How to Make Your SaaS Indispensable: Criticality & Rarity Talk with Pete Crosby, CEO at Revelesco

Morning everybody. I was a good boy and went to sleep last night, but I got— I woke up in the middle of the night to all sorts of pictures from my team who I think are slightly the worse for wear, but I was, I was well behaved, don't worry. Who went out for dinner or a drink, apart from people that ended up in the pool with Monty last night? Pretty much everyone. So it was just me that— actually, we did go out for dinner, but it was just quite late when I woke up.

I did.

Who can tell me how they chose the restaurant or the café or the bar that they went to here in Tarifa?

Word of mouth.

Word of mouth. Who told you? Ben, who's been here for a day. Okay, Ben, how did you choose? Ben, how did you choose? You walked around and what, you went into the first one?

Went into several.

Okay. That's not very helpful, Ben. And then you told Rich, this is the best one.

I said, this is the place where we're gonna get the best pizza I know.

Okay.

Old school, classic, Neapolitan oven. Trustworthy source.

It was the oven. How did you know it had that oven?

How did I know about that oven? You could see it from the outside.

Oh, that's cool. Anybody else?

Say it again?

Review. Okay, nice. And the reviews weren't from like 2009? The review was up to date? Okay, nice. Trust a COO to have done it properly. Well done. Well done, Jeremy.

2 reviews. 2 reviews.

Oh, there we go. Now it's coming out. Okay, anybody else? Anyone else? How did you choose where you went last night?

Someone told me where to go.

Emily told you? It's organized, yeah. Yeah.

This is—

whenever I go somewhere new, this is always— maybe it's a bit nerdy, but it's always top of my mind. Why is it that I'm going into this place? We went back last night to a place that we'd gone to the night before. The reason we went back is because the chef was holding his daughter while he cooked the food. And he had one of those mixer things that you use to make your soup go smooth. He had one that was like a bazooka. And I looked up at him while he was holding it, and he pointed it at me and could have shot me. So we went back to the same place because we thought, I guess we extrapolated from that, it's a family vibe. In fact, we had a Prosecco with the waitress because she was 40 that day. So we went back because the vibe was family. It seemed to be local people, it seemed to be slightly less tourists. The food was very simple. That's kind of what we wanted. But we went there because it was a family vibe. And the reason I think about this all the time is how do you, on a location like this or like anything, how do you differentiate yourself from everybody else, especially in the restaurant game where you're basically serving dinner?

Food.

Food is a commodity for most of us, at least all of us in this room. It's a commodity, and yet we make choices about where to go. We make emotional attachments about where to go. For me, I was trying to think, what could I do if I was going to open a restaurant in Tarifa? Because Emily, I'm really sorry, but Elizabeth's like fallen in love, apart from the wind, with this place. So like maybe we'll come here more often. So what would I do if I was to open a restaurant here in Tarifa?

What would you do?

But can someone tell me, if they were to open a restaurant in Tenerife— for one of you must have a dream to open a restaurant. Normally in a group of 50, 60 people, they have that, someone has it. What would you do that would mean that you would stand apart from everybody else? That would mean that you were different and you were the most successful? And when Gerry checked his Google reviews, there'd be 200 5-star reviews, not 2.

What—

any ideas? What would you do? Doesn't matter if it's a bad answer. My answer will be bad too. Yes. That's okay. You go first. Oh, how boring! That's an excellent idea. Class. Go on. What about you? So you would localize for tourists. Okay, anyone else? Yes.

Falafel.

Falafel. Okay, like specialism, like only falafel? Yeah.

Nice.

Oh, so you would be the go-to falafel place, and Ben would be saying to Rich, like, if you want a falafel, Erin's place. Good. Let's have one more, one more. Anyone else?

Rotisserie chicken, but just a main, like just chicken.

So you'd niche down. Okay, I did see a hand raised in the middle somewhere, Catherine.

Yeah.

Oh, I love that.

Very cool.

Yeah, so my idea was no better than any of yours. I thought what I think I would do is, seeing that across other more touristy parts of Spain there's been this wave of localism and anti-tourism, I'd want to get ahead of that in case it came to us. So I'd want— I decided I would want to give back a percentage of the profits to the local community, perhaps to particularly influential communities like the elderly people who might be on the councils, perhaps to the kitesurfing community, presumably keep this place going. So I thought about giving a proportion back. And the reason we're all thinking about this is because we want to think about what's mission critical to the people that are going to come and see us and what's rare about what we do. And I'll come on to that in a moment. I just want to show you where this idea of criticality and rarity sits inside the Revelesco ecosystem inside whole revenue strategy. So you can see here in the middle these 4 things I spoke about yesterday. I won't recap those, but you remember those 4 ideas of desirability, clarity, of scalability, and of deliverability, and how they become a virtuous circle the more you focus on them. And then I briefly talked about, well, how would you even think about And so I spoke about how strategy is the starting point and how action tends to come second, or ought to come second. Strategy, design, execution, iteration. But as we dig deeper into strategy, what we can see is there are 3 key elements that we have to consider. The first is buyer value. So, Katherine, well done. You knocked the ball out of the park with your answer because yours was—

Value.

