The Growth Workshop Podcast
Episode 6 - Centricity in SaaS: Lesley Ronaldson Keeps the Customer First
Fri, 28 Jun 2024
We discuss strategies with Lesley Ronaldson (VP of Sales EMEA at Gong) on the importance of a customer-centric approach to digital transformation for your business. She shares her experiences and practical tips that you can use to understand customer needs for business success in the digital age.
Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with your hosts, me, Matt Best and Jonny Adams. In this podcast, we'll be sharing insights from our combined 30 plus years experience and hearing from other industry leaders to get their thoughts and perspectives on what growth looks like in modern business.
We'll cover all aspects of leadership, sales, account development and customer success, alongside other critical elements required to build an effective growth engine for your business. This podcast is aimed at leaders from exec all the way down to line managers. Hello and welcome to the Growth Workshop podcast with myself, Matt Best, and my co-host, Johnny Adams.
Today, we're joined by the fantastic Leslie Ronaldson, a friend of our business now for a number of years and a familiar face to a few of us here. So we're thrilled to have you on with us today, Leslie. So thank you so much for joining.
Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to do this podcast.
Brilliant. Brilliant. And as you'll know from and as the rest of our audience will know, as is customary, we ask a question about what's been interesting, what's been going on in your week. So, Johnny, I'm going to come to you first. And nice to see you as always. But what's been going on in your world over the last seven to 10 days?
Matt, lovely to see you. Leslie, it's fantastic to have you on today. Thank you so much for joining us. What's been going on? Two things. I've been on a nice vacation holiday over a number of days, which has been fantastic. I went away with my wife. It was our last trip before having a baby. So it was sort of one of those where we were really sort of planning the most important things of our life.
But I still managed, Matt, and you're going to roll your eyes and Leslie, sure, you might do too. But I still managed to actually come back for a day of work during that trip. And I think that sort of puts things into perspective that
It's all about balancing life and work at the moment here at SBR as we're looking to grow and scale into one of the biggest and best sales consultancies in the world. I think there's those sort of things that you need to do. But equally, I managed to have some fantastic time over in Spain, ate loads, drank every single day, which was a bit unfortunate because my wife obviously couldn't drink much.
But we had a wonderful time whilst balancing work and a lovely break together. So yeah, that's what's been going on in my life.
Congratulations. And also, I love that I think work-life balance is gone now. We call it work-life harmony here.
What do you mean by that in your context, Lesley? Thanks for the congratulations.
It's not a balance anymore. I mean, sometimes it's just it is what it is. There's days where I leave at three o'clock to go to maybe a school show. And there's days where I maybe have to work till nine or ten at night and I make it work. It's the nine to five is out.
So interesting. Someone was bleating on LinkedIn, no offence to those that do that, but they were talking about a four-day week and how powerful it is. And my point was, well, you can do a four- or five-day week, but actually it's the flexy part. I think what you call harmony, I absolutely advocate that work-life harmony piece.
So, yeah. Yeah, harmony, nice. And, Johnny, there's nothing that a pregnant woman, in my experience, the thing about my wife that likes least is watching the other half sup a nice cold beer in the sunshine at about 12 o'clock on holiday. So, yeah.
My wife's Irish, as you know, Matt, and Leslie, you'd probably know this being Irish. Her point is, if I can't do it, then at least one of us has to do it. So she's all for me drinking beers.
Yeah, one of us should have a good time.
One of us should have a good time. Fantastic. Similarly, reconnecting with family, right? I think that's been something that for me over the weekend, I've been fortunate to have my parents come and visit, which is always nice. And it's good for the kids to get some time with their grandparents as well. So I've just had a really, yeah, really nice time kind of connecting.
And when you think about that, work life harmony peace right just a bit of prioritizing time had a couple of really involved weeks at work which have been really great really kind of rewarding in lots of ways but tiring in others and sometimes it's good to be able to just go i need to disconnect from this a little bit and reconnect with the family time so that's been what's going on in my world
And Leslie, how about you?
Well, there's a lot going on. I suppose I'll stick with work for this one. I'm just back from a trip from the US. We had a new CRO join Gong last September, and there's been a couple of changes on the leadership team. And he has a huge belief that sometimes I'll talk about my team and my team is my directs, as in my managers, my directors, my reps.
But he wants us to focus on the first team and my first team should be my peers. So we went to the US for three days and I have to really commend him. He kind of left us to our own devices a lot. There was a lot of downtime, a lot of meals, a lot of activities and sports and quite a loose agenda. So what happened was there was a lot of conversations that weren't about work.
