In this week’s episode of the Enterprise Monetization Podcast, Sandeep Jain sits down with Albert Wong, Director of Revenue Operations at Alloy to discuss some of the struggles revenue operations teams face when trying to select tools to use for their Quote to Cash Lifestyle.

Episode Notes:

Sandeep Jain:

Welcome to the 13th episode of “The Enterprise Monetization” podcast. And this is your host, Sandeep Jain. In this podcast, we invite thought leaders from monetization space that is CPQ billing, so that you can learn about challenges, opportunities and best practices in enterprise monetization. Today, I'm pleased to invite Albert Wong to this podcast. Albert has deep expertise in the field of revenue operations. Currently, he's the director of revenue operations at Alloy that I'm sure most of you are aware of, but we'll let Albert talk about that in a second. But prior to Alloy, Albert has worked at companies such as CaptivateIQ, Gong, Blend, and others. With that, I want to extend a very warm welcome to Albert. 

Albert Wong:

Thanks for having me. 

Sandeep Jain:

Awesome. Thank you for your time. So let's jump into this Albert. So before we go into Quote-to-Cash or CPQ billing, your favorite topics? Could you just share a fun fact about yourself with audience? 

Albert Wong:

I guess some quick things about myself, born and raised in Southern California, a certified scuba diver and my deepest dive was about 125 feet, where it was probably questionable if I should have been doing that at all.

Sandeep Jain:

That sounds like a lot of fun. Awesome. That's a good hobby. When was your last day by the way? Did you get time to do those?

Albert Wong:

My last dive was last Thanksgiving, roughly. 

Sandeep Jain:

Not too far ago. Well, the Thanksgiving is coming up again. So maybe the next time. Moving on to the next one up, could you give a background to our listeners? How and when you started? How do you came about revenue operations? Is that what you always wanted to do, or you assured yourself in that direction, somewhere along the line? 

Albert Wong:

So I myself, started my career out in consulting for financial services. I did that for a little, over two years before I got my first job in the startup world at a FinTech company called Avant where I was doing BI and then I switched to a strategy role at a company called Loot Crate that was consumer facing. And that my first real b2b role was ad blend, where I was one of the founding members of the business operations team. And I joined as the first biz OPS person, under the CEO at Gong, where I helped skill it and accidentally transitioned into sales operations. And then from there, I built in started the RevOps team at Captivate. And now I'm leading the RevOps team as director of RevOps here at Alloy. 

Sandeep Jain:

Alright, so let's talk more about alloy, what does Alloy do? 

Albert Wong:

So, Alloy is a data orchestration platform to help identify frauds, what it does, is connect with a variety of data sources that essentially provides data identification, it's like, is this person who they say it is? And because of that, can we actually confirm them? It's primarily designed to help anyone, who's dealing with financial data. So a lot of FinTech companies, as well as banks, especially as the financial world is becoming more digitized. 

Sandeep Jain:

Give us a little bit more information about the Alloy in the sense of how many employees you are. And how big is a sales ops team? 

Albert Wong:

Alloy is roughly around 323 0r 330 people right now. I would say the direct sales team, somewhere AES is something between 15 to 20 and then BDRS is probably around10 or something like that. And then we have solutions engineers, I would say it's probably another 10 or something like that. We also have post sales teams, and so on. So as for my direct team, I specifically manage the revenue operations portion, where it is the sales and marketing operations piece. While we also have a post sales, CX operations person and enablement within my team as well, directly under me, there are four and then we have two enablement people and a CX operations person. And my boss, the VP of revenue operations, that oversees all of us. 

Sandeep Jain:

That's pretty interesting. And the reason I say this is revenue operations sometimes just involves sales, but the name is revenue operations part. But it seems at Alloy, you're doing marketing, sales, customer success, the whole revenue cycle, which makes the revenue operations synonymous to what it should be. So it's interesting to see the word matching the work.

Albert Wong:

Yes, it's something that's we did it by design, mainly because we wanted to streamline everything, because what happens is, none of this stuff sits in a silo, it all effectively flows from one team to the next. So we essentially sit there as decentralized team, that it's essentially helping pass information in a more consistent manner. So we can properly report to the executive team as well as to other teams that, this is exactly what's happening. This is how things are moving through the funnel. 

Sandeep Jain:

Awesome. So let's do a double click on that. Could you start from the start? What are the things that you're using? What are your pin points in this relay race, beginning from the marketing stack?