What do buyers actually want? You know, my idea might be terrible. So you understood that you should go out and find out what the truth is. We're not going to talk about buyer value today, particularly. The second is criticality and rarity. I'll come on to that in a moment. And the third is narrative modeling. And we're going to hear from Ben, and possibly Ben and I will have a chat about that afterwards as well, and talk about how to construct A narrative model. But today is about criticality and rarity. And as you can see, it's at the heart of whole revenue strategy. Because without this, you're just another restaurant that has empty tables. You know, when you walk in, they stick you in the window because you're the only people that walked in. And nobody else comes in for the evening. And you wonder why. I wonder why that is. How is it that that one over there is completely full? Have we chosen the wrong place? Criticality and rarity. provides the answer to that. So what's criticality? Criticality is that your buyer, your prospect, cannot survive without that thing that you do. And again, you might remember yesterday I showed you that pyramid with primary, secondary, and tertiary. And we all know that we can't always be like fundamental life source for our customer. A restaurant It's not a fundamental life source, although food is. But nevertheless, we need to demonstrate that we're critical. And so what you can see here is that what is it about you that makes you completely necessary, makes you indispensable? And you might guess, if you know me or if you started to get to know me, that we're going to find a scoring system for this later on so that you can start start to put this into context. Without criticality— without rarity, criticality is a waste of time. And this is why the restaurant example is so interesting. Food is mission critical. Restaurants are not rare in most locations. If you— some of you have come across from the US. For my 50th birthday, we're planning to do the Route 50 across America from Washington across to LA. And on stretches of that road, you drive for miles and miles and miles and miles before you see something. And when you see somewhere to stop and eat, what do you do? Thank God for that. You pull in, and it doesn't matter how scuzzy the place looks. You're going to eat because you're starving, and you're going to fill up with fuel at that station because if you don't, you might run out. Suddenly, that commodity has become rare. I'm going to show you a chart in a moment because these 2 things end up being absolutely in synchronicity. Imagine a chart, criticality going up the left-hand side, rarity going along the bottom. And I'm sure all of you can tell me, because I imagine all of you have had to do board presentations. And when you've done your board presentation, you've had a little chart like this, and you've managed to find a way to put your company in the top right-hand corner. Because in a quadrant, the top right-hand corner is always the best place to be, isn't it? Criticality without rarity is useless. Here is that chart. Let me just quickly walk you through it. At the bottom here, we have nice to have. You will make some sales if you have a nice to have product. Why? Because if you read Crossing the Chasm before we heard from Geoffrey yesterday, you'll remember that there are innovators and early adopters who love jumping on new things. And sometimes those new things take off. And sometimes those new things don't. They look at those things and they're excited by the product. That's okay. It's not going to give you much scale, but it's okay. And at the top, we've got indispensability. Then we've got this rarity line, and over here we have commodity. Petrol is a commodity— gas for the Americans in the audience. But over here, we have uniqueness, the complete opposite. So you can imagine, if you were up here, you would be both critical and rare. In other words, a buyer should say to us, I can't believe I would even manage to survive without this. Yes, please take my money. That's where we should be. Up here we have critical but common. So I gave the petrol example earlier. It's the right example. There might be some small reasons why you look at rarity. Supermarkets, at least in the United Kingdom, like to look at price. So you can get very, very cheap fuel, and to many of us, fuel is just fuel. It's hard to differentiate. They try to do so, but ultimately it's critical but common. Down here we have rare but trivial. Anyone got any ideas what could be in a rare but trivial category? Think about consumer stuff for a moment. Anyone got any thoughts?

Gucci handbags.

Gucci handbags is an excellent Example. Sometimes highly desirable, and there are absolutely marketing strategies to sell Gucci handbags. The rarity is a very important part of that. Ultimately, a handbag doesn't matter at all, yet to some people it's really important. Nevertheless, it's a trivial purchase. And down here we have trivial and common. Anyone got any ideas of a trivial and common purchase? Yeah, for example, Say it again, Jamie.

Just day-to-day stuff.