I would say I came back from that trip and there was 10 of us plus him. And I can tell you a personal story about every single one of those leaders. And I had a lot of aha moments of aha. That is why often you come across on a call the way you do or that is why we had maybe that bit of friction last year over an account.
He also talked about the five dysfunctions of a team, which was really important. And actually, we all read the book before we got there and The biggest one, the foundation is trust. And I left that trip with way more trust, way more understanding. You know, we talked about kids and partners and the age that we're at, the age profile. A lot of us have sick parents.
So talking about that and kind of where we are in our lives. And honestly, it was a brilliant trip. I love the no agenda piece. And I'm actually going to mirror it here in EMEA because I think although my leaders are close, it's really important to step away from the number, the data and the drive and just breathe and be and let them get to know each other.
Because again, you build that trust, then conflict is easy. You can debate, then commit. And that's what we want to do here.
Oh, brilliant. I completely advocate the trust piece as the key pillar. It's a bit like Maslow's hierarchy. You need to support the bottom foundation before you can go to the next stage. But the way you've talked about that, how your CRO put you into a position to produce the trust, then the productive conflict, I think that's something that's missing.
So thank you for sharing that you need a sort of environment to test case it. And how long was it in the States? How long were you together?
Three days and actually at the end of the three days, like, you know, there was hugs, personal numbers exchanged and we've all agreed I'm going to go back over it. And usually I wouldn't go to the US more than once a quarter, but we got so much out of it. We now want to go to the next level. We now want to go to kind of commitment, action,
results and start to plan for next year usually we have those conversations in October but we want to start them early I mean you know it's a global conversation now as opposed to my region my segment my team they're my first team it was brilliant he's a genius our CRO I'm curious how would you think you'll take your lessons learned from that trip and cascade that into the team is there anything you're thinking that's going to help you
There was one thing. So there's these, they're called value cards. You get them on Amazon. So he had 12 decks of those cards and all of us were given the cards and you had to open the value, the deck of values, put them into three piles. Important, middle important, not really important. Then you'd take the ones that were really important and pick the top two and go around the table.
And it was chill. We were eating lunch. It was casual, feet up on desks. It wasn't formal. And then you all had to say why those two values were your top two values. My top two is fairness and commitment. Others were different, but you all had to say why. And I will say there was not one person around that room that didn't talk about their childhood, which was very interesting.
Your family of origin is so, so important. And a lot of aha moments for me, that is why you'll have Sometimes sharp elbows in a conversation because you were perhaps brought up in a different home than I was. A single mom. That's why you're so driven. That's why you will win at all costs. It was really good, really deep.
A lot of bonds made and he's created a team that will run through walls for him.
And this is why we love speaking to people like yourself and yourself, Leslie, because I think, you know, what are we? Do you mean it's into the conversation? You just dropped multiple golden nuggets for people to listen to. Even for me, I am taking that idea and we're going to have a go at that.
So thank you so much. And it's interesting you say around the childhood piece. I was listening to Simon Sinek on the High Performance podcast recently, and he was talking, you know, in order to help people find their why, it always starts with a childhood memory because it's such a guiding principle in life. Who we become and how we become that way.
And I think it's a really interesting thing to reflect on. I think it's that time away, right? It's that time out of the day to day. And like you said, out of the numbers and out of the data and out of conversations about specific accounts and specific situations and into something that's a little bit freer and allows everyone to be their self a little bit.
I think some personalities have a work. Like there's a work Leslie and a home Leslie. They're very similar, right? I'm really direct. I'm high energy, high excite, no surprises there. But there's definitely people who I would have, when there's a work version of them and I saw a completely different version of them. They're very polished in work and
They're very driven, but actually when you kind of rip it back, one of them was probably the most entertaining person I've ever met in my life. The stories he told, I was like, what kind of life have you lived? But in work, he's so buttoned up. I never saw that side of him. So yeah, it's super important to focus on your first team.
Reminds me of the, again, I'm being really unfair here, but you know, chap in IT turns up to the Christmas party, has a couple of drinks. My God, what are they doing on the dance floor? Shirt off, tie around the head. Crazy. Get back to work, sitting behind the desk. But no.
Yeah, one of our engineers here just opened up a comedy club and he's a stand-up comedian and I was like, what? But you're so quiet. Everybody has lives outside of work. Never, ever, ever judge a book by its cover. Ever.
