Duo, that when we had trials and we started doing Google AdWords, we had more leads to deal with than salespeople or account development reps to handle. So for a couple of years, it was almost a pure inbound motion. But then all of a sudden, and we thought, oh, SMB is going to love us. We're here to democratize security and make it available to everybody and that type of stuff. And all of a sudden, $50,000 deals started coming in, and then million-dollar deals started coming in, and multi-million dollars. And it was sort of like, wow, they didn't just come in by doing a 30-day trial. They truly needed a different sales motion. And so we realized our, our ADR team, which sort of pre-qualifies the lead, We had a whole bunch of people who knew how to do inbound, but they didn't know how to do outbound, and so we hired people who knew how to find the right person in an organization that you think is perfect for Duo. Now, there's some amazing technology that you can actually know what organizations' intent to purchase software like yours. An example of that is Sixth Sense. And so we will go to Sixth Sense and we'll say, oh, that's interesting. This Fortune 500 company is in the market for two-factor authentication. We should have an outbound rep get the— talk to them. So I think combination of getting a focus there, with the right people. And if you can afford the right tools, there's some amazing technology out there.

Jeff, do you remember when— I mean, we started with inbound, but I can't remember what the pivot was where we're like, now's the time to do outbound. Was it kind of seeing more enterprise interest and feeling like, hey, they're gonna need more— they're expecting something different there?

Yeah, I think it was, you know, as we started getting enterprise customers or inquiries that we weren't even expecting. It's sort of like, hey, we're not, you know, just SMB anymore. Enterprises want us too. So let's find more of those because one multimillion dollar deal takes a lot of $20,000 deals to make up for those.

Exactly, exactly.

Um, do we have time for one more?

I think we do. Okay, one more would be great. Okay, thanks, Caitlin. I'm like, I think we do.

So, um, this is an interesting question for you, Lisa. It's like, what's your experience on separating areas of responsibility between sales and customer success when you're repeatedly selling to the same SaaS customer?

Okay, so sort of what, what's the role of each?

Yes.

Yes. Okay, so, you know, this is, uh, I know when I first came into this role, there was a lot of conversation around, you know, do you share, um, do you put your CS folks on a comp plan. Like, who's responsible for expansion? And we as an organization, or me in particular, feels that any— I want my CS practice— this is a classic work from home moment. Let me just pause here and share that I live in the Stone Ages and still have a home phone that is now ringing and I don't know how to turn it off. So lovely. All right, it stopped ringing now, so perfect. So my philosophy with CS is that I do not I feel personally that if a CS person gets involved in negotiating money, negotiating pricing, that we're jeopardizing that relationship, that it gets, it gets a little muddy. And so what I, what we have set up here at Duo is that while we talk to customers about their strategic objectives, then we understand, oh, is there potentially some sort of upsell and we take the customer through the first part of, oh, hey, let me show you how we can do that in the product and kind of help them understand. We're going to bring that sales partner back in. So what I like to see is that partnership, because as I mentioned earlier, sometimes your CS person hears a different story than your salesperson. And so if behind the scenes you formed a really great relationship there, there's a really nice synergy that, that we can get. And then, you know, it's, it's, it's both ways. Sometimes we in CS get into an account, maybe we lose a stakeholder, maybe our salesperson knows someone else. You know, you're working as a team. So I really like to see the teaming. I like to see the salesperson responsible for negotiation. And, and that's, that's how I like to see that relationship divided. And I think it served us really well. Coordination. Yes.

Thank you, everyone. This isn't a question, but I have to read it out loud anyway. Davis wrote, "Amazing presentation." So thank you. Thank you.

Yes, this was super fun for us. We're really excited for all of you out there and, you know, would love to hear your, your win stories and carry forward and just have fun with it. So I know, I know we did.

So Alright, thank you, Lisa and Jeff. Davis has been a, a long-standing one in all of us. He's, he's really going for the long haul here, so we appreciate it, and we appreciate your time, Lisa and Jeff. It's been great, and you guys really are insightful with your stuff, and so we appreciate it. We really do. Davis, I hope to see you in the next one, and I hope to see you guys, Jeff and Lisa, in another one as well. We've got a few more sessions for the day. Thank you again, guys.