Sandeep Jain:
Hi. Welcome to the 17th episode of “The Enterprise Monetization” podcast. And this is your hosts Sandeep Jain. In this podcast, we invite thought leaders from enterprise monetization space, that CPQ billing usage, so that you can learn about challenges, opportunities and best practices in enterprise monetization. Today, I'm actually thrilled to invite a person that I met about four years ago, when I was exploring this this interesting field about CPQ. He and I had an excellent conversation then. And we have kept our conversations alive over the years. So it's absolutely thrilling to invite you Prafull to this podcast. Now, before we get into this, let me introduce Prafull to our audience. Prafull is an accomplished leader in the technology sector with an extensive background in enterprise tech. And he has a very strong passion for mentoring and advising startups. So we'll hear a little bit more about that. Currently, Prafull, serves as the head of enterprise technology at Mapbox, where he's responsible for leading the company's digital transformation. Prafull is going to tell a little bit more about Mapbox in a second. Prafull has a very impressive career trajectory. He has held several leadership positions at companies like LinkedIn, Atlassian, Flexport. And he has driven a lot of systems transformations. I think this is the time and I had met Prafull, when I was doing research in Quote-to-Cash. Through his journey, Prafull has also amassed an interesting experience across CPQs of all different types, starting with big machines, Apttus, and then Steelbricks or Salesforce CPQ. Now with that, it's very exciting to have you Prafull on the show.
Prafull Patil:
Thank you. Thanks a lot for having me.
Sandeep Jain:
Awesome, Prafull. So before we start, can you share a quick fun fact about yourself?
Prafull Patil:
So when I started in college, at that time internet was not that available to us. So I ended up doing programming in college without internet. And then also in start of my career, it was pretty much read that giant Java book, read Tomcat documentation and do Java programming. If you are stuck, ask your colleagues and that is how I started.
Sandeep Jain:
Understood. Share with me another fun fact about yourself. So this is an interesting one, but share something that you haven't shared with somebody else, because I'm pretty sure your friends would know about this one. But is there something else you want to share the other folks?
Prafull Patil:
I can twist my palm and it will make this noise, I do not know if you can hear it. It is just like on-demand
Sandeep Jain:
Now, that's a fun fact I'm talking about. So the kids get scared, you can scare kids on demand.
Prafull Patil:
Some of them are very surprised. They're like, do it again and again and some of them are like what's going on?
Sandeep Jain:
That's interesting. Let's get into a little bit more serious things about your background, like how do you came about at Mapbox? I think you have an interesting trajectory. So just give us a sense of how you decided to move from one role to another to where you are?
Prafull Patil:
As I mentioned, I started as an engineer, and implemented end to end manufacturing systems, started working and had a lot of time, great fun, and did some transformations for comments, then moved to Silicon Valley and then joined LinkedIn. LinkedIn was very small at that point of time 2012, got opportunity to build a lot of systems from the ground up from millions of revenues to billions of revenues, how do you scale company, and I was lucky to be at the core of this transformation. So we ended up integrations with billing systems, setting up sales systems, we acquired companies, integrating their stack, work on customer master product master. We did a very thorough RFP for CPQ. And that is where we engage with few vendors and dig very deep dive, and also got opportunity to grow my career at that point of time from engineer to become a leader, and I also build global teams. I think after six years, I had great opportunity to do this again, and I thought let's do this again. And it will be really fun. Atlassian is a company which I love their product. So I went on there to work on commerce, sales and partner systems. Got opportunity to do some of the CPQ things there. And that is where I also got an opportunity to interact with Max Roodman, who started SteelBrick. So work with him on some aspects, did mergers and acquisitions for three of the Atlassian from a system standpoint, build team in Mountain View, Austin and Bangalore, also deep transformation in partner systems. Then later, I wanted to see how startup world works. So got opportunity to build systems at Flexport with GTM systems there, and also set up the integrations team. After that, then I came to Mapbox. And here I am head of enterprise technology. Along the way, I have been advising startups and returns a product strategy. And then a lot of folks reach out to talk about business systems. And I love to talk with posts, learn from them and share my experience. So that's overall where I am.
