From CCO to CRO: Driving Nezasa's Growth by Integrating Customer Success in GTM Strategies

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Okay, welcome everyone for the final session of Pulse.

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I can't believe it's flown by.

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I hope you all had an amazing couple of days.

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My name's Oliver Marriott.

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I'm a CSM gain site.

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And I have the pleasure of introducing Alex Farmer,

0:13

CRO of Nizaza, or Nizaza for the Americans.

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And he's gonna be talking to us about his transition

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from CCO to CRO.

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So please give it up for Alex.

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(audience applauding)

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- We'll make it work, yeah.

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Oh, there's a clicker right here, Stupendus.

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We're gonna keep it casual, I think today.

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It's the last session at Pulse Europe.

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So I thought we would, you know,

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spend a long couple of days at the conference.

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So we'll keep it casual, ask all your questions,

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but thank you.

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You should hope to make it worth it.

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I did say that the good thing about this

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is if people get up and leave in the middle of the session,

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I'm sure it's because they have a flight to catch

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and completely unrelated to the content.

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You can vote with your feet.

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Actually, please don't.

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That would make me feel terrible, thank you.

0:57

So yes, my name is Alex Farmer.

0:58

I'm the Chief Revenue Officer at Nizaza.

1:00

I'll get into that all in just a second.

1:03

Really delighted to tell a little bit of,

1:05

get into, joined as our Chief Customer Officer

1:08

and became our CRO one year ago.

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And we transformed our business.

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We, the whole team, really rallied together

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to really kind of pivot our trajectory.

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And we, our North Star really was kind of

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customer success principles

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and applying that across the go-to market,

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which is what I'd love to talk with you all about today.

1:26

I hope to get a little bit into the weeds with you all.

1:28

So there's some kind of tactical takeaways as well.

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Really so you can, you know, with your go-to market teams,

1:34

take some of the lessons, the mistakes that we made at Nizaza

1:37

and take that forward in your companies in addition.

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So I do hope to have plenty of time for Q&A.

1:43

In terms of our agenda, intro and background,

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I'll be very brief.

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I'm gonna talk for about 25 minutes

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so that we do have plenty of time for questions.

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I'll do a very quick personal intro

1:52

and then talk about how we really delivered customer-led growth

1:57

more tactically about kind of that playbook

1:59

so you can take some things away.

2:00

And finally, I would love to offer,

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if this is the way forward, a prediction about what we can

2:04

expect in the next kind of four or five years,

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you can come back at the polls five years from now

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and tell me how wrong I was when we do those predictions.

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But let's see.

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This is the boring part.

2:15

It's a personal intro, so I will go through it very quickly.

2:17

You see a lot of customer success titles.

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There might be one that sticks out as a sore thumb.

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This CRO position, as I say, this is relatively new.

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For me, it's been a great opportunity

2:25

to kind of learn something new in my career,

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but I've been kind of a commercial customer success leader

2:31

through my journey, but really kind of taking what I've learned

2:34

and then pivoting that into new business

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is what we're here to talk about today

2:37

and tell that Nizaza story.

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Nizaza, yes, it's hard to pronounce.

2:42

I did not name it, I can tell you that.

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I will tell you why not, it's informal, last session.

2:48

Nizaza, flexible, the world's most, don't Google this

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'cause I'm not 100% sure if it's true.

2:54

Our founder tells us this all the time, okay?

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No fact checking, please.

2:57

This is not about facts.

3:00

It is the most flexible subspecies of bamboo, okay?

3:04

Nizaza was founded 12 years ago as a B2C company,

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we're based in Zurich, the company's HQ in Zurich,

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our co-founders really like to travel

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and they built a B2C travel company.

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They built a company designed to kind of deliver

3:20

complex multi-day itineraries.

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It's easy to go online and buy a flight plus hotel package,

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you can buy it anywhere, it's kind of the same product

3:27

you're saying in the same hotel,

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you're flying maybe on the same airplane

3:30

and you pay a different price, that's simple.

3:31

But if you wanna buy in a single basket,

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two week tour of Southeast Asia,

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a two week road trip of the American West Coast,

3:40

that's more complicated, you have to buy it

3:41

in a bunch of different baskets.

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So that's what they set out to, it's a flexible trip,

3:45

that's how we get the most flexible subspecies of bamboo.

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Again, I did not name it, I'm pretty sure

3:49

that story is true.

3:50

Our tagline is travel without friction,

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so as you can imagine when you're planning a trip

3:55

to build that two week tour,

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there's a lot of friction in the booking journey.

3:59

You will, even if you go to chat GPT customers systems

4:03

and use our AI planner co-pilot, not an advertisement,

4:06

but it will plan your tour for you.

4:08

But to go and check out or buy that trip,

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you're buying on 25 different browser tabs

4:13

in 25 different baskets.

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So the planning and booking process for a tour

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is quite complicated.

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So Nizaza, as I said before, our goal is to automate

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or make that process as flexible as possible,

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allowing our customers, like Tuie,

4:29

for a goal, complex multi-day tours,

4:32

in a single basket checkout.

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So that's a very long-winded way of saying,

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it's kind of like Shopify for travel,

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helping travel agencies and tour operators,

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bringing their complex, unique tours online

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for you to purchase in one or two clicks.

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We're here in Amsterdam, two wee tours

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just launched in the Netherlands two weeks ago.

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So I'll get into our pricing model in just as high early

4:53

and by often, it'll be very great for Nizaza,

4:55

thank you very much.

4:56

We are 75 customers, we are about 55,

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there it is, employees, and we're about 5 million in ARR.

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So we've been around for 12 years,

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it's this weird and wonderful cocktail of startup,

5:08

scale up and kind of later stage.

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You'll see on the next slide.

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Once they turn around, that's a very bold word,

5:13

but business that needs to scale.

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Let's put it like that.

5:17

And that's kind of hootation.