It's just great to get to know people like that. And yeah, thank you for sharing that story with us, Leslie. That's fantastic. And I mean, as we go into the heart of today's conversation, really what we'd hope to get your perspective and insight on. And as Johnny said, you've already dropped a couple of insight bombs, if you like, on us and the audience, which is fantastic.
But we know that, again, going back into that sort of looking at your career, that you're passionate about sort of customer centricity and how important that is to a business. And that's really what we're looking forward to diving into in a little bit more detail with you.
Before that, though, it would be really great, I think, for the audience and for Johnny and I just understand a little bit more, hear a bit more about your journey so far. You know, you've held some incredibly senior roles in a really competitive market and a really competitive space. Could you just talk us through your journey so far?
I'll give you the whistle stop tour. So I've just come into my 101st quarter in sales. So just over 25 years. I started my career in the late 90s in Dell. Bottom of the rung, bottom of the ladder, BDOR, SDR. And I have to say I was absolutely hooked. Dell was a massive multinational in Ireland in those days. And we had one of the manufacturing plants in Limerick.
And they were growing out of a huge team. And I knew I was going to try and go as far as I could there. And I had made a commitment. I did a couple of foreign assignments there. I helped set up the first call centre in India. 2004, I lived in Slovakia for a while in Bratislava where we outsourced our German sales. After about 15, 16 years in Dell, I had a mentor say to me, hey,
You've had a great run. You know, I was managing partners at that stage, a senior manager. He said, hey, you've had a great run. But could one say you're a one trick pony? Now, that phrase lives in my head rent free. He said, you know, you've been behind a pretty big logo, pretty deep pockets selling hardware.
I think you may need to start looking at SaaS, looking at software and potentially kind of the startup world. So I was like, oh, yeah. Okay, let me have a look. Now, in Dublin, there is, we were really, really lucky at that time, around 2010, I suppose, there was Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and we called it Silicon, like there's like a Silicon Valley element to Dublin.
And I had a friend who worked in LinkedIn and we had a chat and he said, look, they're starting a new business line on LinkedIn. It's called LinkedIn Sales Solutions and the product is Sales Navigator. And this was 2014. I was like, okay, yeah, you know, I know a bit about LinkedIn. I used to call it the Facebook for work. How wrong was I?
So I went to the interview and I was one of the first managers hired in and they called it a startup within a startup. So we launched Sales Navigator. LinkedIn absolutely brought me on a journey. I would say the leader I was in Dell would have been, you know, I grew up in a boys club. I grew up surrounded by a lot of men and I definitely had kind of
sharp elbows but LinkedIn taught me a lot of things to be an empathetic leader to seek to understand always to you know always lead with my heart and my head but data right data is really important but your people are really important and customer LinkedIn was the first place where I ever heard about value engagement
and I had an amazing manager in LinkedIn called Paul Terry and he said Lesley let me finish you like this if you're at a dinner party and the person on your right only talks about themselves and the person on the left asks you lots of questions about you who do you want to sit beside and I said well I want to sit beside the person you know I want to talk to the person on my left and he says why I said well because he's interested in me and it's conversational he goes and that is how we treat our customers no feature blasting no talking at them no talking about the product
You want to know about them. And for me, that kind of turned on a light. When I think about the Dell days, we were selling like laptops and desktops and there was an incentive. If you sold a printer, you got like a multiplier. So it's more commission. And I remember sitting beside a guy called Fred, he hung up the phone and he goes, yes, I just sold two printers.
And I said, oh, we work in consumer sales. So how did you do that? And he goes, oh, you know, this old couple have just bought a desktop, but I sold them two printers. And I said, mate, you've literally just turned our dining room into a WeWork. You know, that's not selling with integrity. Nobody needs two printers. They probably didn't even need a printer. God love them.
But I just remember thinking, that's not cool. And then I think when I got to LinkedIn, I was definitely brought on an education about it is all about your customer. And SaaS, because the way the SaaS model works, you know, retention and churn, it was an absolute like an overnight haul of how I sold. and how I saw integrity and more integrity and always with customer in mind, never overselling.
It's not about me. It's not about the sale. It's not about the commission. It's about solving a need or solving a problem. So that was the LinkedIn journey. Then I was approached by a smaller startup, a language translation company. Then Asana, which was project management. I am really organized person. Sometimes it can be crippling.
