Sandeep Jain:
Hi, Welcome to the 15th episode of Enterprise Monetization Podcast. And this is your host, Sandeep Jain. In this podcast, we invite thought leaders from monetization space that is CPQ billing, consumption-based billin so that you can learn about challenges, opportunities and best practices in enterprise monetization. Today, I'm excited to have Taka Yokoyama who is the VP of operations at Safehub Joining us, Taka has been on the product side of CPQ and dealing with actors, which is now conga as some really all of, you know, and salesforce revenue cloud. He also has spent some time on the operational and implementation consulting side of the space prior to joining Safe Hub where he now owns the entire monetization operations as well as technology stacks there. Taka also has an MBA from Wharton School and well, he's a proud new dad as of the first day of 2023. So, welcome to this podcast, Excited to have you here.
Taka Yokoyama:
Thank you. I'm excited to be here as well.
Sandeep Jain:
Awesome. So, could you provide like a quick summary of your background to our listeners?
Taka Yokoyama:
Yes. So in addition to what you introduced me, how you introduced me, Monetization will I think is what we'll call it for for this podcast. We also know that as quote a cast or lead to revenue depending on who you're working with, right? But monetization as we speak is really my second career. I started in this space as a solution engineer for activists now conga and that's where I was exposed to complex configurations like for elevators, a lot of attributes and then some some deals that involved heavy deal scoring algorithms with some of it being circular logic.nSo that was a lot of fun. And then my engineering past really lended itself into going deep into these complex customer use cases. After that, I joined the Salesforce Revenue Cloud in a similar capacity as a sales engineer. This time, I tended to get into a lot more discussions regarding just contract and renewal logic, distributor partner, pressing relationships and then approaches to usage. So after that, I consulted for Navint for about 10 months before being invited to join Safehub where I am now. And that's as you said, I own the monetization design for both the business and the technology.
Sandeep Jain:
Sounds good so your experience is interesting because you have been in the space not only from an operator side but as a vendor side as well. So it's good to have somebody who has seen both sides like how the sausage is made as the phrase goes. Alright, so before we go to Safehub and how you do your monetization, can you just share a quick fun fact about yourself?
Taka Yokoyama:
Yeah, I'd say a fun fact is I'm a home brewer. I've been doing that for over 10 years at this point. And so I obviously need to have a greater near my front door. The fun part about that is that I'm the only one that I know of that hands out adult treats during Halloween when people I want to ask you to give you, give your address.
Sandeep Jain:
But that, that's interesting. How did you get into this? Was it like, I've never seen somebody who's kind of serious about this and you've been apparently doing this for a long time.
Taka Yokoyama:
So, yeah. Well, it's, I mean, if you kind of look into sort of the operational side, the process side, calculations, it is CPQ in a sense of beer together, right? And then you actually get to enjoy that beer via consumption. but yeah, it has a lot of things I'm interested in from that, that sort of scientist side and math side of things as well as other hobbies.
Sandeep Jain:
I don't think anybody in the world would have drawn the shortest line possible between CPQ and brewing, which you just, anyway, let's get to more fun stuff. Now, for folks who don't know about Safehub, Can you just talk a little bit more about what you guys do?
Take Yokoyama:
Right, So I mentioned that monetization is sort of my second career. My first career was as a structural engineer. So if we tie those two together, we are a post-earthquake building damage notification platform. In essence, our mission is to save lives by equipping building owners and managers to make informed decisions on evacuating from damaged buildings, right? And we do this by sending out centers that track the earthquake and then understands how much damage or probability of damage to those buildings. This is important because far too often, and recently in Turkey, structural damage is not visible while collapsed, risk increases with every aftershock and we're seeing aftershock after aftershock in Turkey today. So that's the human end of the end of the business really. And then the other end of the same business is that we want to prevent operational losses due to evacuating buildings when buildings are not affected by earthquakes. And so without this, if you do evacuate you, those are business continental operational losses, you take obviously, then if you don't evacuate and then there's risk to the building that is human capital that you're risking. So that is safe hub in a nutshell in terms of our mission
Sandeep Jain:
Awesome. So do you have customers I'm assuming outside us as well?
Taka Yokoyama:
Yes. So we are primarily in the US but also anywhere where there is earthquake risk. That means, you know, if we talk about the ring of fire around the Pacific Rim, right in Japan, Philippines, Indonesia, New Zealand. And then some, some places around the EMEA area as well
Sandeep Jain:
Understood. And can you talk about your role there and of course, you said monetization. But can you talk about like, how is your team structured and what do they do?
Taka Yokoyama:
Right. So team structure is, you know, it's a funny way to think of it. Well, I'm VP of operations or a head of operations for a series, a startup.So it's a very, very small team, right? So I'm essentially a generalist in every way. Of course, my part of my expertise is in this monetization of space. So I go ahead and run with the policy of the process and technology there. And then my small team includes some solution engineering, customer success, accounting. And then when I say a little bit of everything I do, a little bit of sales alliances, I THR and legal as well.
Sandeep Jain:
Wow, that's, that's quite a few things that you're, you're doing there. Alright. Could, could you describe your quote-to-cash?
Taka Yokoyama:
So what I'm gonna start with a business model, I'm a context person. So, okay, a way of getting to that question. So we're generally a B2B subscription service. We are an IOT company. So we have a hardware component and we incorporate that in the service. You know, I knew just enough about revenue recognition from my time as a consultant that, you know, we bundle it all up together and have accounting figure out the allocation on the back end. But from that, we have three channels in which we sell through. And the first is direct to other businesses, customers in this space tender value, reducing people risk and operational risk. This includes 40-50 companies, joint purchasing groups or GPO s if you talk about sort of the hospital space and then some cities, the second is through a reseller. Much like adding a point solution to a suite of services that that reseller provides to their customers. And then third, a growing part is a parametric policy. If I were to simplify because before coming into space, I knew nothing about what it really meant. But this is a reseller model. But the use case and pricing is different from the reseller model that I just talked about, which is important for our discussion. So in summary, this means we have a direct B2B, a reseller channel with partner discount margin protection and then reseller channel where the processes were a percentage of that package that, that gets sold.
Sandeep Jain:
Understood, understood.
Taka Yokoyama:
So technology stack, if we go down, I think from, if we say lead to, to cash zoom info, Pardot, Salesforce CPQ, you Quickbooks and obviously Excel.
Sandeep Jain:
Wow. That's a good list. And how many sales steps you have because you talked about your first channel as director business, right?
Taka Yokoyama:
So at this point, we have zero sales people but that means everybody is a salesperson as a series A company in the middle of, you know, this tech trough that we're in, right? So we do approach it by a founder sales approach where all of our leadership is engaged in all the direct sales and support of our channels.