Albert Wong:

From our marketing stack, our primary marketing tool is Marketo. And I'm sure there's a number of other stuff on top of that, and especially as you are moving towards adopting and ABM strategy, while Salesforce is our bread and butter, that's actually holding information across the board and tied to Salesforce. There's like a million other tools, Lane data for routing and zoom info, for essentially data enrichment. I'm currently going through a CPQ implementation, and also sales engagement tool such as sales loft, which we are actually transitioning off of, and then post sales, it goes to a another platform called Catalyst. 

Sandeep Jain:

What about the billing side? What's the handoff from the courts to do the invoicing? 

Albert Wong:

On the billing side we previously did off of opportunities, and it was a manual process. And then we essentially we're creating these opportunities and stuff and uploading them and then creating it afterwards in a platform called Ordway. We looked at Ordway once previously for CPQ purposes, but it didn't fit the bill. It wasn't flexible enough and what didn't fit the complexities that we needed it to. And as such, we actually ended up implementing in Salesforce CPQ, which has been a massive, undertaking. 

Sandeep Jain:

Understood. I'm assuming there are some stories here that you might want to tell, so the billing is manual, and the coding around Salesforce Marketo for marketing, use the term called ABM, I believe that's Account Based Marketing. The practitioners would know but in case somebody's wondering what that is. So tell me one of the biggest challenges, this is not specific to Alloy. And you worked at big companies like Gong, which is a massive company captivate IQ. Now there are big sales company, one of the things that you see, again and again, the core problems in this stack. 

Albert Wong:

The core problems of sourcing across is having documents and having systems of records and having information, that works for everyone across the org, or essentially, how do you provide the right information for these different groups, from sales, to finance, to accounting, to legal, which are probably the main groups that really deal with the sales cycle, and especially creating quotes and sending out sales orders and stuff. And that's one of the big problems, that I've seen over and over again, and it's a massive point of friction, and you have to go back and forth all over the place. So it's like, this is what I'm seeing from here. This is what I'm seeing from this system. So what I'm seeing from that system, essentially, that reconciliation just take so much time and energy.

Sandeep Jain:

Do you think it's an implementation problem? Or is it an architectural problem? Is it a tool problem? All of the above?

Albert Wong:

I think the problem is, a lot of these tools, they were designed for local maximization rather than global. And what I mean by that is, essentially, each of these tool was meant to optimalize for a certain thing, for a certain purpose. And when the product designers, product managers went into this process, I think very much the emphasis was just that, it's the, how do I do everything I need for this function? for these purposes? without looking at the bigger picture of, let's not think of all of this as individual parts, but rather like an entire entity. And that's been one of the big problems, where it makes it so, not all of this fits together. Because who made it, they weren't working together when designing it. It's just okay, we built all this out. And then they can talk to the next piece using an API, and someone else will figure out the next piece, to do all the cleanup.

Sandeep Jain:

Understood. When I talk to customers, especially high growth companies, I see most of them start off using a manual order form, a Google Sheets or a Word doc. And it seems that it's because it's much easier to do, when you're starting off with few customers, that's a quick thing to go. But they keep on doing this because it becomes a habit. Could you talk about, what's the pros and cons for using manual order forms and not automating it? 

Albert Wong:

The pros of it is, one, it's incredibly flexible. It's pretty much unlimited flexibility, you can do exactly whatever you want. And two is, it's free/cheap. Essentially, you don't have to spend any money implementing, and it's just the amount of energy and stuff that you have to put into creating the initial quotes, is a lot easier. And for a small company, or an early stage company, when they haven't actually figured out a lot of their pricing and packaging, it honestly makes a lot of sense. Because you're constantly in a reiterative process of like, I don't know what the structure is, I'm going to test this way out and that way out. And sometimes you might be testing multiple pricing models at the same time, where on a system that's much more complex to do. But if you're at a 10, 20, 30 person company, it's like, okay, I have two salespeople. I'm the CEO, and I'm the direct sales person. It's like, okay, I can test all these different things. So that's definitely the benefit of a manual, simple order form, like on Excel or Google Sheets, as I've seen before. The problem is, when you scale, when you actually have a more set process of, this is what the expectation is. Where you're trying to scale, we're starting to hit that next, that first renewal and stuff, you start running into a lot of different problems then, in terms of scaling, what happens is, you're no longer just like the CEO, who's also the seller, but you are actually having a sales team and where you're having a sales team. If you don't lay down a proper system or something like that. Allowed them to do whatever they want, it becomes the Wild West, where they can go rogue and do some pretty crazy things. As I can tell, from personal experience, I have seen sales orders, where they sold things, where technically there's no way to actually differentiate or something like that. And what I mean by that is we sell as the company only has one type of license period. But we sell this as if there's two or three different types of licenses to provide different pricing. And we're like, we sell one type of license for account executives, one type of licenses for BDRs, or something like that. But the reality is, the company itself only has one license. So it's pretty much completely going by trust of what your customer tells you like, we hired a 10 more AES or 20 more BDRs, the BDR price might be half as much, you have zero clue if they're telling the truth or not really. And you're not about to try to scan over and ask them for their org chart. So I've seen instances like that, where it can be really scary. I've also seen stuff like for this specific type of person, or persona or something, you have unlimited licenses. So where it effectively capture your ability to ever do real upsells. So that's the danger of, why you need to actually put some constraints, and actually need to have a system in place in order to stop crazy sales orders like these. 

Sandeep Jain:

Understood. What I've also heard about and would love to get your perspective on that is this bad data. And by that what I mean is, these codes get QDF, and they get signed. But somebody has to operationalize this freeform text into your Salesforce CRM or whatever CRM you're using. And the operations team and the billings team, now need to actually extract that data. So could you talk about like if we are using or if anybody's using a manual order form, how does this translation happen? What's the cost for that? And is it okay to do it?

Albert Wong:

It is an extremely, painful process, especially for a stranger, or wonky deals, where turtling might be all over the place. As if you have something that's like, this deal is for 13 months and 10 days or something like that, it can be really bizarre. Just from personal experience, how I had to do it is essentially, figure out the time length, and then change it to based off of whatever the company's time length is, it's like, by month or something like that, you have to transform it, as this equals to 12.11 month and calculate it out for the contract value, whatever this upsell might be. And that amount of manual overhead is one, it's very prone to error. So it's easy, if you under calculate, then it means you're getting yourself paid less. If you over calculate, and you get caught. It leaves a really bad customer experience. People bring up questions and they question your professional competency. So it hurts either ways. And try to get it to be perfect means sucking up a lot of time and energy. Oftentimes the folks who need, it is probably like into finance, or someone who is usually decently quantitative and analytical. And it's honestly not the best way for them to spend a lot of their time. 

Sandeep Jain:

Got it. What about amendments, renewals, proration? How should companies deal with manual order forms? Is it easier to do? Does it become increasingly harder?

Albert Wong:

Increasingly harder without a doubt. It becomes so much harder because for a manual order form, there's nothing for you to really be able to automatically reflect on. You have to go and essentially look up what the original order form, in order to do the amendment, especially if there is some type of tearing, like from ‘X’ amount to ‘X’ amount, and this amount of price and then for the next tier, it's for the next amount of price, that whole process has to be pretty manual And then like I said before, you have to calculate it out for that TCV, which can be very cumbersome. And for renewal, you also have to look back and see, what was the exact terms or what type of provisions are there? I've seen built in deals, where there's provisions like, upsell, next year renewal, the maximum amount of price increase might be like 3%, 5% ,7%, or something like that. It's built in advance or like, there is actually a contractual cap to it. And when you don't have a set system, you pretty much have to almost start playing layer, until they go through line by line. It's like, wait, what was the special terms associated to this? 

Sandeep Jain:

Well, that seems like a lot of work. And what do you think about I've heard these things called AE axiety. If you're using a manual order form, is everything all right? Is that a thing? 

Albert Wong:

As the robots manager, and I have actually had the experience where we essentially screwed up, it's actually an AE screwed up a quote, bad enough, where it was a couple of $1,000 discrepancy. And I would say, the amount of stress and pain it caused, definitely what we would classify as that. And that's the other part, when AEs have to go through and check through all these little bits and pieces. A bunch of times, what it does is, it sucks energy, and momentum from them to actually going out there to sell. Instead, they're trying to check in for the map. It's like, is this actually right? Am I going to be able to get approval for it? What are all the issues, which, it's not the best use of their time either?

Sandeep Jain:

What do you advice or recommendations to probably vendors or product managers, for these tools who are listening to this podcast? Like how should they think differently about solving the problems? 