Sometimes your greatest strength over index can become your greatest weakness. And I am super organized. And Asana was like, I'd come home. It was the mothership
I use it today actually all of Gong and Mia is run off Asana so shout out to my Asana crew and then I had always known of Gong it had been on my radar since 2017 because they were the new kids on the block they were incredible on social media as I worked in LinkedIn and their profiles were brilliant their marketing was funny spicy direct hit you between the eyes some amazing videos so when they approached me I was so happy in Asana it was a bit of a
Will I, won't I? And I said, yeah, this is absolutely the world for me. And I will tell you now, I'm never leaving.
You're never leaving. You heard it here first. I'm sure the rest of your team are thrilled to hear that, Leslie. Thank you so much for sharing that history with us. Again, some really great insights. I think there's this one key thing that jumped out to me as you were talking about SaaS. And I think it's such a... I have a background in SaaS as well and in delivery.
And one thing that SaaS did to the market was...
to really throw the challenge back to the vendor when it comes to that customer centricity because it gave the end buyer options right the days of huge monolithic change that was involved in in swapping out between technologies where you had like deployed implemented you spent a whole bunch of money in data centers and stuff just to host particular technology sas kind of tore up that rule book and sort of turned the spotlight back at the vendors to say what are you going to do
to make sure that your client values this? What are you going to do to drive that important customer centricity? How much do you care about your clients? It's something that really resonates with me. And you see those organizations, I was in an organization going through that transition from that sort of deployable into SaaS. And it's a big transition and it's quite eye-opening.
So yeah, and clearly why you've been so successful since then in understanding where customer centricity comes from, why that's so important. So customer centricity, what is it? Well, I mean, Forbes defines it as the ability of an organisation to understand and meet customer needs and expectations. But what is it to you?
I think as my husband usually says to me, explain it to me like I'm a five-year-old. I think it is what your customers' needs are and their demands are at the focal point of all your decisions. Whether it's delivering a product, a service or an experience, your whole team has to be thinking customer first and customer first mentality. It's bandied around a lot.
It's a lot of, you know, principles in companies. Our principle is here, create raving fans. So I want our customers to buy, but we want our customers to be obsessed with the product. And often at events, we're very careful where we sit people. We do prospect, customer, prospect, customer, prospect, customer, like a seating plan. And we will match up vertical. and we'll match our persona.
Often sit back and watch a VP of RevOps, who's a customer, tell the VP of RevOps, who's a potential client, why he bought Gong. Because it's not me selling, it's someone else selling for you. So for us, our customer, they're king. Our customers are absolutely king.
Yeah, that's fascinating. And some might be listening to this and saying, well, that's about the product. No, it's not that, right? In order to make that product sing, you need the people behind it. So, you know, thinking about that and we think about why that's then important as a unified approach across your whole business. How do you take that from a product initiative? We drive everything.
This is why our customers love it and make it something that lives and is the sort of foundation of a business.
there's probably a couple of things we do here, probably, you know, four or five, but the first one is a clear vision, right? Clear vision from the top down. As I said, one of our Gong principles is to create raving fans and we have clear measurables for all employees. So retention metrics, et cetera. And our CRO actually has customers as one of our pillars, which many, many companies do.
We touch on this every month globally in a team review. And we ensure that every single person knows why we do what we do. I think as well, if you want to remain customer centric, it has to go across all departments, right? You are all responsible for your customer. It does not end with the order form getting signed.
I think back in my old, old sale days, I would have just closed a deal and moved on to the next. That doesn't happen now. I think when I hand a customer over to the customer success team, I still want to stay close to that. And it's really important. Luckily with Gong, and this isn't a plug,
We have the full gamut of from the SDR outreach email or call that was sent through to the full close of the deal, to the negotiation, to who the key players were within the deal and why they bought the product. And we hand that to the customer success team and our professional services team for the implementation. And we all understand why the customer bought.
So I think it's really important to kind of have everybody bought in. I think as well from a cross collaboration with the team to voice of the customer is so, so important. So wherever we get customer feedback on a sales call, after the sales call, the rep can just go into Gong, tag the product team and give them visibility of what the customer said.
As much as I trust salespeople, if you were to say something to me now about the product and then I was to go then and tell Johnny maybe two hours later, there'll be elements, but I may miss a trick. So for us, once a customer gives us product feedback, we'll absolutely tag our product team and also our product marketing team.
And then there's a couple of other ways as well, which it's important to have customer communities, etc. When I think about feedback loops, you have to listen to your customers. You can't say the product is brilliant. We use it here. Isn't it amazing? Like you can sometimes drink your own champagne and get a little drunk. So you have to be open to feedback. Like feedback is a gift.