Sandeep Jain:
Understood. So I must tell you that you're one of the few companies that have come across, which is that early stage, but are still using a CPQ because traditionally, what I've seen is even when companies have like two or three reps, they are still using a manual sort of quoting process. So we'd love to hear your perspective on why you decided to go CPQ much earlier in your stage, right?
Taka Yokoyama:
Part of it was I wanted to clean up contracts. And as we learn how to put proposals together and several people trying to put proposals out to customers constant changes to that proposal documents, I wanted to make sure that there is a template. CPQ is one way of of knowing how to do that. And then board reporting becomes easier when opportunities and quotes are in the system along with the contracts because you know, we call it contracted ARR are, are so CARR for, for us. And that's one of the metrics that we want to share with the board every quarter or even every month. And due to our deployment process of sensors, matching with buildings and keeping track of the contract fulfillment. Understanding the the order sort of management side of CPQ meant that I could build upon that and really build it into salesforce from that CPQ side.
Sandeep Jain:
Understood. Well, actually you talked about your, your business model, you talked about subscription and this hardware, do you, but you also talk about sensors. So do you have a usage-based or how many sensors you have deployed, And they're giving signals? Is that consumption-based pricing that you have?
Taka Yokoyama:
No, not at the moment. I have opinions about that or, or sort of things I want to, to toss around. But at the moment, no, we don't have any usage. I think we're trying to keep it simple and basic. You know, the first thing that might come to mind as usage per earthquake, but we can't control earthquake. So I have someone pay $0 month and then, and then it also seems cruel to then have someone pay so much money if they experience a 7.5 Magnatude.
Sandeep Jain:
Understood, you know, different sort of your business. I understand what you're saying. And so how many SKUs or bundles you have in your current business model
Taka Yokoyama:
We have five main bundle SKU’s so bundle is in the top level. And our, and we're subscription. So this is a notification is a service and the unit of measure is per building because we think the value is per building, not necessarily per person or per center. And so we classify those buildings at small, medium large and then custom. And then the fifth one is the parametric policy which is askew and it's just based on percentage of the premium. And then, so under those bundles, we have the new hardware skew or existing hard Rescue. This is where I'm tracking from the order side through the contract into a renewal. If we're, you know, if this person needs a new center or we're just tracking an existing center and then a setup skew for the accounting side as well. So again, approaches keep it simple, understandable and then manageable at this point.n That's, that's the best way to do this at this stage.
Sandeep Jain:
Do you do any business in other currencies other than USD or it's just USD right now?
Taka Yokoyama:
Were deployed in a lot of countries, but we have somehow been able to manage to keep everything in USD So far. And I've seen the complexity of multi-currencies and agreements on exchange rates and how often you refresh them and I really don't want to get into that. We really have to and hopefully that's a good problem to have at that point.
Sandeep Jain:
That's a smart choice again. So you talked about different tools that you're using five SKUs of subscriptions hardware. What are the challenges for you? What are the top like two or three challenges for you and your quote-to-cash right now?
Taka Yokoyama:
I think the invoicing as a broader topic is definitely challenging because each customer, I have to think of a timing on when to invoice, how to invoice as it relates to hardware delivery. And the contract itself sometimes delivery takes two days while international shipping and customs can take a month. And the question is, do we want to invoice once or and if we want to invoice once we invoice necessarily a month later with the pass-through costs, right? With the shipping costs or can we invoice them twice to say first, the subs subscription that you paid for and then here the shipping costs, the surcharge that we might invoice again. And then the contracts as a smaller player, oftentimes we have to work with larger companies on their paper which brings in nuances of payment terms, hide your invoice, right? You have to go somewhere into their portal and start invoicing. And then how do we go about those charges and renewal's interesting.
Sandeep Jain:
Do you happen to do these contracts with your customers before you do a renewal. Is there an amendment like an Upsell or cross sell that happens?
Taka Yokoyama:
We try to. So another thing that, you know, at least in the automation that I built in salesforce is basically three months before a renewal comes up, just picking one of the leaders or a sales person that is tied to that account to say, hey, renewal's coming up one. Let's check in to make sure they're happy if we haven't been checking in. And I make sure we try to check in every month or so. And then talk about, well, what is the larger plan? Was this a pilot or is this phase one phase two, phase three? So is their opportunity to Upsell If we change pricing models, how do we communicate that?
Sandeep Jain:
So that's the renewal workflow that you're talking about.
Taka Yokoyama:
We, we do try to Upsell, right? We want to understand our sales motion and we wanna understand where are all the customers buildings, right? For cities is concentrated into local geography and we say, okay, what are your most important buildings like your first responders? We want to make sure that police station it's safe to go into before those people are deployed in terms of larger companies, their global footprint. So we then look at their portfolio to say here are all the faults in the world, which ones are higher risk for earthquakes. Let's start there, Right? And then prioritize. So, and I think typically when we go in, this is a novel concept, a novel business, a novel service. So we seldomly run into places where someone says, oh yeah, this is part of our annual budget. So necessarily we have to ask people to go get budget and that's deployments limited by the budget they're able to get for that year before it gets baked into that next year.
Sandeep Jain:
Understood. And what are the top priorities for you? Talk in the next like couple of quarters, what are you looking to do in terms of the company or maybe as in terms of quote to cash that you own? Anything interesting happening?
Taka Yokoyama:
As a company, our mission is always we want to save lives and in order to do that, we want to save lives by reducing the frequency that people are reoccupying, damaged structures after earthquakes, which means we have to deploy as many buildings. Also, obviously that that's a sales thing and that's going to be first from the pure sort of business sense. It's responsible growth, right? We're trying to, we're seeing that all throughout tech based right now is responsible growth, not just growth for the sake of growth in NBA speak. We talk about ROI I think that's a mckinsey term where you can't be destroying value by having too much growth outpacing your ROI. So yeah, I think those are the two that we're focusing on
Sandeep Jain:
For the folks who don't know what is ROI
Taka Yokoyama:
This is the return on invested capital. So clearly just making sure that the money input by, by shareholders and you know, effort input by stakeholders has a return that's larger than I guess losses Where and talk to any advice or recommendation to the vendors in the space like the court to cash lenders in the space based on your collective experience, adapt as sales cloud. And you know, here as an operator, the one of the most difficult things when I was selling into this space also then consulting and trying to do projects in this space. And obviously from an operational perspective is the vendors don't play well together and sometimes it's just an object model thing. Sometimes I think it's a partnership thing. So my recommendation is leading into more collaborations even if you consider someone a frienemy or arrival because collectively, I think there's enough space for everybody or great players to grow. An example of this is salesforce CPQ with Zuora. I've seen many approaches to this from all different angles. I think both solutions are good at what they do, but people need both solutions to work together somehow. It's easier said than done again, it is an object model that may be fixed. But perhaps as an industry, if you know enough of each other's models, maybe there's a way to map compatibility, ease of what solutions work together and what may work best for customers. And maybe that's something that a big consulting company should put together.
