How to Drive a Value Gamification and Customer-Centric ROI
Dive into an extraordinary journey of transformation and achievement with SAP Signavio's innovative approach to value tracking. This session will highlight their top three milestones: 1. Innovative Value Tracking: Introduction of real-time inline reporting that tracks value continuously across the entire customer lifecycle—from pre-sales to post-sales, capturing both out-of-the-box and realized value. 2. Billion Dollar Challenge: A company-wide gamification initiative that not only served as a catalyst for engaging all employees but also led to the identification of over $2 billion in potential value right from the start. 3. Measurable Success: Strategies for making value tracking quantifiable and impactful across business processes. Join us to discover how these strategies have revolutionized their approach to customer success and how you can implement similar techniques to capture significant value in your organization."
>> All right, good afternoon everyone.
I trust we're having a wonderful Pulse thus far.
Thank you once again for joining us here,
however as well here, here in this track.
Track one, scaling CS, working smarter, not harder.
One of the biggest challenges we all face in this industry,
honestly in life in general, if you think about it however,
as we're moving along, I want to make sure that we're engaging
as much as we can throughout the course of these presentations.
There's going to be Slido polls, Q&A for each one of these.
So please as we're going through the presentation,
as the presenters are going, make sure you're navigating
to your app, putting through any questions you want us to be able
to address at the end.
So here in a moment, I'm going to welcome Christina and Oscar
from SAP Signavio.
They're going to go through how to drive a value,
gamification, and customer centric ROI.
So please join me in welcoming Christina and Oscar to the stage.
[APPLAUSE]
All right.
So hello and welcome, everyone.
And thank you so much for your interest
in the topic of how to drive a value gamification
and customer centric return on invest.
For us, it's not just a presentation today,
but it's a mission we've been on for quite some time now.
And actually already met four years ago
on doing exactly this on one specific customer together.
So Oscar and myself are very passionate about this topic.
And there have been a lot of changes.
And fast forward now four years at a different company
in different roles and responsibilities.
And with a lot of changes in the methodologies
that we're used also so far, we're
here presenting to you not just how
we do it for some of our customers,
but how we bring this to another level
and bring it into our DNA for our whole customer success
team at SAP Signavio in really improving our way of how
we bring value to our customers.
So before we go in there, maybe you want to introduce yourself?
Absolutely.
And thank you so much, everyone, for being here.
We are super excited to guide you through the journey.
Again, as Tina just mentioned, we
will start with really focusing on kind of where
we came from, how we are approaching it,
and then very importantly, how do we scale this?
How do we make sure that, of course,
this is part of our DNA?
And not only that the CSM or the CS organization sees it
that way, but the full organization sees it that way as well.
From my case, so I'm Oscar Ramos.
I lead Customer Success globally for SAP Signavio.
That means that under my team, I have the privilege
of working with the Customer Success Management team, which
is we have the high touch and the virtual.
We have a Value Management team, which
will also explore later today.
A Transformation Success Management team,
and of course, our great ops team that is also here.
So again, we'll guide you through all of that
and very importantly, show you the outcomes and the value
for our customers.
And in back to you.
Perfect.
And my name is Christina.
I am very passionate about continuous improvement,
not just for our customers, but also for us internally,
to always develop our customer success department
and how we work with our customers,
and also very passionate about scaling.
So therefore, I have the pleasure to lead our operations team,
so our Gainside team, as well as our virtual customer
success team and everything that scales with an SAP Signavio.
As Oscar already said, we're going to present to you today
a little bit about our history, where
we are at our customer success department, what
we've been through the last years,
but also our customer success playbook,
where we have our foundation that we laid with our team
this year, where we looked into a data-driven approach.
So therefore, that's the Gainside part,
on really making it possible that our strategy comes to life,
and especially our Value Management part,
because this is what is needed for our customers.
You all know it.
We heard well you so many times today already.
It is essential for our customers,
so therefore we're going to focus on it as well.
And we bring along a little bit playful part,
so our gamification, we love to do it.
Also, Oscar is our Value Machine,
but also Gamification Master.
He always likes to play with the teams
and see how we can really cheer everyone up
to be part of the mission and to really realize our strategy.
So therefore, we're going to tell about what we did there,
with a billion dollar challenge we did with our customers.
So more about that later.
And also as our career was a little bit
move fast, speed is key, and fail fast.
We have, of course, a lot of lessons learned along the way.
We try to be really fast, and we want to also let you know
about what we learned along the way of really implementing
this across our customer success department for our customers.
And lastly, of course, what is ahead of us,
because we're not done yet.
There are so many things we can still improve,
and so a little bit about what we're planning in the next years.
And maybe a quick show of hands.
Here already has started with the Valley Management Practice
within their CS organization.
If any.
OK, so hopefully this will be a great session for you.
So we will start with the foundation.
Again, lesson learned.
So we are really also looking forward
to show you kind of what worked and what didn't work.
So for everyone else that hasn't started on that journey yet,
again, if we covered during today's session, even better,
if not, we'll also be available through the app
to catch together, go for a coffee break,
and make sure that we know we can also do a deep dive.
