Cutting Time-to-Value by 55%: The Digital Onboarding Playbook

Okay, great. Well, I'm going to go into the agenda. So who is Kat Kenny? We'll do a little bit about me.

She gave some of it away, but that's okay. There's still more to be known about this enigma. So we're going to talk a little bit about what DRADA does. And you'll notice I'll be getting into some background.

I actually was a former gain sticker. So this is my first gain site poll as an attendee, not an employee, which is actually really fun for me. Usually that's 14 meetings a day, back to back, running all the different meetings. So it's been actually really nice to be able to attend some of these sessions.

And I'll talk about how that actually built the foundation and my passion for digital customer success. We'll talk about the challenge that I encountered when I first came to DRADA, hired as the director of digital customer success. I'll talk about the solution, what we actually launched to solve the problem. And we'll talk about the outcome, which is obviously the most important part, and how to make sure that we know how to measure any outcome of any digital program that you're launching.

And then we'll get into some Q&A. And as we said, if there are no questions, I can a cappella all day. I go to karaoke every other week. So hold on to your butts.

Okay. So about me, I am from Battle Creek, Michigan. Any Michiganders in the audience? Woo!

One. All right. Well, I have a tattoo for where I'm from in Michigan. If you actually are from Michigan, you point to where you're from.

It's the Mitten State. So I was hoping there would be some more Michiganders in the audience for that to land, but that's okay. So feel free to come up and look. It's the only tattoo I have.

So that's a fun, fun fact. I've moved around. I worked on a cruise ship in Hawaii. When I first graduated college, I was not ready to go into the real world.

I wanted to travel and do fun things. So I waited tables on Norwegian cruise lines, pride of America. And then I moved to Chicago for 11 years, Austin, Texas, and now Denver for the past almost a year. I love traveling, as I mentioned.

I love hiking. I love the outdoors. Skiing, as I mentioned. Karaoke.

Me and my boyfriend go every other weekend. And we've been called the couple at the bar, which is pretty fun. We both are quite good, you know, in my opinion. I've got I love, you know, blackjack and crap.

So I'll be seeing you on the tables out there, especially if anyone goes to Ellis Island. Five dollar blackjack tables all day. And a craps table five dollars till like one o'clock. I don't work here, but I am promoting it anyway.

So I have two cats, Olive and Strudel. They are the loves of my life. They are lovely. And they're there in the picture.

You can see a picture of me at the Emmys. I love movies, TV, all things. I have a friend that works in the Academy. So got to go to that was very cool.

I started my career in hospitality, waiting tables, as I mentioned. I think everybody who comes from customer service background or any sort of hospitality seems to really kill it in this industry. So kudos to all the former hospitality there. And as I mentioned, I'm a former gainster.

So as they call the gain site employees. And that had such a huge impact on me and my career. I'll definitely be talking about what I did at Gain Site and how it led to what I'm currently doing today. But before we get into that, I'm going to talk a little bit about Drata.

So we are, if you haven't heard of us, context matters. And if you haven't worked with us before, we are the agentic platform for continuous trust management. What this means in practical terms is we are the trust layer that sits between great companies and the amazing stakeholders who have to verify them. So auditors, partners, board members, prospects, regulators, etc.

And what we do in practical terms is we automate continuous compliance. And we also manage risks and accelerate security reviews. So when your team is like needing to capture manual evidence, this is going to be automated in the background so your team can actually spend more time on the work that matters rather than focusing on capturing manual evidence. So cool.

So a little bit about Drata there. As you can see, the results are there to speak for themselves. People who use Drata tend to see about three times faster time to audit. We also see six times faster on security questionnaires and four times faster on vendor assessments.

And average see an ROI of 3.2 times. So if you're interested, come up, see me after. I'll make some introductions to sales. Is there much better at pitching what we do than I am?

But, okay, Slido poll. We'll go ahead and get that up there. So when you want a new in-app program or digital program of any kind, what are the first metrics that you're looking at to prove impact to the business? I'll give everybody a minute to get some answers in.

Get some answers in. Use it. Yep. Product adoption.

Important. Revenue. Use usage. Yeah.