Sandeep Jain:
And so in that sense, have you seen any customer who's happy with these two products together? And it's not about just these two in particular. But my question behind the question, if you can say that is if two vendors have to separate data models, have you seen like a good implementation or is it just the nature of the beast that economic soil and water?
Taka Yokoyama:
I guess I would say happy, I guess depends on who you ask. Ultimately, when you get down to the people who are having to day to day, get data from one to the other and make it work, I don't think they're as happy or people who are in the project trying to make it work. I would say probably not happy.
Sandeep Jain:
And Taka on the similar lines, Do you have any recommendation for operators such as your like people in, in your shoes who are starting just starting on their Q2C implementation? And maybe there are a series of company, maybe there's like a city C or D or later stage companies. Do you have any recommendations on some like cool things to do or not to do?
Taka Yokoyama:
Yeah, recommendations I think is the context of the business. It depends on the context of the business. So for example, at Safehub at a small company and I discussed the reasons why we just went with Salesforce CPQ, you part of this was speed to value as someone as an expert in this, I can set it up myself without engaging with implementation partners and other contracts. I didn't need a full deployment, right? I can look at it and say, how can I make it work in two weeks and then how can I build upon it based on what I'm learning about my own business as I come in and, and tweak it as we go without always having to have a project around it. So that, that was my context and that's why I went with salesforce CPQ, which is not the same reason anybody else might go with CPQ or go take this approach as a consultant. Like I said, you have to understand the business and start designing the policies and processes first, you know, like B22B or B2C or is it reseller and then other components are, you know, packaging, pressing and then review the solutions out there and there are trade-offs everywhere, right? Nobody is perfect and everybody designing to a use case or a type of business that they would fit so that trade off, obviously, features and functionality is one way to look at it. But also the how much of the business model you have to adjust to that technology, how much the technology do you have to customize? Where's the expertise, what's the time the value, what head count you have to really resource it, what integrations might have to happen, one of the costs and all of that has to really come into play to make that decision. So it's it's not easy. And then I think the biggest thing that I would say is this is a long-term journey. So what you set up as a solution is for now and if you tackle this with an infinite mindset, as Simon Sinek would say, that makes it so that, you know, no implementation is perfect but does it meet the requirements of today? And as the requirements of tomorrow evolved, is it still right or the best solution or the best implementation temptation for tomorrow? And then from a business, from a financial perspective, you also want to be tracking, okay, what is the value of switching versus value of updating against the cost of switching or cost of updating?
Sandeep Jain:
Interesting. Yeah, one of the challenges I hear is people start with something and they later update their CPQ and billing. People have used several terms like open heart surgery. Call it maintain management. And I think for tools like CRM accounting systems, there's a natural evolution cycle. You go from probably a pipe drive to hubspot, salesforce accountings. You probably started the Quickbooks to intact to Netsuite to SAP. And it's, it's kind of natural naturally. There's an evolution there but in these middle systems, I've seen companies resisting the change because it's so hard. I think I read an article which says building is like an octopus. There's so many legs in so many different places, it's so hard to rip out these systems. So like changing these systems later on is a big, big task for the companies
Taka Yokoyama:
And I think the joke that I've heard in the industry was the fastest way to lose a job is to rip and replace an ERP leader in a company. And in the second fastest way is to rip and replace CPQ. And I think again, going to this context of if you set yourself up to say this is a project that we go from something to perfect, you are just setting yourself up for failure.
Sandeep Jain:
That's interesting. Changing gears a little bit Taka, I think we talked briefly a little bit briefly about the usage-based billing and he said you have some ideas and of course, it probably doesn't make sense for your business. But could you talk about in general about consumption-based billing and some challenges there if you have given some thought to that.
Taka Yokoyama:
Yeah. First off, I'm a huge fan of the concept of usage-based billing. And this is looking at from the consumer side of things, the vendor side of things and then vendor as in the product team and then the account management team and then pure selling and for, for, for each one, I think it's a positive right from the end customer, it allows an end customer to start small with any solution. You don't have to say this is a pilot and you're just consuming what you think you're consuming and if it works, you scale as it's needed. So it's great for small businesses, small cost who might have a difficult time forecasting growth over a full year, right? Because a lot of these vendors come in subscription, you say how many, how many licenses do you need for this year? It's like, I don't know today we have 10 people in a quarter, we may have 20 in a quarter, we may have 12. So then that actually you buy up front, go for the year. If you don't buy upfront, then you're amending the contract several times and then you come into this renewal preparation amendment mess from there. So if you just set it up on users, a number of users and allowed to go up and down, easy to track. It also reduces shelf ware risk from the vendor product team, they get to track how their products are being used. And I think if you track by usage, then you can see each feature or function that you might put out there and track usage, which ones are being used the most. And that is a way to say, well, which feature has the most ROI, what features do you might, might you have to tweak to make sure that you get your getting some value out of it or customers getting value out of it from the account management team. I think far too often we're towing the line between churn based on the shelf ware or we're forcing that shelf ware to stay there, right? Because that is your income source, which I think is an unfortunate ethical burden on account management teams. And so usage gets away with that and I don't know how to structure the comp based on usage and what the best approach is and that's for somebody else to come in. But overall, as a seller of owner of a company, I think it's great purely to call it a two-part tariff as a way of price discrimination. So in theory, this allows you to capture the most value you can from each customer based on what they're willing to pay.
Sandeep Jain:
That's interesting. Have you seen usage-based billing in your past experience working well at some businesses?
Taka Yokoyama:
I think there are there's intent out there, that's I think working generally well, I think from my end. Well, I, I see, you know, slack and one password are to think usage-based but, but simple usage right to say if, if we add a user or subtract a user, they just adjust or credit that monthly between and so every, every month I'm able to adjust my spend based on the growth instead of locking me into, into some number of seats.
Sandeep Jain:
This is interesting you mentioned this because internally at our company, we are using a tool and they have a static pricing. So let's say if, if the number of users change, we have to go manually in the system and change it, sometimes you're over paying for something. And it's like just I would love to have that model where you define a concept of like for using this tool, there's a base pay, but then it is monthly average users and you define how you define the monthly average. Like if a person is using once every month, you con them. But I think that's fair. And we love this tool by the way, but I think it's very unfair pricing because of this static. Like you have to configure how many users and I find that kind of annoying to be honest. So, so interesting.
Sandeep Jain:
This, this has been a great conversation. I don't think I've ever interviewed somebody in this kind of space earthquake prevention with sensors. Safehub, is kind of a unique company in that sense, at least from my perspective. But before you go, is there any recommendation on a resource like a book or podcast or maybe a blog that created sort of an impression on you that you would love to share with our audience?
