From Legacy to Loyalty: Unlocking ARR Retention & Growth in Established Industries

All right, well thank you for joining us. I guess we don't need another introduction, cuz now you'll remember cotton balls and unstoppable. All right, so we're here from Rockwell Automation and we're really honored to be a part of the pulse this year. A couple things, so our session is called From Legacy to Loyalty.

And we're gonna share our story of customer success at Rockwell Automation. So I'm gonna start with just a simple truth. Rockwells and the industries that we serve are very established, have been around for many years. I'll talk a little bit more about what makes them complex.

But the real truth in established industries is that growth comes from loyalty. And when I say that, I mean, it comes from not just retention, but it comes from expansion of value, expansion across more sites, delivering more value to the customers. And that's really, it's not from that new logo. It's not that we don't love to get that new logos, but this industries that we serve have been around for a really long time.

And so it's a real challenge and we're gonna talk a little bit more about our journey and what we think about what really causes the friction and how complex these environments can be. And we hope to connect to what some of you are probably not all born SS companies and have mixed revenue models. And that's really the market that we're serving. And we're gonna talk about how we built our path over the last seven years.

We're gonna talk about lessons learned along that journey so that we can help share that with you. So if you can move faster than we did, that would be a goal of today. So I'm gonna hopefully move ahead here. Okay, so let's start with just the fundamentals.

When we think about the complexity of, like I said, the industries that we serve, left is really the space that we played in before. So we have products, we have services, we have software as a company. So our reoccurring revenue comes from lots of different sources. And in the past, we had a product centric, very transactional in nature.

Buy a piece of hardware through a distributor, buy a piece of software through our commerce. But that is really, as our offers have shifted and as we're driving revenue through new business models, we shift to that playbook on the right. And that's really the transition that we're gonna talk about today, being more proactive versus reactive. Adoption is really the lever that we wanna get after, and it helps to convert what's sold into what's renewed and what's expanded.

That equation is really simple at the end of the day, is really driving that growth in revenue. So everything that we're gonna talk about walks through our journey. First at a high level, and then we'll kinda double click. And Lisa's gonna go into the detail about exactly what we built in so that you can hopefully learn from that.

So we're gonna start with a polling question. Yes, so how would you describe your customer success operating model today? Just to kinda scale the room here and see where everyone is at. We have mostly heroics and firefighting, some structure, still reactive, repeatable playbooks in place, or fully scaled and data driven.

I'll give you a minute to answer that one. [BLANK_AUDIO] It's fun to watch it lie. Yeah, it is. [LAUGH] Okay, so looks like 65-ish keeps going up a little bit, percent are around some structure and still reactive.

Which is where we imagine most of the people that are in this room would be. And that's why we're gonna talk about how you shift from that having some structure, some foundation into moving to, we need to be proactive, we need to be driving transformational customer success. [BLANK_AUDIO] All right, so if we're really talking about the goal and kinda the destination, and we're like, why is it so hard to get there? What is getting in the way of really building on that expansion and retention?

What gets in the way? For us, a lot of it was around our operating model. So there's a lot of structure and friction that was happening within the way that we were working across our company. And a couple things that I wanted to highlight in.

The first one is really that we had disconnected workflows. So we had services teams, sales teams, customer success and renewal teams, all kinda operating within their own systems with not clear handshakes, handoffs. Like when we moved from one system to another, that data and that context didn't come along with it. The second is that data was everywhere, but it was really like nobody knew what the source of truth was and people didn't trust the data.

And that becomes really hard to drive action and take the right necessary steps to move forward. When there first, there wasn't common metrics that we were all lined on with the definition, what does success even look like? And then where are we gathering the data from? Is that even the real data?

Cuz this system says this and this system says something different. So that fragmentation meant people were working really hard and trying to align, but it was getting in the way between the sales team and the success team and the renewals team. We also have very complex business models. And I know that a lot of people say you're complex.

And the reality is we have, as I mentioned, a services business, which it takes a lot to get the adoption. You might have one customer that has 13 different sites and every site is at a different stage of renewal. So you're driving different actions and they're in different maturity levels. You also have, we have different software revenue models.