5:19

Just a word on the customer success team today,

5:22

and to go to market function,

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we have two people in marketing,

5:24

two individual sales reps, two SDRs, and two CSMs.

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So it's a pretty lean team,

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we also have three people in support

5:31

and three people in onboarding.

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So just in terms of the size and scale here,

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it's very easy to stand in front of you

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and say, look at all this great stuff we did,

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because change management takes a two-hour meeting

5:39

instead of like a six-month change program.

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So let's go back in time.

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I wanna be very open and kind of like raw

5:46

with you about our journey.

5:47

There were things in our business

5:48

that were going very well in late 2022, early 2023,

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and there were plenty of things that were not going so well.

5:56

This is when I joined in September 2022,

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we did not have any customer success managers,

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we did not have any onboarding team.

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We had account managers,

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and I don't know if this is like you,

6:08

if you're in a startup,

6:09

but the support team reported to the CTO,

6:12

and the account managers reported to a sales leader.

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And as you can imagine, they didn't really talk.

6:17

So you had this like very,

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the way I like to think about it visually,

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I'm a very simple person, as you can already tell,

6:22

you had the revenue organization,

6:24

sales and account management kind of sitting here,

6:26

and then you had everything technical sitting here, right?

6:28

So it was kind of like this horizontally aligned

6:29

org structure and critical, right?

6:31

So you had kind of a revenue,

6:33

a new business organization and a post-sale organization.

6:35

So that kind of, there was one handover,

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but you had a very aligned team,

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depending on where you were in the buyer or customer journey.

6:42

No surprise, but we were highly reactive, right?

6:45

You know, customer had an issue,

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the account manager wasn't technical enough,

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or didn't understand the value,

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they were just trying to sell stuff,

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I say that with love to our former account managers

6:52

in the room, but that's, you know, what we were doing, right?

6:54

We'd pick up the phone and they wanted to add something

6:56

to their contract, we would take the order, right?

6:59

Support wasn't really doing support,

7:01

they were doing customization and implementation,

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'cause we didn't have an onboarding team.

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So you had all these construction sites

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where we were reacting to things

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that were broken in the construction site,

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but nobody actually thinking about how to build the house,

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right?

7:11

Relatively predictable.

7:13

We were feature selling, we weren't talking about value,

7:15

we were talking about features,

7:16

that's what happens when you have kind of

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a very technical co-founding team

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that, you know, in the travel industry, especially,

7:21

anybody in travel sector?

7:23

Just me, great.

7:25

But you have a real kind of like DNA of customization,

7:28

my business is different, my tour operator,

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my travel agency, the button has to look different,

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and there's still kind of this build technology

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versus bi-technology DNA,

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and that was a challenge that we grappled with.

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We had six product plans, 75 customers,

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you don't need six product plans,

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maybe when you have a thousand customers, right?

7:45

So that was ridiculous.

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M.R.R through two acronyms for you, M.R.R,

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I think you know what that means,

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monthly recurring revenue, ASP average sales price,

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500 a month, that was the average sales price,

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so we were kind of doing this fun,

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product-like growth on this segment,

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and too many things going on, too reactive,

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we didn't really have a strategy to push toward, break even,

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and that's what we needed to do.

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As I said before, we needed to grow, right?

8:07

So we made some tough decisions,

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we kind of got, there was a little bit of management change,

8:13

and we kind of got everybody together

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to rally around how we move from stagnation to growth,

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and the North Star metric that we used

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was customers kind of scale and grow.

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So that's the context,

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a little doom and gloom for you

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on the last session of our conference,

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but it gets better.

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So customer-like growth, that was kind of,

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we needed to do something,

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so we wanted to change our business

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to really kind of put the value,

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or customer value at the center,

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that's what we kind of retrenched to,

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when all things are chaotic around you,

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what are we gonna focus on?

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Well, we're gonna focus on the customer.

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There's a quote that I really enjoy,

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somebody named Dave Jackson,

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sorry I'm not quoting a against that book,

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I do love them, but it's a different book,

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it's called Customer-Like Growth,

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and the way I paraphrised this, praise this quote,

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I won't read it to you, is,

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customer success is a bad solution to a CEO problem,

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and that's relatively negative at a customer success conference,

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but I don't mean it that way.

9:07

I mean it that customer success teams

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have a pretty impossible task,

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when the business is not orientated to make them successful,

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or rather the business is not orientated

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to ensure the customer can be successful.

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The customer success team is instructed to tread water,

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when sales and marketing are targeting bad fit customers,

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throwing more fuel onto this fire that's burning.

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So what we really need to do is step back and say,

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how do we put customer value at the center

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of our entire go-to-market function?

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We could rebuild our business around the values

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that our customers get from our product,

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what would that look like?

9:38

And that's really what I mean when I say

9:40

pivoting to customer-like growth.

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So I'm gonna talk about kind of how in principle

9:48

we can do this, and then I'm gonna get really tactical

9:50

to say here's what we did, right?

9:52

So there were really kind of four key steps in this playbook,

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but I'm attempting to show you a bit of a buyer journey here,

9:59

a buyer and customer journey,

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but the way we put value at the center

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of that buyer and customer journey,

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the way we ensure that customer value is our marketing.

10:07

We were selling features, right?

10:09

Feature selling, so look at this button,

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and of course our customers really liked that,

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because they like to customize all the buttons,

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I said to you before, selling features not value.

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So immediately the sales conversation is about,

10:18

what does this functionality do?

10:19

We're talking to technical IT people

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who are used to building their own technology,

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instead of commercial people who are used

10:25

to buying business results.

10:27

So pivoting to focus on Proofpoint MES,

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I swear to you today, and I don't have any CSM's

10:32

in the room, so I'll say this,

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but our sales team is better at success planning

10:35

than our CSM team at the moment,

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and I tell them that all the time,

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and it really pisses them off, and it's good,

10:39

because our sales team, but we've hired

10:41

our value-orientated folks who really kind of understand,

10:43

they understand value-selling,

10:45

we call it success-planning,

10:46

and the customer success domain,

10:47

but those things are almost the same, right?