Taka Yokoyama:
Yes, several. I think these days, the whole space monetization is not under one team, right? And we talked about team a little bit and and there are people from different teams participating in that space, which necessarily means that you have to balance each team's needs. The simple one is sales versus finances comes up all the time and they have different priorities. And so in order to balance that, I think the leader of monetization has to be able to work with anyone, whether there's a direct line, a dotted line or no reporting structure at all. And so from that perspective, I think being able to have influence in a positive way and negotiations definitely top skill set. So along those lines, if you find any webinar online course provided by Professor Kate Massey of the Warm school, I would look it up and go for it. I also recommend this book called Bring Yourself By Mori Taheripour. And then the other book that I referenced earlier today that I'm about to complete this weekend is The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek.
Sandeep Jain:
Could you talk a bit about, bring yourself like what's unique about the book that you found
Taka Yokoyama:
It fits under the negotiations category, but the approach is more about authenticity and introspective. So a lot of negotiations books that I've read and I've had, have a sample of these over here. It's, you get these strategies and tactics on, you know, what's the floor that you're gonna, you know, the simple one is any, any pricing thing, what's your goal, your target and your floor and you, you start and you just whittle back, right? But Mori’s approach is one really be understand who you are, be honest with yourself. What are you trying to get out of it and work with somebody to say, well, can our goals align and we both get what we want out of it and then how do we structure that? So it's, I would say it's a lot more cooperative. It's a lot more encouraging you to stay yourself and not try to put up a front, you know, try to play the good cop, bad cop type of thing is really understanding where the other person is coming from so that you can really understand what type of structure works for both of you.
Sandeep Jain:
I remember from my MBA days, there was a phrase called Bagna. I forgot what it stands for. Like the best, I don't know, it was the next best alternative or something like that. So interesting that you talk about this. But awesome. So we got to hear about three resources and sort of one. I'm gonna look up, do you know if Professor Massey's videos or webinars on youtube online? Because that's negotiation is always an interesting topic to most people that I speak with.
Taka Yokoyama:
Yeah, he often has webinars and, and I'm sure you can look it up. Actually, I looked it up before joining here. Just, just in preparation. I think there was something on Coursera for free.
Sandeep Jain:
Interesting. Thank you for the tip.
Taka Yokoyama:
I'm pretty sure if somebody wants to take a look, they can take a look there.
Sandeep Jain:
Taka, it's been awesome speaking with you. Thank you so much for your time.
Taka Yokoyama:
Thank you.
Sandeep Jain: Hi. Welcome to the 8th episode of “The Enterprise Monetization” podcast. And this is your host, Sandeep Jain. In this podcast, we invite thought leaders from monetization space that has CPQ and billing, so that you can learn about challenges, opportunities, and best practices in enterprise monetization. Today, I'm pleased to invite Navin Persaud. To this podcast, Navin has a deep expertise in running sales and marketing ops. He's currently the Head of Revenue Ops at a company called 1Password. I'm pretty sure all of you would know what that company is for. But for those of you who don't know, 1Password is a private company based out of Toronto, Canada, and they do password management for both businesses and for personal use. So they are like a Product-Led Growth company, if you're familiar with the term Product-Led Growth. Prior to that, Navin managed operations at several companies such as Fixed Software, Ceridian, Leader, Lenovo and IBM Canada. With that, I want to extend a very warm welcome to Navin. Navin, welcome to the show.
Navin Persaud: Thanks, Sandeep. Happy to be here.
Sandeep Jain: Awesome. So, before we start, can you share a quick fun fact about yourself that you'd like to share with the audience of this podcast?
Navin Persaud: Sure, sure thing. I think people who know me know I love to fish fishing. I'm not exactly a great fisherman, but I love the analogies that that fishing offers me in my work life to my personal life. And really that persistence, the amount of effort preparedness, these are all things that work in both elements, whether, you're fishing or whether you're that sales rep trying to close that up order.
Sandeep Jain: It's interesting. I don't fish but I could never call it that analogy. Well, we've all seen the fisherman just sitting and just waiting for the hook to be engaged. I don't know, what's the right phrase there? But I can imagine the patience and the diligence required to get this thing done, it's very interesting. Do you fish often, by the way?
Navin Persaud: Anytime I can get.
Sandeep Jain: Wow. Okay. So I'm assuming you're close to a place which allows you to do what you want to do?
Navin Persaud: Proximity water doesn't stop me. If I have time, I'll go find it
Sandeep Jain: How much is this, if you don't mind me asking this, the paying for this activity is like a few hours like what's the time commitment?
Navin Persaud: Yeah, usually, you have to know that you're gonna go a day before because then you have to pack the vehicle and make sure you have all your gear, have bade know that you're waking up early the next morning, and then you go.
Sandeep Jain: Got it. And once again, my goodness, but is it kind of a solo sport, or is it?
Navin Persaud: It's either, but like, the great joy for me is taking my son. So my son is 18. And he loves fishing as much as I do. And sometimes he's pulling me to go fish when? No, I'm not thinking about it. So it's actually really great.
Sandeep Jain: That's interesting. That's interesting. My son is eight years old, probably, that's a good dad and son bonding exercise, I guess. So thank you for sharing this, by the way. Let's come to some other fun stuff that we want to talk about today, which is monetization. So I give a quick summary to our audience. But Julie, just quickly share about your professional journey. You know, it seems that you started in marketing, sales, and then you're now into revenue operations, which is sort of an over encompassing thing?
Navin Persaud: Sure. I started my career as an IBM 15years, right at a university, I thought I was going to be a lawyer at IBM. Opportunity at IBM was amazing, as you know, entering the workforce, starting off as you know, an operations moving into sales roles, finding a home operations, and then eventually moving into SaaS organizations Rev Ops 2015. And then learning SaaS from there on in having never experienced Salesforce, didn't really know what SaaS was never sold software, moving from like a commodity based business to software and, you know, looking back, I wish I had done it sooner.
Sandeep Jain: Go ahead and dial up one password. Can you talk more about the company and your role at 1Password?
Navin Persaud: Sure. I've been to 1Password for just over six months now. It's been an amazing journey, their Product-Led Growth Company, they serve as both individuals so like a B2C model, and companies as a B2B model. They're on an incredible growth curve at the moment. Product-Led, and my role here as leader of Rev Ops is to really just look at the internal processes and systems and sort of help the team remove obstacles, to just keep that efficiency rolling out, it's been a great journey. I've enjoyed the ride. And I look forward to more projects and initiatives that we're about to embark on here shortly.
Sandeep Jain: Understood. And could you talk more about, like how your role is structured within is apart of the sales organization? Because revenue operations crosses the multiple boundaries of multiple functions. So that's why I'm curious about how it is organized at your company.
Navin Persaud: Yes, for sure. So I reported to our CRO, so we're part of the go to market organization, which is effectively sales, and that's typically what I've seen in my career. I think, once I've reached this particular level, I've always reported into either CRO or CMO. But generally in sales, because that's where the pain is felt. That's where they need someone to help them with the systems, and the process, and the reporting and the data. So it's a natural fit, and a natural home sales affords you the opportunity to be on the same team on the same page, so that you're working with each other as opposed to against each other, which is always great. In order to get things done, get buy in, and to generally just move initiatives forward.
