Sandeep Jain:
Hi, welcome to the 20th episode of the Enterprise Monetization podcast and this is your host, Sandeep Jain. In this podcast, we invite thought leaders from the enterprise monetization space that is cpq usage, billing, etc so that you can all learn about challenges, opportunities and best practices in enterprise monetization today. I'm glad to have Hannah as a guest on our show. Hannah has deep expertise in demand generation and sales ops. She's currently Director of Revenue Operations at Atreus. If you haven't heard of this, we'll talk a bit more about this, but it's part of a public company called Equity Brands. Prior to that, Hannah was director of Demand Generation at Calidus cloud, which I'm sure people must be aware of considering the CPQ roots of the company and she has had similar roles at other companies as well With that I would like to extend a very well warm welcome to Hannah. Hannah, welcome to the show.
Hannah Hanrahan:
Hey there, Thanks for having me, Excited to chat today.
Sandeep Jain:
Awesome. Ok, let's, let's jump into this. So before we go into the CPQ and billing, could you share a fun fact about yourself, with the audience?
Hannah Hanrahan:
Sure. So I guess in my free time when I'm not doing CPQ and revenue ops, I run a girl scouts trip here in Leander, Texas. And I've got about eight girls who join, considering opening it up to 12 because, we've got lots of demand in the area, but that keeps me pretty busy and it's a, a nice kind of separate area that I can focus my time and energy and you know, work on the next generation of Redbox leaders.
Sandeep Jain:
No, this is this is great. Thank you for sharing that, Hannah. And I guess you have kids yourself, So how do you manage the time by the way between revenue operations and girl scouts and being a mother?
Hannah Hanrahan:
I do. Yeah. So I have a eight year old and almost six year old. I'm actually getting into a lot of time management books right now, and just working on a process that I'm trying to get in place before the school year kicks off here. But it's, it's a constant juggle. I have to categorize prioritize and be efficient with my time.
Sandeep Jain:
No, this is very interesting. because as, as a, as a girl scout leader, a leader for girl scouts, you know, you're also telling them that it's, it's OK to be a mother, have a job and doing this, you know, how to prioritize time. So I'm pretty sure they look up to you in that regard, that you may be unaware of. So I think this is really good.
Hannah Hanrahan:
Yeah, I hope so. I try. So, and I'm a temporizer which as we get into some of the conversation, I like to have programs and templates for how I do many of the things that work and then even the way I run the troupe, right? And so I find that those help me again, just to get more things done efficiently, quickly, it spans all parts of my life.
Sandeep Jain:
Awesome. We'll get into the templates for CPQ I mention in a second. So, and Hannah, could you describe, you know, one thing unique about your, your background was, is you were an account manager but then you were, you had marketing ops and then you were doing sales ops. Could you give our audience as somebody of why you made certain changes in your career and, and where you are right now?
Hannah Hanrahan:
Yeah. You know, it was kind of an opportunistic thing for me to get into sales and revenue operations. But I started in demand gen and well, actually I really started in marketing and demand gen and email, marketing and marketing automation was becoming a huge thing at that time. And I really loved the technology, the automation, the process behind just email marketing. So I went pretty deep there and spent about 13 years working internally at companies and building up programs and then actually as an account manager and working with clients so support a countrywide were a few that I had the opportunity to work on their programs. And anyhow, so sales operations was a need in the company that I was at Lucid, we were required by Acuity brands and became Atreus. And so I took that opportunity and just dove in and really enjoyed getting to learn more of the business side. So in marketing, it was all about, you know, leads building pipeline. And while I enjoyed that, I actually really liked getting in to see how deals were structured and the process behind working with even just closing and invoicing and financing and all those pieces. So I've just kind of followed that chain through and have found myself, you know, leading our revs function here at Atrius.
Sandeep Jain:
Awesome. So for folks who actually don't know much about Atreus, can you talk a little bit more about the company? What you guys do?
