Hello, and welcome to the Growth Workshop Podcast with myself Matt Best and my co host, Jonny Adams. Today, we're joined by the fantastic Lesley Ronaldson, a friend of our business now for for a number of years and a familiar face to a few of us here. So we're thrilled to have you on with us today. Lesley. So thank you so much for joining.
Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to do this podcast.
Brilliant, brilliant. And as you will know from and as the rest of our audience will know, as is customary. We ask it ask a question about what's been interesting what's been going on in your week. So Jonny, I'm gonna come to you first and and nice to see you as always, but what what's been going on in your world over the last seven to 10 days?
Matt, lovely to see you, Lesley, it's fantastic to have you on today. Thank you so much for joining us. What's been going on two things. I've been on a nice vacation holiday over a number of days, which has been fantastic. I went away with my wife, it was our last trip for having a baby. So it was sort of one of those where we were really sort of planning the most important things of our life. But I still managed Matt and you're gonna roll your eyes unless the show you might do
too. But I still managed to actually come back for a day of work during that trip. And I think that sort of put things into perspective that it's all about balancing life and work at the moment here at SBR. As we're looking to grow and scale into one of the biggest and best sales consultancies in the world. I think that's the sort of things that you need to do. But equally, I managed to have some fantastic time over in Spain, eight loads drank every single day, which is unfortunate
because my wife obviously couldn't drink much. But we had a wonderful time whilst balancing work and a lovely break together. So yeah, that's what's been going on in my life.
Congratulations. I and also I love that I think work life balance is gone now. We call it work life harmony here.
What would you mean by that in your context, Lesley? And thanks for the congratulations.
It's not a balanced anymore. I mean, sometimes it's just it is what it is. There's days where I leave at three o'clock to go to maybe a school show. And there's days where I maybe have to work to another 10 at night and I make it work. It's the nine to fivers.
Interesting. Someone was bleating on LinkedIn, no offense to those that do that. But they were talking about four days a week and how powerful it is. And my point was what you can do four or five days a week, but actually it's the Flexi part. I think what you call harmony. I absolutely advocate that work life harmony, peace. So yeah, yeah, harmony.
Nice. And Johnny, there's nothing that a pregnant woman, in my experience, thinking about my wife that likes least is watching the other half supper nice, cold beer in the sunshine at about 12 o'clock on holiday.
My wife's Irish as you know, Matt, and Lesley, you'd probably notice being Irish. Our point is, if I can't do it, then at least one of us has to do it. So she's all for me drinking beers. Yeah, one of us should have a good time.
Fantastic. Similarly reconnecting with family. Right. I think that's been something that for me over the weekend, I've been fortunate to have my parents come to visit which is, which is always nice. And it's good for the kids to get some
time with their grandparents as well. So I've just had a really, really nice time kind of connecting anyway, think about that work life harmony piece, right, just a bit of prioritizing time had a couple of really involved weeks at work, which had been really great, really kind of rewarding in lots of ways, but tiring and others. And sometimes it's good to be able to just go out and need to disconnect from this a little bit and reconnect with a family time. So that's been
what's going on in my world. And let's see, how about you?
There's a lot going on, I suppose I'll stick with with work for this one. I'm just back from a trip from the US. We had a new CRO join Gong last September. And there's been a couple of changes on the leadership team. And he has a huge belief that sometimes I'll talk about my team, and my team is my directors and my managers, my directors, my reps. But he wants us to focus on the first team. And my first team should
be my peers. So we went to the US for three days. And I have to give, you know really commend him, he kind of left us to our own devices a lot, there was a lot of downtime, a lot of meals, a lot of activities and sports. And quite a loose agenda. So what happened was, there was a lot of conversations that weren't about work, I would say I came back from that trip. And there's there was 10 of us plus him. And I can tell you a
personal story about every single one of those leaders. And I had a lot of aha moments of aha, that is why often you come across on a call the way you do or that is why we had maybe that bit of friction last year over over an account. He also talks about The Five Dysfunctions of a Team which was really important that actually we don't we all read the book before we got there. And the biggest one, the foundation is is trust. And I left that trip with way more trust way more understanding.
You know, we talked about kids and partners and the age that we're at the age profile, a lot of us have sick parents. So talking about that and kind of where we are in our lives. And
honestly it was it was a brilliant trip. I love the no agenda piece and I'm going to I'm actually going to mirror it here and AMEA because I think although my leaders are close it's really important to step away from the number of the data on the drive and just Just breathe and be and let them get to know each other because again, you build that trust then conflict is easy you know you can you can debate them commit and that's what we want to do here.
