Company of the Future? Pivots On Our Way to $50M ARR

over the next 20 minutes she's going to walk you through all of this please help me welcome to the stage Miss Elina Vandenberg of Chile [Applause] Viper have fun enjoy I got all that right right love it Point solution day one right okay all right all right I have to uh ride the wave of the beautiful demo uh that

monday.com clickup and huit have in in common do you know what they all have in common why their demo process is so good they use chili Piper all right enena talk to you about genz um buying differently I'm going to talk to you about the change that we're making in our organization so that the genes can have the best experience working in a SAS company but also buying from a SAS company because as she

pointed out the traditional playbooks of um entrepreneurships don't work anymore and you don't have to do things like me this is just what has worked for as a chili Piper it was what's authentic to us and I think that's one of the biggest lesson is that you can listen to how people have done it in the past you can listen to crowd knowledge but what really can work is what adapts to your values and your

beliefs um in my case what I've experienced is that in entrepreneurship we only have have two modes either we're in Terror or we're in Euphoria and if we're lack if we have lack of sleep both of them get accelerated I want am running on very few hours of sleep because last night we went to play pocker and we kept going um however there's some uh something that I really want to optimize for which is having fun

and having Euphoria at work because that's how I that's what motivates me that's what drives me that's what keeps me going I do not want to run a company by being miserable and the most important part by building a company is creating a culture that you want to live on uh forever that you want to leave to your grandchildren to your children and that's what I call the company of the future and the structure of such a company it comes a

lot down to how systems are set up how employees are being helped to thrive and how uh growth happens this is our AR to date um there are a lot of things that have happened this year but we're cash break even and we're continuing to grow um and our modeling is courtesy of a famous uh person in this room our fractional CFO Josh this meme was not created by Him but go listen to him speak about how he accumulated 400,000

followers but as you know we're all kind of delusional sometimes and that's how we're projecting our numbers um and and in my delion I think that there's a better way to do companies there's a better way to run a company that prepares you for the future and that is the traditional or chart in which we all have an SVP a VP a director an IC is broken I believe that the best

way to run a company is by having a flat structure some of you might have read Paul's Graham's Essay with founder mode Brian chesy Airbnb did anyone read it this week yes a couple of you so what he's referring to by founder mode is that we're told that we can run our company by hiring great people and get outside of their way senior great people that sounds lovely in theory in practice because we're Founders and we're very particular about things and because we see a lot of things differently that

doesn't really work so what has worked for me is by creating a structure where there's self-management people can create plans together we're all seeing things that I might not be able to people on the front line see things that are different we all have a purpose and the purpose matters a lot the decision making is not made at the top I I gave control I gave out control a long time ago the decision making is made together that relieves me of a lot of

stress um we bring ourselves fully as we are to work not with masks not with uh uh things that we don't believe in and there's fluidity in how we actually take action but in order to execute I believe that you have to hire certain kind of people that believe they can if somebody comes to work just because they have to do their job if they do not have a desire to win they're not going to

win as a result the most important thing for me when I hire someone in my company is that they have the belief that we can achieve the kind of crazy numbers together that they believe that we can do it and this is a hard one to spot in the hiring process the belief is not enough the system is not enough what is critical is a game plan like in sports if you don't have a game plan you

do not win and that game plan has to be based on numbers numbers can sometimes hide reality but there are numbers that you can rely on in your pipeline that allow you to play the game better than others and the pipeline numbers do not lie especially as you're looking at the funnel program question and as you're looking at demand conversion you can create game plans and activities that impact those numbers and I gave you an example here from marketing because I took over marketing uh about two years

ago as an acting CMO and I started getting obsessed with my icps getting obsessed with my targeting with my account touches with my velocity my first engagements and as inen was saying there are 16 touches before somebody comes and buys and you want to optimize for all of this Impressions that your customers are uh going to see and as a result in our marketing plan we have very precise activities that are going to influence and that we're tracking

towards our pipeline uh conversion and yes we started with one product uh the one that's used by monday.com and click uh click up and and Hood but there were a lot of other products that the market never saw we actually had at some point an inbox as well and the Inox was uh allowing buyers to see their entire buyer journey and see who had the company emailed what they did and so forth we killed it because we realized that it's going to

be so hard to get people to switch from Gmail or uh Microsoft to another inbox in the end we went adsn to our space we called the platform demand conversion we focused on what we know which is pipeline uh conversion and we created uh five SKS that you can see here uh uh form routing chat team handoff scheduling and L distribution uh with the goal of cross

selling and um creating a um a machine that that creates a pipeline from these other products my co-founder who happens to be my husband and also has Fancy Pants is going to speak next after me so he can talk to you more about how those multi product strategy Works um I'm going to focus on the things that I have split with him which is uh operational excellence and the best way to achieve operational excellence is I found using AI there are