Sandeep Jain:
Awesome. Now, thank you for sharing this journey Prafull. And I'm pretty sure there's anybody from startups listening, they want to reach out to Prafull, they can do that through LinkedIn. I'm assuming your previous employer. By the way, my co-founder, Jeff, he comes from Atlassian. So we have a very friendly sort of relationship with Atlassian in some ways. Let's just deep dive on what Mapbox is, what Mapbox does, and your go to market your systems. But let's start with what is Mapbox do?
Prafull Patil:
So Mapbox is a technology company that provides location and data mapping tools for developers and businesses. What is the most impressive thing about Mapbox is the product. Developers love our product. Our API's are amazing user experience you are able to build through Mapbox API's is top notch, like amazing experience. Our platform offers customizable map geocoding, direction, navigation, special analysis, all things geo technology, we offer that. Our API and SDK enables integration of custom apps, location based services into web, mobile, AR VR. And our clients range from startups to enterprises. Some of the customers are BMW, Kia, Instacart, Strava, Tableau, all sorts of aspects. I think one cool thing I will tell which everyone can relate to is, vaccines, that girl, so that particular site is powered by Mapbox. And President launched that during the COVID. Also recreation.gov. A great site that is also powered by Mapbox. If you are on a phone and you see a map, if you look at right bottom or left bottom, you will probably see Mapbox there most of the time. I started observing this after joining Mapbox. Oh my God, it's everywhere.
Sandeep Jain:
Cool. What is your role at Mapbox? We know that you're leading the digital transformation there. But can you talk a little bit more about this? How's your overall team structured? And what do people do?
Prafull Patil:
In summary, I'm playing like a CIO role at the moment. And what does that mean is I have IT enterprise applications, security and compliance, data engineering, business analytics. So these are the teams I lead. And really, what we are doing is, helping run company and making sure our internal and external customers are successful, and drive that digital transformation make ourselves successful and more efficient.
Sandeep Jain:
How many employees is like how big Mapbox just to swing?
Prafull Patil:
Around 800 employees.
Sandeep Jain:
Understood, and you guys are still private?
Prafull Patil:
Yeah.
Sandeep Jain:
And the employees based on the US or you guys geographically distributed?
Prafull Patil:
We have a global presence. We have folks in Europe. We have folks in Japan, and then we have a strong North America presents as well.
Sandeep Jain:
Awesome. Let's go into your business model now. Can you talk about first what are the channels through which you sell?
Prafull Patil:
So our main channel is self-survey as you go. And where you start free, we have very generous free tier. And that is where you will see developer signup. And they start hacking, building some cool apps and every product has a meaningful prettier, and they can sign up and build without friction. As users grows, they will get volume pricing built in, and there is no negotiation necessary. That's our one channel. If you want to assign some commitment, then you receive additional discounts. And that's kind of offline channel which you can go through. As far as our products are concerned, we have 12 skills, we have pretty cool pricing calculator on our website. So you can go and see what products you're going to use, and it will give you how much you're going to spend. So very transparent and upfront for customers, how it is gonna play out for them.
Sandeep Jain:
And in terms of channels before we move on from that. So you said you have selfserve, you have a sales lead motion, do you have resellers or marketplace?
Prafull Patil:
No, that is not that significant.
Sandeep Jain:
Understood. And in terms of the actual business model, do you do subscriptions? Is it usage because you're talking about API? So I'm suspecting it's going to be usage?
Prafull Patil:
It is mostly usage base. And as you can see on our website, some subscriptions are like a support plan, you can buy a support plan for a year that is the subscription aspects of our SKUs, but rest of them are consumption based model.
Sandeep Jain:
Let's talk a little bit about that in a second. But how many reps do you have if you have a sales now, just so that folks can understand how big is you?
Prafull Patil:
I think around 50 plus, if I'm not wrong. That's our number.
Sandeep Jain:
And can you talk about what are your systems internally in a Quote-to-Cash perspective to serve your self-serve and sales lead channels?
Prafull Patil:
So in terms of our Quote-to- Cash stack, we use Salesforce for CRM. For quoting, we have some internal thing built on top of Salesforce and we use that and then that is integrated with stripe and NetSuite. We use stripe billing. And then as far as how we get usage, we have some internal stack that kind of gets the usage for us.