Sandeep Jain: Understood, and what companies have a separate revenue operations function, do they also have a Sales Ops as a function or is it kind of merged with the Revenue Ops?
Navin Persaud: I think Rev Ops is a new creature in the last few years, it's a buzzword. I think sales ops was more of a legacy term that companies are sort of just shifting away from. In the past, I've seen sales ops, I've been a sales ops leader, and it's really about, you have an MQL, you've created a customer, you have an MQL, you've created a customer like that was the journey. And your role was to operate within that. Whereas Rev Ops is a lot more encompassing is you have an MQL, you have a customer, then you have an upsell, you have a renewal, you have a churn, you start all over again, you have expansion. It's more of a full cycle. And it marries well into organizations where you have a CRO, who owns not only the new customer sales teams, but also the customer success and expansion teams as well. So it's a nice little wrapper.
Sandeep Jain: Awesome. I think you explained this very well. And I mean, I've talked to quite a few people on that, but I think explanation hits the mark. So thank you for sharing that. And so look, we talked about a Product-Led Growth scenario. So can you talk about the challenges in this journey that you talked about, from a view point of a Product-Led Growth company?
Navin Persaud: Yeah. So first of all, it's great to be working in a Product-Led Growth company. Because here you have great virality in your product, great demand. And really what you're coming in, at least from my perspective, to fix are effectively the plumbing of all the systems and the billing and the process and the lead flow sand how all of that works in behind the scenes. And your hope is you're just trying to fix things and those processes to get out of the way of a product. So that the velocity people can you can acquire new customers that can move through your sales teams, and then into your customer success teams at great speed. Whereas the inverse is if you're not working in a Product-Led Growth company, you're really trying to fix those things to help drive velocity where it doesn't already exist, and that's where it's really challenging. In terms of challenges, I would say, having the ability for customers to self-serve is paramount. Lot of Product-Led Growth companies has the ability to acquire customers. So they would have like an Ecommerce solution where customers can sign up for a trial and then buy on their own. But not a lot of them have the ability for customers to move to different forms of payment. They have to get to a human in those instances. And that's where these bottlenecks start to appear and surface. And if not built and sort of planned appropriately. You run into scaling resourcing issues, because then all of a sudden, this, this big wave of customers who potentially needs to be upgraded or pay in a different way, needs a human to do it. And therefore you need more humans to kind of meet that demand.
Sandeep Jain: So let's just focus on that. So this is the B2C workflow that you're talking about. And is there like the tools existing tools don't have that. They don't have an answer to that workflow that you're looking for. And you have to build these experiences yourself, or the experience is not great from the like, what's the problem there?
Navin Persaud: Well, this is actually B2B as well. But I find that a lot of Product-Led Growth companies, their product, and the way in which they bill is something that is inherent and built within their product from the get go. And over time, they extend the reach of the product to service billing and integrate with other systems. Sometimes it's not ideal, like it's not the best way or not really what the intentions of the product were solely there to solve for. And then you reach that period of limitation where it's either you, you scale back what the product is, and you buy something that just doesn't well in the market to solve for those pains, you just have to reach a certain amount of growth where you have to make that decision. And in the meantime, you have to make things work with the product you haven’t place, and the structure and a process that's already built into your platform, to scale allow for growth, and give that flexibility and upgrade paths etc.
Sandeep Jain: Understood. And with respect to this particular like there are two workflows from B2C and B2B.And the tool that comes there is the CPQ, which is workhouses, the product catalogue, do you see any challenges there having a CPQ service these different channels, where your customers are coming from?
Navin Persaud: WithB2C, it's pretty simple. Like you try the product, you like it, you put down a credit card, you pick your tear away, you go, it's really not, from what I've seen, the CPQ use case there, where CPQ is most prevalent is on the B2B side, specifically, where you have a customer putting their hand up saying, you know, I hate pricing. CPQ is really your subscription engine, your ability to understand what the customer needs price of that quote, and then turn it into a customer with a subscription and a contract to be able to amend upsell down, sell churn renew over time. And it's really the management of that engine across 1000s of customers that makes it complex, if not done quickly. And in an efficient way, I've seen significant challenges with companies where they've waited. And then they decided, yeah, you know what, we need to go do this, and the work is just a lot longer, a lot longer. So because CPQ, and the systems I've dealt with are complex, it's that you have to translate or almost rinse everything that what was built into the CPQ framework, so that it can spit out what you need for it to go forward. And that's where all the challenge lies.
Sandeep Jain: Understood. And then you'll experience Navin, for product like good companies, even for the customers coming from B2B. Is there a requirement for a self-serve CPQ that I don't want to put my credit card, but I'm gonna do a deal of several $1,000 or10s of 1000s of dollars. But I'd still want to talk to a salesperson, is that a valid scenario that companies should think about?
Navin Persaud: Absolutely. For the point that I raised earlier, if you're aren't building a fly wheel within yourself serve engine, your website's always on, and the ability flexibility for customers to buy what they need, without necessarily always having to talk to a human to get it done. You're hurting yourself, because then you're really relying on your ability to scale on the people that you have to service that demand in a timely fashion with the right price points, and all the other administrative actions that follow it. Companies who are Product-Led Growth and build that flexibility in from the start before them the ability to ramp sales teams over time to be extremely targeted, focused on a specific cohort of customers, whether it be in your enterprise or specific industries, or specific product types, etc. that’s really powerful. But if you're really requiring on the humans to service your demand, because you have a limitation of what someone can buy on their own, then you're sort of at the bit at the mercy of the people that you can hire and putting see.
Sandeep Jain: Got it. And so one side of the CPQ may have been but the other side is a billing for that. Do you see any challenges with billing for both your B2C and B2Bcustomers?
Navin Persaud: Yeah, from personal experience, B2C is a new thing for me, so I won't go into that. I see. That's pretty straightforward. A lot of vendors out there I think Stripe was one of the most predominant ones. From a B2B standpoint, yes, because even if whatever CPQ you decide to choose and use, you then have to play nice with your billing system, a lot of companies that I've been with almost all of them, except for one, use NetSuite, which is typically your ideal stack. And you have to basically have the two systems play nice like you're going to do a set of calculations and understanding of ARR, and subscription and term and everything else and then basically tell the other system, here's what you need to go and do with that data. Here's how you need to create sales orders and invoices and renewals and billing schedules. And at any point, we may send you something else to upsell and down sell, etc. and your systems need to be handling that. I've never seen it. I've never joined a company where that process was great at the get go.