Oh brilliant. I completely advocate the trust piece is the key pillars but like Maslow's higher Archi, you know, you need to, you know, support the bottom foundation before you can go to the next stage. But the way you've talked about that, how your CRO put you into a position to produce the trust and the productive conflict. I think that's something that's missing. So thank you for sharing that you need a sort of environment to test case it and how long was it
in the States? How long were you together?
Three days. And actually, at the end of the three days, like, you know, there was hogs personal numbers exchanged, and we've all agreed I'm gonna go back over unusual wouldn't go to the US more than once a quarter. But we got so much out of it. When I want to go to the next level, we now want to go to kind of commitment auction results on start to plan for next year. Usually, we have those conversations in October,
but we want to start them early. I mean, you know, it's a global conversation, as opposed opposed to my region, my segment my team there, my first team, it was brilliant. He's a genius, our CRO.
I'm curious, how do you think you'll take your lessons learned from that trip, and cascade that into the team? Is there anything you're thinking that's gonna help you?
There was one thing, so there's these cards, they're, they're called Value Cards, you get them on Amazon. So he had, he had 12 decks of those cards. And all of us were given the cards and you had to open the value that the deck of values, put them into three piles important, middle important, not really important, then you to take the ones that were really important, and pick the top two and go around the
table. And it was chill, like, we were eating lunch, it was casual feed on, you know, feet up on desks, it wasn't formal. And, uh, you will have to say why those two values were your top two values. My top two is fairness, and commitment. Others were different. But you will have to say why. And I will say there was not one person around that room that didn't talk about their childhood, which was very interesting. The fact your family of origin is so so important. And, and a lot of aha
moments for me. That is why you have sometimes sharp elbows in a conversation because you were perhaps brought up in a different tone than I was a single mom. That's why you're so driven. That's why you will win at all costs. It was really good, really deep, a lot of bonds made, and he's created a team that will we'll run through walls for him.
And this is why we love speaking to people like yourself and yourself as he because I think you know, what will we do you minutes into the conversation, you just dropped multiple golden nuggets for people to listen to, even for me, I am taking that idea. And we're going to have a go at that. So thank you so much.
It's interesting, you say around the childhood piece. I was listening to Simon Sinek on the High Performance podcast recently. And he was talking, you know, in order to help people find their why always starts with a childhood memory, because it's such a guiding principle in what you know who we become and how we become that way. And I think it's yeah, it's a really interesting thing to reflect on. I think it's that
time away, right? Is that time out of out of the day to day and like you said out of the numbers and out of the data and out of conversations about specific accounts in specific situations and into something that's a little bit freer, and allows everyone to be yourself a little bit.
I think some personalities have a have a work. Like there's a work Lesley and at home, Lesley, they're very similar, right? I'm really direct. I'm high energy high excite no surprises there. But there's definitely people who I would have went, there's a work version of them. And I saw a completely different version of them. And they're very polished and work and they're very driven. But actually when you can refer back, one of them was probably the most entertaining
person I've ever met in my life. The stories he told I was like, what kind of life have you lived, but in work? He's so buttoned up. I never saw that side of him. So yeah, it's super important to focus on your first team.
Reminds me of the again, I'm being pretty unfair here. But you know, champion, it turns up, the Christmas party has a couple of drinks. My God, well, they do on a dance floor shirt off, tie around Ed crazy. Get back to work, sitting behind the desk.
Yeah, one of our engineers here just opened up a comedy club and he's a stand up comedian. I was like, what, like, You're so quiet. Everybody has lives outside of work. Never ever, ever judge a book by its cover ever.
It's great to get to know people like that. And yeah, thank you for sharing that story with us, Lesley, that's, that's fantastic. I mean, it's we go into the heart of today's conversation. And you know, really what, what we'd hoped to get your perspective and insight on. And as Jonny said, you've already dropped a couple of insight bombs, if you like on us
in the audience, which is fantastic. But we know that, again, going back into that sort of looking at your career that you're passionate about sort of customer centricity and how important that is to a business. And that's really what we're looking forward to diving into in a little bit more detail with you before that, though, it would be really great, I think, for the audience. And for Jonny and I just understand a little
bit more and hear a bit more about your journey. So far, you know, you've helped some incredibly senior roles in a really competitive market at a really competitive space. Could you just talk us through your journey so far.