Perfect.
But what is SAP's Ignavio?
So we are a business process management solution,
and we were founded 15 years ago.
Back then, we were just Ignavio.
And we are working for our customers
to first, in the first place, understand their processes,
actively manage, and also optimize their processes
to be really ready for a successful change.
And this is something that every one of us in this room
needs.
So I guess also our solution would
be suitable for all of you.
But also SAP thought it's amazing and needed
for their whole customer base, and they
need to help their customers change from their ERP systems,
but also the way to the future and to be future-proof.
And that's why they acquired us in 2021.
By now, we have more than 5,000 customers.
And luckily, we have a double-digit growth, a year over year,
which is nice to see that our solution is working,
that we are needed for our customers.
And we have more than 1,500 employees by now.
And also, in the last three years,
our customer success department tripled even in size.
So as Oscar already mentioned, we
have five different key functions within customer success.
And therefore, we were the first function, actually, also
that SAP acquired not just in process management,
but also we're moving more to business transformation.
But what does that have on top of what we mean?
Yeah.
We know that transformation is kind of a fluffy word, right?
So we see it all the time.
So for us and for an SAP strategy,
we actually see transformation from a holistic perspective.
What it means at the end is, if we talk about transformation
of the business, we ultimately need to tackle three things,
right?
We need to talk about processes.
We need to tackle processes and adjust our processes,
because that's our way of working.
And that's, of course, where Signavu comes in.
So that's really understanding how do we design, analyze,
improve our processes, and continuously evolve.
And of course, as we all know, if we change processes,
there will be system interdependencies.
We need to make sure can we optimize the way
that our systems are set up.
That's why we have also here amazing colleagues
from Linux, right?
So also another acquisition from SAP
to bring that picture together.
And finally, of course, if we have the process in place
and, of course, systems in place,
we still need change management, right?
We still need the ability for people
to adopt the processes, to use the new systems.
And of course, that's why, for us, we also
have acquired recently Waltney.
Of course, for this presentation,
we'll focus more on the process side.
And very important in terms of how are we optimizing it,
how are we defining the quantification of value,
and very importantly, how do we monitor and realize
that value continuously with our customers?
And as this conference is all about,
we're all in the same path.
Every one of us is working in the area of customer success.
And we all have a similar journey,
and we all have similar challenges.
We wanted to also present to you what were the things
that we went through as a customer success department
in the last year to really show what are the things
that you could exchange with us on,
where we can share lessons learned with each other.
And it all started, well, before with Ignavio,
but the recent years, since 2022, we were, as we said,
we were acquired from SAP.
So the first year was really about stabilizing
our whole Lexus systems, where changes in systems,
we had to get new processes up and running.
There were a lot of changes for our employees as well,
but we still needed to really serve our customers
and bring the value to them, even in those stormy times.
So in 2023, we could then rather focus on really further
building up our capabilities, especially, I think,
all of you know also when there's new products
that you're launching.
And also the CSMs need to learn about new capabilities.
We had that as well when we went from process modeling
to also process analyzing.
So therefore, there we had to build up our customer success
team further and get new skills for them.
So therefore, that year was mainly used for that.
In 2024, that's also what you're going to learn today
a little bit more what we did.
We really wanted to see and do a collaboration
for how to get best in class to really focus on the key things
that a customer success department need to be good at.
And we looked at a strategy on how to really achieve it.
And in 2025, so next year, it's all about both business
transformation management practice build up.
As Oscar said, we're being merged also
with amazing other companies, like for example,
Leena X, where we can then learn from each other
and build up new practices and even be better together.
Absolutely.
And here, we looked at the key for 2020 for us.
We are going to show you was the sets and degree
of foundation calibration.
As Tina mentioned, you know, significant traditionally
was a process modeling tool.
So if we think about, for example,
like a VZ over an errors, that was the starting foundation.
And the way that you drive adoption,
the way that you drive value, is very, very different
from kind of one UN analytics.
So we had to rethink on how we approached this.
And the first point was what are key challenges, right?
What do we need to achieve and how we want to achieve it?
And when we think about challenges, again,
we were coming from a really standalone model
integrated approach.
What it means was we had kind of product based components.
And the way that we also looked into adoption
was product based, right?
Or only product based.
So if you talk about process modeling capabilities,
we are going to go through adoption this way.
If we are talking about analytics, this is the way.
And we had to start thinking, especially
as we started getting enterprise customers,
how do we drive a value-driven, realistic approach?
That comes to methodology, right?
So what's the best methodology and framework
to put the pieces together and drive it?
Of course, in that case, we wanted
to make sure that currently, you know,
there were no metrics on business impact.
So our main challenge was, OK, we
know that we are creating impact at our customers.
But when it comes to the time of renewal,
and we say, OK, do we agree on the business value,
sometimes they say yes.
But then we ask, did we get an ROI, right?
So is it time to renew?
Are we confident in the value that we brought?
And sometimes that answer was no, right?
Or that answer was, I don't really know.
And of course, in this case, we have
to make sure that it was measurable.