Engagement. That's a good one. Time to value. Somebody read the title of this topic.

Love that. Utilization, trust, flow usage. Change in behavior. Time to value.

All right. Awesome. I'm going to go ahead and skip over. But these are starting to see a trend a little bit.

I like that. Completions. Cool. Yeah.

Good stuff, guys. All right. So I'm going to go into a little bit more about my gain site experience. So when I started at gain site, I was a manager of customer success for the gain site PX product.

Any PX people in the room? Awesome. Yeah. So PX is similar to like a Pendo.

You've got in-app guide, walk-through tours, tool tips, user behavior and analytics. Really found my love of PLG, improving anything that can drive outcomes. The founder of gain site PX, Mickey Alon, he was amazing. I learned so much from him.

And after working at gain site for a while, they asked me to take on our acquisition of North Pass at the time, which was gain site customer education. This was pre-skill jar days. And then they said, hey, how about you just manage all of our acquisition products? So I started also managing gain site customer communities.

And what was cool about being the leader of all of these products for CS was I really started to see a trend. And these products became the forefront of digital customer success after the post-COVID over hiring happened. Everybody was forced to reduce, forced to cut back. You want to say, I'm sure everybody in this room has heard, do more with less.

So that was the actual like foundation of what we even did at gain site. We were using our own products and drinking our own champagne to help us decrease cost to serve, to help us scale our business without adding head count. And this is where I fell in love with the concept of digital CS. It became all the rage right when I was at gain site.

So that was pretty amazing. I know digital customer experience has been around a lot longer, but the concept of digital CS really became booming while I was there. And that's where I really fell in love with all of these products, anything that can help you measurably accelerate time to value and be able to decrease cost to serve and scale your business and customer success. So the thing that happened though, after I was working with PX, and then I started taking on education and I took on community was I would hear a variation of the same conversation with every single one of those personas, you know, product leaders, community leaders, education leaders.

It was sort of the same thing where they would focus a lot on sort of those leading indicators like, or just things like number of courses published, number of in-app tours created, number of groups built in community. But what was the real like business impact? So a common conversation that I lived many, many times was talking to customers and they'd be like, Kat, we did it. We launched 10 new in-app tours this week.

And I would be like, that is so amazing. Like what was the problem that you were trying to solve and what was the impact of business? And the response typically looked a little like this. Any firefly fans in the audience, huge fan.

That happened time and time again, whether it was PX, community or education. It was the same conversation over and over again. What I call that is vanity metric theater. Things that look exciting on paper, but don't really matter in terms of it's the same as a feature factory.

If you're just shipping a lot of features, but your GRR is down, nobody's buying more products. Who cares? At the end of the day, who cares? You have to know what the impact to your business is in order to keep your job.

I talked to education leaders and community leaders who are always so scared to be on the chopping block. Again, post COVID over hiring, recorrection. They didn't know how to be able to articulate to their CFO, the CEO, what they were actually doing besides things that just looked busy work. Right?

So I'm going to kick things off with a fun quote from Albert Einstein. If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes on the problem, thinking about the problem, and five minutes thinking about the solutions. What this actually means is the importance of discovery. Right?

Discovery is such a critical skill no matter if you're in sales, marketing, support, whatever it is, you really need to dig in to understand what is the problem you're solving before you just launch things to launch things. You know, we have a lot of pressure in digital customer success to launch applications, to launch programs, but if you don't know how to articulate it back to the business, again, you could be on the chopping block. So I'm going to talk about how to do this at Drata for the first 55 minutes, solving or discovering what the actual issue was, and then we'll talk about the program that we actually launched and what the results were. So the challenge.

One of my favorite questions that I learned working at GainSight was when talking to customers, you basically say, like, what is the biggest friction point in the customer journey? And answering that can really help dictate what you're actually going to build and what you're going to focus on. So when I first joined Drata, I made sure to immerse myself in meeting with every single stakeholder at that company. I met with CSMs, of course, interviews, I asked them, what do you think are the biggest challenges with our customers?