Yeah, a Bic pen, for example. You find them everywhere. Someone would have given me a pen earlier to write something down. I'll have left it on the floor, and I won't have put a message in the group chat to say, can someone bring my biro back from the theater? Didn't really care that much, but it turns out I should have missed my iPad, because it was me that left it here. So some things are trivial and common. So far, so obvious. Everything that Emily and I have done at Revelesco has been designed to place ourselves up there. So we have decided that we want to do this kind of almost anti-conference. We've decided that we want to bring people to somewhere beautiful. We want to bring people's families together. We've decided that we want to bring the best experts in the world, and we've interviewed the others. 7 specialists on the Revelesco team, but we've interviewed more than 100. So getting strong expertise, trying to find ways to help ourselves get up there. But again, that's all very random thinking about it in that way. So how can you think about it? Now I put together a basic example of this for you, but we're going to move on to some B2B examples in a moment before I walk through the how. So the first of these I put down here is fast fashion. We had the example of Bic pens. But up here, petrol, we've spoken about. Over here, not Gucci handbags, but sports cars. Equally unnecessary, equally fun, equally trivial. And up here— anyone got a better example in the consumer marketplace than Apple laptops? That's the best I've been able to come up with. Once you're in the Apple ecosystem, you want to stay there. Status is important. You almost feel a bit inferior. inferior when you're operating a Windows laptop. By the way, people with Windows laptops feel exactly the same for other reasons. Anyone got a better example than Apple laptops? Harley Street practitioners. Ah, that is a very interesting idea. Yeah, did you all hear that? Harley Street practitioners. For the non-UK people, Harley Street is the center of medical excellence in the UK. It's private healthcare. It's but they are wonderful. Anyone else? Yes, sir.

Gym membership like a third space.

Say again?

Gym membership like a third space.

Yeah, why not? Interesting idea. Thank you. In B2B, I would like examples because it's not easy to think of software that you regard as indispensable and If you take it away, it's difficult to survive without it. I put LinkedIn there because— anyone here ever tried to negotiate with LinkedIn when their team wanted LinkedIn Navigator? Yeah. How did that go?

Not well.

Yeah, disaster. They're not interested because there's no alternative. It's take it or leave it. Even Salesforce, you can say, I don't want to spend that. My friend spent this. And you can get a deal. But you can't get a deal with LinkedIn. At least if someone has, I'd like to understand. Any other examples you can think of? Mission critical, rare. Yeah, not so easy, right? Gartner.

Sorry?

Gartner. Gartner. Gartner, that's an interesting one. Is it mission critical? Well, I think it can be. I've certainly worked with organizations trying to raise their next round who need to be on the Gartner quadrant because of the size that they are. And they know that the funder is going to look at that and ask them why they're not there. Anyone else?

Yeah. Bloomberg do not negotiate. They charge an absolute fortune.

Oh, that's really interesting. What have they succeeded in doing that is both mission-critical and rare?

They have cornered the market. There is no substitute. If you need Bloomberg, you need Bloomberg. You cannot substitute them.

Excellent example. Anyone want to give me an example of— actually, I'm not quite sure what's going to come up next. Let's have a little look. Ah, the bottom right-hand corner. Anyone got an example of something that's unique but nice to have, a bit like the Gucci or the Porsche? Slack.

Slack.

Unique? Top left, Slack. Yeah, someone was even telling me the other day that they use Discord instead of Slack. Has anyone else done that? Yeah, who said yes? Yes. Use Discord at Panzura? No. Okay. But I've been using Discord for consumer stuff, and I get a better experience than I do on Slack. Maybe there's some features that are missing, but yeah, interesting idea. Anyone else? I have one example of my own down here.

Anyone else?