If we cannot quantify it, if we cannot prove it,
it's safe to say that if we have a critical moment,
the value won't exist, right?
It won't be justifiable.
And of course, it will be at risk.
And of course, we have these discussions that also
meant that we had to change the CSM role and the CSM profile,
right?
So going from a relationship manager, right?
So making sure that we had the coordination role,
real integration role, discussion role,
and of course product knowledge, to really
a consultative approach and a trusted advisor, right?
So that's something that this year we were very clear on,
right, also together with the organization.
The time for just relationship manager is over, right?
We cannot afford that anymore.
It's really the time to step up and have
that consultative approach, right?
It doesn't mean necessarily that you are doing implementation.
So I also want to be very clear.
We have professional services that do the implementation.
But it's really-- we need to be the people that
are called by the customer when there's a question run.
How should we do transformation, right?
How do we drive it?
What do I prioritize?
Where do I start?
And that was really the clear guideline that we had to find.
And finally, of course, the strategic realignment
for val realization.
So we wanted to make sure that we had a lot of history,
as you saw since 2022.
We also had a prior significant history.
So now let's use this opportunity to re-prioritize,
to really reassess what the business needs,
and of course, to drive it together as one organization.
And finally, we wanted to address the customer retention,
right?
So all the components that we just discussed
were impacting as challenges our renewal rates,
our impact, because again, we were not
able to drive that business conversation
at transformation conversation.
And we wanted to make sure that we were able to identify causes
and again, prioritize and execute accordingly.
And of course, when we're looking to all of this,
and it's a running organization as we all have it,
there's a million opportunities, there's a million initiatives,
there's a million priorities, of course,
the customer success organization was a bit concerned.
How are we going to drive this?
How are we going to approach it?
And we show them one picture.
So we just said, this is going to be all about the power
of tiny games, right?
It's not going to be about changing dramatically
from one day to the other.
We don't expect that, but it's that 1% of A. And let's
all commit to that 1% of A. And let's give you the tools
to drive that improvement so that one year from now,
we actually have that exponential growth
and exponential impact.
And talking about tools, that's where back in May,
this year, we defined RCS Playbook.
So our customer success Playbook was, in a way,
almost like a Bible, a tool that helps guide our CSP,
or CSM, right?
So at the end of the day, the question was very simple,
or the point was very simple.
If it's not on the Playbook, it gets deprioritized.
If it's not following those guidelines,
it's not prioritized.
Because we also needed to protect our own people, right?
So they were being stretched all over the place
by different parts of the organization.
And we wanted to make sure that whatever we focus on was
generating that our way for customers.
And we covered a couple of topics.
We won't go into a huge amount of detail
with the exception of the value one.
But we did start with our core beliefs, right?
And we also said, it's a fail-fast organization.
And you might ask yourself, why fail-fast, why not succeed-fast?
The point around that was really about,
we shouldn't have a fear of failing.
So we need to try new things.
And it's relatively, I have to say, it's easy to succeed fast.
We just need to have small objectives and easy objectives.
So we wanted to think differently of,
let's have stretched targets, let's really go to the next level.
And if we fail, we fail.
But it cannot be that we fail slow, right?
It cannot be that it takes six months to try something new.
And fail, we need to drive this moving forward.
That brings us to the second core belief.
80/20 speed is better than perfect.
So that was also something that sometimes it took us a little bit
of time to get to a concept, better to test out the concept,
practically with customers, and then
converting to a methodology.
And you'll also see it from a value perspective there.
We have, of course, customer outcomes.
So that's our key priority.
If it's not generating a customer outcome,
a business outcome, we shouldn't do it.
And finally meritocracy, right?
In a big corporate organization with SEP as about 100,000 employees, right?
It's sometimes easy to get into the bureaucracy, the politics.
And at the end of the day, we've made it very simple and very clear.
It's all about meritocracy, meaning that merit where merit is due,
outcomes, specifically customer outcomes,
will generate, for some merit and a recognition.
And of course, we talked in terms of areas of focus crawl, walk, run.
So crawl things like, for example, success plans.
How do we drive success plans?
How do we drive QBRs?
How do we do EVRs, et cetera?
How do we do account governance, right?
At SAP, as we can imagine, there's a lot of complexity
because we don't work alone, right?
We have our own LOB with Signavu.
And then we are talking about, for example, six, seven, eight
different teams that sometimes are working at a customer.
So we had to make sure that we have a way to drive governance
in a pretty model.
Then we went even further, very, very detailed with tactical handbooks, right?
So if the adoption is at a certain level, what do we do?
What's our response to it?
What is almost a decision tree to drive it?
Which could be, for example, mitigation of low adoption,
but it could also mean expansion.
So if the adoption of the customer is at a certain level,
this is how you should tackle it.
This is how you should actually bring a type in the conversation.
And very specifically, it's almost a checklist
that you can use to guide your conversations
and drive the value.
And finally, of course, we base all of that in data.
So what we had defined was a data-driven north star,
which was more kind of our first iteration of OKRs.
And at the end of the day, what we said was, OK,
we have not the targets for that at that time in May,
so Q2, Q3, and Q4, so until the end of the year.