When I first joined Drata, I was overseeing our emerging segment or the long tail segment, right, as well as building out digital programs. So I really wanted to understand that persona, the customer base. It's like one to 100 full-time employees. So pretty small startups, and they're usually looking to get their first SOC 2 certification because they have some huge whale in their sales pipeline, and they just know they need SOC 2 yesterday in order to close it.

So I met with customers, interviewed them, product team marketing, and what this enabled me to do was actually have meaningful conversations with our data team to build measurable dashboards to help, again, prove impact to the business. Understanding context, you know, I'm a big fan of the combination of data plus storytelling equals love. I think there's you can't do it with one or the other. One by itself is just not enough, but marrying those two together can really have the most impact.

So I learned a lot about our personas. Typically in a one to 100 full-time employee company, this is like a founder, a CEO, and he's wearing a bajillion. He or she, excuse me for my bias, I should know better. He or she is, you know, looking to do many jobs at the same time.

They don't have a ton of time to be spending how to learn a product, how to actually get their certification. So focusing on that, you know, non-GRC professional. So here we go. This is what our journey stages were in our CSP.

We sadly do not have gainsay. I am heartbroken. But, you know, this can be applied to any CSP. We have four journey stages, onboarding, activation, adoption, and value.

I won't get too in the weeds about what actually the criteria is used to qualify for any of these, but onboarding is just setting up connections. The more connections you set up in Drata, the more powerful the automation. So that's obviously a critical component of getting customers onboarded. Activation is once they've actually made their connections, and now we want them to start working on their policies.

Adoption is once they publish their policies, and now they're going to have these automated tests pass below or above a certain threshold. And once those tests passing get into a certain threshold, they are considered in value stage. Why does any of this matter? This could just be made up, right?

But the reason this mattered was we saw that customers who achieved value stage renewed almost a 92% retention rate, which is huge. It was clearly indicative of them receiving some sort of value and wanting to renew year after year. So, again, looking at the emerging segment, you know, it was about a coin flip if they were still in onboarding or activation at time of renewal. So it was a 50-50 chance if they were going to renew or not.

If they were in adoption stage, it was about a 70%. And again, that 92%, I knew that the critical component was getting more customers into value and more quickly. You know, they say you lose customers in the first 120 days of selling them, so you need to make sure they're achieving value as quickly as possible. For us, it was taking around 144 days.

That's an average, so there's obviously outliers that skew that. But way too long to achieve value. So I knew, and when I started looking at all the numbers, I knew that the onboarding stage is where we were seeing the highest friction. So needed to really help those non-GRC professionals get up to speed in getting those automations done as quickly as possible.

So one question to ask yourself when you join a new company, you know, as much as I wanted to say, okay, I would like to buy an academy and a community. I would like to buy all these tools to enable me to do the job that I know I would like to do. That's not the best thing to do when you start a new job, to be asking for budget for tools. You kind of want to show maybe you know what you're talking about a little bit.

So I made sure to find out, okay, what am I working with here? So when I dug into the tech stack, we thankfully had an in-app tool. So coming from GainSight PX and my affinity for in-app tools, I knew we had Chameleon. And it was owned by the product team's budget, so even better.

Didn't cost us a dime in the CF team. Thankfully, my team, my time working with product leaders, I was able to build a really good foundation and relationships with the product team that they were like, sure, you can use it. In fact, you could train our team how to use it, which was really fun. So pop-ups, walkthrough, checklist.

And then we used amplitude for user behavior and analytics. Chameleon doesn't do that out of the box. It's just we have stand-alone tools for both. And then our data warehouse.

So Snowflake, I'm sure everybody has some sort of data lake. This was advanced metadata, our single source of truth. And then support data. I was looking through most submitted support tickets, most visited help article sites.

I wanted to understand where our customer is going for questions when they're getting stuck, when they're getting frustrated. So I know not everybody has access to this amount of data. So again, I would just find out, work with what you do have and try to come up with some sort of solution. And then later, you can ask for the investment of other tools.

So we'll talk through the solution. And this was one, again, that I learned at Gainsight. We did the same thing. You've probably seen it in the applications.

They had a knowledge center bot, which is called a launcher in Chameleon. It's basically an in-app checklist. So do this, do this, do this, helping them get through those key configurations. And each step of this checklist had a guided walkthrough tour, actually holding their hand through every step.