So we had, not only do we have SaaS, we have perpetual licenses as well from our customers and subscription models. So three different software models that we were operating simultaneously. And then 90 different unique ARR offers. So we'll talk a little bit about the size of our business.

But imagine a customer success organization of about 225 CSMs, a little bit less than that actually, driving a billion dollars in reoccurring revenue. And having to manage that, and some of our customer success managers are in the front here, understanding 90 different offers. And every plant might have something different. Some might be services, some might be software.

It's really challenging. And 70,000 customers buying reoccurring revenue. So you can see how that complexity adds up. And it was back to that last question.

A lot of this was heroics. It was like, okay, we gotta find the unicorns, the people that understand the offers and really are commercial and can help our customers in the way that we need to. But it was really hard to find the people, hard to retain, really talented people because it was so frustrating for them working through it. So I see a little bit of nodding heads, so maybe some of you are kind of in that same boat.

But at the end of the day, what we were missing then is, number one is, we weren't helping our customers drive that value. And so when it came time to renew, they're like, I'm not sure if I'm getting the value out of this offer compared to this other offer that might be lower cost. The other thing is that we as a company weren't meeting our goals, our KPIs. So our net retention didn't look as good as we want.

Our in-quarter renewal rates were not where they needed to be. So both sides, the customer side and then the business outcome side, we weren't getting what we needed to get done. And that structural friction was really getting in the way of our success. And so we're gonna walk you through how we work through that.

But before we go deeper, just because a lot of you are in different industries than what we serve as a company. But Rockwell Automation is a company that's 123 years old. So a lot of legacy built in there, a lot of customers that have been our customers for a very long time have high expectations. We have 26,000 employees around the world.

About half of them are outside of the US and half of them are inside of North America cuz we are Milwaukee, Wisconsin headquartered company, so a Midwest company at heart. Every region of the world, the customers have different expectations. Our go to market models look different. In North America and Latin America, we have a limited distribution model, which means one partner in every area of responsibility.

In the rest of the world, we have mixed models. So all of this complexity is adding to how are we really gonna serve the customers in the way that they need to? And then lots of different industries we're serving. So you might in one sense have a pharmaceutical company that's bringing drugs to market to save lives.

You have a food processing plant or a paper converting, making boxes for Amazon, right? All these different things, all these different industries, the customers have different needs. And so that's where all the complexity and you can see comes together. But what I wanna really ground in is that $1 billion.

So over the last seven years, we've grown basically our ARR from very little to just shy of a billion dollars. So a huge double digit growth rate up until probably this year, we're like high single digits, but really strong growth. And new offers keep coming, more complexity keeps coming. So I see many again nodding to say like, look, not everybody gets to be born in a space that has one or two offers with low complexity.

So this model has to work for everybody and that's what we wanna share. So we had, this is kind of the fork in the road for us. We could have said we're gonna scale the effort and for a while, that's the way that we approached it. We were adding people, but then you start to do the math and the return on investment.

It gets challenging cuz you were layering in a bunch of resources. Yeah, you can keep working harder, but that only gets you so far. So this is where we had to make a really pivotal choice and this was really about scaling the system. And when I say system, I don't just mean scale the business systems that operate.

It's really about scaling that operating model, the processes, the technology and the people. How do all three of those things work together to really deliver what we needed to do? And that's the path that we took and that's what we're gonna share with you. So along this path on scale of the system, there are really four deliberate moves that we took.

And over time, it wasn't overnight. And as you look back, you kind of think about the work that we did. I would say first, and Lisa will double click on each of these, but first enterprise alignment is so important. Any transformation that you're gonna go through, if the top and the bottom, if everybody's not aligned on what the goal is, you're not gonna make progress.

And you're not gonna make the most meaningful progress that you can to move forward, that's really where transformation stall. Second is leveraging the ecosystem. So we knew we couldn't do this alone. We had lots of different partners in our ecosystem.

We had to make sure that whether it was our direct team, our distributors, our partners, that everybody had a role to play and that we were aligned on how that role might change over time. Because it doesn't stay stagnant. It changes as we mature, as customers mature, as our partners matured. We had to adjust that over time and we'll share a little bit more about that journey.