So for us, unlike many, many customers, we have voice of the customer. So again, the customer feedback that we get. We do customer advisory forums like many other companies. So again, we love feedback. And then finally, customer communities is an amazing way to do this. So if I think about someone who does it really well in the market, it's HubSpot. They do an incredible job.
They've built out a membership base where you share ideas and tips and tricks. And actually, if you think about when someone goes to buy, they've already made their mind up. I mean, I don't go and book a holiday or book a hotel without going on TripAdvisor. I don't book an Airbnb without reading a review.
So it's your customers that are actually going to be your advocates and your evangelists, so to speak. So I think communities are really, really important. And then I think the last two things is when it comes to customers, like you need to empower your employees. You need to give them the right tech stack and tools and training to do this.
You know, you can't say, you know, sell to your customer, then fill in this spreadsheet, which I've seen in other companies. Fill in this spreadsheet and then send it to the customer success person and then make sure that you, you know, you schedule a call and then scheduling your QBRs. I think, you know, there's a lot of software out there like prolific for account plans, you know, Gong.
I think it's important that you have a really clear, we call them swim lanes, like really clear swim lanes of a customer journey. I think everybody should have roles or responsibilities. We did two-day training. We took the whole company off-site globally to talk about roles and responsibilities.
So there's none of this, it's not my job or, hey, that doesn't feel like it's my job, but I know whose job it is. So everybody owns the customer. And then lastly, data. I haven't talked about it all but I love data.
I'm numbers driven I really am but like data can tell any story so you need to be really careful I can mold data to tell a great story or a bad story but we do need to look at performance metrics like you do have to define and track indicators related to the customer satisfaction and engagement and really ensure those behaviors are being measured you know whether it's an OKR or KPI and here at Gong we are maniacal about this so we track our numbers weekly in fact
I am on a call every Monday for one hour with our head of customer success for all our renewals, two quarters out, two quarters out. And every customer success manager who owns those renewals saying, here's where we are. Here is the risk. Here's what we need. There's a flag on the product and we are we are selling impacts.
We're pulling all people in and that's to ensure that they have a good experience. Then we do monthly reviews. And then we also showcase these in QBR. So there's definitely, there's a cadence and a process to being customer centric. And as I'm listening to myself, it sounds like a heavy lift and you know something. Yeah, it is.
But if you get it wrong, you've got the sales team doing amazing, selling all these deals. It's pointless. Like you're not profitable. You're not growing. And your folks won't stay. Like you'll have a nutrition problem as well.
A whole load of stuff in there to unpack, Liz. I mean, you talked to me about roles and responsibilities and Johnny will know without that clarity of process, that clarity of ownership. But then you also said something which some might think that contradicts that in the sense that the whole business needs to be customer centric and the whole business needs to be focused on the customer.
And I think some people say, well, that means that everybody owns a bit of it. Yeah, but people still have jobs and people still have certain responsibilities that talk to their skill set. It's finding that balance, isn't it?
I think it is. I had something this morning. There was a customer issue and they went to support and the customer support person was like, hey, that's actually not my gig. That belongs to customer success manager. However, he walked over and we're lucky we're in the office to the customer success manager said, hey, I just had this feedback. Let's jump on the call together.
There's nothing in it for that part. The customer success, you know, he's busy, but we sell as a team. We sell in packs. and a customer lost, we're all shareholders as well, right? We are all on this journey together. You kind of have to hire people that will go the extra mile for you and care. You'll not hear someone on Salesforce say, my accounts, they're Gong's accounts.
My book of business, it's Gong's book of business. That's not your account, it's Gong's accounts. You just happen to be allowed prospect into it. So I do think it starts from the top down, whether, you know, from leaders, directors to managers.
And when I think about potential customers, I will use Gong and look at every single open deal in my pipeline and I can see which deals have a VP of sales as a persona, a part of the decision maker. then I will reach out to that VP of sales and I will do a peer-to-peer demo. I don't use Gong the same way an AE uses Gong. And straight away, I'm locked into that customer. We have a relationship.
When it comes to negotiation, I'm not just coming in from stage left to give the best and final. Me and that person already know each other. And that's been really helpful for me. I probably do demos of the product three to four times a week, which is really important because you've got to lead by example.
Wow, that is just brilliant. The thing I love about that is you mentioned about drinking your own champagne and feeling drunk. I am absolutely legless at the moment because you clearly are drinking a bunch of your own champagne and you are role modeling some fantastic behavior as a VP and creating that from a bow tie to a diamond effect. You're creating those levels really nicely set.