I'll give you the whistlestop tour. So I've just come into my 100 and first quarter in sales. So just over 25 years, I started my career in the late 90s and Dell, bottom of the rung bottom of the ladder, be the or STR and I have to say I was absolutely hooked. Dell was a massive multinational in
Ireland in those days. And we had one of the manufacturing plants in Limerick and they were growing at a huge team and I knew I was going to try and go as far as I could there and I had made a commitment I did a couple of foreign assignments there, I helped set up the first call center in India 2004. I lived in Slovakia for a while and Bratislava where we
outsource our German sales? After about 1516 years and Dale, I had a mentor say to me, Hey, you've had a great run, you know, I was managing partners at that stage a senior manager, he said, hey, you've had a great run. What Could one say? You're a one trick pony. Now that phrase lives in my head rent free. He said, You know, you've been behind a pretty big logo, pretty deep pockets selling hardware, I think you may need to start looking at SAS, and looking at software, and
potentially kind of the startup world. So I was like, oh, okay, let me let me have a look. Now in Dublin there is we were really, really lucky at that time around 2010. I suppose there was Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and we call it silicon. Like, there's like a Silicon Valley element to Dublin. And I had a friend who worked in LinkedIn, and we had a chat. He said, Look, they're starting a new business on LinkedIn. It's called LinkedIn Sales solutions on the product
to Sales Navigator, and this was 2014. Was it okay, yeah, you know, I know a bit about LinkedIn, I used to call it the Facebook for work, how wrong was it? So I went to the interview, and I was one of the first managers hard and, and they called it a startup within a startup. So we launched Sales Navigator. LinkedIn, absolutely brought me on a journey, I would say the leader I was and Dale would have been, you know, I grew up at a boys club, I grew up surrounded by a lot of men.
And I definitely had kind of sharp elbows. But LinkedIn taught me a lot of things to be an empathetic leader, to seek to understand always, to, you know, always lead with my heart and my head with data or data is really important. But your people are really important. And customer. LinkedIn was the first place where I ever heard about value engagement. And I had an amazing manager in LinkedIn called Paul Terry. And he said, let me let
me finish it like this. If you're at a dinner party, and the person on your right, only talks about themselves, and the person on the left, asks you lots of questions about you. Who do you want to sit beside? Most of all, I want to sit beside the person, I want to talk to the person on my left, and he says, why so well, because he's interested in me. And it's conversation he goes on. That is how we treat our customers. No feature blasting, no talking at them, no talking about the
product, you want to know about them. And for me that kind of turned on a light. When I think about the Dell day, we were selling like laptops and desktops. And there was an incentive if you sold a printer, you got like an a multiplier. So it's more commission. And I remember sitting beside a guy called Fred hang up the phone. He goes, Yes, I just sold two printers. I said, Oh, we were consumer sales. So how did you do that? And he goes, Oh, you know, this old couple have just
bought a desktop but I sold them to printers. And I said mate, even if she just turns our dining room into a we work you know, that's that's not selling with integrity. Nobody needs two printers. They probably didn't even need a printer. God loves
them. But I just remember thinking, that's cool. And then I think when I got to LinkedIn, I was Daffy brought in an education about it is all about your customer and SAS because the the way the SAS model works, and you know what retention and churn, it was an absolute like an overnight hole of how I sold and how I saw with integrity and more integrity and always with customer in mind, never overselling, it's not about me. It's not about the sale. It's not about the commission. It's
about solving a need or solving a problem. So that was the LinkedIn journey. Then I was approached by a smaller startup that language translation company, then Asana, which was project management, I am really organized person, sometimes it can be crippling. Sometimes your greatest strength or index can become your greatest weakness and I am super organized. And Asana was like I come home was the mothership. I use it today. Actually, all of Ganga Mia is run off Asana, so shout out to
my Asana crew. And then I had always known have gone it had been on my radar since 2017. Because they were the New Kids on the Block. They were incredible on social media, as I've worked in LinkedIn, at their profiles were brilliant. Their marketing was funny, spicy direct hit you between the eyes, some amazing videos. So when they approached me, I was so happy in Asana. It was a bit of a will I won't I? I said yeah, this is absolutely the role for me. And I will tell you that I'm never leaving.