One thing I will say is don't spam customers with thousands of in-app tours. It is not a good user experience. One thing that has really changed in the PLG community is users want to be able to trigger the experience when they want to trigger it, rather than assaulting them with a pop-up right when they log in, giving them a checklist that they can actually launch the tour when they want to launch it and engage with it on their own. So we basically gave them a walkthrough tour of what everything was in DRADA.

We walked them through how to set up their identity provider and infrastructure, which are our two most crucial connections in DRADA. They really help accelerate in a lot of what we do for security and compliance. And then we walked them through giving them help articles, giving them our upcoming training, live training events, all right there, very discoverable to make sure that we were giving, like, pushing information to them, rather than making it a pull motion, which it was before. Customers had a question, they get frustrated, they go to the help center, they're looking for answers, or they're going to the support team.

So what I wanted to do is actually serve them the right help article at the right time to the right person that they're getting the answer proactively and in hopes to deflect support tickets, deflect one-to-one questions to CSMs. So when we talk about measuring, again, I knew what my baselines were. I knew that it took 144 days to achieve value. I also knew down to the connection how many days each one of those connections on average took.

I'm not going to get into those details on this presentation, but I had all of that. I knew exactly what the metrics I was going to check. So with in-app programs, you're looking at things like leading indicators of clicks, view, completions. Again, those things on their own are vanity metrics, but they are indicative of leading to engagement.

So if you have low numbers on these, then that's not good. But just because you have high numbers doesn't mean that you're actually achieving value. So there's lagging outcomes. I tend to look at lagging outcomes as a bit of a midterm lagging outcome and then the long-term lagging outcome.

So for midterm, I'm looking at things like am I decreasing time to value? Are they getting to the value stage more quickly? Are they increasing the number of key connections based off of using the in-app checklist? Am I decreasing the number of inactive accounts?

That was another big thing. We had a lot of, I would say, a failure to launch. But who logged in, got overwhelmed by the amount of things they needed to do with a lot of guidance or walkthroughs. So they just never logged in again.

And our ARR is not substantial. A very small customer could be paying around $7,000. So it's not motivating enough necessarily to go back in because it's not hundreds of thousands for a really small customer. So there was just this feeling of oh, and not logging back in.

And we lose them at that first moment that they're logging into the platform. And I wanted to make sure I was increasing the number of customers in value stage, not just accelerating the time to get there. Because again, if I'm just measuring time to value and not actual number of customers, then I'm not going to get that 92% renewal rate that I was looking for. So lagging outcomes.

It's all the stuff we talk about all the time. So increased GRR and increased NRR. That's the golden goose. Right.

So the outcome. The exciting thing. Okay. So is everyone heard of a user retention report?

If you use gainsite PX or amplitude or anything like that? Well, if you're not familiar, a user retention report is basically tracking the number, how often people are engaged. Like let's say after the first time they log into your product, how many what percentage of those users are logging back in seven days later, 30 days later, 90 days later? This shows stickiness.

It's showing that they're engaged. So what I looked at was looking at admins in our emerging segment, which is going to be the blue line at the bottom. Looking at the admins in our emerging segment before the launch of this application. So again, that's my baseline data.

I know that we had about a 40.8% retention versus the commercial and enterprise segment was closer to like a 50% retention. And here's what happened after we launched the in-app guide. We jumped from 40.8% user retention to 68.5 user retention. So again, this isn't necessarily high retention or high expansion, but I knew it was driving value.

So these are the early indications that something is working and we're seeing stickiness. Now here's the big one. So measuring impact. We did decrease time to value by 55%.

So we went from 144 days on average to 66 days on average. And clearly the time to the other journey stages from onboarding, implementation, adoption, up to value, all of those were significantly decreased. I even had based off of the number of days it took to set up every single connection. Those were much lower.

So of course leading to the lagging outcome. And the really exciting part here is not just that I accelerated time to value by 55%. We actually saw five times the amount of customers who achieved value in the first 30 days than we typically saw. So this was really significant.