Third is we had to modernize the tech stack. We had implemented GainSight. We had previously used Microsoft Dynamics as our CRM. We transitioned to Salesforce to get a lot of value out of the integration.

We're also layering Staircase AI and we'll talk a little bit more about how those three technologies are working together to help us get to that proactive side of it, not the reactive side of renewals. And then finally, this is our destination. This is really about delivering intelligent customer success at scale. This is the payoff.

This is where we wanna get and we'll share. We've made some progress. We still have a lot of work to do yet. And our journey isn't done and it doesn't end after these four pillars.

But we have seen meaningful progress. And with that, I'm gonna pass it to Lisa. Yeah, thank you. So we're gonna talk about bringing this transformation to life a little bit.

Because what you're seeing here is not just a set of programs. It really was a fundamental shift across our enterprise for how we deliver customer success at scale. So if you look at the far left, this is where we started. Very transactional, renewal focused, reactive, services led initially and success was defined by closing that renewal.

We were constantly chasing the transaction to happen and we weren't able to provide customers that value and they weren't seeing that value initially. And the metrics started to reflect that. So we had 90 to 95% net retention, which isn't terrible, but wasn't where we knew we could be at. And our renewal outcomes were a lagging indication.

We didn't have any leading indicators. We weren't able to be proactive. So then we expanded the model. We added software.

We had multiple different software models. Channel, we also made acquisitions that had their own customer success organizations and tech stacks. So we started continuing to build on that complexity without having that operational program and foundation into place. So this is where we really had to make that shift.

And as the complexity dramatically increased, we had to make the decision of which way our journey was going. Do we continue to try to do heroics and burn our CSMs out? Or do we really look at this and say, what are the investments that we need to do? What's the foundations that have to be in place?

And this is where we started to make those decisions. So we shifted to proactive value realization. And this is where the metrics really started to change. And we're still on this journey.

I'm not gonna sit up here and say that we've figured it out and we've cracked the code on being able to deliver value realization and customer success. But this was a shift for us. We actually started having metrics and being able to look at our customer health and evaluate where could we drive more adoption? Where could we be driving more value with our customers?

And that's when the measurable milestone started to change. So we started to increase our net dollar retention. It increased over just two years by 10% on our net dollar retention. And we were now driving our customer success organization was not just chasing that renewal to get that transaction.

They were finding opportunities to drive expansion. Expansion that they could run through upsell, as well as expansion that they could drive through CSQLs to our sales organization. So this is when we really started to see that shift. This is when we went from really being more of that reactive to starting to look at how can we ensure that we are getting sticky with the customer and that we're able to continue to be on a solution provider journey with our customers.

Maybe just to add to that, I think it's like these metrics that changed then, changed also our relationship and how we were seen with customers as more of a partner now versus the one that was transacting the renewal. And then even with our own sales organization, saw us as a partner with them side by side versus the one that's gonna go transact again the renewal. That is a huge shift in our organization to be seen at that same level as our account managers are, and I think that was a big significant transition as well. Absolutely.

Okay, so we're gonna check one more polling question. So which of these plays do you think would have the biggest impact in your organization? Enterprise alignment, so alignment on the metrics and who owns them and the handoffs, segmentation for motion. So meaning do you have the right segmentation model depending if it's high touch, mid touch, or low touch?

Modernizing your tech stack, maybe you invested a little bit there, but you haven't gone full swing on that. And also having health management and intelligent customer success at scale. Which play do you think would have the biggest impact on your organization? Now you guys can see it up there, okay.

All right, so it looks like it's kind of between enterprise alignment, which is not easy to do, and it's not a one and done. It's like a continual part of the change management, which is one of the lessons that we learned, and we'll talk a little bit more about that. Once ARR became a board level metric that we're reporting externally, it really helped jump start that. So that might be something else too.

And then health management intelligence, yes, at scale, which is really kind of the place that we're at right now, where we're trying to get further along on that journey, so I think similarly, okay. So we, as you can imagine, these are our four plays, right? So these are the four areas that we focused. We wanted to ask that question because we wanted to see which one we might want to spend a little bit more time on in our presentation today.