Sandeep Jain: Understood. Well, from a NetSuite perspective, running subscription billing, do you find this, is this flexible? What do you think about the flexibility of the tools to support the amendments and renewal cases? That's something that is brought by all, every time I speak with somebody who say I have a very complex or unique renewal process or an amendment. And so what do you think about the complexity of the tools or ability of the tools to do service, this core requirement of SaaS businesses?
Navin Persaud: It's never really that can solution, do it. It's almost always do you have the skill in house to make it happen? I've seen this time and time again. So I mean, we just came off of a CPQ implementation, it was a huge lift. We're now sort of like cleaning up thereafter. But now we're focused on the next piece, which is like how do we integrate this data that we're getting on a CPQ, to our billing system, and what needs to change or what needs to be accommodated so that we can automatically send data back and forth. So it's not a capability issue, it's whether you have the skill and hours to turn on the feature functions that are necessary to accommodate. Quite often, I've seen that suite instances really just be stood up to generate invoices, and a lot of manual work being done by a finance team, just to accommodate that. You really don't want to be building like a massive building team, because that's just an administrative burden into GNA. What you want to be able to do is understand the areas whereby you can automate things, so that you can eliminate the time it takes for you to send out invoices, so you can improve the time it takes to collect cash, so that you can keep customers happy and renewing. So you can just be sort of pro active. And so like to recap, it's never the capabilities of the systems. It's the complexity and the resources of skill to actually make it happen.
Sandeep Jain: Got it. And Navin, any thoughts on usage-based billing?
Navin Persaud: As a customer, I've seen it. So I've bought a lot of SaaS in my SaaS career. You have Salesforce and DocuSign, all these other solutions. And I'm constantly managing how many users do we have available today team, because we're hiring more people. And I need to make sure that I need to either go buy some or use what I have. And some companies do really well, they get you right when you need that license. You know, you can go into their self-serve like Sales force, the greatest example, I can go on self-serve my own licenses right now, whatever I need, I don't have to talk to anybody, will I get a deal? No, but I will get the licenses I need right now. If I'm thinking I'm going to need to make a bigger purchase off to call up my rep, and we'll have to talk through it that way. But night or day that's afforded to me, and that's available. Other companies have soft caps. I've dealt with a number of vendors whereby you can go over we'll catch you on a true up either at renewal or at some interval that you reach through their head. It's easier for me as a customer, because then you know, I can deal with it. It's more of like a deferred pain and it doesn't interrupt my business flow. I sort of liked that model being the vendor. I'm not sure how much I like that model, because I'm potentially leaving some error on the table, or I'm potentially hoping that my team has the right visibility to the reporting to understand where those trips scenarios exist. So they can go after that revenue at the right time.
Sandeep Jain: Understood. So you're talking about mostly like a seat-based model where your number of seats are growing…
Navin Persaud: Unless you're also referring to like how much you use the product, DocuSign is a great example of that, I believe they have two models. I've used both where you have seat based or you have envelope based. An envelope base where they basically say, you get this many envelopes in a period. And you can just have as many different users in the system as you want doesn't matter, we're just going to charge you based on the number of envelopes you send out. And when you exceed that, we're automatically just going to bump you to the next year.
Sandeep Jain: Got it. So I was asking more about that use case, which is, as a revenue offset, 1Password,that's if you decide to have usage billing for your own product. I don't know if you have it currently or not. But if it is based on I don't know, number of different sites, or number of different licenses that are stored in 1Password,and you charge your customers on the basis of that, does that add complexity to your own billing, like how you build your customers and how you do your operations for your customers?
Navin Persaud: On the self-serve side, companies like that, not really. I mean, every time you add a user, you get a charge. And when it's done through like systems like Stripe, or otherwise, the get you as soon as you add the user your credit cards on file, you get sent an invoice immediately. Where it becomes more challenging is when you have to move to invoicing as terms of payment, or something other than credit card. That's where you're having to understand that the change in usage, translate it into your billing process, and then issue an invoice. That's where it can be more complicated if you don't have the right systems talking to each other at the right times to actually automate that work. If that work is manual, it's not scalable.
Sandeep Jain: Got it. I think the first use case which is more an advanced sort of billing, so pre-buy is what you need. So if I'm going from 5 seats to 10, I go and do the transaction on the website, which is going to be simple versus the scenario where somebody has to monitor how much I'm using. And then at the end of the quarter, month or year, generate an invoice based on how much I used; this requires a different billing scenario.
Navin Persaud: Great. Other companies are also adopting like packs or bundles, whereby you can pre buy, you know, like a bundle of 30or 40 seats. And then you can, you know, start using them and filling them upas you go for the company. You get the immediate purchase of that number of licenses straight up for the user, you have a threshold right away that you can fill and then figure out once you get past it.
Sandeep Jain: Got it. So, Navin, when you look at this from now, let's say 100,000 foot view, B2CB2B,CPQ billing usage. And you look at this whole thing, is there one big challenge that sort of comes out for you saying, well, if somebody would have solved that actually will make sense or make your life easier as a RevOps person?
Navin Persaud: So I'll say this, the start, I love Salesforce. I'm like, I absolutely adore the platform, because it has made a different career for me. But the way that it's designed, unless you have the right skill in house, and your know what you're doing, and you have a plan, you can fall off the Yellow Brick Road in an instant, you can then decide to go and customize a bunch of things. And then realize, oh my god, I should have just configured some things because now it's so much complexity. You know, CPQ is a great product. I've implemented it three times now. And the biggest challenge each time that I've implemented, it was that we didn't start with it. We ended up with it. Because we realized the homegrown or existing process we had just wasn't going to cut it anymore, was creating downstream problems with our billing our ability to invoice, track renewals, understand churn, we needed something systematic programmatic. And moving to that system was the biggest pain every time that I've done it, not because the system is a pain, it's because you have a wealth of migrated data that you have to translate over. So there's advice that I could give to someone, it's don't wait. Don't try and build it on your own. Figure out a plan that's scalable for your business now, and portable life and when you need to move to something else. But if you don't allow for that, you're just deferring a whole lot of pain for your future ops team that's going to come in here and try and solve what you didn't plan for from the get go.
Sandeep Jain: Got it, got it Navin. Anything about the interface between the CPQ and the billing systems. I think you alluded to that earlier. I think he talked about NetSuite versus and there could be other accounting systems as well, or billing systems, I should say?
Navin Persaud: You really need a partnership there with your ops team or whoever is going to manage your CPQ and your billing systems because you know, your hand in hand, you have one solution, generating quotes and renewals. Another solution highly dependent on that output to generate invoices and ensure payment. They have to be speaking the same language from like how you're recording revenue, if you have ramp deals, what are you going to invoice, is it staggered? What amendments look like? And then related to that is compensation, something that we're not even talking about here, but you have another team and finance needs to figure out how to pay your sellers, and how to incent them, and how to ensure that the revenue and the data they're getting is accurate and aligns to the plans and programs that are in place. So it's not just billing and solving that issue. There's another element of compensation that also has to play nice in this world.