So and actually before I go into that, I didn't have time to get into my chart. And as you've noticed, I haven't really talked about AI in this session. But sometimes if it's not broke, don't fix it. There's still some classical non-AI things you can do to help achieve value.

But we did recently work with our data time to democratize data requests. So typically what I would need to prove impact beyond what I could get an amplitude on my own was file a data ticket, work with my data team, go into a queue, and maybe I'd be able to build out some sort of dashboard in Power BI or Tableau, whatever, to show the significant impact in terms of retention. I did get to run a report this morning and last night I was playing around with it. It's through Snowflake.

They have an agent called Cortex. So this is pulling from every single resource in terms of product adoption across Intercom, which is our support software, across analytics, everything. We saw a 9% increase in GRR for users who engage with the launcher versus those that did not. So I was really excited to see that today.

And it was a nice little surprise. Don't get to have it in the presentation, but wanted to share that we are using AI in that way that I can actually democratize data requests. So really, it's impact there. Okay.

And I'm going to give you a take home of a five step move that you can take to run any digital program. Again, this could be community, it could be education, it could be in-app. So we're going to talk about sort of the first 55 minutes. And I do not mean literally 55 minutes.

And I do not mean five minutes to actually launch your program. Probably a little bit more finesse than that. Okay. So you need to define what the problem is before you build something.

I see a lot of people get excited and want to rush right into the build phase. But if you don't actually know what you're looking to fix, it's going to be busy work and it's going to be actually taking resources away and capacity away from something you could have been working on that actually does show value. So define the problem. If you're not able to define it, don't build something yet.

Work with all the resources that you have. Baselines are so critical. It goes back to discovery. What does this look like today?

And then you'll know what the actual outcome of any program that you're launching. So making sure if you don't have a baseline, this is I can't tell you how many people skip this step. If I ask them, well, what was it before? Well, we don't know.

So I highly, highly stress getting this is so critical. You can have a hypothesis. Sometimes it's hard to know exactly what the result that you're going to get. Like I didn't say, oh, I've got a goal of accelerating time to value by 55%.

I had no idea. So you can take a guess and have a goal. But, you know, without historical data, since I've never done a program like this before, it's hard to say this is going to be the result. Okay, to have a hypothesis.

And then if it doesn't get to where you're hoping, then you can iterate and try again. And then the launch. I know this says like the smallest thing, but you should also just do this in a test. So for me, it was just the emerging market, right?

I didn't touch commercial. I didn't touch enterprise. I knew that I was focusing on a specific persona in the emerging segment. And I wanted to see what the success was of those users.

So launching and then showing that you can prove the actual outcome of the program. And of course, measuring. So being able to compare to the baseline to what the actual result was. So in total, identify the problem.

Build the program. And measure the impact. Thank you. [Applause] Oh, of course.

Awesome. That was great. Now you can put in your questions if you haven't already. Let's start.

Let me look at these real quick. How are you gathering value realization through a manual CS triggered action or do you pull your users in-app once they've completed the checklist? One of your methods? Yeah.

So for this particular program, it was actually measuring those who engaged with the launcher and how many of them achieved that value stage in Catalyst or in our CSP. From there, I'm getting early signals because I launched this last April. So I've only got two months worth of renewal data at this point. It's going to take a while to get to that true lagging outcome.

But that's how I was measuring value realization. It's a journey stage that we call value. Now, product people are going to say time to value might be something different. We might be talking about the aha moment where they have that first magical moment.

I'm looking at value in terms of our value journey stage. So I was looking at how many of them actually achieve value and how quickly did they achieve it when I launched this program. Hopefully that answers the question. How are you guys defining that value stage?

What are the criteria to enter that stage? Yeah. And we're going to be iterating on this all the time, especially as we've made acquisitions. We're no longer a single product use case, right?

And we experience this at Gainsite. There were many products. And if you're a customer who owns five or six products, you need to be able to define what value means for each of them separately, but then as a roll up to the ultimate outcome. So for us, you know, a little bit in the weeds, but we were looking at having their policies done, their connections made, and then the rate of automated tests passing.

And automated tests for us is showing value because it's time savings. It's stuff that they're not focused on capturing manual evidence for audits for auditors. This was something that was humming in the background. So we knew that they were saving time.