And what we did was we base all of that in data.
Now, the problem was, of course, we based it on data.
But at that time, mostly exports from game site,
exports from different sources.
So we were really trying to, again, move fast,
80-20 to define this playbook.
And of course, the next point was, if we are going to track OKRs,
if we are going to track value, we
need to do it in a systematic way, which was exactly the next step.
And it had to be quite real time and fast,
because we wanted to move fast.
And of course, I think what we did with a playbook
was really that we had strategies before.
But really, the game changer was there
to make it really thorough, to really bring everyone on board
and really make sure that everyone knows exactly where
do we want to go.
And then the question was that we really needed
to get speed on the street.
And that only worked with execution.
So really tracking how many success plans do we really
then have in the system?
So we made sure we have everything in game site.
Actually, the playbook-- I think you didn't talk about it yet--
that we already implemented in three weeks.
We got all the playbook up and running.
It was very fast.
So we then introduced it to the CSMs.
And then we got the data in three weeks also in game site.
So we could directly track, for example,
from how many of our customers we already
put up a success plan, et cetera.
So we made sure that we add our 360.
And we added some fields, for example,
in the details section of our 360 with strategic documents.
So we made sure that the success plans that our CSMs did
were their customers that they were put into the system,
as well as renewal plans.
And we made sure that everyone knew they have to do it
in which quarters we had some numbers, again, to prove it.
And then we could easily track where are we going.
And actually also we used there a little bit of a gamification
approach, or just looking into the different regions
and seeing which team is the fastest to get to a certain number.
And I think our US team then crushed it directly
to really get up to speed and really by proving it with numbers
and showing everyone the progress that we're
making on the tactical topics that we discussed in the playbook.
So that was a game changer in really making sure
that we have not just tell them we expect you to do success
plans, but to be really able to track them.
Also, we added another sheet, so to say, in our 360,
around references and value.
Value is also the most important part,
but we're going to do a deep dive on that one.
But on references, we just used-- it's a simple approach.
We wanted to be fast.
We used inline editing to make sure
that the CSMs could, as soon as their customer, for example,
had a new reference, that they can just edit there.
So it's very transparent on the customer.
So everyone who's going into Gainside,
not just our team, but also services, sales,
when they go in, they see directly everything
at hand from that customer, which references they did,
and also that we can then track it.
So it was about really having the transparency
at the customer in 360 and all the people looking in there,
being able to see what is our strategy, but also
the dashboards that we built.
So for the leaders and directors of customer success,
it was really great to have a dashboard.
So we built the Playbook Dashboard directly
to be able to track where are we.
But also, we introduced further dashboards.
Like, for example, the expansion dashboard
was one of our biggest successes, I would say,
where we looked into from our data, from our customers,
looked at where they have a really high usage,
and also which product would then maybe fit to them,
that we could maybe also offer them.
And there, from a database, we made sure
that the CSMs get a notification that they need to track
and see is that really something where we could do an upsell,
and then work together with our sales departments.
So by having the strategy in the Playbook,
and then directly implementing it in GainSight,
we really got speed up, and they made sure
that the execution is really taking place,
and that helped us tremendously.
But I think one of the most important ones
was really how to track value, and that's something
that Oscar you're gonna show you.
- Absolutely, and again, one of the key topics
from the Playbook, which we now are going to deep dive,
was an around value.
And I wanted to give you a little bit of kind of the background
how we did it, right?
So again, we did the Playbook, and overall Playbook,
and definition in May this year,
but actually the value journey started back in 2023.
So what we did at the time, and again,
we believe in practical concepts,
so what we did was we tested a value methodology
at more or less 200 customers.
So we had more or less a high level concept,
and we just built it up and started executing.
Very importantly, we did it for pre-sales
and post-sales back in 2023.
So we wanted to make sure that, you know,
like a lighter version could be used for value-based selling,
and the same approach could actually be continued
to value realization post-sales.
So we tested it out, we also did a lot of training,
a lot of enablement, and we started seeing the results,
and our seal level also started seeing the results.
So results on the sales side, for example,
we went from sometimes, you know,
two to three months of cycle times for sales
to two weeks, three weeks.
So it started moving very, very fast.
And on the post-sales, we started seeing higher adoption rates,
but also higher expansion rates, where value was included.
And again, it's not really a rocket science methodology,
it's really all about four steps,
value identification, value qualification,
so really making sure that the value is validated
by the customer, value prioritization.
So again, customers will have different priorities
that select the use cases, the opportunities
that they want to tackle first,
and at the end, of course, we want
to do the value realization in monitoring.
And very, very importantly, we do that
and give four value drivers,
working capital, spend reduction, revenue, and productivity.
If we think about any potential process improvement,
it always falls under those four,
and then what we did was we created
very granular opportunities,
so more than one-handed potential opportunities
that our customers can get from the tool.
Of course, that allowed us to do it, like back in 2023,
but then we said, okay, we need to start scaling it.
So in 2024, based on the results,
we had started also rebuilding the team,
so that's why we currently have the value management team.