Albert Wong:

It's pretty much what I said at the beginning of the podcast, of really thinking about things from a broader, more global perspective, instead of thinking of them locally. Too often, our organzations way too siloed, where finance thinks about finance, where accounting thinks about accounting, and sales thinks about sales. There's not a collective group. It's like a gathering of minds. Let's think about this whole process, from end to end, that impacts all of us. So I think it's definitely having a meeting of the minds, of actually understand what this whole process looks like. And try to understand, what does a great process look like? And each of us might individually take on some more pain here and there. But overall, it becomes the most optimal process for the entire team. And from there, you have the discussion, which is as what should we be bringing on board? And quite frankly, from what I've seen it, it is oftentimes, the least number of systems possible. The idea is, you bring on as many systems as you have to, but you try to limit it to the minimum number of possible, I think is probably the ideal. So that's where, really systematic thinking, of if there's a vendor where it's covering multiple portions, as monetize does, it does help where it is, we're thinking about this problem. And this problem, too. 

Sandeep Jain:

Understood. And what are the priorities for you in the next couple of quarters. 

Albert Wong:

Internally for my company, one of the big priorities is actually billing. We are currently on a utilization billing model. And I can definitely say, there is some pin points associated with it, especially with that and disconnect of not having CPQ before. So that's definitely one of the top company priorities. For myself. It is essentially driving much more of an outbound motion and activity. And essentially to help my team hit the targets.

Sandeep Jain:

Any metrics that you will recommend that Reb ops people listening to this podcast should be using to understand the health of their current systems? 

Albert Wong:

I guess that depends on what type of help we're talking about. If we're specifically talking more about the CPQ, where all the Quote-to-Cash world and stuff like that, I would say what you want to see is, what is your rate of collection? How much of your invoicing going out, you're able to collect? And also, what's the average turnaround time that you're able to actually get cash everything in? Versus, we had sales orders out for X, Y, Z amount of time, we haven't been able to do this piece or that piece, and it's stalled out too long. And also, it's like, what is the procurement process? Or what's the process of average timeline, of when someone sends out the sales, essentially starts the quote, to be able to send it out and getting it signed? What parts are taking up a lot of time, energy and momentum? For me personally, and that's also on the plate right now, there is a legal component of contracts and stuff on an iron clad, how does this all fit in? It may not have been globally optimized before. And now I'm diving into that right now. 

Sandeep Jain:

Let's talk about usage billing. Actually, the thing that you brought up earlier? Is this something that you look at a new tool? Because you're saying you're implemented a CPQ? Or you're implementing one, you probably have something for billing. So when you think about usage, how do you tie the ends together with an existing CPQ, or billing system? How do you think about that problem?

Albert Wong:

Billing or utilization billing is, a little bit of the new trend. And it's good and bad in some sense, the good part is, it's a great marketing pitch. Where you pretty much can tell customers, you are only going to have to pay for whatever value you're able to derive from the platform. And that's a very strong message. But the bad part to it is actually being able to execute, it is really crazy difficult. And what I mean by that is, it is interconnected process of everyone needs to be on the same page, from essentially sales to finance to accounting to legal to a lot of the technical side, because a lot of the utilization metrics and stuff that is actually flowing from the technical end, so it's flowing from your product and engineering people, which a lot of traditional times, they haven't been super, intertwined into the go to market motion. But with a utilization model, they become much more central to that, in order to actually make this whole thing work. So I would say, the thing about having set systems ahead of time, it makes it so much more structured, versus the whole idea of engineering is you engineer for scale, or describe engineering almost like never make sense. If you're trying to do something went off. It only makes sense if it's the idea of like, I can spend 100 hours to build this thing that saves me five hours of time in perpetuity. That's why it makes sense. If it's like, I'm going to spend 100 hours to build this thing that saves me something that would take 10 hours time. And I'm only doing it once, it doesn't make sense anymore. So that's where I would go from it. That's why you need to have a lot more set systems or else, there's no way you can, try to build for every single one off that, someone could come up with off of their infinite amount of creativity on a sales order, will drive every one crazy across the org and it just sucks so much time from everyone.

Sandeep Jain:

Got it. Actually a follow up on that. How often do you see people building their own tools because they're frustrated with what is available outside or maybe just not connecting well with each other?