Sandeep Jain:
And what are the systems in place before you joined or are these systems that you built as you went along?
Prafull Patil:
So some of these things were in place, but in my two and a half years of tenure, there were a lot of things which we had to just scrap and rebuild from scratch, and some of the things we had to improve. So that is what we did.
Sandeep Jain:
Got it. And what are the biggest challenges for you, Prafull, as it stands to Quote-to-Cash?
Prafull Patil:
One of the challenges will be like, like, up, there is a new product coming in. And that doesn't fit the current model, like, like how we do calculate usage and all that kind of stuff, then it needs to go through the whole thing, and it might take a lot of time. So I think that might be one last thing I will say.
Sandeep Jain:
I heard you say earlier that you build the coating system yourself. And I heard earlier that you have experiences across different CPQ. So tell me the story here. Like, why do you guys decide to build something ourselves because I don't hear that very often.
Prafull Patil:
When I got here, we had a first version of that system and it was okay. What I saw is, we can make this better and it is workable. I think, as the company scales and grows, we probably need to do something else. But given current at the moment, I think this makes sense. Implementing CPQ is a very big undertaking. You got to have everyone across the board involved. And you need to be really sure whether this is the right call for you, this is the right moment and is there a right ROI on this particular aspect? We pulled that what we have right now. We are using Stripe and it has a lot of coating functionality. So we are probably in a good spot. And our structure is not that complicated. So those are the reasons.
Sandeep Jain:
And another thing I want to double click on is since you have a primary usage based billing model, maybe we have talked to public companies that do usage based model. And there is minimum commits that apply. There is a wraps of minimum commits that is prepaid credits. So there's a lot of different levers on consumption based billing. And I hear people talking about how do I operationalize this? Like, that's a big mess. I didn't hear you say that. So there could be two reasons. One is, you have somehow figured the magic sauce. And in which case, I want to talk about that. A second is, your usage billing could be simple which is here is the red card, here is credits, just eat it until you're done and pay me more. So what is the story here?
Prafull Patil:
So our usage model is very simple. So what does that mean is, customers will come and they will buy a prepaid particular specific credit. Let's say there will be customer who will buy $20,000 worth of credit, and they can use any product we have and on monthly basis, they will get invoice and their credit will get reduced. Once their credit is expired, they can get more or they can go on to pay as you go model.
Sandeep Jain:
Got it. Do customers come back to you and say, “Look, I've exhausted all my credits, and my credits are increasing. So I want better discounting, I want to renegotiate the contract.” How does that work?
Prafull Patil:
That is typical sales motion. I think that is a typical sales motion and it will happen.
Sandeep Jain:
In this case, one of the things is because you have an internally built CPQ. And the billing is happening where this usage billing happening. Are you dumping usage data directly into stripe?
Prafull Patil:
Yeah, it goes to stripe.
Sandeep Jain:
It goes to stripe. Then how does your CPQ or the internal system talk to stripe? Is it through the CRM, like Salesforce CRM? Is that where the connection happens or you’re CPQ?
Prafull Patil:
We have usage information in Salesforce as well. I think the team has done a great job bringing and implementing customer 360 and getting all data together in a warehouse, in snowflake and sharing it across the system. So we have insert data in CRM, we have a reference of that in stripe as well. So that helps us.
Sandeep Jain:
Another related thing is one of the problems that I've heard, and you and I talked about in first talk is the product catalog proliferation. So the product catalog is in multiple places. I think he talked about launching products quickly as one of the challenges. How does that discrepancy play out? Like, you must have a product catalog and stripe in your CPQ tool. I'm assuming that you've built and probably in Salesforce CRM as well.
Prafull Patil:
When the company grows, this is the real problem. I think most of the companies have this problem, which is the prices are not in sync, one changes, and another doesn't know. Right now, I will say it's a manual. And we it is maintainable given the SKUs we have. But I think with the scale, this is gonna be a problem.
Sandeep Jain:
And, Prafull, on a related note, what are the top priorities for you in the next few quarters?