We're exploring changing that, but this is what has worked for us historically. The fact that it showed in 92%, you know, correlation to retention was good enough for me. It was something, it wasn't insignificant. It was significant enough for me to say I don't necessarily care how we defined it because it was defined before I joined the company, but I knew that it was enough to show me that this is what actually gets people to renew, and that's what I care about.

But we are evolving because we're looking at multi-product, we're looking at different users. So we'll continue to iterate and refine that as we go along. Makes sense. How are you ensuring that the right resources are getting to the right personas during that onboarding period?

And how are you ensuring that they're getting the right materials? Yeah, I will say at Drada, I'm not at the point, so we're about a five-year-old company, right? We're still pretty early on, but we've achieved over 100 million ARR and over 8,000 customers in that small timeframe. So things are a little crazy.

But I know at Gainsight, what we did was with Gainsight PX, we did a role goal survey, which I also plan on implementing at Drada. So we're collecting that user identification, like who are you and what are you trying to achieve with our product? And then I would use that data to decide what information I'm sending to them at what time. And now with everything with MCPs and Claude, I'm positive we can get to a point where it's very personalized, not just a canned message that goes to every persona A when they reach this stage.

It can be based off a myriad of things. So I'm pretty excited about some of the tools that we're exploring for that right now. But again, I also looked at just like help ticket data. Like for people who are in this journey stage, like what were the tickets they were submitting?

Intercom had some great data working with FinAI agent. I saw Zendesk today. That was really cool. And then I was looking at help center traffic for people who were what were the top articles they were visiting.

But that's why I interviewed all these people when I joined, too. I could just look at data and tell myself a story, but I was also asking people in interviews, what are the questions that your customers have the most when they're onboarding? What are the things they struggle with the most? What information do they always miss?

And I'd make sure that those were embedded in the guided walkthrough tours that actually had a link out to the right help article at the right time. So making sure it wasn't persona specific quite yet we're going to get there. But for now, it was basically just you know, admins who are in this segment, what were the things that they typically needed at that point in time. Makes sense.

All right. How did the signals change across the customer journey? So how does the scale across different customer types, industries, segments? Yeah, I think kind of ditto to my last response is like, I don't think we're there yet to where we're vertical specific, where, you know, we're working through segment specific right now.

But that is the vision is to get to role, goal, vertical, what specific framework they're working towards, you know, not SOC 2, maybe GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001. All of these are going to have very specific bespoke content that they need. But we're not quite there yet. But that is something that I would be making sure that I'm considering as we evolve the program.

All right. You found that 48% of churn customers never set up key infrastructure integration tied to DRADA's core value. So how do you determine that this specific friction point was the right one to tackle first? And what diagnostic process would you recommend for teams identifying their own key bottlenecks?

Yeah, so this was something that I learned from our data team. We have an amazing data team. And yes, I know that that is a privilege and not something that everybody gets access to. So I was quite surprised when I joined DRADA, like how much data we had.

If anything, I think we have so much data that we don't know how to, like, organize it and really make meaningful assumptions out of it. Although, again, like, we're getting to the point where I can democratize that on my own through some of the work we're doing with Snowflake and Cortex. But because I saw that as one of the top reasons for, like, correlations to customers churning, and I knew that infrastructure was critical for empowering some of those automations, so if they don't connect it, they're not going to see those results and they're not going to achieve that value stage because in order to get to that automated test passing metric that we mentioned earlier, that means they're in the value stage, they're not going to get there without these connections. So this was just, like, a first thing of many.

Like, I'm all about looking all the way up the street. If you've ever read the four tendencies book, I am the questioner. I need to understand everything that goes through the entire workflow. I want to know what things look like from day one of the customer journey so I can really inspect what needs to be fixed and worked on.

If I don't dig in enough, and again, discovery, discovery, discovery, that's what's going to help you say, oh, wow, that must be a significant thing because 48% of them that churn didn't have this infrastructure. We're going to save that top one for a little bit later. That will be the closeout question. You mentioned that your product team was already using, I think, Chameleon for in-app.