Is that your hand raised, Dennis, or are you just sort of elegantly resting on your— OK. Anyone heard of— anyone heard of Thryvrr? Thryvrr. So I subscribed to this for a couple of years. You know that ring, you know the Oura ring that many of us use? I know there's several of them in the room today. My battery died after about 3 years, and I decided not to But Thriva is one of those blood tests. They now have a needle-free blood test as well, which my daughter will tell you I sat at the kitchen table for about an hour and a half before I pricked my finger. What a loser. Because in the instructions they say it doesn't hurt, and it turns out they were right. It doesn't hurt at all. Thriva now sends you a blood testing needle-free thing, and then you pay to have your testosterone, your thyroid, thyroid, your basic blood stuff, your iron, all of this tested. They get it reviewed by a GP. They send it back to you like, oh my gosh, you need to stop eating cheese. And then you test again a few months later. As it happens, it was very useful for me at first. I did discover that my cholesterol was 9. And we reduced my cheese count, and it came down to about 4.5 within about a month. So who knew that cheese caused cholesterol? Sliver is still a nice to have. I don't pay the subscription anymore. I seem to be okay. I learned a few lessons. But as far as I know, there aren't many things like it. Up here, we talked about Fathom yesterday. I love it. It's great. There's about 100,000 other AI tools. And down here, anyone heard of Convertio? I have it as a Chrome extension. It means you can change weird files that you receive into JPEGs or whatever it is you need for your presentation. It doesn't cost anything. There's loads of services that do it. The reason I use them is because I'm a little bit worried that the others are some dodgy kind of phishing thing. But I never think about this. I have no brand loyalty. I just happen to use it. I don't pay anything. If they have a payment plan, I haven't got anywhere close to even considering the payment plan. They're down here in the bottom left-hand corner, at least for me. And this really is the key, because when we ask ourselves, where should I start? Well, the answer is not here. So let me give you a couple of quick assumptions. First, have you defined the pain well? We talked about that yesterday. Have you understood the risk? We talked about that yesterday. Root cause. What we haven't talked about, and I don't propose to talk about during the course of the summit, is ICP is the casualty. Casualty, some of you might even call it persona. I don't like that language particularly. I think it's a bit old-fashioned. But the idea of casualty for me is the person with the pain or the individual with the pain. Not a job title because we can be 2 CFOs and have very different types of pain. But ICP is particularly important because when we go back to some of those examples, I imagine there is an ICP out there somewhere And a casualty out there somewhere for whom Convertio's pain model is absolutely— one would hope— is absolutely perfect. So ICP and casualty are particularly important. So what we're saying here is, who's got the pain? How risky is it to not address that pain? Remember the heart attack example. What's the root cause? I should be going to the gym more. Who is this for? Because there are very different types of gym user. Maybe— I don't know if you know this guy down here, Dan. But Dan, have you already run like 15 miles this morning?

Not yet.

Not yet. So Dan does a lot of running. I, as you can probably tell, have barely been inside a gym in my life. However, my gym use would be very different to Dan's. I'm not an athlete. The casualty— specifically, what kind of individual are we talking about? Once we've got there— Then we can start to think about, well, how do we change our entire product set and the way we present it to the market into something which is both critical and rare? And the starting point for that is components. Any of you here any good when you— you know when you break— your car breaks down and you pop the hood or the bonnet up on the side of the road and you look underneath? Does anyone actually know what they're looking at when they do that?

No.

Yes, Klaas does. I might have guessed. Anyone else? Klaas is an engineer. Okay. And then another engineer. Okay, so the 2 CTOs in the audience that I know of both know how an engine works. Awesome. So I can just about— unfortunately, I have a son who can take his tractor apart and rebuild it. I have 2 brothers that can do similar things and a father and a father-in-law that can do it.

I can.

And I can just about top up my windscreen washer and put in oil when the orange light comes on, and that's about it. But for Al and for Klaas, one can imagine— you see this on YouTube all the time, don't you? Proper dads helping their sons to strip down an engine. I wish I could have done that with my son, but I don't have that skill. And what you're left with is thousands of components. Some quite useful, big old things like a diesel pump, and others— who knows what the hell that is— little washers. Yet each of them are necessary. You probably all remember the very sad story of the Challenger space shuttle. What you might not remember is the reason the Challenger space shuttle exploded in the first place. It was the perishing of an O-ring, tiny, tiny little washer in one part of the spacecraft which perished caused a chain reaction, and within 6 or 7 seconds of that going up into the air, a number of astronauts were unfortunately killed. It is very important to have the right components installed in the right way. So what I do is strip down the engine. So when we're talking about B2B organization, I'm a little bit more in my safe space than I am when I'm looking under the hood of a vehicle. And there are 4 different elements that I would think about when I'm breaking down my company into its component parts. And the first of those up here is features, the most obvious bit, I guess. Now, we all know, because we were taught this when we learned about selling many, many years ago, we were taught not to be feature salespeople. We were taught to sell the sizzle and not the sausage, and all that kind of stuff. And all of those things are true. Ultimately, your product has features. It has things that it does that people use. Most of them are very, very copyable. Not all, by the way. And some will take an awful lot longer to copy than others. But ultimately, if someone were to give me and one of the 2 CTOs in the room— so perhaps me, Alan Class— take a couple hundred million dollars off a VC, we can probably go and build something. Nevertheless, features are important, so we list them out. Second thing is benefits. What's the difference between a feature and a benefit? Well, a feature might be we have a dashboard, and the benefit might be every morning when I wake up at 5 in the morning and reach for my phone, I'm able to see if there's any red flags in my customer base immediately, and it means I can deal with the stuff at the top of the list. Now that's probably the confluence of an email feature and a dashboard feature and a reporting feature and some real-time dynamic reporting and all sorts of other things. There's maybe a whole bunch of features in there. They combine together to give me a benefit. Integrations. So this might be technical integrations. It might be that we are inside the NetSuite ecosystem, and that means that if you use NetSuite, then it makes it very easy for you to buy our product. But it could be other types of partnership. Emily and I have spent, gosh, 10 years now building partnerships, ecosystems in each of the companies that we've worked in. Why do you do that? Because it makes it easier for people to buy from you. It also makes you different from others. So there are all sorts of things that can come under the banner of integration. And then finally, services. Now, there was a trend a long time ago for software businesses to not want to offer a service at all. I'll give you the software. Salesforce, I guess, is still a bit like that today. We give you the software, off you go, like, see you later. But there are many organizations, some in this room, where their customer success team is populated by psychologists or people with legal expertise or people that were previously financial advisors. Because now these are not a team of people that are just trying to be nice to you. They're not just like a low-level team of customer success reps. These are experts in your industry. They can provide you with expertise. So there are all sorts of services that can arrive inside your organization. So what I'd love us to do now, and don't worry, I'm gonna give you some examples, is can someone put their hand up and tell me one of the features of their product that they are most proud of? Perhaps it's a new feature you've recently added. Released. Let's see. Is that a hand raised or is that a stretch?