Prafull Patil:
I think some of the integrations like integrate tax system with billing and all that kind of stuff. And then support revenue acceleration programs, as they come, I think that's what we will be focused on.
Sandeep Jain:
Can you talk a little bit about what does revenue acceleration mean? Is it like, a new go to market motion that you're planning or is it something else?
Prafull Patil:
It will be. Like, if there are new SKUs launching, and there is gonna be some different ways of pricing. And that might be a driver for revenue acceleration, so there might be some other aspects, for example, unlocking specific currencies. I don't have any foresight into that, but the example I just shared, that's a good one.
Sandeep Jain:
A related one, which I was thinking about asking, but I forgot, because you have a very well developed self-serve motion, which was what Atlassian had your previous employer. One of the challenges I've heard is how do you merge the self-serve in the sales lead channel? So when I sell serve customer comes in? They grow big, and they want to be now doing a deal with you? How do you manage like expansion or contraction from sales lead to do a self-serve?
Prafull Patil:
This is a great question. And this is definitely a challenge across the board in the industry I see. And I will say to address this problem, you gotta start with data. And what I mean by that is, you need to know what is happening in your online sales motion, who your customer is, you got to identify. So what I will say is you can use some data tools like zoom info clear with whoever comes through your online motion, you got to identify. Sometimes what happens in online motion, what I have seen in companies is you just have very limited data about that particular customer, you got to enrich that. Then after that, you need to get them in a CRM and if based on information you have gathered, suppose there is some particular user who signed up with a credit card, but they are a fortune 100 company, your CRM should tell you that. There should be some alerting mechanism to tell that person and company person just joined. So that you can have a rep assigned and kind of start working with that person. Now you need to have a good alerting mechanism built in to say, there is particular customer who is on your pay as you go channel, but their usage continues to grow. Then you need a way to alert your sales team that Hey there, this particular customer, their usage is going growing month over month since last three months, probably good opportunity for us to engage in conversation and talk with them how we can make you successful, what are you trying to do and engage in that conversation? So building these kinds of alerting, which we have built. I built this at Mapbox as well as I built at my previous companies is very helpful in those particular cases.
Sandeep Jain:
This makes a lot of sense. Thank you for sharing this, Prafull. So when a person joins a self-serve, he directly don't go into Salesforce CRM. It is a certain criteria before they get an entry into Salesforce CRM lead, or something like that?
Prafull Patil:
I think they go to CRM, but what triggers for them so that they are flagged to your sales team. For example, you might have 20,000 people coming through your channel every single month. But how do you look at that data make sense of that information? And then have a refined list for your salespeople.
Sandeep Jain:
This is like your self-serve leads, like how do you want leads flow into your salespeople? I think one of the challenges that I've heard is, people don't want to dump all their self-serve leads into Salesforce CRM, because it does not scale is what I've heard. And that's really my question was that sometimes companies don't even add leads. Is that a problem that you have or do you ever really go into Salesforce?
Prafull Patil:
For us, I don't think it's a challenge. But with the growth and scale, I can see that it might become a problem. And at that point of time, you probably want to limit those to marketing system, and then based on certain criteria’s bring them to CRM, that makes sense.
Sandeep Jain:
Shifting gears a little bit. You have worked at several companies worked with several tools, you must know like what works or does not. So do you have any advice or recommendation for vendors in this space about how they can do things better for operators like yourself and your team?
Prafull Patil:
I have a lot to say, actually, because I started from big machine like dealing with XML files, and then at SteelBreak, and then I looked at that at some point of time as well. So, one thing I will say is simulation. So CPQ is a great tool but it is also very dangerous tool. And what I mean by that is, if you have a junior CPQ administrator configure some rule and that rule ends up giving huge discount to specific customers. The code might be already in front of customer at the point when deal just catches it, it's already late. So there can there is a potential of a lot of accidents happening. So this is one thing what I have not seen in CPQ space is, if I change this pricing rule, how does this affect my existing customers? How is it's gonna affect me? There should be a way to simulate. This is a very hard problem to solve. I think this is very key for big customers, because the stakes are really high. And this will come in really handy for pricing teams to come up with pricing strategies like, what they need to do there.