Albert Wong:

I don't think anyone really tries to build the whole thing end to end, they might build parts, bits and pieces of it, here and there, try to bridge a gap. It's very rare to see someone like, I'm going to build my own entire CPQ system. I've heard of certain instances, but they're very rare. The only ones I can name off top my head are like Microsoft. I know, Microsoft has an infamously like famous billing system where that whole system probably cost like billions of dollars all on its own. And it can do the craziest most complex stuff. But the number of businesses that are at the scale where I can dedicate that much resources, that are just not very many. There's Microsoft and then, who does this leave open to be also be able to do this? I guess Meta and Google can, but not that many other people can. 

Sandeep Jain:

That reminds me, I was at Cisco a long time ago. And we had our own CPQ. We used to call it CCW, Cisco commerce workspace. I don't know if it's still around, but to your point, big companies, they end up building their own but that's interesting. There's one thing we haven't talked about as yet. But the trend of which I see more or less the similar to usage billing, which is self serve. In B2B, some people call it product lead growth. What are your thoughts about this? Is this thing real? And actually, more than that, from a revenue operations perspective, what does it mean to you? 

Albert Wong:

I definitely think that the trend is very real. It also perfectly aligned with this no code movement, essentially, the idea of simplifying things and making things a lot more usable for like non technical users. It's essential for velocity, it's essentially like, a company is trying to build, and they're making changes quickly, they need to have the ability to actually make these changes themselves. And instead of each time they want to make these changes, they have to have a meeting of the mind with someone externally, like I don't want to have to go to one of my vendors or contractors each time and go meet with their CSM or their services team to make a slight tweak, that takes up a lot of time, because that’s line up calendars and stuff like that. So this trend towards self serve is very real. And it is a representation of how far technology has developed, where previously technology was developed, especially for enterprise software. It's developed for experts. Now it's developed for much more generalist, people who are trying to build and run a company. One thing you'll definitely see from this is probably a greater emphasis on R&D to make this experience possible. And probably a discount in the amount of services revenue, a lot of companies might have. 

Sandeep Jain:

That's interesting. But how about revenue operations if Alloy decides to do self serve, what does it mean to your internal systems? Is it like something easy? For revenue operations team to incorporate that as a channel? Do you have to go back to the drawing board again? Like what's the experience like for RevOps teams? 

Albert Wong:

It's definitely something you have to really think through because you have to figure out, for this self serve, how much of the enterprise experience does it encompass? Alloy itself has three product lines right now. Is this self serve going to cover all of them? How are the bundling and packaging and stuff going to work on it? So there's a lot of considerations to it? But we're self serve deadly, is much easier to jump in is, if you already sold the initial product and then it's about utilizing the product is much more self service as well, as upsells is much more self service that already provides a lot of time savings and costs.

Sandeep Jain:

One thing that I've heard, which I would love to get your feedback on as, like you already have a CPQ billing system. They have their own product catalogs, often, which are disparate. But now your self serve, as you were saying earlier, out of three product lines, we will sell only one. And so do current billing systems, CPQ systems understand self serve, while you have to go back to the engineering teams to build something for you. Like, how does that work? 

Albert Wong:

So I would probably say, in a self serve world, you want to keep the catalog simpler. Even if there's something crazy and complex in the back end of all these different things you might sell, I would say, at least for customer facing, keep it very simple, where it's like, here's the clear selection list, or five options or something like that. You don't want to delve down this rabbit hole of like, there's 200 permutations, it's going to break everyone's brains and, they don't know what to do with it. And it causes a lot of hesitancy on the users and buyers end. 

Sandeep Jain:

This brings us to almost end of the podcast. How do you see this industry changing by the way, we talked about consolidation as one of the trends? Maybe looking at the forest instead of the trees? I think that's what you're suggesting earlier. But anything else, do you think from a revolution perspective that's happening in this industry? 

Albert Wong:

I think we are in the situation where technology has got better, there's more, no code solutions out there. And because of that, there's a general trend where like MPs are what's acceptable, what's okay, for enterprise tech is going to be higher, the bar is going to be higher, effectively. Previously, you would very much say, the MPs for an iPhone beats out any enterprise software by not even a mile, probably, like a flight worth of miles or like we're talking 100,000 miles or something like that. That gap is going to slowly bridge more and more over the next coming years, where the demand for enterprise tech is it needs to be a little bit better. So that's where it's trending towards, which coincides with what I said about, these tools should be easier to use, so they can be self serviced. 