Yeah.

That's an extremely accurate feature that nobody else has got. At least no one else has got the same accuracy as you've got.

Nice.

Someone else want to talk to us about a benefit? Of using their product. You might need to give us a one-liner on what your product is at the same time.

Estelle.

Did everybody hear that? This is a— I saw you taking a strip saw yesterday. You got—

Okay.

So I will try to repeat some of that. I had this problem yesterday with this still. I think I'm like cursed on this. I've worked with Arctic Shores for 5 years, and I did a terrible job of introducing using what Arctic Shores did to somebody yesterday, as you know, I should be able to do it backwards. So this was a particular benefit to help the, the candidates who are using ChatGPT and spotting ChatGPT. Someone else got an integration that they can talk about with their product, something that makes it particularly valuable? Has no one thought about this? Oh, Erin has.

Integration with the CRM, so any data that we enrich can go into the customer's CRM.

Nice. And that's something at Revelisco we just started doing, which is pulling Fathom data into Brevo, which is the CRM, quite a basic CRM that we're using, because we're finding that we are having lots and lots of conversations and lots and lots of detail, and that data can instantly get lost. Pulling the Fathom data across, gosh, like, so how did we ever survive before then? What about a service that someone provides? So this is usually additional to your core product.

Yes? So we're an education technology company. And you said that they like clients that are much like our customers. And we always consult with them.

What a brilliant example. So for those of you that didn't hear that, that was about professional services and some, I think, minor customizations that make a really big difference to product adoption in the post-sale phase. So we often find this with— there's been this growing group of organizations that are now deploying professional services as a differentiator because it's very hard to replicate the people people relationships that you build then. And it sounds like you've got some really interesting product adoption just from those like minor color changes, branding, etc. I popped up here just to give you some examples, the optimized dashboard. But an optimized dashboard might give you red flags highlighted immediately for action down here, a partnership with our number one systems integrator, and over here our CST, but all fully accredited advisors. So when I'm doing a workshop with a with an organization, there won't be 4 Post-it notes. There'll probably be hundreds of them, usually on a Miro board, but sometimes on an actual whiteboard. And what we're doing here is just brain dumping everything that we think is important. I think, Rich, when you and I and your team did it together in Telford, we must have had— gosh, I don't know, there's hundreds of flipping Post-it notes everywhere. But that's the whole point, because you're putting them all over the board. But what you're then going to do is start to group them. Because a service, an integration, a feature, a number of benefits can all be combined together. And they can be combined together in such a way that you start to demonstrate criticality and rarity. Let me explain what I mean. Who knows what this is? Gerrit's got his hand raised right now. These are the real questions, aren't they, Con? Oh, no, no, sorry. Sorry, before you— no, no, no, no. You're being way too serious, Gary. I mean, no. What I mean, what is this? You were— sorry, you were in professional mode. I'm still in kind of Tarifa t-shirt mode. Sorry?

It's lifepro.

It's a what?

It's lifepro.

Well, that is a great answer. Anyone else want to give it its technical term? Rather than the sort of alcoholics in the left-hand corner. Anyone know what drink this is?

Old-fashioned.

It looks like an old-fashioned, but I don't— there's no— I mean, I suppose that could be a cherry, and there's definitely no orange on top. No, not an old-fashioned. Sorry?

Negroni.