Sandeep Jain:
And what do you do today that it does not exist? So you're saying that what if the price of this usage API was ‘X’ instead of ‘Y’, what would happen?
Prafull Patil:
I'm not talking about this in a Mapbox context, I'm talking more in a general context. I think what I will do if I have to do this today is I will go to Data Warehouse and I will through some SQL or through some data transformations, I will try to simulate. But what does that mean is then you gotta have whole team involved in this activity.
Sandeep Jain:
Understood. And you want this to be like a no quote, just change the pricing, like create a new pricing, and then pretend this was the pricing for the last year? What would have happened?
Prafull Patil:
There should be some way of getting some information. I know, this is not an easy problem.
Sandeep Jain:
Vendors are not paid to solve easy problems that you can do yourself.
Prafull Patil:
I think the other thing I will say is preview pricing. This is like you are launching a beta product. Six months, you want it to be in the wild. You can use this for six months. But we are also going to give you insights into how much this is costing you, so that you are better informed. And what I mean by that, let's say, I launch product one as a beta. And now the customer keeps using it, their usage keeps piling up, then they go to their portal, and they see I am using $2,000 per month for this particular feature. So it makes sense to me. So providing that transparency, I think that is a great way to build trust.
Sandeep Jain:
Let me just understand that. This is interesting what you're saying. So if I'm your user, I come to Mapbox or any website. It's a free product, because it's beta. Now you can say, “Sandeep, this API’s priced whatever ‘X’ cents or dollars per API call, we're gonna give it to you for free, because we are in beta trial. You still want when I go to the product to see that accrual.” So one thing is I see this is $0. And I have one API’s price this but what you're saying is based on my usage at the end of the month, create a sample invoice. So that I can understand well, I would have paid this much amount. So I have a sense of value that I'm receiving from you. And what I'm getting back in dollars. I've seen that thing before.
Prafull Patil:
You’re right. And this is a challenge for consumption based businesses. Because with subscription, what you're gonna buy or what's gonna happen? It's very hard for me as a customer to figure out well, I will start using your thing.
Sandeep Jain:
Understood. What else? This is good.
Prafull Patil:
I think some of the things are CPQ and billing transformations are big undertaking. I think there needs to be deep discovery that there is there is a strong will and executive support from IT and business side and a whole company. Otherwise, what I have seen is implementations get stalled, they are not successful. So that will be my advice to vendors as well as customers or companies who are, who are looking to do these kinds of implementations. Also, some of the other things I will mention is UX, user experience should be front and center for any vendor in the space. Sales teams are really great at spinning up Excel sheets, the moment your coding experience is not great, what will happen is there will be a pricing spreadsheet, and that will start circulating. So I think we are competing against that.
Sandeep Jain:
Another related question. There has been a talk about this product catalog proliferation with CPQ billing and usage systems. So integrating that in one platform, do you have any thoughts on this unified architecture versus having a split architecture?
Prafull Patil:
In terms of unified architecture, it can offer several benefits, such as consistency easier report to reduce integration challenges. And by having single system that can handle both CPQ and billing processes, I think business can eliminate need for separate skills and it can lead to fewer data discrepancies. Also, it can be seamless experience for customers and reduce complexity. I think at the same time, unified architecture may not be suitable for businesses especially those with CRM, and then complex M&A is happening with unique requirements. And then best of breed approach, you can't implement. For example, you get best CPQ and best billing system, you can't do that because they are integrated. So for example, during my time working on CPQ and billing at LinkedIn, we faced several challenges of syncing data between multiple systems. Part of the product catalog, we ended up building product master, I think it was the right call, because the company just grew in a big way but that challenge can be solved with unified architecture. So overall, I will say, the answer is it depends, depending on the size and we need to have careful evaluation of pros and cons of each approach. Consider factors such as integration requirements, scalability, vendor support, and then we can make a right choice.
Sandeep Jain:
So if I just summarize, what do you say. Are you saying if you're early stage company, then unified architecture probably makes more sense? But if you're a bigger company, with already have bigger systems, then you probably have to think a little bit more before you go towards that architecture?
Prafull Patil:
Absolutely. I will say you are a small company, it's a no brainer. You don't want to deal with systems complexity, and you want to focus on growing revenue and supporting that.