You went to them and wanted to do in-app onboarding. Did you have trouble getting buy-in or getting them to be onboard with this? I got to hand it to my time at Gainsight and Gainsight PX specifically because they were my people. That was my persona that I worked with.

So I was like, I would lead with, hey, I worked with hundreds of customers that were product leaders and here's the things that we would talk about. I would learn about their KPIs, their OKRs, what were the things that they wanted to learn before I just injected myself and said, hey, I know in-app stuff, I'm just going to take this over. I really wanted to understand their struggles and how they used Chameleon. Then, honestly, it was really great.

I was very happy that I've worked with such a great product team. I had clout. I know not everybody comes from that background, but I would try to lean in with empathy, curiosity, understand what their goals are and tie them to some of your goals. You will always find things that are aligned and say, hey, let's do this together or, hey, if you weren't working on this thing in-app, what could you be doing?

I knew they didn't have a priority to focus on in-app checklist. That wasn't their priority. I worked with our CPO and asked if I could try this as an experiment and the fact that I built a really solid relationship with him and learned more about their side of the business is what earned me the keys to the castle there, if you will. Makes a lot of sense.

For customer education, should we be concerned with stickiness of the education platform or just the product we're trying to create adoption for? How would you approach that with the customer education lens? Yeah, this is the question that keeps me up at night right now with AI and everything, but I think we're about to launch our own academy program in two weeks. I don't have baselines.

I've never had an academy. I can't say here's how many people have typically completed courses, so I'm going to be working from scratch and capturing my baselines. I would say working on stickiness of your education program or just with the product we're trying to create adoption for. No, I think it should be both.

You want to make sure that your education program or anything that's helping your customers self-serve and drive stickiness and change of behavior is as discoverable as possible. Make sure you're weaving in your academy into all of your playbooks and two messages that are going out. In-app, we're going to be using Chameleon to launch our academy. We're also going to have in-app tool tips that will say, "Hey, go take this course to learn more." You want to make sure it's in as many places as possible.

You shouldn't make customers hunt through your org chart to find something. You're almost hitting them over the head with it because they're never going to know it as well as you do, so you want to make sure it's as discoverable as possible. I think you shouldn't be concerned with the stickiness. I mean, yes, if no one's using it, then maybe, but you want to make sure that you're actually driving awareness, discoverability, and measuring the impact.

Take surveys. Are people actually learning anything from the education content? Right now, we've got a handful of customers testing our new e-learning courses to make sure that it's actually landing rather than just thinking that it's good and giving us all a pat on the back so it's actually making sure we're getting that qualitative feedback. We also use course ratings at the end of every course to make sure we're capturing that star rating and that they can fill out whether something is missing or not.

Then, I am going to be measuring are people who engage with the academy in completing courses renewing at a higher rate? I'm going to look at all the other things that lead up to that. I'm going to say, are they is user retention higher? I'm probably going to look at the same metrics that I looked at for in-app, but now just for education.

I would do the same for community. I know this is not something that you're probably doing yet, but you've probably thought about what might be the best way to take into account different tiers or subscription offerings that you have in building the customer journey since the metrics might be a bit different. Yeah, and they are. On the tail end, we're looking at startups who just need to get their sock to.

They don't really care how they get there. They just know they need sock to in order to close deals. On the enterprise side of the house, Drata is really trying to turn the concept of GRC and trust on its head. We're trying to get away from the old ways of manually uploading evidence, running risk manually, vendor questionnaires manually, and getting that to be an automated agentic platform.

It's a new way of thinking about it. It's very old school. I would say it was going from on-prem to the cloud back in the day. For GRC professionals, this is a whole new way of looking at GRC.

So, yes, I would definitely be changing up the content. That will be my next thing we're doing right now is launching new playbooks. We've got some running in the emerging segment right now that we're tracking the impact. I'm going to be tweaking those to commercial and enterprise.

I will say with the CSP tool we have right now, it's very manual. It's not flexible. So, I am looking at other tools right now that could be a bit more dynamic, something that I can be agile with and test and refine over time. But, yes, I would definitely be looking at those things.

