Sandeep Jain:

Welcome to the 23rd episode of the Enterprise Monetization Podcast. I’m your host, Sandeep Jain. In this podcast, we invite thought leaders from the B2B enterprise monetization space—covering CPQ, billing, and metering—so you can learn about challenges, opportunities, and best practices in monetization.

Today, I’m excited to welcome Pierre from Canada. Pierre has deep experience across sales, customer success, and revenue operations. He’s currently the Vice President of Revenue Operations at Devolutions, a late-stage startup based in Montreal focused on remote connection management and privileged access management solutions. Pierre, welcome to the podcast! To start us off, could you share a fun fact about yourself?

Pierre:

Thanks, Sandeep. Great to be here. Sure—so, I have a pretty atypical background. I started in music, actually. I studied it in college and then co-founded a large music school and recording studio. Eventually, I pivoted into business, worked in startups in Paris, then even in banking after selling my business. I later found out I have ADHD, which helped explain why I was doing so many different things in my 20s.

Eventually, I channeled that “structured chaos” into roles in sales, customer success, RevOps, and business intelligence. I also went back to school to study business administration and leadership. That gave me a very broad set of tools I use every day in my work now.

Sandeep:

So—from music to revenue operations! That’s quite the journey. Does your background influence how you hire and lead teams today?

Pierre:

Absolutely. I really value people with non-traditional backgrounds. Whether it’s project management, web development, or something else—diverse perspectives bring a lot of strength to a team. It’s something I look for when hiring.

Sandeep:

Tell us more about Devolutions—your products and customer base?

Pierre:

Sure. We’re headquartered in a small city outside of Montreal and have team members in Europe and Ottawa. Our focus is on IT administration—primarily remote access and privileged access management. We’re a global company with over 10,000 paid accounts and around 800,000 users of our free product. About 80% of our business is in the US and Europe.

Sandeep:

You mentioned product-led growth earlier. Do you also run a sales-led motion?

Pierre:

Yes, we’re mainly product-led, but we also support self-serve and sales-assisted paths. Many users start with the free product, buy single-user licenses themselves, and then expand. It’s a low-friction model supported by a strong land-and-expand strategy. We let the product do the selling initially, and our sales team steps in as needed.

Sandeep:

How is your team structured?

Pierre:

I joined about four years ago. I saw opportunities to build out structured sales operations, customer success, and RevOps practices. I also focused on building a revenue tooling stack and data-driven decision-making. Today, my team includes a five-person revenue tooling team (developers, QA, architect), and a seven-person RevOps and data science team. We consider internal customer journey directors—like marketing, sales, and support—our clients.

Sandeep:

Let’s talk about your business model. How many SKUs do you offer?

Pierre:

It’s fairly simple—three main SKUs and five add-ons. We’re also working on bundling packages by use case.

Sandeep:

And which currencies do you transact in?

Pierre:

Mostly USD, but also CAD and EUR.

Sandeep:

Is it all subscription-based?

Pierre:

Yes. We pivoted from perpetual licenses to subscriptions in 2019, and it’s been key to our growth.

Sandeep:

Do you work with resellers?

Pierre:

We do, mostly distributors—not value-added resellers. Around 30% of sales go through distribution channels.

Sandeep:

What about your direct sales team?

Pierre:

We have four SDRs (three in Montreal, one in Germany), three account managers, three customer success managers, two AEs in Montreal, and a channel partner manager in Ottawa.

Sandeep:

What systems power your sales stack?

Pierre:

We use Salesforce for CRM—Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud—and now Data Cloud too. Our quoting system is custom-built on Salesforce. Accounting is in NetSuite, connected via Boomi. We also use Stripe, Avalara for taxes, and Abacum for forecasting. Tableau powers BI.

Sandeep:

Why build your own CPQ?

Pierre:

Salesforce CPQ was overkill for our needs. With our internal development team, we could tailor something lightweight and integrated. We did a build-vs-buy assessment with a Salesforce consultant and chose to build.

Sandeep:

What did that project take?

Pierre:

We started in January and went live in October. It involved one architect/developer, two additional developers, a Salesforce admin, QA, and support from RevOps, accounting, and a consultant. It was a big lift but worth it.

Sandeep:

Let’s talk self-serve vs. sales-led. How do you move between them?

Pierre:

We have three customer tiers—lower-tier is all self-serve via the store, middle-tier is hybrid, and top-tier is sales-assisted. It’s all integrated through Salesforce, which is our source of truth.

Sandeep:

Are all 800,000 users in Salesforce?

Pierre:

Not yet. Currently, all 10,000 paid accounts are in Salesforce. We’re working to onboard premium free users next. Integration remains a challenge, especially around taxes, credits, and edge cases between systems.

Sandeep:

How do you handle co-terming and upsells?

Pierre:

It was messy at first. Clients could have multiple terms. Now, our quoting system enforces co-terming by design. Any additional purchases align with the main contract’s end date.

Sandeep:

What about in-app billing for sales-led customers?

Pierre:

We’re not SaaS—our solution is self-hosted, sometimes even offline for security. So in-app billing is tough. We provide a customer portal for quotes, invoices, and upsells. But many distributors avoid portals, so sales must assist.

Sandeep:

Top priorities this year?

Pierre:

We’re re-engineering pricing and packaging around key use cases like PAM. We’re also revamping our store to boost self-service. This is a cross-functional project involving dev, product, marketing, sales, RevOps, and accounting.

Sandeep:

What advice would you give vendors building for teams like yours?

Pierre:

Integrate your stack. And trust your users—they may prefer self-service. Avoid outdated sales tactics like spammy cadences. Design smarter websites and experiences. Not everything has to be a call.

Sandeep:

Great advice. Any final resources to share?

Pierre:

Yes, The Revenue Architecture Bible. It’s been instrumental for us. We use the bow-tie funnel model—from acquisition to expansion—to guide all our metrics and initiatives.

Sandeep:

Thank you, Pierre. This was fantastic.

Pierre:

Thank you, Sandeep. It was a pleasure.

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