10:49

So applying success-planning in the sales process

10:51

is the second thing that we did, the market,

10:53

with our marketing team,

10:54

and then it's the job of the sales person to say,

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"Which Proofpoints apply to you?"

10:58

What are the business challenges that we're talking about

11:00

in the market that apply to your organization?

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And that's very easy, because I can say,

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"Okay, it's a scorecard, it's a bingo card."

11:06

These two are the most relevant for you,

11:07

here's the collateral I have to talk to you about that.

11:10

So very consultative sales process,

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it's guided by a much more than,

11:13

the third aspect is refining the sales process.

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They say we implemented value-selling,

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so we have a very defined sales process,

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we do not sell to IT, we do not sell to what we call scouts.

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If you're a scout who just is kicking tires on product,

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we say, "Here's a very little information about our..."

11:27

We ask them questions about their business.

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They can't answer those questions,

11:30

and they want to ask to us about features we say politely,

11:32

this is what the product does, take that away,

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and when you're ready to have a business conversation,

11:35

please come talk to us, right?

11:37

And having that discipline,

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because as my colleague says,

11:40

when you slow down, you sell faster, is very important.

11:44

And it ensures that you don't waste your sales,

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nothing happens, we just talk.

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And let me tell you, the travel industry loves to talk,

11:49

very, very conference-based industry.

11:52

And then skipping to the post-sale section,

11:54

we built this success plan that's tailored

11:56

to your business objectives, right?

11:58

And we've tailored, continue to show you the,

12:01

when we have a success plan,

12:02

ready to hand to the customer's success team,

12:03

well now you've got to deliver it, right?

12:05

So you're raising the stakes,

12:06

I'm putting hard numbers in the value

12:07

that I can deliver to your organization.

12:09

Okay, fine.

12:10

So we could do QBRs, and I just did not,

12:13

Ted talked to tell you how I feel about QBRs,

12:16

but it's a lot of manual work.

12:18

It's taking screenshots of dashboards

12:19

the customer may or may not have access to,

12:21

and putting it in a slide deck that the,

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I've been there, I've been a CSM in my career,

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you send that really long follow up email

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with all those beautiful bullet points,

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they're not reading it, I'll be honest, right?

12:31

So we productized customer success.

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We got dash, I mean we are a travel commerce platform,

12:35

so it helps that they're putting money through our platform,

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but we productize it so when they log in,

12:40

they see a dashboard of their conversion rate,

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these are some of the proof points.

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Conversion rate increase,

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reducing time to offer, as in the time it takes to,

12:48

plus then improving the traveler experience.

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If you're a two-week customer,

12:51

you have such a nice time planning your perfect tour

12:54

that you go back to buy from two-week, right?

12:56

It's just returning customer rate, it's not new,

12:58

but we productize those KPIs in the product

13:00

to close the loop on those success plans

13:02

that we're creating manually.

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So this is a, I debated with myself

13:08

if I do this at the start or the end,

13:09

it's like watching a movie and me telling you the ending,

13:12

but if the results were bad,

13:13

I'm not sure I'd be telling you about it.

13:14

So spoiler alert, the periods are not exactly half years

13:17

because we kind of made all of these changes in September,

13:19

2023, right?

13:21

Where we changed leader in the sales organization

13:24

and we kind of combined sales and customer,

13:28

the customer teams.

13:30

Three metrics here, new business MRR,

13:32

expansion MRR, and average order size for new business, right?

13:36

As I said to you before, average order size was 500, right?

13:39

It's now 3.3k.

13:41

We increased our average order size by 600%.

13:44

Expansion took a little bit longer to kind of bet in,

13:46

but we now have earned the right

13:48

to sell our customers more stuff

13:49

because we align it to the value

13:50

that we deliver with the product.

13:52

And our sales performance is increasing significantly as well

13:55

because we're not having bad conversations.

13:58

Let me revise that statement.

13:59

They're great conversations, they're just pointless.

14:01

They're not gonna buy from you.

14:02

So talk to the people who are commercial

14:04

where you can do the business planning

14:06

with that organization, right?

14:08

So I mean, I think, you know, the results,

14:11

still very early, we're a small company,

14:13

but we're very kind of pleased

14:14

with this transformation that we made.

14:16

And now I'd like to maybe pivot to talk about

14:18

how you can take something away from this session

14:21

and actually do something about it.

14:23

So how do you go about changing your go-to-market?

14:30

Using customer success principles

14:32

as your kind of North Star metric?

14:34

Well, four, and it's not just 'cause of the template

14:36

they gave me for slides head four things in it.

14:38

Okay, there truly are four, okay?

14:40

I'm gonna talk about four areas,

14:42

tightening your ideal customer profile

14:44

and being bold about that, right?

14:47

Making sure that you,

14:49

being bold to change your product,

14:51

your packaging and pricing.

14:52

Value selling, we talked a little bit about before,

14:55

and then productizing indeed customer success.

14:57

I'll talk about how we did that

14:58

because that was so important for this change as well.

15:02

Bullet points, they're not novel, I'm gonna explain them.

15:04

It's easy to say, you should talk about ICP, right?

15:07

You've heard that plenty, but how do you go about

15:08

actually getting the buy-in to make that change?

15:11

We had an ICP summit, I think we called it, January 2023.

15:15

We did a little bit of pre-work,

15:16

we had every single leader in our,

15:18

how many versions of that do you think we got?

15:21

However many executives we had in the room,

15:23

is the correct answer.

15:24

A lot, right?

15:25

And that kind of made it very clear to our folks

15:27

that we didn't have the right alignments across the business.

15:31

So we really kind of sat down and said, okay,

15:33

what are the types of customers who buy from us?