You're never leaving. You heard it here first. I'm sure you're Yeah, I'm sure the rest of your team are thrilled to hear that. There's thank you so much for sharing that that
history with us. Again, some really great insights. I think there's there's So one key thing that jumped out to me as you were talking about SAS and I think it's such a I have a background in in SAS as well and in in delivery and and one thing that SAS did to the market was to really throw the challenge back to the vendor when it comes to that customer centricity because it gave the end buyer options, right the days of huge monolithic change that was involved in in swapping out
between technologies where you had like deployed implementer you spend a whole bunch of money in data centers and stuff, just a host particular technology, SAS kind of tore up that rulebook and sort of turn the spotlight back at the vendors to say what are you going to do to make sure that your client values it's what are you going to do to drive that important customer centricity? How do you How much do you care about your
clients? It's something that really resonates with me and you see those organizations I was in an organization going through that transition from that sort of deploy boldly into into SAS. And it's a big transition. And it's quite eye opening. So yeah, and clearly why you've been so successful since then, in understanding where customer centricity comes from, why that's so important. So customer centricity. What is it, Wyoming Forbes defines it as the ability of an organization to understand
the meet customer needs and expectations. But what is it to you?
I think, as my husband, he says, me explain it to me, like a five year old, I think it is, what your customer's needs are, and their demands are the focal point of all your decisions, whether it's delivering a product, a service or an experience, your whole team has to be thinking customer first and customer first mentality. It's bandied around a
lot. It's a lot of, you know, principles are in companies, our principle is here, create raving fans, so I want our customers to buy, but we want our customers to be obsessed with the product.
And often at events. We're very careful here, where we sit people, we do prospect, customer, prospect, customer prospect calls, we're like a seating plan, and we will match up vertical on your master persona, often sit back and watch a rabbit you know, a VP of Rev ops, who's a customer tell the VP of Reb ops who's a potential client, why he bought Gong, because it's not me selling it, someone else selling for you. So for us, our customer, their king, our customers are absolutely King. .
And some might be listening to this and saying, Well, that's about the product. Well, no, it's not that right. In order to make that product sing, you need the people behind it. So you know, thinking about that, and we think about why that's then important is a unified approach across your whole business. How do you take that from a product initiative, we drive everything, this is why our customers love it and make it something that lives and is the sort of foundation of a business?
There's probably a couple of things we do here probably, you know, four or five. But the first one is a
clear vision, right? Clear Vision from the top down. As I said, one of our guiding principles is to create raving fans, and we have clear measurables for all employees, so retention metrics, etc. And, and our CRO actually has customers is one of our pillars, which many, many companies do, we touch on this every month globally in a team review, and we ensure that every single person knows why we do what we do think as well, if you want to remain customer centric, it has
to go across all departments, right, you are all responsible for your customer, it does not end with the order form getting signed, I think back in my old old cell days, I would have just closed the deal and moved on the next that doesn't happen that I think when I hand a customer over to the customer success team, I still want to stay close to that. And it's really
important. Luckily, with gone, and this isn't a plug, we have the full, you know, we have the full gamut of from the STR re you know, outreach email or call that was sent through to the full close of the deal to the negotiation to who the key players were within the deal, and why they bought the product. And we hand that to the customer success team on our professional services team to the implementation. And we all
understand why the customer bought. So I think it's really important to kind of have everybody bought in, I think as well from from across collaboration with the team to
voice of the customer is is so so important. So wherever we get customer feedback on a sales call, after the sales call, the rep can just go into gone, tag the product team and give them visibility with what the customer said, as much as I trust salespeople, if you were to say something to me now about the product, and then I have to go then and tell Jonny, maybe two hours later, there'll be elements, but I may miss a
trick. So for us, once a customer gives us product feedback, will will absolutely tag our product team and and also our product marketing team. And then there's a couple of other ways as well, which it's important to have customer communities etc. So when I think about feedback loops, you have to listen to your customers, you can't say the product is brilliant. We use it here. Isn't it amazing? Like you can sometimes drink your own champagne and get a little
drunk. So you have to be open to feedback, like feedback is a gift. So for us, unlike many, many customers, we avoid the customer. So again, the customer feedback that we get, we do customer advisory forums like many other companies. So again, we love feedback. And then finally customer communities is an amazing way to do this. So if I think about someone who doesn't really well in the market, it's HubSpot. They do an incredible job. They've built out a membership base where you
