Scaling from $0M ARR to a $1.2B acquisition with a Single Leader for Sales & CX

so vikus is one of the best people who have been there done that as are all the other speakers today so you'll get a chance to hear from him shortly on sales and customer success vas than you so much thank you everyone um looking forward to the conversation that believe it or not uh can sometimes be controversial I don't know how often I I bring up this topic with a CEO or founder uh that comes to me thinking about building out their go to market

Market motion and I mention this and they're like whoa whoa whoa I just want to go hire a sales leader um so we'll talk in the next 20 minutes about why an early stage business can benefit from having one leader that is responsible for sales in CX uh we'll also talk about some of the considerations and where it may not be applicable how many people here have

heard of customer with a C all right few folks so I'll give you quick bit of background on customer founded in 2015 by two amazing technologists brand berbal and Jeremy surreal they had previously exited their uh prior company to a small company called salesforce.com um and the entire kind of premise behind customer is that it's a CRM for customer service so it's not a

new space it's not a new category you've probably heard of people like zenes and Salesforce service cloud and intercom and others so customer was very much or is very much a rip and replace business our average deal size was about 75k ACV selling to mid-market low Enterprise um and you know we had a a really healthy uh cross sell upsell

motion uh customer ended up exiting uh to uh for just over a billion dollars and actually was then spun out of of meta which is not part of this story um but for another day so myself vicis bamry been in tech for 30 years uh been in SAS since the very early days uh for those of you who might have a little bit of gray hair like me I was at Oracle open world than when Benny off led the

protest uh so that's how long I've been around since the early days of of s so a lot of history there and a lot of experience um we did not set out to have a single leader for sales in CX so I wish I could say that we were really smart and we knew that this was going to be the right thing for us and our business uh but we actually kind of accidentally fell into it right and and so sometimes I believe it's better to be

lucky than good and in this case we were lucky so I joined customer as the VP of s sales um in 2017 you know I had three sales people in one bdr and was like told to go build the business and then we had a transition on the leadership level and our CEO looked at me and said hey we've got these five people in CX so at that point they kind of had a a mixed set of responsibilities but mostly on boarding we had one support person and he said can you take

this on temporarily um temporarily uh lasted a long time almost six years and uh 220 people across the organization by the time I left after the meta spin out so uh that was an exciting run obviously it led to tremendous growth and success in the business uh but just to give you a sense of kind of the responsibility I was responsible for traditional sales so

Enterprise mid-market AE sales leaders Business Development bdrs channel the sales Consulting team revops and enen Professional Services customer success and support so the full life cycle and that really led to some some significant benefits uh for us and our customers and I think is the reason that we were able to grow so quickly in a category that for those of you who know help desk

ticketing contact center it's a core system and we weren't like I said we weren't creating a new category but we also trying to get companies to rip out these core customer support platforms that were some of the best SAS companies on the planet right imagine like you know zenes Salesforce right these are not you know companies that have major issues and all of that so trying to get them to rip out because we have a better platform was certainly a

challenge but we benefit benefited from the fact that in the early days in particular right when you think about you know we get into all these mapping exercises and we go in and we go okay we got to do our customer journey and the marketing leader gets in the room and the sales leader and the the Cs leader the CX leader and maybe the CEO or or whoever uh one of the things that's often missed in the early days is that the customers are betting their careers

and their livelihood on you as an early stage company and so those relationships matter so one of the things we found when we made this transition accidentally as I mentioned um is com customers really appreciated the fact that myself as the leader on the quote unquote sales side was the same hand that they were going to shake or throat they were going to choke if something went wrong post sale right it

wasn't this kind of game that you often see in in SAS companies and businesses where it's like the sales guy goes in and sells and then something happens not my problem like go talk to the CX leader go talk to the customer success leader right so one of the things that I really leaned into early on every time I met with a customer is I made it very clear to them that things will happen in deployment things will happen post sale right we are new a new company that's trying to figure this out but when it

does here's my phone number I'm the guy you call I'm not directing this elsewhere so that was a a significant benefit I think some of the other things is it allowed me as our business mature to really think about about our life cycle holistically and how we wanted to onboard customers to ensure long-term growth right because the thing is we were looking to build a big uh significant business and so we didn't want to just burn and churn through through

customers the other thing is just getting sales and and and customer success teams to think about the messaging that we wanted to deliver and giving a unified customer experience so just a little levers right like you know if you think about a lot of SAS companies a lot of times they don't even introduce the customer success person until after the customer is fully live because they don't want to mess with the onboarding team or the Professional Services team and that might work but

having a single leader that's in all these conversations can say wait why are we doing it this way why don't we just move this piece up here and introduce the customer success person up front so a lot of different things you can you can do and just to give you kind of a you know expectation you know when we kind of put this in our net retention at Peak was about 140% right so Best in Class in terms of net retention and growth within our existing customer base because the

biggest thing it gave our customers was faith that we were going to be there uh after the contract was signed you know I talked about some of our Revenue growth already right one of the things um I'm sure you know if you talk to your sales leaders if they exclusively owned sales they can identify bottlenecks in the process right where are things kind of slowing down either deal Cycles or their