15:35

What are the win rates and you should build segments?

15:37

What are the customer,

15:39

which customer segments that we currently have today

15:41

is our cost to serve higher than the revenue

15:43

they're delivering us?

15:44

Because one thing I didn't tell you,

15:45

and I'll tell you on the next slide, but quick preview,

15:48

our pricing is a lower entry level subscription fee,

15:51

and then you pay for the value

15:53

or the revenue you generate on the product.

15:56

So, which is a nice model

15:59

because it gets more customers signing up sooner,

16:01

but if I can't onboard you,

16:02

if you're not the right fit customer,

16:04

you're never gonna return the customer acquisition cost

16:05

I spent to acquire you, right?

16:07

So we wanted to be bold about that.

16:09

We had this ICP summit, and we linked,

16:11

and the other thing that I think is really important

16:13

for success leaders to accept the targets they're given.

16:15

That feels too like, I don't know, patronizing.

16:19

So I don't mean it like that.

16:20

But you have a CRO, potentially if you're a VPCS

16:22

reporting to a CRO, the board says you need to grow.

16:25

So you have this big revenue target,

16:27

and we think about, okay, we're gonna expand

16:28

into these new verticals because that's what we're gonna do,

16:30

right?

16:31

So you need to improve NRR,

16:32

and you need to reduce our,

16:34

we need to increase gross and net retention.

16:36

Oh, but by the way, I'm gonna dump a bunch of new,

16:38

untested new vertical customers into your lab,

16:41

but you have to make them grow even more

16:43

than your entire customer base.

16:45

It's growing, right?

16:47

And I think for me, the very important pushback there

16:48

is linking in all that business planning segments,

16:51

and what is that gonna do to my churn rate?

16:52

And it's fine if the business agrees

16:55

that we're gonna increase new customer acquisition

16:57

by going into new untested verticals,

16:58

but then agrees that we might see higher

17:00

than expected churn from those verticals.

17:02

And that's, but that's a business decision, right?

17:04

And I think sometimes we, you know,

17:06

we see gross and net retention and a silo,

17:09

but these things are very much linked.

17:11

All right, this is a novel, but I've done it

17:13

for most of my career.

17:14

I started my career in HR Tech,

17:17

and we talked about good fit and bad fit.

17:19

No, what do we call it?

17:20

Regretted and non-regretted employee churn.

17:23

You mean what that means?

17:25

I'm not, you know, you left for performance reasons, right?

17:28

And we're actually happy you left or you quit,

17:29

and we were gonna fire you.

17:31

I'm sure there's a more technical HR definition of that,

17:33

but you get what I'm trying to say.

17:34

And then, you know, you look at our attrition rate.

17:36

So for most of my career, I took that,

17:38

and I've applied it to churn.

17:40

In board presentations, we have regretted

17:42

and non-regretted churn.

17:43

I've been in startups and scaleups for most of my career.

17:46

And as I said, we canceled the bottom three product plans,

17:49

so yeah, we had a lot of churn.

17:51

Now, the dollar value wasn't very high,

17:53

but we had a lot of logo churn.

17:55

And if a board just looks at a spreadsheet,

17:56

wow, the churn's really gone up.

17:57

Oh no, this is non-regretted churn.

17:59

We made a very conscious effort to go up 500 to 3000 a month,

18:03

while all those customers have 500 a month

18:05

are not good fit anymore.

18:06

So you have this kind of cleansing of your revenue

18:08

that is acceptable.

18:10

So, you know, if the churn's not looking great,

18:12

it's very convenient to say, look,

18:14

this is non-regretted churn, and here's why

18:16

we made that decision a year ago,

18:17

and now we're just kind of reaping,

18:18

frankly, the benefits of streamlining

18:20

our existing customer portfolio into this already.

18:24

The second item, just did four, two.

18:26

The second item, there we go.

18:27

I can count to four.

18:29

I just want you to know that breaking news.

18:31

Our pricing structure changed.

18:33

Previously, you had to pay for everything.

18:36

If you wanted a new, we don't have a really seat-based,

18:41

but if you wanted a small customization

18:43

to an even new travel agency to come on board

18:45

to resell your products, you've got to pay me.

18:48

It was pay to play.

18:49

That's how we did our pricing structure,

18:52

which is an e-commerce software business

18:55

that wants to generate more volume, excuse me,

18:58

on the platform, we're putting pricing impediments

19:01

to volume, which doesn't make any sense.

19:03

So what we did, right, and I think this is maybe

19:05

kind of the most important thing for how we made

19:07

this transition in Zaza, our secret sauce, if you will,

19:11

we simplified our product plan.

19:14

Plans, cancel the bottom three.

19:16

Three tiers, what do they call it?

19:18

Good, better, best, I think, is what they say?

19:20

That's what we have.

19:20

We have good, better, best.

19:21

We have different names for it, but you get the point.

19:22

There's an entry-level plan that bundles some functionality.

19:25

There's a mid-tier plan, which we sell the most of,

19:27

and then there's enterprise, which is contact us,

19:28

custom pricing, whatever.

19:30

We have unlimited everything.

19:32

In enterprise, it's very expensive.

19:34

That's the subscription fee, which is different

19:37

thousand a month, 15,000 a month.

19:38

Still a pretty big difference.

19:40

So I think our ICP could be tighter,

19:42

but I will tell you, our entry-level subscription

19:45

one year ago was 500.

19:46

So we've tripled that bottom tier price,

19:48

and we're still playing with how much we can raise it.

19:51

That doesn't mean I immediately raise the price

19:53

of all my existing long tail, but it means I start seeing

19:55

what it does to my conversion rate, what it does to my churn

19:58

rate, because I can tell you the customer that's

19:59

going to churn will still buy it at 500

20:02

and then do no volume on the platform,

20:04

but they're not going to buy it at all at 1500.