share ideas and tips and tricks. And actually, if you think about when someone goes to buy, they've already made their mind up I will I don't go and book a holiday or book a book a hotel without going on TripAdvisor. I don't book an Airbnb without reading a review. So it's your customers that are actually going to be your your advocates and your evangelists so to
speak. So I think communities are really really important. And then I think the last two things is when it comes to customers like you need to empower your employees you need to give them the right tech stack and and tools and training to do this you know, you can't say you know sell to your customer then fill in this spreadsheet, which I've seen in other companies fill in this spreadsheet and then send it to the customer success person and then make sure that you know you schedule a call and
then scheduling your cube yours I think You know, there's there's a lot of software out there, like prolific for camp plans, you know, Gong, I think it's important that you have a really clear, we call them swim lanes, like really clear swim lanes have a customer journey. I think everybody should have roles or responsibilities. We did two day training, we took the whole company off site globally, to talk about roles
and responsibilities. So there's none of this, it's not my job or pay, that doesn't feel like it's my job, but I know whose job it is. So everybody owns the customer. And then lastly, data. haven't told me about it all. But I love data. I'm a numbers driven, I really am. But like data can tell any story. So you need to be really careful. Well, I can I can mold data to tell a
great story or a bad story. But we do need to look at performance metrics, like you do have to define and track indicators related to the customer satisfaction and engagement and really ensure those behaviors are being measured. You know, whether it's an okay or or KPI, and here, Gong, we are maniacal about this. So we track our numbers
weekly. In fact, I am on a call every Monday for one hour with our Head of Customer Success for All our renewals, two quarters, eight, two quarters, eight, and every customer success manager who owns those renewals, saying, here's where we are, here's the risk, here's what we need. There's that flag on the product. And we are we are selling in packs we're pulling all people in, and that's to ensure that they have a good experience. Then we do monthly reviews. And then we also
showcases and QBR. So there's there's definitely, there's a cadence and a process to being customer centric. And as I'm listening to myself, it sounds like a heavy lifting unit or something. Yeah, it is. But if you get it wrong, you've got the sales team doing amazing selling all these deals. It's pointless, like you're not profitable, you're not growing, and your folks won't stay like you'll have an attrition problem as well.
A whole load of stuff in there to unpack there's Yeah, I mean, you talk to me about roles and responsibilities. And Johnny will know without that clarity of process, that clarity of ownership. But then you also said something which some might think that contradicts that in the sense that the whole business needs to be customer centric, and our whole business needs to be focused on the customer. And I think some of them so what that means that everybody owns a bit of it.
Yeah, but people still have jobs and people still have certain responsibilities that talk to their skill set is finding that balance, isn't it?
I think it is. I had something this morning, that was a customer issue. And they went to support and the customer support person was like hey, that's actually not my gig that belongs to customer success manager. However, he walked over and we're lucky we're in the office to the customer success manager said hey, I've just had this feedback let's jump on the
call together. There's nothing in it for that part. The customer says you know, he's busy, but we sell as a team we sell in packs, and a customer last we're all shareholders as well right? We're all on this journey together. You kind of have to hire people that will go the extra mile for you and care you will not hear someone on sale for say my accounts there gongs accounts, my book of business it's gongs book of business, that's not your account, it's gongs accounts,
you just happen to be allowed prospect into it. So I do think it starts from the top down whether you know from leaders, directors, to managers, and when I think about potential customers, I will use gone and look at every single open deal on my pipeline. And I can see which deals have a VP of sales as a persona, a part of this of the of the decision maker, then I will reach out that VP of sales. And I will do a peer to
peer demo, I don't use Gong the same way in a user's Gong. And straightaway, I'm locked into that customer, we have a relationship. When it comes to negotiation. I'm not just coming in from you know, stage left to give the best and final, me and that person already know each other. And that's been really helpful for me, I probably do demos of the product three to four times a week, which is really important because you've got to lead by example.
Wow, that is just brilliant. The thing I love about it is you mentioned about drinking your own champagne and feeling drunk, I am absolutely leadless at the moment because you clearly are drinking bunch of your own champagne, and you are role modeling some fantastic behavior as a VP and creating that from a bowtie to a diamond effect. You're creating those levels really nicely set. I absolutely love that. Leslie how you're going out there? And it's a bit like the other types of
tech stack out there at the moment. What are those use cases and nothing stronger than with you demonstrating and walking the walk in front of your team to be customer centric? I love it.