So again, a relatively small team,
so only eight people, and on top of it,
what we did as well, was we brought the value methodology
to the product.
So again, when we talk about analytics,
so we have two types of analytics within our portfolio,
we made sure that it was, you know,
with self-use its self-service, right,
so that the customer could actually leverage it
and that we could approach it together
in a very consistent pragmatic way.
Having that in consideration, of course,
now the key exercise, or the key pain point back in 2023,
was we really didn't have that scalability,
but we also have no way of documenting in a consistent way.
Of course, we had some reporting,
we had some Excel, some PowerPoints,
some nice graphics that we also use for leadership,
but then we said, okay, we tried it with 200 customers,
now we have 5,000 customers to approach this with.
So how do we do this?
How do we report on it?
How do we calculate?
How do we drive those conversations?
And that's exactly why we adjusted also a gain site
to reflect that.
So it does reflect exactly our methodology,
so again, it goes from pre-sales to post-sales,
in the way that you can document in gain site,
and again, follows the identification,
qualification, pronunciation, realization,
so actually, both pre-sales and post-sales can update it,
during the handover,
during, of course, the post-sales adoption journey,
and very importantly, you can track that
to our realization and drive that moving forward,
which of course allows, as you see on the right here,
allows you to compare also different regions.
So we do believe that a healthy competitive kind of mode
is good, if approached the correct way,
so we also wanted to make sure that we could drive it.
Now of course, here we face an issue, right,
because, okay, the value team can do it,
the people that we have been able to do it,
and we can also do it in product,
but at this moment in time, our customer success managers
were not yet confident that they could do it.
So there was that change management topic of,
can we actually do this, right?
This is a specialized topic, that's what they were saying, right?
So we cannot do this, maybe we don't feel comfortable
with the customer, maybe the questions will be quite tricky,
and I think that's understandable, right?
It's, you know, having a conversation around process
improvement can be tough and can be tricky,
so what we said was, okay, let's think about a way
to bring this up to speed,
and what we did was we wanted to kick started
with a value challenge,
and that's exactly what we did with gamification,
so what you see here is three simple examples,
so we started with a bootcamp on the bottom, right?
So around our customer success managers,
so we said, let's select a few champions,
let's not pull the ocean,
and let's make sure that we go through all the content,
all the methodology, all the exercise,
and we actually make sure that we are autonomous
at CSM to drive that value with customers.
And of course, that's great in theory,
even if it's, it is with a little bit of a practice
because it's a bootcamp, so then we said,
let's go for a one billion challenge,
and you see it's two billion, we'll get to it,
but we said, let's go for one billion challenge in six weeks.
Let's go for our customers,
let's use the product feature that we already have
from the beginning of the year,
and let's make sure that we find a lot of value,
that we identify and qualify a lot of value,
which of course was a success,
so we identify that value,
and we really started deep diving on it,
and very importantly, we turned that into what we call
a Valley Cookbook, so by then we have more than 300 customers,
so now what we did was we actually built kind of an asset
that any customer can actually use
on top of their product features
that guides them on a step to step
on how to identify value and realize value,
so we call it Cookbook, so in a nutshell,
what we say is there could be a thousand things
that you could do on your processes,
these are our top 25, 30, 35,
that we know you're gonna realize value one,
we know that you're gonna get the ROI,
so trust us, start with that first,
get that value, get that confidence,
and let's drive it moving forward.
So much about ambitious goals.
When you first told me we were going to do
a billion dollar challenge of a potential value
with RSCSMs, in only six weeks I was like,
okay, shouldn't we just set goals
that they are motivated and think they can achieve it,
and then we crushed it even,
so I think it's really important to really
take ambitious goals and see and fail fast,
and be rather like, let's see and try to achieve
as much as we can, and really have that ambition,
so that was great.
And I think what is also interesting is,
I mean right now we are six months out,
since this challenge is the playbook,
and for example, even yesterday, one of our CSMs,
without speaking to any one,
value management team, everyone,
they build a full value management workshop,
and they invited 25 customers in Italy.
And it was interesting because they sent us
the pictures afterwards, right,
with all the value methodology them speaking
about them driving, and I think that's
the scalability effect, right?
You have the product features there,
you can drive the scalability,
but you still need the trust of the advisor,
where do you start, how to start,
how to drive the methodology,
and that's where we also are seeing that,
now more and more and more with CSMs,
and the funny story is we even had one CSM in Latin America,
that was even faster than one of the value management,
all value management team leaders,
so we actually also started picking up
a little bit our value management team
of saying, it just got surpassed, right,
so that was a perfect example of scalability
and driving and of course making everyone happy.
Of course, there's a lot of assets here,
we'll give you one minute if you like to kind of scan it,
so this will direct it to a blog post that has all the links,
so you can download it, you can also go into the details,
so I'll just give you a couple of seconds to go through it.