I absolutely love that, Leslie, how you're going out there. And it's a bit like the other types of tech stack out there at the moment. What are those use cases? And nothing stronger than with you demonstrating and walking the walk in front of your team to be customer centric. I love it.
Listen, I just want to win and no AE can close it alone. Not one. Yes, you can close a 20, 30K deal, but I'm talking about the six figure deals. Let's all get in. Let's all get around it. What do you need? We do a light linearity where we should be towards the end of the month. So we have a 72 inch screen, a live gong deal board open. We go, right, 92K deal. Bobby, where are we?
And this is in front of 80 people and it's uncomfortable at the start and it's uncomfortable for new people. But Bobby's like, here's where I am. I'm bum, bum, bum. I'm at Red Lions. And someone said, hey, is it a German customer? Oh, I've had one of them. I'll drop by your desk afterwards and we can have a chat. And I'm watching this magic.
I'm watching this tribal knowledge, this peer-to-peer selling. And I actually did do a VP demo. So I said, hey, Bobby, I've done the VP demo. That's going to close on Friday. Call it. Commit it. So there's a little bit of peer pressure there and I welcome that.
It's peer pressure, Lesley, but I think the devil's in the detail with that example in that you've been in at that client. You're not sitting there from an ivory tower pushing people to commit stuff they're not comfortable to commit. You've been on the other side of the table to that customer.
You're translating your confidence back into the team and back into... And I think that's the difference. It's that you talk about teams win deals and tribal knowledge, and you just simply can't... It doesn't matter how long someone's been in the business. They will not know everything. You've got to... And things are constantly evolving and constantly changing.
So the ability to pull teams together like that and go... And then have that psychological safety net that allows you to put their hands up and go, I'm a bit blocked here. I need some help. Can someone help me? And someone goes, you know what? I've done this over here with this customer. Come have a chat afterwards. We can unblock this together. That's the magic.
That's where we start to get that collaboration.
You hit the nail on the head. It is magic. And of course, we have a huge gong on the sales floor. And when that deal comes in, we celebrate as a team. And then people go back to their desk, a little spring in their step. It wasn't their win. But again, I want to bring that whole floor on a journey.
I don't want to be too controversial, but I love this chat because it's raising the light of customer centricity. I advocate customer centricity. I think back to my careers and stuff, I really have literally waking up talking to customers is the thing that I've done in previous jobs and love it today. The people that I work with.
and projects that we get at SBR where it's like, oh my God, I love working with that client. I flew over to Boston recently. I didn't want to leave, even to the point that I managed to get into check-in at the airport one hour before my international flight because I was having beers in Boston with the team. I just couldn't leave, right? And I was even debating staying.
The other side of customer centricity is, look, we're customer centric because we have to, but are you really? And I think there's the sense of a really strong sales team
that's customer centric doesn't always provide the product that they have they don't push the product completely they might offer you know it's not us but actually you need to go and speak to this organization because you would achieve your goals with using this piece of technology or actually you don't even need technology why don't you go and talk to barry who can give you some insights
My interpretation of the aggressive SaaS industries is growth at all costs, in my opinion. Again, you can say no, Johnny. And that customer centricity gets challenged because the way we produce SDRs and AEs is quite rightly, this is your job role. We're going to let you do your job role and we're going to empower you to do it. But you're not going to do other job roles.
You're just going to do this very SDR-based, AE-based job role, which actually sometimes suppresses their ability to be strategic sellers, which is Don't take this, actually do that. My challenge in SaaS is I think that we don't do a good job for the SDRs and AEs because we don't enable them to be strategic sellers.
And actually that stops them being more customer centric because they will deliver or try and push their product to all costs. That's my opinion.
I thought you were going in one direction, you went in the other. So the first direction I thought you were going in is selling without integrity. There is absolute cases where we're speaking to a customer saying, we can't do that. What you want our product to do, we cannot do that. And in fact, if they sell the product...
And I had an expression in another company, the refs were selling the dream and leaving the nightmare with the customer success team. If you oversell, you will be caught out. So what I have done in previous companies is if that happens, you'll lose the commission. So there's a bit of a slap on the wrist. If we can't do what the customer needs, you cannot sell the product.
You can't sell a motorbike to somebody who needs a car. It doesn't work. That's the first thing. The second thing, if we feel a competitor can do it better, maybe. And yes, there are cases, but I would ensure, and I've done this in every role, that there is a competitive analysis done for every AE knows what the landscape looks like. There is a battle card for every single competitor.