Listen, I just want to win and know he can close it alone. Not one on in Yes, you can close a 20 30k deal. But I'm talking about the six figure deals. Let's all get in. Let's all get around a little What do you need? We do a light linearity where we should be towards the end of the month. So we we have a 72 inch screen a live Gong deal board open. We go right nights to do kdl Bobby, where are we? And this in front of 80 people and it's uncomfortable to start and it's
uncomfortable for new people. But Bobby's like here's where I am on Baba bomb. I'm out red lines, and someone said Hey, is it a German customer? Oh, I've had one of them. I'll drop by your desk afterwards. And we can we can have a chat and I'm watching this magic. I'm watching this tribal knowledge this peer to peer selling let's say and I actually did do a VP demo. So I said hey Bobby, I've done the VP demo. That's gonna
close on Friday. Call it committed. So there's a little bit of peer pressure there and I welcome that.
It's peer pressure Lesley but I think the the devil was in the detail with that example in that you've been in at that client, you're not sitting there from an ivory tower pushing people to commit stuff, they're not comfortable to commit, you've been on the other side of the table to that customer, you're translating your confidence back into the
team and back into. And I think that's the difference. It's that you talk about teams win deals and tribal knowledge, and you just simply can't, it doesn't matter how long someone's been in a business, they will not know everything you've got to, and things are constantly evolving and constantly changing. So the ability to pull teams together like that, and go and then have that that psychological safety net that allows you to put the hands up and go, I'm a bit blocked here,
I need some help. Can someone help me as someone goes, You know what, I've done this over here with this customer, come over chat afterwards, we can unblock this together. Like that's the magic. That's where we start to get that collaboration.
You hit the nail on the head, it is magic. And of course, we have a huge gong on the sales floor. And when that deal comes in, we celebrate as a team and the people go back to their desk a little spring in their step wasn't there when, but again, like I want to bring the whole floor on a journey.
I'm don't want to be too controversial. But I love this chat, because it's raising the light of constraint that customer centricity. I advocate customer centricity, I think back to my careers and stuff I really have literally waking up talking to customers is the thing that I've done in previous jobs and love it today, the people that I work with, and projects that we get SBIR, where it's like, oh my god, I love
working with that client. I flew over to Boston recently, where I have a client, I didn't want to leave, even to the point that I managed to get into check in on the air at the airport one hour before my international flight because I was having beers in Boston with the team. I just couldn't leave. Right. I was
even debating staying. The other side of customer centricity is that we're customer centric, because we have to, but are you really, and I think there's the sense of a really strong sales team, that's customer centric doesn't always provide the product that they have. They don't push the product completely they might offer, you know, it's not us. But actually you need to go and speak to this organization, because you will achieve your goals with using this piece of technology. Or
actually you don't even need technology. Why don't you go and talk to Barry who can give you some insights. My interpretation of the aggressive SAS industries is growth at all costs. In my opinion, again, you can say no Jonny. And that customer centricity gets challenged because the way we produce SDRs and AES is quite rightly, this is your job role, we're going to
let you do your job role. And we're going to empower you to do it, but you're not going to do other job roles, you're just going to do this very SDR base, a base job role, which actually sometimes suppresses their ability to be strategic sellers, which is, don't take this actually do that. My challenge in SAS is I think that we don't do a good job for the STRS and
A's because we don't enable them to be strategic sellers. And actually, that stops them being more customer centric, because they will they will deliver or try and push their product at all costs. That's my opinion.
I thought you're going in one direction you went the other. So the first direction you're going in is selling without integrity, there is a absolute cases when we're speaking to a customer saying we can't do that what you want our product to do, we cannot do that. And in fact, if they sell the product, and and I have that I had an expression, another company, the rats were selling the dream and leaving the nightmare with the customer success team. If you oversell
you will be caught out. So what I have done in previous companies is if that happens, you will lose the commission. So there is a bit of a slap on the wrist. If we can't do what the customer needs, you cannot sell the product. So you can sell a motorbike to somebody who needs a car. It doesn't work. That's the first thing. The second thing if we feel a competitor
can do a better maybe. And yes, there are cases. But I would ensure and I've done this in every role, that there is a competitive analysis done for every he knows what the landscape looks like, there is a battle card for every single competitor. And I actually can click a top spot and then go to every single now. And you need to save the customer and hey, what you're looking to do, we do it ex may do it better. However,
here's where we beat X and do it. You are being honest, but you're gently leading them away from where they were kind of going and saying I won't do that doesn't really matter. But it'll do this, this, this and this. It's up to the customer to make the decision then but again, it is selling with integrity. The second part of your question was the SDR and the AE. So the SDR has a role and their role is to prospect into as many hands as
possible. Bring them on a journey and get in front of the the skin in the game for the SDR is they maybe do not care as much about the customer. But they care about them as professionals. They're early in seed and career they want to get to AE so what we'll do is if they get to eight months or nine months and good track record, then we make them a senior we
just promoted someone this morning in the huddle. Then they unlock what we call the STR a Academy where they then have access to my meetings at one to ones and then they're allowed sell into our very lower lower lower your customers so they get some access to what the world's gonna look Like, we also sometimes use STRS to do demos that selling in packs. P So do they care about customers? I'm gonna say probably not. And I'll say when I was an SDR, I didn't really I was all about them
hitting the number. But as they go on the journey and they're selling, and they understand that more they do the AES, absolutely Chairman's customer.