Hannah Hanrahan:
Yeah. So Adrius is a part of the Intelligence Space Group for Acuity brands. And it's a what I like to call the innovative arm of the company. And our, our goal here is to make buildings smarter, safer and greener. And we're doing that through software sensors and controls. It's a company filled with a lot of really intelligent people. It's at the edge of really this IoT space, you know where the device places that are not enabled, and easy to access in terms of data, we're able to grab, we centralize energy data, we aggregate it and then we make it easy for our, our buyers who are, who tend to be sustainability or building operators to see and understand where their, their energy consumption is coming from. So it's a really exciting place to be right now, especially as there's a lot more sustainability goals and commitments made by companies out there. And so that's a little bit about the company. There's a lot more to learn.
Sandeep Jain:
Awesome. This is good. And so can you talk a little bit more about your role within the company? Like what does revenue operations mean? Like how big is the team?
Hannah Hanrahan:
Yeah, yeah, so revenue operations so is a we've got about maybe 150 or so people within our part of the group. And our revenue operations team is actually pretty lean. We've got somebody who I consider an operations business partner. He's very focused on sales ops, but also works with customers success support. Finance all the various teams and then a salesforce admin who's busy making sure sales force is our core product which will get to you later. But making sure everything's functioning and building out new processes to support the teams. And then we work with an what I consider a sales force dev group. And they are essentially a contracted group who help us design scope and implement some of our bigger projects. So it's pretty lean and mean, it's really like the three of us. And about probably four people on the contract side.
Sandeep Jain:
Got it. And this question kind of comes up quite a bit. So would love to get any perspective on that in terms of contracting. Is that something that you do on an ongoing basis? Is this like a quarterly thing and an annual thing once in a while or is this something on a continuous?
Hannah Hanrahan:
I've worked with several different business models and this is an ongoing basis that I've worked out. So this particular group, I have a small kind of subscription for just day to day, week to week support. And then we have an on demand model where we plug them in as projects come in. So the work that we can do with them will be a lot at times. And then sometimes there's just a little bit or not too much to do.
Sandeep Jain:
Understood, understood. And thank you for going over that. What I've seen the question from revenue operations folks. Is like, should I have this as a need to have basis? I think what you're describing is very unique, which is a subscription basis on the services that you keep using them for something. But then for them, then you possibly do another deal with them.
Hannah Hanrahan:
Yeah, it, it might be a little unique in what I value and that is the integration and the way parts of our operations and tech stack are set up, take time to learn. And so I have found that pulling people in and out of projects can cause more friction. And oftentimes we lose sight of some of the nuances of how we have particular pieces that up.
Sandeep Jain:
Got it. And Hannah, could you describe like what's your business model look like for Atreus? Like how many SKU’s are transacting in how many currencies you have?
Hannah Hanrahan:
Yeah, we're pretty, we keep it to one currency. I think that might be a project at some point. But we have about three different product suites and that includes 200 different sku’s under it. And we tend to bundle those together in packages. It's a mix of subscription and one time. We have a few usage-based scenarios with customers. Does that help kind of?
Sandeep Jain:
Absolutely. The, the idea is to just understand the scale of the business and what different things that you might be using. And what are your channels for selling sales led? Is it through resellers self serve
Hannah Hanrahan:
We have a mix. So, we have a direct sales team, and we've got channel that sells as well. We have a little bit on the resale side. And that's about it right now.
Sandeep Jain:
Ok. Do you have any sort of self-serve at this stage?
Hannah Hanrahan:
We don't. That's a conversation. Yeah, that is a conversation and probably one of our top of mind projects that we're exploring.
Sandeep Jain:
Ok, let's, let's talk about this in a second. Hannah, because I want to get into this, which is the topic that everybody wants, to listen or talk about. So before we go to that, what are your current stack looks like? Like what's your CRM tool, billing tool?
Hannah:
Yeah. Well, I mentioned salesforce. So we're, we're pretty heavy in salesforce. We use the CRM, We also use CPQ. We use Maxo for billing and invoicing. We've been a customer of theirs for a while back when they were optics. We use Avalara for tax automation and that's about it as far as the revenue stack.
Sandeep Jain:
So Hannah, a related point, what are your biggest challenges in your quote to cash stack as it stands today?