If you haven't started anything, start with the thing that's going to impact the most people. And then you can start refining, personalizing, getting a little bit more bespoke per segment, per, you know, what have you. Start small, start large, and then continue to make that a bit more personalized and contextual as you go. I'm curious how you might have thought about engaging customers during this onboarding process that were not engaged at all.

So, how do you reengage or get to that point? Yeah, we worked through, you know, if they're not logging in, they're not going to see the checklist. So, we have to make sure that we're sending other channel communications. So, we used Playbooks, of course, through our CSP.

We actually just now launched, like, tech touch Playbooks. So, it's actually having... We mapped out our entire customer journey. So, you saw earlier, like onboarding, activation, adoption, and value.

We mapped out all the things that they need to be doing because we have redefined what those mean at this point. We've made it a lot more robust. We made it more welcoming to multi-product journeys. So, now that we're sending the right Playbooks at the right time, we've got nurture Playbooks that are just going to be sending them educational information, sending them to the academies, sending them to the community, and then we're going to be sending risk Playbooks, like, if they aren't doing those things.

So, we give them a certain amount of time and say, okay, if they haven't done this by this date, which includes just, like, not logging in, right? That's a simple one to build if they're not logging in. Making sure that they have access to support. Don't make them go looking for what your support information is.

Like, give them the email right in your Playbook. So, we do have customers who sometimes struggle with login because they might change their domain during the sales process. So, we're saying, hey, having trouble logging in, and then we give them all these steps. And for Drato, we are looking to move our, to an entirely digital segment for our long-tail customers.

So, there won't be a person. So, we're really reliant on these tech touch points to try to alleviate the problem. But for our scaled or pooled segment, we do have CSMs that, after those automations don't work, you know, we're hoping there's a percentage of them that do work on their own without involving a human, that we then create a task for the CSM, right, to intervene. Now you reach out to the sales person who sold them.

You know, have a Playbook of step-by-step. If they haven't logged in, if they're not engaging at all, what's your risk Playbook? Who are you reaching out to? Are you multi-threading?

Are you looking at who's actually logged in? Are there different users that maybe you've never engaged with before that you could just send a quick LinkedIn message or a quick email saying, hey, I know we don't know each other, but does this person even work here anymore? Because, like, I have not been seeing them log in. So, you just got to try to exhaust those risk Playbooks.

But, yeah, that would be my advice in terms of re-engaging, just making sure you've got some drip campaigns or sequences or Playbooks that are set up to engage when those signals are happening. All right. And the most important, highest upvoted question, what is your go-to karaoke song? And has it changed since the days of Gainsite karaoke?

Oh, I think I did Fleetwood Mac when I was at Gainsite. Yep, that was fun. That was, like, my first or second week at Gainsite. We went to Cohesion, which is a big event for just employees.

We were in New Orleans. We got, like, a parade. It was nuts. It was one way to be introduced.

And I went up on stage and developed some early fans during my time at Gainsite. I'm okay. I'm not that great. But, you know, I was in show choir, so I try to get out the pipes once in a while.

You know, it's fun because the karaoke bar that my boyfriend and I go to, has anyone heard of a KJ? I just need to bring this back to my boyfriend to end an argument. Yes? Oh, all right.

One guy in the audience said karaoke jockey. I've never heard of it in my life. We got into a little tiff about it. I was like, no one's heard of that.

But so the KJ... I'm out of a couple of hundreds. Yeah, I think this is... So I'm going to measure the baseline and the impact of the survey we just did, tying it all back.

So the KJ can download pretty much any song you want. So I've been doing some B songs. I've been doing like Ben Folds, Amy Mann, Fiona Apple. But I would say like a go-to and one to get everybody revved up is like Faithfully by Journey.

It's a good one. Yeah. Ooh, good. That resonated.

Awesome. That was a good response. Ooh, Journey. Yeah.

Not a rapper? I can rap a little bit. Maybe like Hamilton. So otherwise...

You know what? That's good. I could do some Hamilton rap as well. I'd probably go for Hamilton or some show too.

This will be a duet with us later. Perfect. We'll see about that. Anyway, well, thank you, Kat.

I really appreciate it. So good to see you. And thank you, everyone, for joining us. Thank you.

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