Sandeep Jain:

Got it. Albert, it was a pleasure speaking with you, but before you go, is there any resource like a blog, a podcast a community that you might recommend to our listeners? 

Albert Wong:

So for myself, my personal favorite podcast I listened to is actually, ‘Masters Of Scale’ by Reed Hoffman. Reed Hoffman is obviously the founder of LinkedIn and partner at Greylock. Some of them can be a little bit cheesy, but overall, I love hearing stories of essentially like how founders, built what they built. So that's probably my personal favorite podcast. And as for books and stuff, the best business book I've ever read was actually ‘Ride of a Lifetime’ by Bob Iger, who was the former CEO of Disney?

Sandeep Jain:

What did you like about the book? 

Albert Wong:

What I liked about the book was, yes, it was an auto biography. But at the same time, I'm sure some of it was embellished, but he does talk about the really hard parts of his journey. The really hard parts of his experience, where he had to deal with pretty bad issues, where things really hit the fan, such as there was an incident at a park where a child was (Inaudible 40:04) and like how do I deal with this whole crisis and his whole process of how he's been at Disney for a while, he was affected like CEO. And they dangled the role of CEO in front of them for years, for almost like a year or something like that, when they had a pain of other people, go through like how about we considered this person, this person and being although, I liked the fact that it made it much more relatable of, it wasn't just all success, but he also talks about some of its failures. 

Sandeep Jain:

Got it. Anything on revenue operations, that comes to you, as some resources online, I know that they're not many to be honest, when I look around, I wish there was some RevOps University or something. 

Albert Wong:

I think there are some Reb ops universities, online courses and stuff like that. But I think the revenue operations is as a relatively new trend. Right before this, probably the last couple years ago, even when I first transition in revenue operational was just first starting to pick up, before that it was much more siloed as marketing operations, sales operations, and maybe like CX operations, CX operations itself is very new. While marketing operations with stripe is new, I'd say marketing operations, you can maybe step back as far as like HubSpot and Marketo, whenever they came onto the scene. While for CX operations, it's roughly as far back as maybe Gainsight. So like, those are definitely a bit newer, while sales operations is a bit more mature. And the idea of consolidating them all under one umbrella is still very, very new. So I would say even the best thought leaders in this space, they've only had honestly, a couple of years, they were much more specialists in one of these, and then they're like, okay, because of my expertise in these things, I'm helping connect the dots in a lot of this stuff. 

Sandeep Jain:

It's interesting, you mentioned this, I know we are almost to the end of the podcast. But revenue operations, as we discussed earlier, covers three things marketing, sales, and customer success. But when I look at the company's, most of the times revenue operations actually bought into the head of sales. So they call it revenue operations. But it's sales ops, ish. At only very few companies, I've seen revenue operations reporting into the COO role. And one of my pieces is, early stage companies don't have a COO, they have a CEO, they have head of sales, they have head of functions. And this RevOps is by definition, a merging of functions. And there is no role other than the CEO, where this merging happens. So it's sometimes CEOs don't want to have this thing reporting into them. And sales is usually the most vocal, out of the three groups. So they end up getting the team. I don't know, this has been my observation. 

Albert Wong:

I would say, in those cases, I would describe it, as those are not real revenue operations. Much more of the trend, where it's like, this is what the latest trend is, let's just change the title lane to align with market. I've actually had a paddle of essentially sales and marketing operations, or sales and RevOps, professionals. And in this panel, in this conversation, the consensus was a large none. Alot of them actually would say, these were a little more senior folks. So they're not analysts or something. They were all minimum, like senior manager, directors and VPs, and stuff like that. Their consensus was pretty much, I would not report to a head of sales, I would not report to a VP of sales, I would only be willing to report to, much more a new trend as well as a CRO or CEO. 

Sandeep Jain:

That's a good point. Some companies do get a CRO before they get a COO. 

Albert Wong:

I would somewhat echo that settlement, which is funny to say because obviously my old boss Christian was VP of sales, but I would describe Christian was a unicorn where yes, he was VP of sales, but this was A guy who actually had ‘X’ sales operations experience, ‘X’ finance experience. So he definitely was able to think about things in a little bit different perspective than someone, who just purely came up through the sales award. 

Sandeep Jain:

Got it, Albert. It was really good speaking with you and thank you for your time today. 

Albert Wong:

Absolutely. 

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.