Hannah Hanrahan:
So the core challenges that I've found and we've been focused on is just opening up our sales channels. So we have a pretty streamlined direct sales channel motion. We're working more and more through the channel. So continuing to find ways to leverage that infrastructure that we've built and enable our channel to more efficiently sell without relying on our internal teams is one a self you mentioned self serve portal. That's certainly something that we've talked a lot about. And how do we again open up what we've built to our customer base. Where right now, we tend to have a middle man in between all of these channels. And then we're also working on automating renewals. And I know there's a lot of different ways and solutions to do that. But we have some kind of core challenges in the way our system is set up to really unlocking that. So channels and sales motions, the then the second one would be just in inter company transactions. So we're a large business overall and then we're a small business within that. And so we run into some what I would kind of categorize as business transformation challenges and that we've been established for quite a while and we need to identify better ways to work together internally. And so I think those are the, the top two or three I suppose for me.
Sandeep Jain:
Got it. And Hannah, so if you look at the, the channel sales, the resellers, what's the biggest thing to do? Is it a catalog challenge like because you must be selling at different prices? I'm assuming like, what's your core challenge there?
Hannah Hanrahan:
The core challenge I would say is that many of the channels that we would like to sell through are more of a product to sell and less subscription. And so having a process in place to track the start date, the end date and the renewals is not something that those partners have. And so, we manage that piece on our side and, we have a process in place for it, but it's sort of a self serve conversation as well of enabling them to use what we built and just easily quote, close manage those subscriptions, see the renewals and all of that.
Sandeep Jain:
Ok, And for self serve, what is your use case today? And because it could mean a lot, a lot of different things. So what to you?
Hannah:
Yeah, our self serve. Today, I'm focused really on an auto renewal with existing customers. So the ability for a customer to easily see what they purchased, renew it, add on, remove and close out their transaction. That would be number one and number two at some point, this is more of a product and engineering conversation as well as if we want to open that fully up to an online transaction for people that just land on our website and want to start the product right away.
Sandeep Jain:
That's interesting. So, Hannah, what would you say to people who, who might say look at renewal time? I really want my rep to be doing this because that's my chance to grow the pie or Upsell a few things. If you were to do this self serve, wouldn't you be losing venue? Like, how do you do that?
Hannah Hanrahan:
That's a good question. So we, we are not completely hands off in that. We've got our accounts tiered and so there's a certain, set of accounts that we know we can just auto renew, they've already signed off on an auto renewing contract. And, then those, those higher tiered customers, we have more of a hands on approach where the CSM and the account manager are heavily involved in that process.
Sandeep Jain:
Okay, Actually, that's a very interesting point because as, as a company, you might have a lot of customers and you don't want to hire CS MS just to call on everybody because your lower tier customers are like, just give me a renewal. I don't want to talk to anybody. I just want to keep on using what I'm using. So looks like you're solving problem for the customers and CMS as well because a small ticket renewal may not mean a lot to their commission. So it, it's kind of not thinking about it. I think it helps on both sides.
Hannah Hanrahan:
Yeah, that's, that's a good point and it is, it's this, this initiative is driven a bit by internal operations and then also again, just capacity and wanting to serve our customers in the best way possible. But balancing resources, got it is this like a big project that have you guys thought about this? Is this like a small thing? Is this a head on like is this is a complicated problem to solve?I think it's, it's a bit complicated more because of our existing infrastructure, right? And so using the tools that we already have and opening that up to the customers without introducing, there's a lot of new tools out there and I think they do many of these things well, however, plugging it into our existing system and have having that holistic view of the customer account contract is important for us and maintaining, you know, internal tracking of various pieces. So that is probably the more complex piece of it. And then overall, I mean, I think if we're starting fresh, it would probably be a bit simpler to solve. So I do find it somewhat challenging and just finding the right solution.
Sandeep Jain:
Got it, got it. Yeah, on that point, actually, I talked to a lot of people in revenue operations and everybody has sort of a seat based pricing or a subscription based pricing. And I've been told consistently by people who try self serve expansion. So I'm talking about amendments basically. But I think renewals, I put that in the same category. It's like a frictionless way for a customer to do business with you. An existing customer, I would say to do business with you is by enabling these self serve amendments and self serve renewals. And these are logistically hard to do because of the challenges that you just mentioned about like different too links. But that's something I'm hearing consistently from people who try that by building their own custom solutions. They get so much revenue through that stream. They're like, I would, I just want to have this, like, I don't want to get rid of this stream of revenue.