And I actually can click a top spot and I can go to every single one now. And you need to say to the customer, hey, what you're looking to do, we do it. X may do it better. However, here's where we beat X. And it's da, da, da, and da. You are being honest, but you're gently leading them away from where they were kind of going and saying, it won't do that. Does it really matter?
But it'll do this, this, this, and this. It's up to the customer to make the decision then. But again, it is starting with integrity. The second part of your question is the SDR and the AE. So the SDR has a role and their role is to prospect into as many accounts as possible, bring them on a journey and get them in front of the AE.
The skin in the game for the SDR is they maybe do not care as much about the customer, but they care about them as professionals. They're early in seed and career, they want to get to AE. So what we'll do is if they get to AE,
eight months or nine months and a good track record then we make them a senior we just promoted someone this morning in the huddle then they unlock what we call the sgr ae academy where they then have access to my meetings ae one-to-ones and then they're allowed sell into our very lower lower lower your customer so they get some access to what the role is going to look like
We also sometimes use SDRs to do demos, that selling impacts piece. So do they care about customers? I'm going to say probably not. And I'll say when I was at SDR, I didn't really, I was all about hitting the number. But as they go on the journey and they're selling and they understand it more, they do. The AEs absolutely care about the customer.
The first part of your answer is exactly what I've been trying to kick around in my head recently. And I also think the churn rate would be a great lag indicator, right, of this is that if Johnny has a high churn, then there's clearly going to be something that's going on.
Notwithstanding, I still think that there is this strategic element where in SaaS, a strategic account holder, what we see a lot in consultancy is that they sit on this pivot with the C-suite and they're just helping them achieve their 600 million revenue goal or their 5 billion revenue goal, whatever that may be.
And they're able to position and move them around to different types of services and products. Do you think there's a role within a senior AE in SaaS for that at all? Yeah.
So we have just started a center of excellence here. And again, many other customers have it. And what we've done is we've taken our senior director of product marketing, we've moved him in there. Our EMEA head of RevOps, we've moved him in there. And our head of enablement in the US, we've moved them in there.
The reason we picked those three is because the three key personas that buy our product is head of sales, head of revenue, head of enablement. So what they do is they are like our A team. So all six figure deals, We do a center of excellence review. So the US team fly here. We sit in a room for three days. It is a long piece, you know, it is a bit of an investment on time.
But I've never lost a quarter and I do believe it's down to that. So we go in a room, we maybe review 30 to 40 deals over 100K with that center of excellence team. And then they go in and they do the demo. They go on site. They will run the mutual success plan with the AE. It's like a gold standard approach. And then when you move into the customer success item, they become a customer
They don't back away like an AE may do. They are still part of the journey and they've been the executive sponsor to that deal.
I go back to saying thank yous. I know those points have helped me personally. I really appreciate it.
I'm going to use my favourite three words. Tell me more.
So my perception is my reality through past experiences, not due to conditioning, I've experienced SaaS as a quite aggressive environment. And when working with products, because that's what we do as a job, I've seen this win at all costs, boxed up, just going crazy.
head on, I'm going to win this deal and not having the ability to step back strategically and think, okay, let's think about the customer. And this comes back to customer centricity and why I challenged it is to go at this moment in time, they're looking to move this direction as a business. Gong should be coming in six months later. What they actually need is HubSpot.
yes so we've i have examples of that where we say because you're implementing salesforce it's a bit it is a heavy lift to do them both at once so why don't we do salesforce we'll stay aligned check in three months bump bump bump bump bump we also co-sell with hubspot so if hubspot is mentioned we have a joint slash channel with them you like joint lunches with them and we can ping the team there and say hey i'm working with actually we ping their customer success team and say hey
Where are they on their journey? And HubSpot are brilliant. They'll say, you know something, we're only just starting implementation. Hold fire or hey, we're nearly done. Go for it. And by the way, I think you're going to win this, this and this part of the deal. Just sell with integrity. It'll bite you in the ass.
It reminds me of when I lied when I was, you know, back in the day and you lied to someone and you think it's always going to catch up, you know, down the line to tell the truth.
You touched on something about the competitive space. So I think it is a competitive space and it can be quite aggressive. So from a customer centric point of view, I think for us, we just need to be really personalised and personalisation at scale is something a lot of people talk about. So, you know, it's obvious account based marketing.