Sandeep Jain: Got it. And follow up on this. This the management of this accounting system of the billing system fall into the RevOps team or the finance team sort of owns that, I'm assuming it's a mixed responsibility, but I was just curious too?
Navin Persaud: It is definitely a mixed responsibility. One I'm continuing to learn and understand and grow through. And in my world today, if it's in Salesforce, my team owns it in terms of understanding untangling, making sure the data is accurate. We then partner with our finance teams to ensure that their invoices are accurate, and they go out the way they need to go. Finance owns everything, once it's passed it over to their system, invoice collections, all that thing. The ongoing management of subscription is where you really need to ensure that you have the right resources in place, regardless of which team so that you can understand those one offs, those nuances, you know, sales reps will always you know, apologize in advance to all my sales reps, they will always take the simplest path again. And because that's the nature of the beast and I applaud them for it. And I'm always trying to make them have that simplest path. The reality is, you got to make sure it's right, because then you have so many other things hinging off the accuracy of that an accurate invoice accurate comp, a renewal that needs to go out in a year's time, an amendment that could happen at any notice, a notice of churn expansion, etc. All these things hinge off accurate data and your system. And if you're billing if you're CPQ engine isn't accurately you know, keeping track of that data and managing contracts, you've just created a cycle of pain
Sandeep Jain: Actually a good segue to this is how to structure the teams. Like you have done earlier talked about Sales Ops being more tactical, RevOps is now being more encompassing term. But now there is also this billing piece we were just talking about. So what's your recommendation, how to structure the teams to sort of minimize the friction and maximize your and go to market efficiency, I guess?
Navin Persaud: Yeah, I can talk a little bit about my team, we’re structured into three pillars, I have like a technical side of the team that handles our CRM and all the related integrations. They manage for of our projects and what we prioritize, I have a Reporting Analytics and soon to be managing the subscription or deal desk function. There did generally ensure that you know, the top of funnel is working, pipelines progressing, deals are getting closed accurately, rinse repeat, and then the analytics from that. The third function is a newer one, one that I'm starting up in sort of like the growth ops function. A resource or team of resources dedicated to understanding the customer success business, to ensure that there are renewals and amendments and upsells and growth. A repeated trend that I've seen in every SaaS company had been with, you grow through expansion, you may acquire logos on acquisition, but you grow on the backs of your customers. So ensuring that you have the right level of insight and data around how your customers are performing over time, their health, their metrics, etc. is absolutely vital for that engine to be, you know, firing on all cylinders.
Sandeep Jain: That's very interesting. You describe that, Navin. And so companies have a customer support function, which is a post-sales support, but there's also customer success, which is post sales account management. Is your customer happy enough? Are we solving their pain points so that you know once the time comes to renewal, you see the flywheel effect at that point. Is this, How is your this third pillar correlated with a customer success team?
Navin Persaud: So shout out to all my customer success colleagues, customer success as a function, they're the quarterback in my mind. If you follow sports, specifically football, they're the quarterback. So sales makes a sale, they get the glory, then it's off to the customer success rep to make you successful. So speaking as a customer, I've worked with some amazing customer success reps that have increased my time to value with their software simply by being a knowledgeable and accessible resource around their product. And that's no different now, like with our customer success mission is ensuring that we have successful onboarding, that we have a single point of contact on all product related questions that were up to date on new feature functions, that we have our renewals on time. Like it's a super important function, because any subscription business cannot succeed if subscriptions aren't renewed. And your customer success function is the one that is totally armed at making sure that happens.
Sandeep Jain: Got it. So what you're saying is, look, there is a place for customer success as a project manager or as a quarterback to make sure that the account is overall successful. But this third pillar that you talked about, how does that function relate with the overall customer success team?
Navin Persaud: Yeah, partner in crime almost like to help that team, understand their customers, segment them, help them understand renewal, help them coalesce all of the data that comes that companies like us collect to understand the health of that customer adoption usage, whether they're happy, generate a health score, which can then understand customers that are likely to renew customers are not likely to renew, what actions can we take to mitigate? What actions can we take to create advocates and promoters to grow and expand and create virality within your product, and more advocates, all of these things are data points that lives scattered in your CRM, or if you're lucky enough to have like a solution, like a gain site. They live there. But you need people to help pull it out and present it in a way that you can action it on a daily, monthly quarterly basis.
Sandeep Jain: It's really interesting you're talking about this. Over the weekend, I was talking to a friend, he's a Sales Engineering Director at a security company, they are like the 5 billion in value that file. So they're a big company. And he's like Sandeep, I'm in sales engineering, I need visibility into what happens. It is what is happening with my existing customer accounts. And I think they're using gainsiteas well. It's like, well, I don't know, the visibility into the data that I can give to my team that they can make some sense out of it, and they can start helping them. So his particular ask was, look, I need to find out what features are being used by certain sort of customers like, what are the tickets that they're finding out? Are there about feature requests, which means that you're engaged with the product, or is it about more complaining that, hey, this thing doesn't work? So he's like, I'm flying blind. So can just somebody provide me the data? And so I can kind of relate that comment with what you were talking about, is there's a separate customer success team, but your team is in the middle that can help provide that visibility.
Navin Persaud: Absolutely.
Sandeep Jain: So very interesting. Another related question, when you look at this whole B2B and B2Cworkflows for a product, lead growth company, is there like one of the minimum number of tools that you think teams off such as yours have to deal with to get things done? Now there's a CRM going to be there, there is a billing system CPQ. Like for usage, would you think about another system? Like how many systems do you think people shouldn’t?
Navin Persaud: Generally, SaaS companies have what I call like the SaaS spinal cord, you've got your marketing automation, that passes through your CRM, and then you have your billing system, and then connected to all of those things should be your product or way to provision it. Those are like the four core things that should be standard in every SaaS company. How are you marketing acquiring customers? Are you managing pipeline? How are you billing them? And then where are you provisioning them? Every SaaS companies should have those elements, it could be all one element. And then you have another element for your product, but they've got them all represented in some way or another. Each of those pieces of tech though, require ownership. So that you understand both the process and the data as your workflow moves through them. Without like naming any names, but I feel like companies tend to focus in one area and not so much in the other and they leave these bottlenecks. For example, great acquiring leads, but don't really think about how to make sure they get to the right humans at the right time so that they can make the right impactful connections to create pipeline, where they have a great CRM and don't think about, how are we going to sell a product? How are we going to price it quoted, renew it, etc. We're having an invoicing system that just does invoices and leads you to hire so many people in finance, because it's all manual. And lastly, don't have a means to provision the product in a timely manner. That's probably one of the things that I've seen in a lot of other companies and that it's super manual, it's not connected, there's no connective tissue when you close the deal, it says it starts here, when does it actually available to the customer for use? Those are all like, I say that the four key areas that you need to have structure and teams around and specific ownership to those systems, and then they all need to be sort of working together collaboratively. So if there's an operational function across those departments, they should all be talking to each other.