Well, it is based on a Negroni, yeah. That's a very good answer. Who knows what's in a Negroni? I didn't— well, I'm not gonna ask you to repeat it due to your throat, but Campari was definitely right, and probably the rest of it was right too. Have you noticed, I don't know if you have, but when I ask business questions, there's like one arm raised. When I ask alcohol questions, like now we're talking. This is not a Negroni, by the way, but if it were a Negroni, it would be Campari and sweet vermouth and gin. It's actually an Old Pal, which is my favorite drink, which is basically the same thing except that you take out the gin and you put in rye whiskey, and you take out the sweet vermouth and you put in dry vermouth, and you create this very, very dry drink, which I love. Sometimes you do a bourbon, you call that a Boulevardier. It's 3 ingredients. Very few people, unless you're an Italian grandma, you're very unlikely to drink vermouth neat. Does anyone drink vermouth neat? Oh, over in the corner. OK. I can't see in the light whether you're an Italian grandma or not. All right, I chose the wrong location to say that. Does anyone drink Campari neat then? Go on, someone's going to raise it. Do you drink Campari neat in Spain?

No.

But the beauty of a Negroni, the beauty of an Old Pal, a Boulevardier, and an Old Fashioned, and all the many other great cocktails is they're Just a confluence of different things that were never originally intended to go together, but somehow the bitterness and the sweetness, when you combine it together with the right burst of alcohol, is this really incredibly refreshing drink. And that's value stacking. It's taking things and layering them up together. So what we do when we put all these components onto Post-it notes is we start to try to combine them together. It's one of the 3 hardest things that we do. when we're working with a company, because there's no correct answer. And when there's no correct answer, it's creativity. And creativity, as we know, as Ernest Hemingway would have told you, is sometimes you stare at the flipping screen forever. I might have got this quote wrong, because I know you're a Hemingway expert, Monty, but—

Yes.

I don't think Hemingway actually stared at a screen very much, did he? But you sit there with writer's block doing nothing, and then the next day all the words come spilling out of you, it is really hard to be creative. And this is one of the hardest moments. How do you create that? How do you put that together? And how do you create a classic like a Negroni? Very rarely does a new classic come along. But that's what we do. We start to pull them together into what we call value stacks. So I'm going to give you an example. But before I talk about value stacks, I'm just going to rewind and talk to you about the pain so that this example Makes sense. So Gatekeeper, as I mentioned to you yesterday, very sadly Patrick, who's been a wonderful client of ours, has hurt his back and wasn't able to travel. He actually bought the first tickets right at the start of January. And Devesh, is it you that got lucky and got his VIP luxury suite?

Yeah.