But I'm gonna simplify these four key plays in the areas that we were focused on. So that first one was gaining our enterprise alignment. We transitioned this of how we needed to define value like a CFO. If we can't define the value not only to our customers, but internally to our CFO and to our board of our customer success organization, we will always be fighting for more headcount, investment, showing the value that our customer success organization brings.

We had to drive metrics to align to those. And I'll go into a little bit more detail in that. But we had to align on what those common definitions were. What were the metrics that we were all going to agree to?

What was that true pane of glass that we were all looking at and understood and had alignment around? The second one was leveraging our ecosystem, being able to segment for motion. And when we talk about motion, we're talking about what is the actual touch that is being delivered to the customer. So we'll go into more detail on this, but it wasn't just about the ARR.

It was really about allocating the right resources or the right technology at the right time for the right customer, depending on the offering because we do have 90 plus different offers across our portfolio. We don't want to have reactive coverage on something that needs a lot more onboarding or adoption. We really had to look at it and not just say this is a low spend ARR account. They're our long tail.

It didn't work like that for our business. So we really had to segment for the motion specifically. And then the third play was modernizing our tech stack. Our operating model only works if we have the systems to enable it.

If we do not have the systems to enable it, it falls apart because we still are doing the heroics, still having to put people to be able to drive that value and drive these motions with the customer. So we knew we had to make investment moves here and modernize our tech stack and ensure that we had a single flow of data and insight across the enterprise. And then the fourth one is where we're getting to and where we're finally reaching, which is the being able to take these three things and start to actually drive action through them. How every single signal leads into a play.

So if we're looking at things like this is proactive risk identification. What play does that drive into for the customer success manager to reduce the potential for churn? If we're looking at expansion opportunities, making sure that we had those playbooks ready to go for our customer success managers of what offer that could potentially lead into. What is the data telling them?

What are the insights that they need to know so that they can have a more natural flow conversation? So when these four plays really come together, this is when we create a system where retention and expansion are really engineered. And this is how we become that true proactive customer success organization. One that was transactionally focused.

So diving a little bit deeper into this first one, which I know is always a big topic at Pulse and other conferences is how do you gain that enterprise alignment? Because if the organization isn't aligned on how our value is defined, how it's measured, owned, nothing else will matter. It all falls flat there because we're constantly going to be having friction across the organization. CS and sales, who's accountable, who's driving what action?

We anchored this on a simple principle, again, of defining that value like a CFO. Moving beyond sentiment and really ensuring that we had financial clarity. Tying customer success directly to our annual recurring revenue, to retention, to revenue growth. Many people, including our finance organization, because we were a traditional industrial automation company, they didn't know what net dollar retention meant.

They didn't know beyond renewal rates. They didn't understand the difference between a gross renewal rate and a net renewal rate. So it was really educating. We had a major, major change management and change leadership that we had to initiate and it couldn't just happen within customer success and customer experience.

It had to happen across our entire enterprise. So we really had to ensure that we were looking at fundamentals across the enterprise on common definitions and metrics. We needed one version of the truth for our net retention rates, our churn, and our growth. And as we were creating those for our annual operating plans moving into the new year, is that we were creating accountability for who owned what part of that growth.

Who was going to be responsible for where we knew we had churn coming and then being able to drive that growth on top of it. And having that clear accountability is really where we were able to drive customer outcome from end to end. The next one was on our financial measures, connecting customer success directly to business performance. We were looked at as renewal admins before.

Sales looked at the team as renewal admins, go get me that renewal for my account. We needed to show our value more than that and we had to continue to track that value. So now not only do we say that our teams are covering this much annual recurring revenue, we say they're protecting and retaining this much annual recurring revenue plus handing leads to sales plus upselling on top of that. So now we're able to show that value of our customer success managers.

This alignment is not just about reporting, it really eliminates that structural friction. And that is how you truly gain that enterprise alignment. And listen, this was meeting after meeting. This was creating a PowerPoint Bible of our definitions and having different people from finance, the different business units.