20:06

And that saves me time and energy for the customer

20:08

success function.

20:09

So it prevents non-regarded churn, I guess you could say.

20:13

Subscription fee I talked about.

20:14

We have a setup fee, but that's just

20:15

pays for professional services.

20:17

And then volume.

20:19

This, I think, is the secret sauce.

20:22

Anybody work like at Microsoft or know about, like,

20:24

Azure Consumption Credits?

20:27

One non-- OK, three people.

20:29

Good.

20:29

Find those people.

20:30

There would be very interesting to talk to.

20:31

I promise you, very interesting stuff.

20:33

Microsoft Azure Consumption Credits.

20:35

There we go.

20:36

It's a very similar model.

20:37

So basically, I'm paraphrasing completely.

20:41

But so the more stuff you have in the cloud, the more you pay.

20:43

So it's kind of like volume pricing.

20:44

But you can pre-purchase credits.

20:46

So I'm going to buy-- I don't know what the--

20:48

I'm embarrassing myself.

20:49

I don't know what the unit of measure is in this Azure model.

20:51

But I'm going to pre-purchase some credits,

20:53

and it's going to be a lot cheaper.

20:54

But if I don't use all those credits, I lose them.

20:56

That's exactly what we do with volume.

20:58

So you can pay me 1 and 1/2% of every booking,

21:01

that interesting, five of our 75 customers, pay me 1 and 1/2%.

21:06

The rest choose to buy what we call volume blocks.

21:09

So in the sales process, I've done all the business planning

21:13

with them, how much revenue you're going to make,

21:15

how much are we going to increase your conversion rate?

21:16

You make $20 million a year now.

21:18

If you increase your conversion rate by 0.25%,

21:21

we're going to make you $25 million.

21:22

Great.

21:22

You need a $25 million volume block.

21:24

Don't worry.

21:25

That doesn't cost 1 and 1/2%.

21:27

That costs 0.7%.

21:29

And then we calculate that on the $25 million.

21:31

Just seeing volume, saying, I believe in the business case

21:34

that we've written, I'm going to buy

21:36

$25 million in volume from you.

21:38

And guess what?

21:39

Well, the momentum completely shifts.

21:41

If they're slow to go live, they've

21:43

got a burning pile of $25 million they already bought.

21:45

Better hurry up and go live.

21:48

Hey, I'm your customer success manager.

21:49

I want to help you use all that $25 million you bought.

21:52

You're going to lose it.

21:54

And then, of course, you give them a soft landing.

21:56

I know you didn't use all $25 million.

21:58

I don't know.

21:58

Your admin left the company, whatever.

22:01

Buy another $25 next year, and we'll

22:03

let you carry over $10 million of the unused amount.

22:06

We're renewed for two years instead of one,

22:08

and we'll let you spread that carry over over two years.

22:11

So the momentum completely shifts,

22:12

because then we can basically-- we have this problem that, yeah,

22:15

I'm just trying to help you save money.

22:18

You bought a $25 million volume block at 0.7%.

22:21

If you paid 1 and 1/2% for that, it would cost you x.

22:24

You save money, now you've got to use it.

22:25

So that momentum is completely changed,

22:27

and it ties it very nicely to that business planning

22:29

that we're doing as well.

22:32

Nope, I really can count.

22:34

Third-- I promise you, I can count.

22:38

Third aspect in the playbook for customers' leg growth

22:41

is value selling.

22:42

We talked about it earlier.

22:43

I just want to show you an example.

22:44

This is one of our customers, and this is our success plan

22:46

template.

22:47

And this is what we did in the sales process,

22:49

and I have it on good authority that this came,

22:52

this went to the board.

22:54

This was the business plan.

22:55

Revenue, in B2C, revenue, $4 million, independent consultant

23:01

is what that stands for.

23:03

But all of that success criteria is there.

23:05

We have all of their initiatives.

23:07

And this is basically-- if your sales team says value selling,

23:10

what they mean is customer success planning and vice

23:11

versa.

23:12

I'm not going to tell the story.

23:13

I don't have time, but table.

23:14

I'm not that bad of a person.

23:15

But I would very passionately say,

23:18

we really need to do success planning in the sales process.

23:21

Anybody see us leaders said that before?

23:22

Have they asked our sales team to do it?

23:24

Does your sales team actually do it?

23:25

Keep your hand up.

23:28

He says, yes, that's good.

23:30

Come on up.

23:30

There you go.

23:32

That's great.

23:32

So a small percentage, right?

23:35

Actually, I should listen and not speak.

23:37

Rarely do I realize that.

23:41

Our sales operations leader-- I've

23:42

been talking to him for six months about doing this.

23:44

He happens to tell me that he has paid a value selling

23:48

consultant to come in and talk to the sales team

23:50

about how to do value selling.

23:52

Would you like to join?

23:53

And I said, sure, value, customer success,

23:55

sounds like they're linked.

23:56

Great.

23:57

I sat in a Zoom call for eight hours.

24:00

We pay this person a lot of money to teach the sales team

24:03

how to do customer success planning.

24:06

And I sat to myself, I want to blame somebody else.

24:08

And I thought, I'm just not using the words the sales teams

24:11

use to explain what customer success planning is.

24:13

So we talk about value selling a lot of time.

24:15

It is literally success planning.

24:16

So I have a better way of getting them to do this stuff.

24:19

Now, it's easy, as I said before.

24:21

I leave both functions.

24:21

So it's a two-hour meeting with our sales team.

24:23

And we can change manage our way to the future.

24:25

But still, understanding what they call it--

24:28

value selling equals customer success planning.

24:29

The penny dropped.

24:31

It took me way too long to realize that.

24:32

But it was very helpful.

24:34

One other thing we did-- customer and buyer journey.

24:36

Was the success plan is the thing that we take with the customer

24:40

along their process?

24:42

So we do initial discovery, our sales process,

24:45

initial discovery.