Sandeep Jain: Got it. And Navin, if there's one or two things that you think can solve your biggest pain, what would those be assuming Gods are smiling at you today?
Navin Persaud: Let's play this fictitious example. Let's say in year two, I landed another SaaS company. And I get in there, I'll be like, okay, day one, I wouldn’t know how I'm doing it today, if you're selling anything, if you're just starting out, or if you have at least some inertia, we need to standardize this now. Because the pain, it's a road of pain, to get to CPQ once you have a lot of customers, because then you have this massive amount of history to crawl through to accurately understand all of your customers, their commitments, what they're worth, when they renew, etc, that the project that could be simple, becomes quite extensive. And I think a big barrier for a lot of companies is that, yes, Salesforce is a great product out there. But they feel as though they have to reach to a certain size before it makes like financial sense to get there. Totally get it, they got to figure it out somewhere in between, because like waiting, makes what could be simple, really difficult. CPQ like the Salesforce product, it's not hard to implement. What makes this hard is the time that you've waited, before you actually decide to go and do it. That was that's what makes it difficult. So they need a bridge, that there's definitely a market for companies that are atX to X size, that needs something to just manage that within their CRM in a more structured function. Format, don't do custom will try and build something, find something that's successful in the marketplace, it's compatible, and run with it.
Sandeep Jain: One thing that's a great piece of advice, Navin, and one thing that I was thought about while you're speaking is if I'm a customer, and I will self-serve experience. Now if I'm dealing with two separate products, one with a CPQ and billing. So I need to self-service experience for buying. So that's brought by the CPQ. But I also need a sales of experience for invoicing. Now, if those are two traditionally separate systems, what happens to me as a customer? Am I looking at two different universes then, or how does that work? Actually, I'm just thinking aloud here.
Navin Persaud: Yeah, from a self-service standpoint, if it's a credit card transaction, it's typically one system. You buy you transact, you get invoice it all in one, sort of stripe is making a killing. It's when you get to limitations in your product, because your product is sort of like an extension or a legacy billing system that is maybe reaching a little further. And you didn't build a way for customers to move from tier one to tier two. And you then say, well, you've got to talk to a human. So there's a little problem, you have to go to a human. And you add, like inadvertently, you're adding friction to that.
Sandeep Jain: Yeah, got it, Navin. Actually, I was referring to that particular workflow because what I've heard from folks is, look, credit card payments is easy schmoozing. You know, that's everybody gets it. But the problem is when the deal size goes up, your number I've heard is more than $2,000, some companies have limits on how much money you can put on the corporate credit card. So they say well, I need an upgrade for $3,000. I know what I want to buy as a sale person, so could you give me a quote, a self-serve quote that I can give it to my team. And I want to get an invoice as well there, but without talking to anybody. So that's where the self-serve CPQ self-serve billing, and bank to bank transfers and all that thing sort of comes up, which is I think what you're saying is a human has to get involved. As the consumer doesn't want it, the vendor does want it. But it just so happens that that you have to deal with.
Navin Persaud: Huge pain point, think of government entities, nonprofits, companies with you know, certain invoice requirements, like a lot of companies would love to buy self-serve, but can't because they have rules and policies that requires a paper invoice or a digital invoice, or they have a VAT ID or they have some kind of requirement that prevents them from transacting through a credit card. And that almost always in what I've seen remains talking to human.
Sandeep Jain: Got it. So how do we get human out of the quote of the cash?
Navin Persaud: It's not always how you get out, its how do you ensure that you're deploying your humans in the most effective way as possible. Like, if you're you know, I love sports,so it's a great time loving sports right now with football and hockey and basketball and baseball going on. And you think of yourself as a manager, how do you deploy your players so that they can be efficient and lead you to winning outcomes, and deploying sellers to small transactions that are high volume, that's not success? That's employee churn. That's difficult to manage, it's difficult for your reps to get to quota, your response time suffer. So those are the things that you've got to look for to understand, okay, you've got great volume and velocity here. But you don't have an automated means to. It's all for it. And what you really want to do is put your humans on these larger customers to expand them and grow them. And that's what maybe takes more time. This smaller flywheel stuff that opens and closes quickly, you need a system to do that quickly. You know, there's a stat out there today that says, most buying decisions are 60% made before even talking to a human. And I agree, any SaaS that I've looked to buy, I've already done my research, I've taken as much of my demo, I've gone into G2 crowd or Trust Radius. I've looked at their support documentation. I've done everything that I think I need to do. Then at the last point, I'll be like, Okay, let me see your demo and send me a quote, that's when I'll engage as human.
Sandeep Jain: That's a good way of putting in. And it's not about taking people out of the equation, but figuring out where they are most useful. And I think that's the big, big challenge in quote to cash today. Awesome. I did hear that calendar bell, a few seconds back. So I know the clock is ticking. So before we let you go Navin, do you have any recommendation on a resource, like a book, or a podcast, or maybe a blog that you want to share with our audience, that something that you identified with, and you want to share why as well?
Navin Persaud: Two things. One, I'm a huge Ted Lasso fan. Anyone who knows me probably knows the character that I fit in really well there. So I won't say it. The book that I've really enjoyed, as I've worked through it, as it's called “The subtle art of not giving enough”. And it's a great book, it really just summarizes that. There's only so many things in your life that really requires all of your attention, and effort to actually like, throw your passion behind it. And really be upset when you don't have the outcome. Everything else just work through it, it happen. Because if you don't, you're just going to stress yourself out. You're gonna have these outcomes, you're gonna have this all around you where people are not going to want to approach you, you're going to be combative, you're just never going to be happy. And once you realize that there's this inflection point in your life where so many so many things that I can manage within my control, to really, really care about and the rest, I still care about them. And if it's out of my control, it's out of my control. And it's a super resource. Mark Manson is the author, the subtle art of not giving a f$%^, basically the counterintuitive approach to living a good life. I recommend for anyone in a high stress situation.
Sandeep Jain: So between fishing and this book that's how you manage your time, I guess.
Navin Persaud: I do. I try and get away from the screens as much as possible connecting with nature. And it's really for me, it's not about fishing. It's about being somewhere, some quiet some nature, focusing on just a single thing that bobber in the water and letting everything else just kind of like leave my mind. It's amazing. It's refreshing. It allows you to recharge and come back. Focus on the 30 things that enter my mind, the minute Monday 8am rolls around.
Sandeep Jain: I love this, Navin, and I'll actually read this thing. The book that you suggested is just makes so much sense. While I hear you say that. So hey, look, it's been a fascinating conversation. I wish you the very best of luck at 1Password. The company is doing awesome. That applies for a lot of growth, which means a lot of work. Good work for you and your team. So best wishes there and thank you for your time today.
Navin Persaud: Great, thank you. Take care.