It had to ensure we had sales leadership in alignment in there, also customer success, and our IT teams, right? And our human resource teams to ensure that we knew who was going to be measured and who was gonna be paid on what. So this took all of those people coming together in a room and really looking at we need to define this. We all need to agree on these things and we all need to sign off that this is what we are going to define and this is who's gonna own what as we move into new fiscal years.

So in the next one is around segmenting for motion. And for Rockwell, this is a huge differentiator for us in the market, is leveraging our ecosystem. We have very strong partners that we work with and it's core to really what we do. And our ability to segment was not just again around those ARR dollars at the account, it had to be the motion.

So if we only look at it as a reporting exercise, purely based on ARR, this is where you're gonna fall flat. Because you're not looking at what the customer actually needs or what the offer is that they have actually needs to be having them gain that value and truly adopt and utilize the purchase that they've made. So we also looked at it as a resource allocation. So we anchored on three inputs to determine this.

The annual recurring revenue at the account, the complexity of our customers, as well as the complexity of the offering that they had and then the potential risk. And those inputs drive very intentional outputs now. So now we understand what needs to be high touch, scaled coverage and what can be handled through digital motions and where our partners could play and help drive some of these CS motions for us. As Rachel mentioned earlier, in the last five years, we've gone from 560 million annual recurring revenue to a billion in annual recurring revenue.

We can't continue to do that by throwing people at it. We had to be able to leverage our ecosystem, leverage our partners, leverage our technology. So this is how we created that clear, repeatable coverage model. And this is how the impact started to become more significant.

So removing the reactive approach and really ensuring that we had even coverage and not having a customer that's not being touched. And you'll notice at the bottom of the slide today, our digital only, we were at a point of no coverage. This is where we're partnering with GainSight and our ability to ensure that we have coverage for that long tail business. What is the business that can fall in that and how are we gonna cover it in the future?

This is a part of our journey and a part of our next steps here. So the third key play, this is on our tech stack. So this is when the operating model really becomes real because your strategy only works if your technology actually enables you to do it. So we moved from fragmented systems into integrated end to end platform.

And this was really our ability to connect Salesforce for accountability and account structure, GainSight as the execution layer, and Staircase for early risk prediction. So Chuck mentioned earlier the question of buy versus build. That wasn't the question for us. It really became that statement that he said earlier.

It had to be buy and build, right? So we have our technology partners, but also on top of this, then Rockwell is building our customer interface called MyRockwell. We're building AI layers on top of that and internally. So we are taking the approach of buy and build.

We know we don't have the systems that will allow us to take customer sentiment and allow that to give us the visibility into where we have risk across our many different customers, or 72,000 different sites. We had to have a system that was made to do that and could feed that information to our customer success managers. But before we did that, the first thing we had to do was centralize the data. You can imagine a 123 year old company.

The data is everywhere and I'm pretty sure there's still a basement with file cabinets somewhere at Rockwell. So the biggest step of this is centralizing the data. And ensuring that we had a single source of truth across Salesforce and GainSight, and integrating those systems together. So health, usage, engagement data are all visible across the organization within our customer success, and as well as our account managers.

We wanted to create that relationship there. The second was turning that insight into execution. So as I said earlier, making those CTAs, really understanding for our teams, creating those programs around risk prevention utilizing staircase. We're able to now say these are the steps that you need to take to prevent this churn from happening.

We're now able to be proactive. We're not talking about something's gonna turn two months before that renewal comes up. And that is when we moved from reactive to predictive and are able to drive those AI insights from staircase. We also now are utilizing Ever After, which is now acquired with base.

But we have started working with Ever After as a way for our customers to be able to onboard. And that's a part of our digital journey where we had said before that there's no touch there. Our goal is to be able to have that same touch, that same onboarding, and leveraging a system that will then be built into our homegrown customer facing system of my rock wall so that they get a similar experience. And then finally, this is how we're able to scale the engagement.

So utilizing these digital journeys and automation, we're now delivering that consistent onboarding adoption value realization motions across our entire customer base. All right, and Play For is where everything comes together, and it's just that easy. So this is really where now we have all of these insights. We have the systems, we have the operating model.