24:46

We then do an ROI, what are your business goals?

24:48

Success planning call.

24:49

We're typing in the success plan with the customer

24:51

on a screen.

24:53

We then, two calls, do the success plan.

24:55

Yes, sometimes we have to do more than one demo.

24:57

OK, fine.

24:58

But we get into the product quite late.

24:59

And then we do full solution proposal, pricing, et cetera,

25:02

et cetera.

25:04

And then that's where the customer journey begins.

25:06

Once we commit some design, we take that success plan

25:09

in the kickoff call.

25:10

It's the success plan that we're focused on.

25:13

In the onboarding to support handover,

25:15

it's the success plan, the first QBR, success plan, second QBR.

25:18

We redo the success plan because it's been six months.

25:21

And that's the one piece that allows the customer

25:23

to continue to go through that journey.

25:27

And then if you do it right-- is there a laser?

25:29

Nope.

25:30

If you do it right, the case study writes itself.

25:34

Because all of that's existed, obviously.

25:35

It doesn't always happen.

25:37

But the case study's there.

25:37

It's written.

25:38

I don't have to ask them, oh, by the way,

25:39

one year ago, when you spoke to the sales team,

25:41

what was your conversion rate?

25:42

I know now it's 2%.

25:43

But what was it before?

25:45

I mean, we've got to be more organized than that.

25:48

And then it goes all the way back, if I may.

25:50

This is bold for me to do this.

25:52

The proof points have written themselves.

25:53

That's what the case study delivers.

25:56

And it makes this whole process work better.

25:59

OK.

25:59

Truly the fourth now.

26:05

And last.

26:06

So we introduced dashboarding in our product.

26:08

Yes, we should have had it before, but we have it now.

26:10

So that's fine.

26:11

When you log in, you can look at all of your business KPIs.

26:13

You can compare the success plan

26:14

to your actual business performance.

26:16

I don't have to do some big slide exercise

26:18

to give you your QBR deck.

26:19

It's there.

26:20

Now, this is a demo system.

26:21

So we don't have customers.

26:23

These numbers are not correct, but you get the point.

26:25

So you validate the success plan in the product.

26:28

What the next focus for our team is

26:30

is then getting this out of the product and into an email

26:32

or into an in-product notification

26:34

to engage the user.

26:36

I have a new CS leader that's joined, who's done this before,

26:38

where you kind of gamify the success plan in the product.

26:40

So that's all very novel and exciting.

26:42

Maybe we will do that sometime soon.

26:44

But they could validate it themselves.

26:46

But the other phase that I wanted to just mention

26:48

is benchmarking value.

26:49

Benchmarking we've been talking about for years.

26:51

But being able to say, hey, here's the average,

26:52

and here's where you are.

26:53

And then eventually, start to tailor our in-product messaging

26:57

to say, hey, your conversion rate is lower than average,

26:59

but your basket size is higher.

27:00

Here's what we recommend that you do.

27:03

So we can report on it automatically,

27:06

but then how do we influence it automatically as well?

27:08

I will just offer if--

27:11

and it's a big if--

27:11

we have some sample size.

27:13

The sample size is small, as you saw before,

27:14

but it has been successful for Nizaza

27:16

if we unify sales and customer success

27:20

together under one leader.

27:21

If we're able to deliver customer-led growth,

27:25

if we're able to put value at the center of the buyer

27:27

and customer--

27:29

I'm going to just tell you something.

27:30

It's a secret.

27:32

I attempted to make images for slides using AI.

27:36

So look at these next three images.

27:37

There's a bit of entertainment for the last session.

27:39

That is what came-- I don't know what the--

27:41

I'm not a prompt engineer, clearly.

27:42

That's all I'll say about that.

27:44

So my prediction-- I have three predictions.

27:45

They're probably all going to be wrong.

27:46

But I think if we look at the evidence of our journey

27:48

in Nizaza, maybe, maybe, they're true.

27:51

So maybe a little controversial.

27:53

I was a chief customer officer.

27:55

Will the CCO role exist in the future?

27:57

I don't know.

27:58

Because I think, if I may, my prediction is it won't.

28:02

Because you have revenue leaders.

28:04

The old school revenue leader is a chief sales officer.

28:08

They didn't understand customer success.

28:10

Some key of customer success reports to them and hates it

28:12

because their boss doesn't understand what they're doing.

28:14

And then he gets angry-- he or she gets angry that the churn

28:18

has gone up and doesn't understand that when we sell

28:20

bad fit customers, that's what happens.

28:23

Now, customer success has been around for a while.

28:26

We have CROs who came up from the customer function now.

28:29

And I think we have more literacy ends.

28:31

So maybe, chief customer officer was

28:33

a important and necessary correction

28:35

as we've educated our CRO colleagues about the value

28:38

of continued revenue and not just new customer acquisition.

28:42

I do think-- this is a fun-- well, I find this a fun one.

28:45

I always used to talk about how sales and CS

28:47

shouldn't report to the same leader

28:49

because you need an executive team, the voice of the customer

28:51

there, and now I'm the person that I used to think

28:53

was a terrible person.

28:55

So there you go.

28:56

Full circle.

28:58

There's another fun AI image.

29:00

Two different thumbs up emojis in there.

29:02

I was looking at this morning.

29:03

Very creative.

29:04

So if AI is really--

29:07

Gen AI is really going to tend to take over and continue

29:10

to-- you've seen it in the last six months.

29:12

Every product's got an AI co-pilot now.

29:14

We're just scratching the surface.

29:16

And as a-- we've automated value realization

29:18

in dashboards.

29:19

We hopefully-- I didn't mention this,

29:21

but we also want to have a chat-based interface where

29:24

you can chat to the data.

29:25

And it tells you your conversion rate has decreased

29:27

by 2% in the last six months, red alert.

29:30

That's very much possible to do today.

29:32

But it's going to get better.