- In my, maybe while the time,
I think one key factor for success was also
that the value team that we have,
did not just only focus on the customers
and really make sure that the customers
are getting out the value, but they really made sure
to bring along and be like a facilitator
for our customer success managers,
that they learn, so they always tried,
also we did not, the challenge we did also
with our digital customer success managers,
that are even like not as used to the contact
to the customers, and they also were then supported
by the value team in doing actually a presentation
in front of the customers and presenting them
the value we found in the system,
so I think that's really the key to get people
and really on the value function,
especially because you said that many,
or not many already started with the value function
and their organizations, it's key to really get people
that are also eager to drive that spirit
and make it part of the DNA,
and not just of one single department within your team.
- Yeah, that's actually a super good point,
and that was kind of before we go to lesson,
kind of a lesson learned that is not there for us,
which was like the initial KPI,
where initial metric for our value management team,
was customer engagement, so they had a number
of customer engagements that they had to drive,
and what we did was we also adjusted that of,
it's actually the number of CSMs
that you need to scale with, right,
that they actually need to coach, that you need to train,
and of course, resulting on customer outcomes
and customer engagements, but customer engagement
on its own, it's not really the outcome,
so that was also important,
'cause what we were seeing in the beginning is a bit
like they were going in as bulldozers, right,
and driving the valve and identifying the opportunities
to a fantastic work, but we were also, of course,
seeing kind of the customer success managers
not stepping up, right, we're not being given
the opportunity to step up accordingly
in a comfort way as well.
All right, then, further lessons learned,
is one thing that we also said before,
plan ahead, define a clear target that you want,
and a timeline, and then reverse engineer it.
So also, it should be ambitious goals,
as we did with our billion dollar challenge,
but therefore, it's very important to then reverse engineer
and say, what do you want to achieve,
and then looking backwards, okay,
what do you need to do in order to get there in time?
Then the second one is data quality,
so ensure that there's proper data input strategy
to steer the ship, so it's very important,
we made sure that everything is part of Gainside,
that it's transparent to the whole organization,
so that it's not just our team, customer success fighting,
and doing the things for the customer,
but that it's also shareable with the other departments,
showing them about the expansion opportunities,
showing about the strategic documents that we have,
so really ensuring that there's the data quality.
Around the change management,
we talked about it also quite a bit,
so we need to have a value proposition,
which is clearly defined,
and I think we really crush it with a playbook,
that's something where we got a lot of positive feedback
from the customer success teams, as they said,
it's very clear where we want to go,
we also made sure that, for example,
in the three weeks when we created it,
that all the team leads were bringing in the expertise
from their regions to also make sure to improve
what we're working on,
that it's something that all customer success managers
would stand behind and go the same path as we all.
And last, also the customer obsession,
we always want to hire individuals
that are really eager to drive the success of our customers,
but also to do it in a fun and collaborative way,
so therefore we love gamification approaches,
like the value challenge,
we now have a mission to S4,
which is also important,
and to really not just do it with us,
our team internally, but also with our customers,
so doing hackathons with a customer going,
therefore two, three days,
and integrating some fun parts,
where they really get into touch with our software,
where they really start working in the software,
and therefore I think that's really a differentiator,
which we need to use to really make,
because everyone wants to have fun at work,
so we should really work and make sure that this is the case.
- Sounds great, and now in terms of plans for next year, right?
So again, we want to strengthen
this data-driven approach for scalable growth.
So again, we have,
so when we think about our high touch segment,
so this is something where we are,
you know, making each progress,
also with our virtual segment,
we already have great individuals,
like Tina was mentioning,
that they are doing webinars on their own,
presenting to customers on their own, which is fantastic.
So now the key question is,
how do we approach this to all of our customers,
including our community pool, right?
So how do we make sure that we drive this?
So is it going to be enablement?
Is it going to be webinars?
Is it going to be around additional product features?
Is it going to be through AI?
Because now we are also,
are having AI in our products for kind of self-service,
and kind of approach,
so we want to define that,
and of course, you know,
drive that strategy moving forward.
We want to deepen the trust and advice role.
So again, we are changing from that relationship manager to,
okay, let's drive business value outcomes together.
What's your business strategy?
How do we want to approach this, right?
And very importantly, it's not only asking those questions,
it's actually also giving opinions on,
this is how we should drive it.
This is where you should start first.
So again, we have customers that sometimes come to us out,
hey, we have a one billion transformation
in terms of spend, right?
It's a huge program, a seven year program.
How should I use Ignario?
And right now, of course, in the past,
there was a gap, right?
So the answer was not there.
It's like, okay, we need to figure out,
maybe you should have some service, et cetera.
Right now, our key layer approach is we at least have an answer,
we have a framework, we have a methodology
that we can support the customer with,
and very important that should also go through product.
And on top of it, of course, we always bring services,
we always bring customer success engineering,
and we drive that value moving forward.
But very importantly, we always have an answer, right?
We always have an approach in terms of driving
that success to get rid customers,
which completely changes their relationship dynamics,
and of course, the value and the type of importance
that it's given to us.
So for example, you would not open up a QBR and DVR in the past,
just on relationship management,
at least in our case, in our experience.
Now the customer's actually saying,
let's have an EBR because I want to have every six months
of our realization tracking on this.
So it's coming as a pull from the customer side,
and not really from ours.