The first part of your answer is exactly what I've
been trying to kick around in my head recently. And I also think the churn rate would be a great lag indicator right of this is that if Jonny has a high churn, then there's clearly going to be something that's going on notwithstanding, I still think that there is this strategic element where, in SAS a strategic account holder, what we see a lot in consultancy, is that they sit on this pivot with the C suite, and they're just helping them achieve their 600 million revenue goal or their 5
billion revenue goal, whatever that may be. And they're able to position and move them around to different types of services and product. Do you think there's a role within a senior a in SAS for that at all?
So we have just started a center of excellence here and again, many of the customers have it. And what we've done is we've taken our Senior Director of Product Marketing, we've moved him in there are AMEA, head of Reb. Ops, you've moved him in there, and our head of enablement in the US, we've moved them in there. The reason we pick those three is because the three key personas a buyer product is head of sales, head revenue, head of enablement. So what they do is
they are like our 18. So all six figure deals, we do a center of excellence review. So the US team fight here, we sit in a room for three days, it is a long piece, you know, there's a bit of an investment on time, but I've never lost a quarter. And I do believe it's down to that. So we were in a room, we maybe review 30 to 40 deals over 100k with that with that center of excellence team. And then they go in and they do the demo, they go on site, they will run the mutual success plan with the
A, it's like a gold standard approach. And then when you move into the customer success side and they become a customer, they don't back away like an AMI do they are still part of the journey, and they executive sponsor to that deal.
I go go back to saying thank you so much. Those points have helped me personally, really appreciate it.
I'm going to use my favorite three words, tell me more.
So my perception is my reality through past experiences, not due to conditioning, I have experienced SAS as quite an aggressive environment, and when working with products, because that's what we do as a job. I've seen this win at all costs Boxtop a just going head on, I'm gonna win this deal, and not having the ability to step back strategically and think, Okay, let's think about the customer.
And this comes back to customer centricity and why are challenged is that go at this moment in time they're looking to move this direction as a business. Gong should be coming in six months later. What they actually need is HubSpot.
So we've, I have example of that when you're implementing Salesforce, it's a bit it is a heavy lift to do them both at once. So why don't we do Salesforce will stay aligned check in three months bah bah, bah, bah, bah. We also co salad HubSpot. So if HubSpot has mentioned, we have a joint Slack channel with them. You'd like joint lunches with them. And we can ping the team there and say, Hey, I'm working with actually we ping their customer success team and say, Hey, where
are they on their journey and on HubSpot are brilliant. They'll say, you know something, we're only just starting implementation hold fire or hate, we're nearly done, go for it. And by the way, I think you're gonna win. This isn't this part of the part of the deal, just so what integrity it'll bite you in the ass.
Not any reminds me of when I lied when I was, you know, back in the day, and you lied to somebody. So he's going to catch you up by you know.
Just tell the truth.
You touched on something about the competitive space. So I think it is a competitive space, and it can be quite aggressive. So from a customer centric point of view, I think for us, we just need to be really personalized and personalization at scale is something a lot of people talk about. So you know, it's obvious Account Based Marketing, that making sure customers are getting the best experience and and being really innovative. So we need to be five steps ahead
of our competitors. I think hence why voice of the customer is key, those customer advisory forums as well. And also, when we launch new products, we love having customers as part as part of the beta. Because they're the ones using it. I think with anything an offer, like it'd be an example, I could be creating a deck. And I think the deck is amazing. And I'll say another one of our principles here is no sugar. So I'll say to somebody, can you look at my deck, no sugar, I can't see past it
anymore. I'm so in it. And they'll say, Oh no, you spelt that wrong. Um, I didn't see that. So with our product because we love our products so much and and and an engineers, it's their baby. It's really brave. But it's important that we let customers into the beta and say, Hey, this isn't working or actually, that button is annoying that we can move that because I could toggle quickly and I wouldn't have to go here and save me a second. But if I do this 14 times a day, over the
month, it's like three minutes back. So I think that's really important as well and then just being responsive and agile. So when we get the feedback from a customer if their thing To get other customers are thinking it? And if it makes sense to to the product and outpace competitors, why wouldn't we listen to them? You'd be a fool not to.