We are able to drive action. And action is ultimately what is going to deliver your retention and your expansion. At the core of this play, simple but powerful shift, moving from observing customer health to actively managing outcomes. How do we take that information?

How do we ensure that we're providing our customer success managers visibility into usage of a customer? What are they using? What are they not using? What could they be using?

What's happening in their industry? All of that information and also then being able to give our customer success managers bandwidth in order to have those conversations. That is how you are able to now drive the ability to retain the business and drive more opportunities for expansion. So really this result is risk is identified earlier.

Interventions are happening sooner now, and expansion opportunities are surfaced before the renewal is even in play. And so when every single trigger now enables the right play, and every play is tied to an outcome, you move from that reactive execution to a system that's consistently able to deliver meaningful retention and expansion for your business. So as we say on Earth, what have we learned? Before I was leading customer experience, cuz actually it's only a two and a half year old function within our organization.

I was leading our services business and that's actually where we started customer success incubating that as an organization because our services came first before any software from an ARR perspective. So if we look back at our journey of seven years and I've been a part of it maybe for everywhere except for that very first maybe six months, I've been on this journey along with it. Trying to narrow it down to what are the three things that are fundamental and where we had the biggest challenge to be totally honest. And if you can solve these things early, that will help give you a jump start.

The first is that the data is foundational. You need a trusted governed data model and that has to be non-negotiable. And that's still hard for us, I'll tell you that. We've created what we call rock fusion, which is kind of this common data layer, rock for rock well.

And where data gets written and where data gets read and how those pipes work together and kind of where that trusted source. That took a long time to get there and we still, when we went on to Salesforce, we had some things break there too. So you're always like you have to be looking at that data and making sure that you're aligned. If you can get aligned with your IT organization early, that will save you a lot of pain later.

So that's the first thing. The second is that alignment has to be intentional. I remember when we first started customer success, I had to have a weekly meeting with the CEO. Like nobody wants that.

Like how much progress can you make in a week? And it was because it started to be this board level conversation. But I'll tell you, it drove action. It drove us to get investment in to be able to do those technology and process improvements.

But it's like now I don't have to meet with them very often. Cuz our numbers look a lot better. Obviously there's still work to do but getting that alignment. If you can get that from the top all the way down to the bottom early, that will save you a lot of pain as well.

And then finally, change management is really the multiplier. And a couple things, we're doing a bigger digital transformation within Rockwell. Salesforce was part of that. What we did early is we put what we call success enablement.

And that's kind of a fancy phrase for change management. But it's really about driving adoption. Aligning in the beginning, what outcomes do you expect with this change? And then how are you gonna have leading and lagging indicators to say whether you're achieving that?

And look, you're not always gonna get what you think in the beginning, but you make adjustments and you learn from it. I'd say even when we implemented staircase, right? We didn't probably do as an effective change management exercise as we could have. We were enamored with technology.

And you can't just be focused on the technology. You have to think about how does the work change for people? Are your processes documented and simple enough that people can understand? That to us is success enablement, that whole package.

And that really is how you get the value out of any investments that you're making. And we've learned a lot of lessons on change management and that we're carrying forward to other work that we're doing across the company as we drive more digital transformation internally. Okay, so one final polling question. How much of your customer success motion today depends on individual heroics?

Almost all of it, more than we would like. Some, but we have structure, very little, our systems carry it. And if you're the very little, our systems carry it, I would love to talk to you. [LAUGH] Oh yeah.

Okay, so it looks like we're at, For individual heroics, more than we would like and almost all of it, okay? Yeah, we, you know, this is something that we've been on a journey. So from transactional renewal focused engagement to proactive value realization, I'm not gonna sit here and say this is something we were able to figure out in a year. This has been a seven year transformation for Rockwell Automation and we're not done.