And of course, we identified a lot of values,
so we have now closed to roughly four billion
are value identified since the challenge back in May.
Of course, now we want to go to our realization.
ROI is our clear target for next year,
and that's what we're going to be driving moving forward.
And finally, right, with value comes expansion, right?
So it's all about expanding the relationship,
growing the customer with us,
and that's exactly what we want to do in a very natural way,
and of course, a very synergetic way with our customers.
Having that said, thank you so much everyone for the time,
and I think we'll have a little bit of time per Q&A.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
- Wonderful, wonderful.
All right, well, fantastic.
As we see some questions starting to come in.
Yeah, I know a big takeaway from me.
I'm going to go figure out how I can do my own billion
dollar challenge.
I don't know what that's.
All right, so first and foremost.
All right, so SAP is a massive company,
with likely a lot of bureaucratic processes and roadblocks.
How did you overcome any pushbacks along the way?
Did you get any C-level buy-in perhaps?
I think that's what we're going to be doing.
(mumbles)
I think it's one.
I should take it.
Perfect, so I mean, I think I would split in terms
of two components.
So definitely I would agree with the statement,
definitely bureaucratic, lots of process,
a lot of roadblocks, right?
It's also a company that moves a little bit slower
versus for example, a typical SaaS company.
What we actually did was two ways, right?
On one side, like I mentioned, in 2023,
we did a lot of work in terms of creating champions,
and that's why we had support from our general manager.
So all of our general managers, so Ruben and Garro,
so one of co-founder and both of them general managers,
they were the ones actually pitching this to leadership.
In terms of it works, we have proven that it works,
now we need to scale.
So you need to help us scale driving that forward.
So overall that's how we always did it.
So again, having some champions going to C-level
or RC-level or general management level,
and show those results, show that progress,
and at the end of the day also let the organization speak
by itself.
What's also very important at SAP is of course,
we have different groups,
and in a typical account without going to the details,
we have always two very big roles that are holistic,
independently of the type of products
that our customers use, which is the global account director
and industry account executive.
So again, these are two roles that oversee the full account,
independently fit, synavial, in an X, a Reebok,
on core, ERP, et cetera.
So these are the strategic people,
and what we did was we started having champions
with them as well.
So they were the ones doing webinars also
for the full kind of globe, presenting the ideas,
presenting how signal we would actually support
a bigger transformation and a bigger customer scenario.
And the other part of the answer would be, in some cases,
it was also about saying sorry rather than asking for permission.
So of course, there's so many alignments
that sometimes you need to do that we said, OK, again,
if we do it fast enough, if we feel fast enough, it's still OK.
Let's just try this.
Let's see if it works.
And if someone then complains, we'll say sorry.
Again, nothing major.
So we are talking about value outcomes and value
realization, but again, sometimes,
there's a methodologies we're not aligned.
Something like that.
So we wanted to make sure that we move fast.
And of course, after that, that we work together in terms
of how do we do it in a bigger scheme of things.
Failing fast yet also results.
You mentioned results.
So like, there you go.
You've got the proof.
All right, this one just helped out to the top.
What advice would you give for a starting a gamification
process with a limited budget?
Actually, you don't really need a huge budget for it.
So what we did for the billion dollar challenge,
we really incentivized them by also comparing the regions
and saying, let's see who's the best region.
But also when we said, we're going to give you--
we have a conference as well, like polls for our customers.
And we said those that are the best
will also get a free ticket that they can sure
attend this one, because not every one of our customer
success managers can attend those conferences.
So therefore, they got free tickets for that.
We also made sure that they meet up with our CEO
so that we get a thank you dinner or a coffee break.
And so therefore, it was not about really having budget
for it internally to really have a gamification part,
but really just using what we have,
giving appreciation and really celebrating it,
also having regular check-ins and showing where we are
and showing always like, OK, well, this team crushed it
this week and added four new customers
and found 20 more millions in potential value.
So I think it's about really how you celebrate it in the team,
how you make it part of your team meetings,
and really have fun on the way.
I think that was--
Yeah, we did it at zero budget, right?
So it didn't cost us plenty.
But again, it was more about that career growth
and then giving the opportunity for the CSMs to, for example,
have a VIP session with our general manager,
which is something that it doesn't happen every day
that you are able to sit in a very small group,
explain your career aspirations, your career growth.
So it was really doubling down on kind of maybe qualitative
benefits, but of course, more kind of mid-ly
need to long-term benefits as well,
which kind of played out quite well.
And they also got a kind of free seat
for the value management train the trainer aspect,
where we also got some very nice where people from all the world
could fly in from also the different departments, which
was essential, to really the picture that you saw before
with the whole group of people, where
we wanted to make sure that everyone is
speaking the same language, so everyone understands value
and calculates it in the same way.
And there we made sure that those that actually
were the best at that challenge also
were the ones that could be there as ambassadors
and be the first from the CSM team
to really learn more about the way and methodology of how we do
it and then bringing it further to the teams already
start using it, et cetera.
So they were really eager and internally also incentivized
by themselves because they wanted to learn more in that area.