conversion rates in a SAS business quite often this is tied to the delivery side of the house or the postale side of the house right how quickly does it get to get a statement of workout how quickly does it take to get a discount on Professional Services so once again the benefit of having a single leader that can look at this and say wait what are we trying to optimize for at this stage of our company's life cycle right in alignment with the CEO the board the CFO

to say right now ARR is King we have to go and acquire customers but we also don't need to acquire all customers right one of the things you know many times I'll go into a situation or an organization that's looking for some advice or help and I'll sit down with the Cs leader and the and they will give me a laundry list of all the customers that are not a fit for their platform and all the issues that

are being escalated because they don't fit their ICP and my first question is so why did you sign them and he's like I don't know ask the sales guy right or sales gal right they went and signed them because they've got numbers to hit they've got booking targets right so once again having a single leader trust me I did not want to hear from customers that were unhappy so that held me accountable to making sure we had customers that were the right fit for

our platform and not everybody was right one of the things I learned early on was we were not a fit for B2B and so every time one of my sales guys tried to like shoehorn in a B2B customer that was on Salesforce or zendesk I was like wait a minute like we're not doing this because they're going to be really annoyed 90 days after we sign and I'm the guy they're going to call so we're going to stick to our IC P which is B to C right so having that discipline which benefits

the entire business right you think about the strain that sometimes your go to market can put on your product organization your Finance organization and other parts of your business if you have that kind of commitment and conviction then it lessens the burden on the entire supply chain uh within your organization and look let's not lie having a single leader especially early on can force collaboration I know we all want to live in this kind of you know

kind of optimistic world where everybody gets along everybody works together especially in a distributed environment right having a leader who can say look sales and CS this is how we're going to work together and how we're going to manage these accounts and how I'm going to look at even a p&l to figure out who I'm paying on what you know at what point do I pay a salesperson for organic growth or add-ons and at what point do I pay a customer successful person Etc when you have different leaders in

different silos a lot of times even that conversation breaks down early stage companies we all know this I'm preaching to the choir here right we need to move as fast the as the data is available to us and so being able to sit with my revops team and look across the entire life cycle of our customers to optimize for things like pricing the feedback we wanted to give to

product right once again as a as a leader who kind of sat across sales in CX I looked at all the things that the go to market or the the sales side of the house wanted to have because they said they want to increase Tam or there's opportunities they want to take down and then I had to look at all the requirements that were coming in from my existing customer base meld the two so I could go to our product leader and our CTO and say hey these are actually the 10 things we need so not an internal

battle amongst the go to market team to try to optimize for like I got one customer I'm trying to retain or one deal I'm trying to win but what is truly in the benefit of the business as we try to build this great big SAS company uh Revenue forecasting a lot of times you know you'll see it in organizations where you go in and you try to understand like how much money are you going to get out of your existing customer base I don't know

like we have no idea right we it's like even understanding the forecasting behind that right how do we make sure that we're running similar plays to understand the forecasting and the growth for our existing customers so being able to make datadriven uh decisions so is this a fit for everybody um I would say if you're in kind of particularly a

plg motion right where maybe the deal sizes are small the transactions are really fast you're probably not going to optimize especially in the early days of having a single leader because you want your sales leader really out there cranking or your marketing leader right really going out there and just focusing on acquisition so you're probably not going to benefit um from having a single leader in that environment but there does hit that threshold where it probably becomes too

much and I think we were kind of reaching there around 50ish especially especially when you try to think about giving this leader the responsibility of scaling out the business right and when I think about that I think about you know for us-based business going global right doing other things I think that becomes a challenge I think at some point you do end up with competing priorities right and is the customer base getting enough of a voice um and a single point of failure right

so a lot of times you'll see companies will eventually more to a cro right we see it at 50 7500 million companies um maybe didn't start out that way so question is can you start there maybe move to more of a distributed environment where you've got a dedicated sales leader and CX leader and then go back to being a CR um the one thing I would have done differently is I would have brought in a CX leader because if I if you remember

the orc chart I had pscs and and support uh reporting into to me pretty far along and I think at uh probably an earlier juncture I would have brought in a dedicated CX leader so that that's definitely something I would do differently if I was to do it again so what have we covered in the last 20 minutes or so if the clicker oh Gotta Lose

Myself all right I'll recap and then we'll figure out the technology after the fact um so look we had tremendous growth in success uh from having a single leader that was responsible for sales in CX I think in particularly in particular when you're selling to midmarket Enterprise as an early stage company you can benefit from it um is especially if there's a robust implementation on

boarding and growth part of your business right if it's not just a a quick you know switch on or or or kind of plg motion um the advantages are we can always optimize the customer Journey we can look at our you know how do we enhance Revenue growth right so what plays can we run quicker faster um and then always looking at the data holistically across the entire Revenue stream to figure out how do we grow this business together so I hope that's

helpful and and can benefit anybody here but you can always reach out to me on LinkedIn and happy to chat further so thank you so much