Hannah Hanrahan:
Yeah and I mean, it's, I think there's actually a quote I came across that I really like from PWC. It was a, a white paper they worked on with salesforce. but one, what they said was that renewing the customers will keep you in the game. But the upgrades cross sells and up sells, keep you in a long game. And, and that, like when you were in the weeds here and this is what I think stood out to me about your podcast is I like to hear from people who are in the weeds and really understand how complex that can be. and, but it, it's really true.
Sandeep Jain:
Right, because the, it, it is a challenging thing to solve. I, again, I think there's tools out there that are getting better and better and easier to implement and, you know, get off the ground. But it is, it's kind of challenging, especially, you know, keeping all of those, contract dates and, you know, confirming all of that aligned. I think it's challenging to the extent that the underlying tooling cannot support that. So this this concept of omni channel I think came across in customer support first where people like the idea was I have to support customers from whatever channels are they coming from could be Twitter, like even for B2B products, right? Somebody can put the services down and it happens on Twitter first, right? This could be your email, this could be your a support ticket, this could be or a chat. And so you want to support solution that kind of looks at your customer through a single lens, irrespective of the channel. I think what's happening now is in the revenue operations. The same thing is happening. Your customer is coming through the sales led channel first, then they are coming through a self serve and they're like you need to look at me the same, I'm the same person. So help me do business with you in a very frictionless way, do not impose different challenges on me just because I'm choosing a different channel to work with you.
Hannah Hanrahan:
Yeah and I experience that at just at level and then like I mentioned, we're part of a larger company and so there are times we want to sell together. And so that's where this business transformation like I mentioned comes in of you know, regardless of what company you come in through, wanting to have that seamless experience. So there's, there's a lot to unravel there, but I'm really focused on my Arias piece.So, absolutely crawl, walk, run.
Sandeep Jain:
And so Hannah, based on these things that you're looking at being in the weeds, what is your advice or recommendations to the vendors in the space? What's anything that you would say that, hey, look at this pain, like solve this pain point or look at the problem this this way?
Hannah Hanrahan:
Yeah, I think integrating easily with existing technology is important. When you're at the point that our company is at, there's probably been a lot of, unless you're gonna start from scratch, I think few people are inclined to really rip and replace everything. And so, you know, starting small to solve a challenge within that quote to cash process and getting in the door is important but being able to work with other tools, I think, and not requiring something to be fully replaced, And then, you know, maybe that opens doors to other opportunities.But I think easily integrating and, and being something that the sales team and people within the company can learn. So UI is really important, right? And just being pretty seamless. So that it's easy to train and get people up to speed. I don't like to send people outside of sales force if I don't have to. But so that's, you know, again, that's just our ecosystem. I try not to send reps out to many places and just keep as much as I can within their, day to day work. And I, some, I have had some people reach out and ask just about new tools that they're noodling and trying to create a company around. And, I think really getting to the heart of an issue that needs solved. There's a ton of different reporting tools out there. And again, when there's a new tool and I have to go out to a new spot and I'm having to rectify data against new scenarios and making sure everything's aligned. I'm it, it's not as attractive to me, right? So I think just ease of use, really making sure that you're aligned with the core challenge in solving that for a Redbox function is important.
Sandeep Jain:
Understood, and Hannah to the related point, I know you mentioned you're using sales for CPQ and Maxo like different tools for billing. Does this impede you in any way? Like does this create any friction having two separate tools having two different product catalogs? And the reason I'm asking this question is there's been a talk about having a unified architecture now reporting like rip and replace thing that you just talked about. But is there something from an architecture perspective that is works for you or does not work for you having like if you have.
Hannah Hanrahan:
It's a good question. I think it is challenging, especially when I look at opening up new channels, right? So self serve, for instance, any way you go about that, there's gonna be a process of rectifying that data and see what it max, which we use for a ARR. And so it does, I think there could be better ways that we use Maxo or there, you know, it, it's something that we'll probably have to look at at some point just to make sure that we've got the most simple solution there.
Sandeep Jain:
Got it. And so do, do you, do you believe that the Unified Catalog would help or is this like if you had to do this thing again in a different way? So would you do that, would you use an integrated tool or would you still use two separate tools?