And I think our side, it went out though. And ultimately, you know, we, our goal is to get toward where we can be at AI intelligence so that we can provide those predictive health, automated risk intervention, the next best actions, our ability to move faster. Because we are going to continue to grow. 123 year old organization isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

We're gonna continue to acquire new companies, have, build new technologies for our customers. As manufacturing continues to grow and we need to get more product out to market, we will continue to grow. And we have to be able to scale and partner with our customers to do that. And we really need to be able to get to a point where we're able to provide that predictive partnership and that automation with our customers in order for us to scale.

So when customer success truly becomes that we are a growth engine, right? And driving retention, expansion, this is how we get to a point of having long term loyalty. Well, that concludes what we wanted to present and lots of great questions coming in and we wanted to be saved a little bit of time. So we have about seven minutes to run through the questions online or if there's any other questions in the room.

The first, you wanna facilitate? Thank you, that was amazing. Honestly, one of the best sessions I've ever seen, that was great. So I think we all learned a lot.

[APPLAUSE] Based on your last poll, one or two people have it all figured out. So, well. [LAUGH] Okay, so what is the biggest point of differentiation between your AMs and your CSMs? So our account managers also own the transactional business at the account.

So think about the hardware that we sell as Rockwell Automation. They also own that where our customer success managers do not play. This means that though our account managers really truly own the account. Our customer success managers partner with them where we have annual recurring revenue where we have contracts, subscriptions, software licenses embedded.

So this was one of those big things with our alignment. We had to ensure that sales is looking at customer success as a partner and not someone that's gonna be a gopher to go renew that contract for them. And so this is where we had to kind of drive that alignment, but that is the big key differentiator. So we do still have customers, that's where we say our ARR is gonna continue to grow because we are a $9 billion company.

So knowing that only 10% of our company is under ARR or contracts, we know we're going to continue to grow. We still have customers that do not even have contracts or services with us today. And so that's where we have account managers, but we might not have a customer success manager. And that's the big key differentiator there.

Yeah, I think even on forecasting, this has been like getting over the hurdle of this. Our account managers and sales leaders wanted to be responsible for all, like they wanted the whole number rolled up. And just this year, we've finally broken them to when we do our readout on forecasting, customer success, the leader. So Lisa globally and then we have regional leaders, they own the forecast of the renew.

And that includes obviously the expansion side of it. And sales owns the new. So they're separated duties, not only at time of selling things to our customers, but also in the forecasting process. So it's kind of across the whole life cycle that we take with our customers.

Which leads into, sorry, I'll take the other question. How did you navigate churn assignment when aligning at the enterprise level? That was something that was uncomfortable, right? We actually, what we uncovered was our finance teams as we were building our operating plans weren't even taking churn into consideration.

They just thought we were renewed at 95, 99%. Which isn't our reality, right? It's not most people's reality. And so we had to ensure that we were building that forecast in and also that we're starting to use our predictive analytics to build a more accurate forecast around churn.

And then we were forecasting that churn and being very specific that customer success owns that churn number. And every quarter, every month, we are reporting out on where we are to our churn AOP goal for the year. Great, and how did you even decide where to begin when it came to standardizing your renewal motion? Standardizing our renewal, so I would say we actually, there is no standardization for our renewal motion today.

Because we have 90 different offerings, we have different renewal motions for that. However, we really looked at where we needed to align from our operations teams. What type of information we had to get to our customer success managers and get in front of the customers. Some of what we realized was some of our offerings needed to get in front of that renewal proposal in front of the customers 120 days in advance.

It could not be 60, it could not be 90. Our customers needed more time to make changes, make adjustments. And so those are some of the things that we started to evaluate over time, is that with our complex portfolio, it could not be a one size fits all approach. It had to be a little bit different depending, especially where we work with third parties, right?

We have third party that also helps power some of our offerings. And in order for them to get paid or for them to ensure that they have their forecasting accurately, we had to shift how we do those renewal motions for that. Yeah, I would say the add to that would be, but we did prioritize where our biggest dollars were. So our biggest support offer as an example is called Tech Connect.

It's our technical support contracts. That was like a big dollar amount. So if we can get it right for and work our way down from the highest revenue, biggest risk for the company if we don't get it right, that's how we prioritized it. Awesome, well thank you very much once again, it was a great session.

Thank you. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]