That's inspiring because I resonate a lot with that question
because oftentimes whenever I'm trying
to help coach my CS leadership amongst my customers
to help their CSMs adopt a new motion
or whatever valuable activity, the incentivization piece
oftentimes hits that, but we don't have budget.
That's very inspiring.
I appreciate you all having a great example for that.
Speaking of money, how did you quantify the $2 billion
in potential value?
Did you associate dollar values to the impact delivered
by your value cookbook customer?
I mean, they were questioned.
There's a lot of questions actually in this.
And you want me to stop before I continue?
I'll read it.
I can tackle it.
I mean, the first part regarding how do we calculate it?
So as I mentioned, there was a lot of work
in terms of building some product features
that do the calculation for the CSM.
So of course, what we did in that case--
and the dollar is always that it's a quantifiable saving.
So for example, it could be productivities, how many FTs
you could save, right?
It could be working capital, how much cash flow do you get
by making the process faster?
So it really goes into the detail granularity
of the type of value, the value driver,
and of course, the quantification.
So we did a combination of product features.
And because of the maturity of our product features,
sometimes we had a couple of additional templates
to support the CSM.
In reality, the value cookbook was an outcome
of the value challenge.
So we actually used it to identify what worked well.
And then based on that, we converted into a cookbook
for scalability after the game.
And is it an amount of search of the ROY?
It's actually the amount of search with value qualifications.
So for example, it could be that the tool identifies
that you have 10 million of potential savings.
And of course, as you go through it,
you might identify that 5 million of those
are false positives, right?
It could be that there's a wrong data there,
or there's a data input there that would be missing,
or the assumptions incorrect one.
So it's actually the qualification
after the full potential identification as well.
So again, that's part of also our methodology.
So the product tells you in a completely data-driven way
the amount of savings that you might have.
And of course, you need to have the business context
to be able to drill down and be able to qualify it.
And that's how we got to that to build in.
Very well, very well.
I love this next one.
And dealing with a very human element
of the change management process,
how do you deal with failing fast versus it
being demoralizing for the team if you don't hit the goals?
Big what if?
I think one important factor was that we tried to make it
easy for the CSMs and just focus on the main parts.
And really, when we wanted to see what are the targets per quarter,
we really looked into, OK, let's focus on just a few
and the most important ones.
There, we also figured out, for example,
we wanted to have every CSM do a certification on our products,
which was quite intense and took quite some time.
And there, for example, we saw it's not working out.
And we made also sure that in a way they don't feel too pressured.
And then we also, there, for example, cut it and said, OK,
well, we would like you to do it in Q3 or until the end of Q3.
But we also already talked to the directors.
And for some cases, also, they were talking to the team
and saying, OK, if it shifts into Q4, no problem at all.
Because the other factors were more important working
with the customers.
So therefore, I think it's a little bit also always hearing
and talking to them and not just being data focused,
but also for us, human first and seeing
on how this is able, like it's possible to push the team
on one hand, but at the same time also being--
we know how many things are coming up for CSM along the way,
always.
But yeah, to try to make it simple and just a few and focus
on the most important ones, but then also being able to have
understanding and shift it in a way.
And I think that's where also the importance of leadership
comes in, right?
Again, it should be a stretch target.
It should not be an impossible target.
So that there has to be some reality to it.
And also, on the second piece, it's also accountability.
And I can give one example of my own accountability,
where one of the targets that we identified,
we missed it miserably in Q2.
So it was a tactical one, nothing majorly important.
But that was actually on me.
And in one of our calls, it was very clear of saying, OK,
this one, definitely it was a stretch target.
But now knowing it, we need to calibrate a little bit
because of this and this.
But it's on us as leadership to also take accountability.
Right on.
That's very amazing.
All right, so yeah, time for one more here.
And I think this could be very helpful to understand as well, too.
What are the KPIs of the Value Management team?
And do they receive commissions?
So no commissions.
So in this case, they are tracked on mostly four things.
So one is product feedback.
So again, we have a small team.
We want to make sure that we scale through product.
So how are we providing-- how many features
are we providing, how much realistic those features are,
and are they deployed, yes or no?
So the second topic, and now the core of it,
is value identification, value realization.
So each one of them actually has a target in terms
of identification of those.
And the third one is against CSM scalability.
How many customer success managers
are you actually scaling or should target?
Again, it's not that you are the individual hero
as a value manager in this team, is that you scale yourself,
is that you drive this at scale through the organization.
And of course, and the final point, which I think
it's also important is based on the different profiles
of the Value Management team, we also
have always one specific target.
So for example, we have people that
like working with partners in ecosystem,
they have a target on scaling not only through the CSMs,
but also through partners.
We also have others that like, for example,
initiatives like the Valley Cookbook,
so creating reutilizable or reusable assets.
So again, they have targets on the number of assets
that they need to build.
So again, mostly it's common, and then
there's a little bit of a variable component to it.
Very well, very well, very inspiring as well.
Christina Oscar, thank you so very much.
Everybody, thank you.
Enjoy the remainder of the afternoon.
[APPLAUSE]
(applause)