Yeah, you've got a much nicer room than I have. So that's the kind of suite you get when you get a private equity investment. We did this work with Gatekeeper, and we came up with 3 pains. And what was interesting about working with them is when we were in Jersey at Patrick's home doing this thing with the leadership team, we discovered first of all that the casualty that they were selling to probably didn't have a significant enough pain. So I need to give you some context. And you should know that I have all the permission to share what I'm about to share with you. I don't talk about your companies like this, don't worry. So the pain was felt by the CFO, but actually they were selling to the procurement leads and sometimes the legal lead. And what the procurement lead wanted was, I guess, sort of fancy database to keep my contracts in. But the CFO's pain was, I have no idea if I'm going to get an invoice tomorrow for a large sum of money that isn't in our budget that I have no choice but to pay, and that's going to screw our budget over. And now I think of it, I don't have all of those contracts in one place. And whilst that would be useful for a procurement leader, what's useful for me is knowing which liability clauses we're signed up for and if any of them are in conflict with one another. And if you added all those liability clauses up, clauses together and we had a problem, do they add up to more than the value of the company? I don't even know that. And what happens if we're not compliant with something in one of the jurisdictions in which we operate? How are we going to behave then? That's a challenge too. So suddenly I'm worried about my job. Now I'm worried that my fiduciary responsibilities might be compromised. This feels urgent. And so the team moved toward the office of the CFO as the purchasing Even though, of course, the procurement and legal teams were quite likely to be regular users of the product. What pain did that CFO have? I'm flying blind. I don't know what is happening here. I am in the fog in the airplane, and I really hope there isn't a mountain coming up. I can't control things. Because I'm flying blind, I don't know what's going on. I know we're bleeding cash as renewals are missed and negotiated savings are not realized. And then finally, I can't comply. I know compliance is an outcome of visibility, and I know it's an outcome of control, and I'm frustrated at the risk we're facing, but what am I going to do? I certainly can't comply without the first 2. These were the 3 pains. Now remember when we're talking about pain, particularly when we're developing a new product, Sometimes we're finding hidden pain. Sometimes we're finding pain that they didn't quite know that they had until you pointed it out. I hope this hasn't happened to any of you, but remember that you might have gone to the doctor at some point. For some reason, they did a blood test on you and discovered that you needed to go and have a scan pretty quickly or need to go and get something dealt with pretty quickly. I have hypothyroidism. I had a blood test. I didn't know I had that. I knew I had some symptoms, but I didn't know I had that. The blood test revealed a pain that I couldn't even feel. And in the same way, sometimes as communications teams, marketing and sales, we have to communicate pains that people haven't quite figured out that they've got yet. But once someone explains it to you, then it becomes real and it becomes immediate. These were the 3 pains that Gatekeeper decided upon. We built value stacks. Now, I don't know what any of these things are. It doesn't really matter what any of these things are. They are here because you can see that these are a combination of the components that we were talking about later that bundle up to this idea of restoring visibility, which is the answer to I'm flying blind. This is a stack of value that helps with I'm flying blind. So in their case— and please don't ask me to explain any of these things, they have a custom data model and they have AI data build and auto-enrichment. They have legacy contract migration. These are things that they do that enable you to restore visibility. And then take control. So this is the answer to, I can't control anything. An unrivaled workflow engine, a mandated intake with— I'm not going to read all these. Take control. And then finally, Safeguard compliance. So now they're in a position where they can give back visibility, give back control, and allow you to be compliant. Their value stacks are the sum total of all of their components which allow you to answer the pain. Now, when we did this exercise, and there's a couple of you in the room that we've done this exercise with, we started with about 6 or 7 proto-value stacks. And some of them had similar features and things inside them while we were trying to work out which one we should use. In a moment, I'm gonna show you how to think about this and how to place it on that quadrant that I showed to you earlier. But just out of interest, this is the front page of Gatekeeper's website today, and you'll see right here in the middle their value stacks laid out. In fact, they've taken this so seriously that their professional services team, when they come to onboard you, say, hey, there's 3 steps to go through in the onboarding, but first, let's just restore some visibility. And then they work through that as a module, as the first thing that they do in the organization. And the reason that's so powerful, and it's so powerful that it's on the website here, is it's become a mantra inside the organization. The product teams think, if we deliver this, is it gonna help with one of these 3 things? The sales teams run their demos talking about these 3 things. When Patrick puts out a white paper, the content team will base it on 1, 2, or maybe all of these things, or perhaps even a really fine detail inside one of these things. But nevertheless, everything is built around this. That means that product focuses on the value stack, marketing focuses on the value stacks, sales focuses on the value stacks. In their case, professional services focuses on the value stacks, and obviously customer success uses this as a measure of whether or not they're getting value from the platform. In other words, the value stacks are not some crazy marketing thing that the CMO might do to come up with some nice messages. Instead, this is a fundamental for how they describe their business. Now, Why would they choose these? Well, this is the criticality scoring method. Now feel free to photograph it, by the way. Feel free to photo all of the slides. We will of course send you this deck afterwards if it's useful, and all of you that have attended, we have— in fact, I think you'll find that this is described in some detail inside the whole revenue strategy manual that you received yesterday as well. Like most of our scoring systems, it has 5 scores, although there is of course a 0 that one— I don't know, does a 0 count as a number? I don't know. Anyway, there's 5 plus a 0, and the 5 is my company will not survive not having this product. Now yesterday I gave the example of Shopify. There's a very real and existential risk behind Shopify going down As we all know, online retailers will struggle with cash flow, and if you do not have a means of selling your product for very long, you're going to struggle. And there are lots of other examples. Number 4, and many