But making sure customers are getting the best experience and being really innovative. So we need to be five steps ahead of our competitors. I think hence why voice of the customer is key. Those customer advisory forums as well. And also when we launch new products, we love having customers as part of the beta.
because they're the ones using it I think with anything and often I give you an example I could be creating a deck and I think the deck is amazing and I'll say another one of our principles here is no sugar so I'll say to somebody can you look at my deck no sugar I can't see past it anymore I'm so in it and they'll say oh no no like you spelt that wrong I'm like I don't even see that so with our product because we love our products so much and an engineer it's their baby you
It's really brave, but it's important that we let customers into the beta and say, hey, this isn't working or actually that button is annoying. If you can move that button because I could toggle quickly and I wouldn't have to go here and save me a second. But if I do this 14 times a day over the month, it's like three minutes back. So I think that's really important as well.
And then just being responsive and agile. So when we get the feedback from a customer, if they're thinking it, other customers are thinking it. And if it makes sense due to the product and outpace competitors, why wouldn't we listen to them? You'd be a fool not to.
Yeah, I think from what you just shared there, I mean, it's not quite a blueprint, but it's almost getting towards that, Leslie. I think we always came full circle. We talked about sort of how exposed you are in a SaaS business versus the old days. And I think what you're talking about there is how to... stay competitive against yourself as well, right?
It's sort of standing up to your own standards and maintaining those high standards and ability to deliver, which is also really, really challenging. I love what you shared there around sort of personalization at scale and then how responsive you can be and just even understanding that if one of our customers is saying this, they're probably not the only one.
And I've seen that firsthand, you know, that ignorance or arrogance even that bleeds into customer success. So they go, well, that customers, they don't know what they're talking about. We've had four now this week who said that this is rubbish. They must be, they must all be wrong. It's like, well, hang on a minute.
And then all of a sudden what happens when it hits your chair number in the next, like in six months time. So being a, you know, being really acutely aware, I think, Something you shared is how you're showing your team that what Johnny and I talk to our clients a lot about in that track to run on. So this is you're an SDR coming into the business. This is the journey that you're going to go on.
We're going to give you exposure at those points. That's how you get a team invested in the business, in the customer and get them caring and getting them thinking outside of their silos and thinking outside of their immediate responsibilities.
Leslie, I'd love just to ask you, if you were to give our audience, say, let's say we've got someone out there who's a CRO or sales director or head of customer success or whatever it is, someone in a SaaS business that's growing and thriving. What would be the three key things that you'd encourage them to really think about from what you've shared with us today?
It could depend on tenure and also how long they're doing their job. But I think listing tours for me are the first thing I do in any job. So I do an internal and an external. So when I joined Gong, I spent two weeks listing. I had one with every single person in this building. Why did you join Gong? What do you like about your business? If you had a magic wand, what would you change?
And you get a vibe of what's going on in the sales floor. And a lot of it was I wasn't sure of my role's responsibilities. I do this job, she does that job. I'm under pressure for... So you kind of start to hear about maybe the parts of the engine that are a little bit broken internally. And then externally, listening towards your customers.
I think we forgot during COVID how important it is to get in front of somebody. And look them in the whites of their eyes. People do buy from people and we forget that. We buy things online all the time and we just click on apps. So I would say, listen, of your existing customers, look at your existing customer base. So in other companies I've worked for and here, we have our top 100 customers.
Then we have our top 20 execs. So I'm one of them. And all of us have customers that we're aligned to. That is a really tightly run program. And I'm actually, that's one of my OKRs. So I have 10 customers at the moment. That's my focus. How many have I met? When was the last time I met with them? How are they? Have I listened, right? I'm not selling them anything. I'm not here for the upsell.
I'm not here for the renewal. I'm just here. How are you getting on? What's going on? And then the final one, and one I wish I'd known really early on in my career, get friendly with product. You need to get friendly with product. They are just as important as the sellers. They're the ones that control the roadmap.
They're the ones that are doing all these things in the background and you need to have a two-way communication. So we will do product roadmaps here and also give them feedback. It's a two-way street and of that product roadmap, what's customer facing? What can I share? What do the reps need to know? So you're on a call, hey, your product doesn't do this. No, it doesn't miss your customer.
However, if that's coming in August, would you like to be part of the beta? That's really important. So product is key. So listen to your customers, use your leadership team to keep those relationships alive with your customers. It's not just trying to sell to them. And then honestly, product are your best friend.
Brilliant bits of advice and insights shared right from the get go. You're really understanding our customer, creating an organization that's truly customer centric and why that's so important for retaining and growing an effective SaaS business in today's incredibly competitive market. Leslie, we thoroughly enjoyed talking to you and we look forward to seeing you again soon.
That was fun. Thank you for having me.
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