Sandeep Jain:
Got it. Any thoughts on intelligence and CPQ or maybe intelligence is what ChatGPT these days? Or any things that you want to tease or give a teaser about? What have you been thinking about this? How intelligence can play a role?
Prafull Patil:
This is the time everyone is thinking about it. I think, there can be interesting ways we can use AI in CPQ space. I think on customer facing aspects as well as on the internal like a pricing strategy aspects. And what I mean by that is, you can really build a sophisticated recommendation engine based on data you get from your warehouse usage, customer behavior, marketing signals you get, and then recommend them additional products. And that can take a lot of burden out of salespeople, they can have all these recommendations ready for them to pitch to customers in the sales promotion, you can highlight those to customers in the portal or whatnot. As far as pricing strategies are concerned, value based pricing is something you can figure out new ways of how you can position different prices to different customers. So there is a lot we can do there.
Sandeep Jain:
That's interesting. We think about this a lot internally. So it's good to hear what operators think about that, as well. So you're right about its pricing. It's like what discounts can I offer to my customers? Like, is my customer even credit worthy for this deal? Have they been paying their things on time? And that intelligence is sometimes with the finance people, but that information doesn't feed back into the sales on amendments or renewals. So that's good to know. By the way, we didn't cover this topic earlier. So let me just quickly cover that one about amendments and renewals. Are these pain points for you in your business because that's what I something here consistently for SaaS businesses?
Prafull Patil:
I don't think are pain points for us as well as the renewal. So amendments in our context are like a customer buys certain credit, their credit is exhausted and they will buy a new credit. So that's the kind of amendment we have. As far as renewably is again, there is a certain period they buy credit for and it ends at that point of time. So they do renewal. So given the nature of business, I don't think it's a challenge, but based on my previous experience where I work and companies were like subscription based. And there are a lot of amendments happening in the middle of the tenure, and then you do debug, put back and then it gets complicated with bigger customers, there are like six opportunities happen during the year. And at the time of renewal, you are trying to make sense of what really happened? Which product this customer has? How do I make sense of all that? So when the company is very much subscription focus, it's a real challenge if there are so many changes happening during the renewal, during the one year cycle of the term of the contract.
Sandeep Jain:
That's actually very interesting insight that I don't think is talked about often. And what I mean by that is, the subscriptions versus usage. There's been a debate whether we get a subscription company or a usage company, but I don't think what is talked about is and enough has been talked about on the subject. But the fact that with subscriptions, you have a term to deal with. And whenever you're making amendments, there is core term, which means you have proration, and credits and debits. And if you're in the usage based model, which is where you are right now, you're not pricing it on a subscription term. So it just eases your way to do business. And I don't think that fact is widely understood. So we'll call that out.
Prafull Patil:
Yeah, that is a great point. I think a lot of this complexity with the usage base goes away.
Sandeep Jain:
That's interesting. Prafull, this was an amazing conversation, because we dealt with a lot of different subjects around self-serve, usage, CPQ, and billing. But before we let you go, could you recommend or do you have any recommendations on a resource that you will like to share with our audience, maybe a blog or something?
Prafull Patil:
I would love to share two podcasts that I'm a big fan of. I believe most people are familiar with these podcasts, particularly "How I Built This" by Guy Raz, which happens to be my favorite.This is a valuable resource for anyone who is interested in starting their own business. Also, it's a great way to learn from experience of others and the way Guy interviews people, it's just amazing. So I will not miss a single episode. And then another one, this has been with me for many, many years, The Moth, probably not that known by “PRX”. I love 'The Moth' podcast, because it's a great way to hear true stories from real people. And I'm always impressed by the courage and vulnerability of the storyteller. So this is another one as well.
Sandeep Jain:
Thank you so much for sharing these two resources. Actually, I knew what the first one because I used to be in podcasting earlier as a distributor and whatnot. But anyways, the second one was an interesting one, actually. And I have talked to the “PRX” people in the past. So with somehow I missed this one. So thank you for sharing that, Prafull. And thank you for your time today.
Prafull Patil:
I enjoyed our chat and thanks a lot for having me.
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.