of us will end up on number 4, not having this will cause my company to get critical events wrong, and so on. If you are scoring 2 or below, then you're very unlikely to sell anything. There'll be a few innovators that might buy from you because they get excited by the thing that you do, but in general, you're not going to sell very much at all. So we're scoring criticality out of 5. Guess what? We're going to score rarity out of 5 as well. There is a little side note to put here, which is uniqueness is not always a good thing. Sometimes there's a reason why other people have not done this, but frequently it is good to move toward being Very unusual in the way that you solve things. Somebody mentioned, I think it was you, that mentioned Bloomberg earlier. If no one does it like Bloomberg, then you can only buy Bloomberg. If no one does it like LinkedIn, you can only do it like LinkedIn. If you want to do outreach to a certain sort of business, you're going to need to have LinkedIn Navigator. It's both mission-critical to you and no one else has got a database like it, so it's also rare. Not all of us are 5 out of 5, but 4, this is very rare and it's hard to replicate. 3, some others do this, but the way that we do it is so different and very desirable. And naturally, 2 downwards, not useful. Now, another quick aside. It is also true that you will develop some features that fit into this category. That's okay. You sometimes have to do that. That's called neutralization. It's making sure that your competitors are not able to get a steal on you because they have something that you do not have. But you're not basing your messaging on table stakes. This table stakes, by definition, are things that you are able to do because it's expected in the market. So let's go on to the scoring for a gatekeeper. This was the actual scoring, but remember, we did this with them about 2 years ago. I imagine it's a little bit Different. Now, restore visibility ended up as a 9. 5 plus 4. Take control ended up as an 8. And safeguarding compliance also ended up as a 9. Pretty good scores. So what that does then— and now we're entering sales and marketing mode— what that does is it now allows us to take those 3 value stacks and turn them into criteria of choice. What we want in all of our communication is for people, particularly in that browsing and choosing phase that we talked about yesterday, to be saying, ah, yeah, you know, there's 3 things that we're going to have to do here if we want to solve this pain in the right way. And here is the list of those 3 things. And the earlier we can inform that criteria of choice, the more likely we are to be successful. And the more likely it is that our competitors cannot be successful. Because if we are defining the criteria of choice, then when the buyer says these are the 3 things that I want, your competitor has to scramble to keep up. So these were the statements that we came out with. And again, I'm not gonna read all of these, but I'll put them all up here for you to see. Compliance for the procurement team. I'm so glad you said that. I'm sucked into low-level work. I'm always chasing my tail. Without process control across the supplier lifecycle, supplier management is aspirational at best. If things don't change, it will remain impossible. I'm frustrated, I'm demoralized, this needs to be resolved. So they start turning their pains into criteria of choice which come under the banners of our 3 value stacks. Now, I showed you some scoring a moment ago, and this may look complex, but it really isn't. It's just a radar graph. The thick red line here is gatekeepers' value stacks, and the area within it is their value. You can see we have stack 1, stack 2, and stack 3. Now, those scores will of course change over time. You can't sit still. In a year's time, maybe these scores will not be the same. Maybe if they're in a good marketplace, their competitors will catch up, will try to copy, will try to find their own way to position and differentiate, so they will need to change. The dotted lines here are their competition, because what I always ask companies to do afterwards is once they've scored themselves is to as objectively as possible, and that usually means individual executives. doing this exercise blind so that we can compile the scores together. When we have permission, we'll also go and interview customers and ask similar questions. We can get to a point where we can see these are our competitors here. They're not as good as us at doing these things. Now, you can of course imagine that if we were to completely redefine these criteria, maybe a competitor would beat us. Now it's about execution. We have to go out and pursue them. So, persuade the market that this criteria of choice is how you should think about solving the pain that you've got in order to avoid the risk that you have in order that that root cause is eliminated. So you want to be in that red triangle. Now, sometimes when we do this, we find that competitors are as good or even better. It's not always the case that— we don't want to kid ourselves, do we? We don't want to pretend that we're better because this isn't going to work. Sometimes it really informs our product team that we need to dive a lot deeper in a particular direction. But now we're in a position where we're able to be in control of exactly what it is that we provide. Many outcomes, but 4 that I've identified. Selling is a lot easier when your sales team know that there are 3 things that they're gonna focus on. It doesn't mean don't sell other features and benefits and all sorts of things. It doesn't mean that some client has a particular niche use case you might wanna try and talk about. But you're gonna focus on those 3 things, and you're gonna focus on helping them to understand why that pain is only resolved by those things. The messaging is clear. Andy was coming out with all sorts of great phrases yesterday. He's so good at doing that. They need to be in line with the 3 value stacks. The product focus. Now, sometimes it's right to structure your product teams around value stacks. Sometimes it isn't. It really depends on the product that we're talking about here. But structuring your product based upon the value stacks is critically important. And then finally, customers. They understand who and what you are. Now, everybody in this room knows that we need to hear over and over and over again what it is that a product does before we decide to buy. It's very unlikely that someone here received the first email in a that we sent out from Brevo that said, hey, we're doing this thing, Geoffrey Moore's gonna be speaking, and you said, great, let's do this. If you got that email and you said yes, you probably had already spoken to one of us. You'd probably seen a LinkedIn post. You might have visited our website. Maybe you'd seen some materials. You've had multiple opportunities to connect with us. Those multiple connections all needed to be given similar messages. Otherwise, you get confused 'cause you're so time poor. So revenue ultimately is the measure of this. If we get this right, and we've got multiple clients now that are doing this, if we get this right, revenue goes up, sales cycles shorten, all of the measures of sales velocity start to work in our favor. This is the really the heart of whole revenue strategy. Thank you very much, and I will speak to you all again later.

Thank you, Pete.