a lot of touch points that can be optimize in the funnel without compromising on authenticity you don't have to send robocallers to book business you don't have to send fake emails a million of them that sound all the same but you can use AI in the process and we use it for identifying our ICP we use it for account scoring for targeting um to give an example we have a propensity to to sell

to our companies if they have some of these criteria here if they have more than 10 sales rep if they have a high influence of leads if they have a complex sales cycle are in good standing have good g3s and it's hard to qualify all these 300 touch points in order to reach out to your best accounts with your best messages so we created all sorts of bots to ensure that our data points are correct um we also observe that we're going to

sell less well if sorry they're based in Europe they take forever to close um if there're an outlook for some reason people that use Outlook they're a lot slower to make decisions as well um and if they a traditional company that's how we managed to book 500 meetings a quarter um and I just want to give a shout out for all this AI work that we're doing to BS uh AI for our friend here uh who has helped us do create some of these autonomous AI Bots

he's also speaking tomorrow you know all right all right you can just go and chase him and he can tell you how he does it with his magical team on top of it our GTM strategy is probably a lot more unusual because um it's the same as day one when we had a point solution I've have not changed any of it and it comes down to our values to the way we Empower

employees to go to market and the way we uh work with the ecosystem because by now you all know all your products are super easy to copy you anybody can just go on and and copy your products autonomous AI Bots are going to be here they're going to act as your employees they can act as um as salespeople but there's something that remains which is our humanity and our ability to connect with others and

that's so much harder to scale and so much harder to fake and let me tell you how we do it we have a desire to create a community around us and I'm not talking about uh zenes or slack though we have that too that's not what I mean by Community what I mean is by having a true true value of helping people around us when we hire when we work with

Partners when we work with prospects when we work with customers help help is really important when we recruit I told you that I look at how much they believe that they can succeed well I also look how much they care about helping those around them because not everybody has the same value I cannot teach these values I cannot teach people how to believe and I cannot teach people how to care about others but I can hire people that have these characteristics and hiring people that generally but generally care about others is very important to

me because when I look at my employees I generally care about growing them as well and I do unusual things like if I can't find a job in our company that makes them happy if I don't find the path for them to grow them in my company I'm going to find them a job outside and I really go outside of my way to find them a perfect fit with prospects I go the same length I don't trick them into funnels I don't trick them into uh downloading some

eBooks that nobody reads I do not trick them with creating content that's uh faked I go above and beyond to help them with sharing my experiences sharing what I found sharing things that I know that they care about with our customers we do not stop at at customer deployment we help them with tactics and what do people really care about succeeding in their job getting promoted we help them with their

success metrics we make them so that they're superheroes inside of their organization so that when others talk about them on stage they're proud about it we get them on stage we get them all sorts of opportunities in which they're shining we also care for them when they're in trouble if they're sick we send them chicken soup if they're giving birth to a new baby we help them celebrate that as well similarly when we have a partner on board we don't just do our playbooks with Partners we become creative with how we're going to help

them and this is an example of something that we've done with Mutiny uh an event for um for Market together with our influencers we also look at being creative Beyond cash because influencers they care as much of audience as we all do and yes cash is nice it helps them survive but being creative and helping them get more rich is a lot more important uh just an example of

impressions of one influencer in q1 um to show you the kind of results you can get without spending too much money without spending too much uh effort as well I saw outside of that because now we have a lot of products that have important cross cells and triggers for us to sell we uh work a lot with Cross Beam and this is a book from Bob Moore if you haven't read it yet it's a it's a pretty damn book it's pretty darn good U

we're actually part of the book as well and it shows some of the playbooks that are used to uh do Integrations with partners and how to elevate Partners around you to win together um the end result of our efforts to elevate the community around us this is an example for Nicola do any of you know him he publishes these metrics with Mar sales Tech no he actually uh said it to me

alen you didn't build a product you've created an entire industry because it's an ecosystem it's a community that people crave to be part of and that's very very unique that's very very unique because you know that everybody around you is an advocate you don't have to go outside of your way you don't have to be on stage to evangelize for your product because everybody else does it on your behalf and who is better to Advocate on your behalf then your customers your employees they're going

to do it better than you and it's a lot easier if you empower the right nodes in the ecosystem to get the results you want and in our case an important piece of the puzzle let me see if I see uh for some reason it doesn't look anyway an important piece of the puzzle is creating these relationships in person because in in the digital realm there's some fakeness around it yes you can exchange some notes but they don't

really know who you are you become a lot more real when you meet people in person and that's why I think that there's a lot of power at SAS open because you can create a lot of Partnerships here you can create a lot of relationships that are going to last a long time after this event and hopefully you can create uh business opportunities out of it as well and that's been my playbook since day one and because I'm also on social media like Kina um this is my QR code you can connect with me on LinkedIn and I

promise that uh I will connect as long as you write SAS open when you connect with me so when you send me a request to uh connect just write SAS open so that I know where where we have um created this relationship together