Yeah, I think from what you've just shared there, I mean, that it's not quite a blueprint, but it's almost getting towards that. Lesley, I think we always came full circle, we talked about sort of how exposed you are in a SaaS
business versus the old days. And I think you know, what you're talking about there is how to stay competitive against yourself as well, right is sort of sticking up there standing up to your own standards and maintaining those high standards and ability to deliver which is, which is also really, really challenging. I love what you shared there around sort of personalization at scale, and then how responsive you can be and just just even understanding that if one of our customers is
saying this, they're probably not the only one. And I've seen that firsthand, you know, that ignorance or arrogance, even that bleeds into customer success, these are they go watch their customers, they don't know what they're talking about with that for now, this week, who said that this is rubbish, they must be, they must all be wrong, as it were, hang on a minute, and then all of a sudden, what happens when it hits your chair
number and the next night in six months time. So being you're being really acutely aware, I think, something you shared this, how you're showing your team that what Johnny and I talked to our clients a lot about in that track to run on. So this is you're an SDR coming into the business. This is the journey that you're gonna go on, we're gonna give you exposure at
those points. That's how you get a team invested in the business in the customer, and get them caring and getting them thinking outside of their silos and thinking outside of their
immediate responsibilities. Lesley, I'd love just to ask you, if you were to give our audience say, hey, let's see, we've got someone out there who's as a CRO or sales director, or Head of Customer Success, or whatever it is someone in a SaaS business that's growing and thriving, what would be the three key things that you'd encourage them to really think about, from what you've shared with us today?
It could depend on tenure and and also how long they're there. They're doing their job. I think listening tours, for me are the first thing I do in any job. So I do an internal and an external. So when I joined Gong, I spent two weeks listing, I had one bullet every single person in this building. Why did you join Gong? What do you like about your business? If you had a magic wand, what would you change, and you get you get that you get a vibe of what's going
on the sales floor. And a lot of it was I wasn't sure of my roles or responsibilities. I do this job, she does that job. I'm under pressure for exit. So you kind of start to hear about maybe the parts of the of the engine that are a little bit broken internally, and then externally listening towards that your customers. I think we forgot when we during COVID How important is to get in front of somebody and look them in the in the whites of their eyes. People do buy from people and we forget
that we buy things online all the time. And we just click on Apps. So I would say listen, of your existing customers look at your existing customer base. So in other companies I've worked for and here we have our top 100 customers, then we have our top 20 execs I'm on that I'm one of them. And all of us have customers that we're aligned to that is a really tightly run program. And I'm actually that's one of my Okay, or so I have 10
customers at the moment. That's my focus. How many have I met them as awesome, I met with them, how are they have I listened, right? I'm not selling them anything. I'm not here for the upsell. I'm not here for the renewal. I'm just here, how you get on what's going on. And then the final one on one I wish I'd known really early on in my career get friendly with product, you need to get friendly with product, they are just as important as the sellers. They're the ones that
control the roadmap. They're the ones that that are doing all these things in the background. And you need to have a two way communication. So we will do product roadmaps here. And also give them feedback. It's a two way street. And on that product roadmap, what's customer facing? What can I share? What are the reps need to know? So you're on a call, Hey, your product doesn't do this? No, doesn't Mr. courseware, however, that's coming in August would like to be part of the beta. That's
really important. So product is key. So listen to your customers. Use your leadership team to keep those relationships alive with your customers. It's not just trying to sell to them. And then honestly product or your best friend.
Brilliant bits of advice and insights shared right from the get go. You're really understanding our customer creating an organization that's truly customer centric, and why that's so important for retaining and growing an effective SAS business in today's incredibly competitive market. Lesley, we've thoroughly enjoyed talking to you and we look forward to seeing you again soon.
That's fun. Thank you for having me.