29:34

And I think as it gets better, it

29:35

means that there's a lot of change coming for customer

29:37

success because in some ways, customer success teams

29:39

are band-aids for what the computer should be doing.

29:43

I'm creating a QBR deck to show you value that really

29:45

the-- there's great leaders in the digital customer success

29:48

base that have made a lot of movement in the right direction.

29:52

But ultimately, maybe AI is going to be the thing that

29:54

gets us fully there.

29:55

So I think digital customer success

29:57

is maybe going to be the only customer success.

29:58

And we could go back to a customer relationship manager

30:03

or some type of account manager role.

30:05

I'm really being rude to sales folks in this session,

30:08

but I think I can do that.

30:09

That's OK.

30:10

A lot of great sales folks out there.

30:11

OK, don't quote me.

30:12

And the last one, seat-based pricing-- this

30:14

is my favorite AI image.

30:16

If AI can reliably automate value realization,

30:21

maybe seat-based pricing truly goes away.

30:25

Because every customer would love to buy based on value.

30:28

Yes, if I make more money with Nizaza,

30:30

I should pay more money, or was it not your system?

30:34

I still can't draw an A to B link to value.

30:37

Some companies do this, and they're

30:38

trying to lead the market with value-based pricing.

30:41

But if AI can reliably say, yes, you

30:43

have made more money with Nizaza because your conversion rate

30:45

has gone up by 2%, you owe me X% of that increase.

30:49

Pricing has gone for good.

30:52

Maybe.

30:54

Maybe.

30:56

But I think we saw-- the last thing I'll say,

30:59

I think about this way too much.

31:01

It's very embarrassing.

31:01

But the last thing that I will say on this

31:03

is that during COVID, after COVID,

31:07

you saw a lot of reductions in force.

31:09

Revenue went down when seats went down.

31:10

So you're tied to the boom and bust cycle of software

31:12

as a service.

31:13

But if the whole point of many SaaS products

31:15

is to make you more efficient, and if AI is going

31:17

to reduce the number of people in organizations,

31:19

the CPA pricing truly is dead.

31:21

Right?

31:21

So I have to replace it with something

31:23

that we trust, aka value-based pricing, in the future.

31:28

I can't wait for you to come find me four years from now

31:30

and tell me how wrong all that stuff was.

31:32

Thank you very much.

31:33

I hope this was useful.

31:35

A few minutes to hear.

31:36

[APPLAUSE]

31:40

Thank you so much, Alex.

31:41

That was really insightful and a really nice way

31:44

to round off the session.

31:46

I know you've got a flight to catch,

31:47

so I don't know if you get any tricky questions.

31:50

Yeah, I'll blame the airplane, exactly.

31:52

Yep.

31:53

But yeah, please feel free to submit questions on Slido

31:57

on track two.

31:59

And yeah, to kick off, how do you

32:01

go about legacy customers on old pricing

32:03

once you've introduced a new pricing to new customers?

32:06

So I made a joke with someone.

32:08

Joke is a strong word.

32:09

I don't know how funny it is.

32:10

I have been on calls for half of this conference

32:12

because there was a couple of important meetings I need to attend.

32:14

So I made a joke.

32:15

This is a very explicit call.

32:16

And we were actually having this exact conversation.

32:18

We're rolling out.

32:18

So the short answer to the question

32:20

is we don't push them onto new product plans.

32:23

We actually don't at renewal push them up.

32:25

We actually rely almost exclusively on auto renewal.

32:28

So the contracts roll, they keep going.

32:30

That's how it works.

32:31

We don't really negotiate price rises at renewal.

32:33

It's fine because, again, our price rises the more volume

32:36

you put through the platform, the more money I get.

32:38

So that's the focus.

32:39

It's an adoption focus.

32:40

Short answer is your question.

32:41

When we roll out big, big new features,

32:44

we like to buy-- if you are on an old pricing model product

32:47

plan, you are not eligible for the free versions

32:49

of those new features.

32:51

So there's more for-- at some point, there's so much new stuff.

32:54

I've got analytics, connectors.

32:57

I won't get into the nerdiness.

32:58

Analytics and a brand new booking engine.

33:01

So them accept entry level old product plans.

33:04

We present to them all the great value they could do.

33:06

We map-- you can just value sell.

33:07

We value sell it, basically.

33:09

But we're not so forceful on that.

33:10

We basically have a few carrots that

33:12

should get the customer to say, yes,

33:13

the value of the things you built is more than the price rise

33:16

that I'm going to have to pay.

33:19

Cool.

33:20

How are you compensating your CSMs?

33:22

Do they receive commissions?

33:23

So the answer is customer success

33:25

is going to go sell stuff to customers that they shouldn't.

33:28

But the good thing is the majority of revenue--

33:31

I'll tell you a very quick example.

33:33

Customer pays five, so our mid-level product

33:36

plans five grand a month for subscription.

33:38

If-- I can prove this with data--

33:41

if we get that customer live with their first booking

33:43

in the first three months, there's a 75% chance

33:46

they buy a volume block.

33:48

If they don't buy it in the initial sales process.

33:51

We double NRR for our customers in six months

33:54

if they can go live in the first three months.

33:56

So I want to pay my CSMs commission

33:59

on selling customers volume, because they're

34:02

doing everything that's a reward for all the good work

34:04

they did to get them live quickly

34:06

and to get good adoption for those customers

34:09

to go live on my platform.

34:10

So we do pay them commission.

34:11

When I first joined it, they don't fix it.

34:13

We didn't fix it.

34:14

And it's actually been really effective

34:15

to get CSMs finding genuine opportunities.

34:17

Because there is a very classic CSM

34:21

shouldn't be paid commission because they're

34:22

going to sell stuff just to make their number.

34:24

Those are just bad CSMs.

34:26

So I don't think it influences human behavior

34:28

as much as I might have thought in the past as well.