Hannah Hanrahan:
Yeah, I, so I did get pretty deep into that solution at one point. The Unified Catalog definitely would help because what I in some of these solutions I've explored, I'm trying to avoid is managing a product's catalog and more than one spot and creating it in one area and making sure it's updated. And then, you know, we're trying to be fast efficient and not only open up new sales channels but be able to modify our pricing easily and get it out the door quickly. And so keeping that operational overhead of doing that down is also important.
Sandeep Jain:
Got it. And for the self serve, I remember you're talking about using Maxo for that. What was the challenge from an architecture perspective that you were running into?
Hannah Hanrahan:
Yeah, we're actually, so they, they do have that capability and I think that's again, one of the conversations of if we had started fully there, it would be pretty easy to plug in. But we've got salesforce CPQ. And so the challenge there is it's really just having to not, I'm, again, this maybe I'm a perfectionist, but the idea of like one single source of truth for our data. And I think there's actually a lot of webinars out on that right now. But in this particular scenario, I'm trying to keep as much of that in one spot and so having two different databases, it kind of, it duplicates the objects in many areas. And so, for me, that was a little bit tricky to manage.
Sandeep Jain:
No, I think what you're saying kind of makes sense, which is what I hear typically from folks, whatever CPQ you're using, it does not matter like what vendor it is, but that CPQ is managing your contract at that time and not feel like willing to do the renewals for you then who owns the contract now? Like is it the CPQ now? Because it's not a, it's not a transaction that originated self serve. It's a transaction that originated from your CRM to the CPQ. So it kind of owns the contract object, I believe. And you start doing renewals from a different tool then does that tool take over your contract? And there's a kind of big bit of a song and dance world here unless it is done. But yeah, you're saying it in a much more simple way.
Hannah Hanrahan:
So that, that's exactly it. Right. And, and then when you start talking about that invoice and billing becomes important, right? Because you've got your automation of renewals. And so all of these things working very seamlessly together is crucial. And it, it's, it's a little bit challenging to do if you have many systems doing it, which is really what the landscape looks like these days.
Sandeep Jain:
Got it. And Hannah, we briefly discussed about usage based pricing or billing. Is that something that you're actively thinking about? Because that's, that's like a completely different thing you're charging.
Hannah Hanrahan:
Yeah, that one really hinges on invoice and billing being in sync. We're, we, we have a bit of a manual process to offer usage based pricing but we have not gone heavily into it. However, it is a conversation. So I think at some point we'll need to tackle that.
Sandeep Jain:
Got it. Hannah, is there anything else that you would like to talk about? I think we covered your challenges. What are your priorities and what do you think in terms of architecture? Any sort of closing thoughts on what you would like to see in this space or?
Hannah Hanrahan:
I think we have covered pretty much less. Yeah, I think, I don't think so. I mean, I, I find it encouraging to listen to different thought leaders in the space. Just even knowing that I'm not the only one that runs into these things is great. And hearing solutions that others are putting into place to solve them. So I've really, you know, enjoyed listening and glad to be able to chat with you a little bit about it.
Sandeep Jain:
Awesome, Hannah. But before you let you go, I would love to hear from you any recommendations on a resource, maybe a book or a podcast or an article that created an impression on you that you would like to share with the audience.
Hannah Hanrahan:
Yeah. Well, there's a few organizations from the rev up standpoint, there's the Rev Ups co-op and the Rev Ops Alliance, those are both really good networking just to talk to people in the weeds who see a lot of these different challenges. And I've also learned a lot from just, you know, both salesforce and Zuora, they're leading the way in many of these things. I know they're competitive in many states in many products now. But the subscribed institute and many of the salesforce web ops webinars, they get into some pretty granular detail. And so I find just listening to again from a top public organization, how they're handling it, not only from their product but internally is really helpful to learn from and extract ideas to take back into my own company.
Sandeep Jain:
Lovely, lovely.
Hannah Hanrahan:
And also your podcast.
Sandeep Jain:
Hannah, this was such an amazing thing to speak with you today. I hope you get your initiatives up and running fast, like self serve usage. And yeah, thank you for for sharing your insights today.
Hannah Hanrahan:
Great Thank you. Thanks for having me. It was a nice conversation.
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.