34:33

So transitioning from transactional to value selling

34:36

is a big shift.

34:37

What were some of the key challenges

34:38

that Zazza encountered in this transition?

34:41

Yeah, a lot of stress on that one.

34:44

That's one of the biggest challenges, I think.

34:47

I mean, we redid our website.

34:48

I mean, time, effort, energy.

34:50

The good thing is that we were in a period of transformation

34:53

because we needed to break even and grow the company.

34:56

So I think a lot of the challenges

34:58

were known before we did it.

35:00

And we were kind of at this inflection point

35:01

that made us really push to make the change.

35:03

A small amount of folks in our organization

35:05

that didn't make that transition.

35:07

So people left the company because of the disruption.

35:09

I'm not sure I have a great answer

35:11

about some of the more specific challenges we encountered

35:13

other than just change more broadly.

35:16

In terms of customer messaging and sales messaging,

35:18

we're talking to new prospects.

35:19

They don't really know our old versus new messaging.

35:21

Customer messaging.

35:23

The good thing is we had just-- so it's not so much

35:25

that the change to value selling was the issue.

35:27

We had just changed customer success.

35:29

So it was kind of a new engagement style anyway.

35:32

So I wouldn't necessarily pin some of the challenges

35:34

directly on the value selling shift.

35:38

I'm a CS leader interested in moving to a CRO role.

35:42

What are key differences in skill sets?

35:44

So I mean, I'm a CRO that leads a team of two SDRs

35:47

and two sales reps and a customer success team.

35:49

So I'm not managing an enterprise organization

35:51

as a revenue leader.

35:53

Very happy to have made the transition.

35:55

And I really enjoy kind of learning every day.

35:57

So take this, I guess, with a bit of a grain of salt

35:58

based on the scale.

36:01

I mean, these are not that serious,

36:05

but I didn't realize how much business is done on WhatsApp.

36:08

It's Slides and it's video cameras or webcams, whatever,

36:17

and QBR presentations.

36:18

And you're engaging formally.

36:20

And I think we're a little bit victim

36:21

to this in customer success, which is I

36:23

have a customer success process.

36:24

That's probably too strong.

36:25

But these are people.

36:27

And what are their goals and what are their missions

36:29

in their organization and how can I make it easier?

36:31

I think one of the challenges-- customer success

36:33

is an endless process.

36:36

You need to renew.

36:36

You need to renew.

36:37

You need to renew.

36:38

So I can only be as good as possible based on the hours

36:41

I have in a day.

36:41

There is no end moment when we engage with the customer.

36:44

So I have my process to make that challenge easier.

36:47

Sales is the opposite.

36:48

I'm sprinting until I get to an end state, which

36:50

is a signed deal.

36:52

So I get on the phone because I have urgency.

36:54

This has to happen now.

36:56

And I guess the skill set is really kind of creating urgency

36:59

and engaging with the people as their people.

37:01

Because ultimately, they have their targets.

37:03

And if I say, look, value selling, what's your goal?

37:05

What's your objective?

37:06

And really doing that discovery?

37:07

And just treat these people like their people

37:10

and having that urgency to say, look,

37:12

you want to discount-- I gave you a discount if you sign it

37:14

at this date.

37:15

I mean, I guess really it's kind of--

37:17

I don't really have a conclusion to that.

37:19

But hopefully talking around it has given you some insight.

37:21

[LAUGHTER]

37:22

It's the last session.

37:22

I told you it was informal.

37:23

It's fine.

37:24

[LAUGHTER]

37:25

Cool.

37:25

This could be the last question.

37:27

So was there a short-term hit to sales

37:29

when transitioning from transactional to value-based selling?

37:31

If so, how did you handle that?

37:33

I'll be very-- no, because we weren't selling very much.

37:37

So the bar was low.

37:39

But pipeline.

37:40

Pipeline was a real issue.

37:41

Because obviously, I'm going to re-market ourselves out

37:44

to the market.

37:44

And I have two, three months of pipeline generation

37:47

before I actually see a big impact.

37:49

So two things that maybe we did to handle that.

37:53

My colleague calls it refinery.

37:55

Go through the closest you've got, basically,

37:58

the highest propensity leads are the ones who

38:01

have had the most engagement with you.

38:02

So we went through and rose for the last two years.

38:06

Had SCRs, just call them what's going on,

38:08

what's changing your business.

38:09

That got pipeline in very quickly.

38:11

Because our messaging was different.

38:13

Can we transform your business?

38:15

Wow, OK.

38:16

Yes, let's talk.

38:16

Because again, travel people like to talk.

38:19

I think that was the one aspect.

38:20

And then the other thing is we-- because we're small,

38:23

so we can kind of make these tactical decisions.

38:25

We spent a lot of effort on energy-existing customers

38:27

to kind of move-- because when we introduced this new pricing,

38:30

we had to renegotiate all of our contracts

38:31

to move them on to this new structure.

38:33

So actually, we had a big error because we converted.

38:35

Most customers were previously on variable pricing,

38:38

where they would pay me 1 and 1/2% or a certain percentage

38:40

for the volume.

38:41

So we could get a lot of big subscription uplift quickly

38:44

by saying you could save money if you just

38:46

by kind of turning variable volume into paid volume blocks

38:50

as a way to kind of bridge the gap, if that makes sense.

38:54

Brilliant.

38:55

Alex, thank you so much.

38:56

I know you have a flight to catch,

38:57

so we'll let you get off.

38:58

Alex Farmer, CRO, Nazar, and you love it.

39:00

[APPLAUSE]

39:02

Thank you, sir.

39:03

Appreciate it.

39:05

Thank you, everyone.

39:06

Yeah, I hope you had a fantastic couple days

39:07

at Pulse a couple of weeks' time.

39:10

Otherwise, we hope to see you in Dublin next year.

39:12

Have a fantastic rest of your time in Amsterdam.

39:14

Thanks, everyone.