Is Ecommerce the Key to B2B Customer Success?

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Good afternoon, beautiful Pulse community.

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We have finally made it to the last session of the day.

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It's kind of interesting, kind of hard to believe.

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However, I trust everybody is incredibly excited

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about this next topic.

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I love that you've all joined us today for this track,

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specifically how to do CS at scale,

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working smarter, not harder.

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One of the most prevalent questions

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that we have to ask ourselves.

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I love, however, that Kevin Fagan, CRO at Clever Bridge,

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is also asking another very interesting question

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this afternoon.

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Please e-commerce the key to B2B customer success.

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I love that he's going there with it.

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We're ending on a fantastic one today, everybody.

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Please feel free to make sure that you're leveraging your app

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to send through any questions you'd like Kevin to address

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at the end, and as well, there's a couple of slide-o polls

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you'll be engaging with as well.

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So without further ado, please join me in welcoming to the stage.

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Kevin Fagan.

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Thank you.

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How are you?

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Pulse, Europe.

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I love it.

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We got any pulse rookies here?

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Yeah, me too.

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This is my first pulse.

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How about rookies to Amsterdam?

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Yeah, it's a beautiful city.

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I love coming to Europe.

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My wife and I, we traveled to Europe a couple times a year.

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And Forrest Gump once said, life is like a box of chocolate.

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You never know what you're going to get.

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For me, a 250 pound guy, 6'2", coming to Europe.

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The showers, for me, are a little tough.

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They're like a box of chocolate.

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You never know what you're going to get.

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If she comes out, she wants to go to dinner and all that stuff.

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She looks nice and I'm standing up here and it looks like I

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fought a bear in a rainstorm.

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So yeah, anyways, we're moving on here.

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Yeah, like you said, my name's Kevin Fagan.

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I'm a 20-year payments veteran.

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So come from acquiring and issuing most of my career.

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So stepping outside of my comfort zone,

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I'm the chief revenue officer of Cleverbridge.

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I've only been in the role of six weeks.

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Coming in, there was a lot to do, right?

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Q4 push, closing out the year, figuring out the org for 2025,

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budgeting, and then they said, you're going to go on stage

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and speak about something that you don't really

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know much about in six weeks.

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So happy to be here, like I said.

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I live in Austin, Texas.

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Big tech hub.

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I grew up in Chicago with my family there and my wife.

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And we got married in Chicago and moved down to down Austin,

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Texas.

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I got two boys, a little jet lag.

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There are two and a half in six months.

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So it was a rough night for them the last couple nights.

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And then I flew in this afternoon.

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So another fun fact about me is I was a professional hockey

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player.

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Don't get excited.

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I wasn't very good.

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I protected all the guys that made all the money.

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So moving on, let's get into it.

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So does anybody heard of Cleverbridge?

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Does everybody know who Cleverbridge is?

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Yeah, we got some customers in here.

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OK, great.

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Cleverbridge is an all-in-one e-commerce platform.

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So think about Stripe, Zora, Abilara, all these companies

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coming together and having a baby.

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That's what I like to call Cleverbridge.

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We kind of encompass that all-in-ones stack

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to generate a successful e-commerce platform.

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Founded in 2005 in Cologne, Germany,

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our founders sold a company to Digital River,

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one of our competitors.

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And they spun Cleverbridge out of DR.

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So a really cool story, really exciting.

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Three of the four are still involved in the business today

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to some extent.

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We have 300 employees worldwide.

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A cool stat is 70 of those employees in Germany

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all are on international work visas.

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So we truly are a very global company

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in terms of commerce and languages and digital currencies

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and things like that, which is exciting.

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Over 180 million transactions processed billions

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and billions of dollars.

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And you're all gone through the system.

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And something that's relevant here,

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55 million renewals processed, which I think

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is very relevant today.

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And then you can see some of our customers

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on the bottom there.

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So in CS, who's feeling the pressure?

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As you guys all are.

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So as a CRO, I have digital marketing services.

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I have net news sales.

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And we'll get into that in a second of why CS is so important.

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And then I have professional services.

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But my biggest group and my most effective group

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is my CS team.

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And they're global.

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They're in Germany and the US.

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But here's why.

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New logo acquisition is going awry.

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People aren't selling.

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Our sales are going down.

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It takes longer to sell.

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And when we do finally get that sale,

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it's not as valuable as it once was.

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So what does that mean?

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It means your business is the most important piece

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of a healthy business to grow in 2024.

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I mean, our customer success division

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had clever bridges.

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It's 74%.

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But here's a good stat.

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71% of the revenue comes from your current customer base

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and expansion and retention.

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So if you guys got your polls, I'm

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going to ask a question here.

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If you could take out your app, while I just mentioned that,

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is part of your mandate to do more with less, maybe less

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budget, less resources.

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But they expect you to grow.

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They expect the churn to stop.

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They expect the expansion to keep going.

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If we could all take that poll and we could get it more into it

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here.

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Wow.

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OK.

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So you're starting to see the trend.

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Yeah, we feel the same way.

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I'm interested-- whoever said no or the folks that said no,

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come outside.

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I'd love to chat with you a bit and figure out

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what you guys are doing and how maybe we could--

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we could leverage some of those tactics.

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But this is, like we said, this is the promise and also

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the problem with digital success.

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We good?

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OK.

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Again, you're being asked to do a ton with less resources.

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And you're competing with the idea of this is what the

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experience should look like.

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How many of you use these companies on a daily basis?

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All of us, right?

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Probably most of them on a daily basis.

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What do they all have in common?

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Anybody?

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Shout it out.

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What are all these companies having common?

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Really good digital experience.

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They're easy to transact with.

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I've been on Amazon and I've clicked a button in boxes

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accidentally show up in my house.

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They're very, very easy, consumer-friendly, very

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frictionless.

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Well, 62% of our leaders are feeling that they don't have

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enough resources to look, act, and feel like those customers.

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But 90% of our buyers are saying, if you don't have those

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experiences, we're not going to buy from you.

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We're going to go buy from your customers, or your competitors,

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which poses a huge problem for us.

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And that's where we get into this.

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So I know I'm the last thing between you guys in a cocktail,

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so let's get the blood flowing a bit.

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Raise your hand if you do one or two of these things today

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in your current business.

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Stand up if you do three or four of these.

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Nobody's standing.

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All right.

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That's OK.

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Start clapping if you do five or more.

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I was trying to get a standing ovation, but it is what it is.

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I mean, rough crowd already, but that's OK.

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But digital CS has many use cases, right?

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And these are a bunch that we see in today's world.

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The one thing that's near and dear to my heart coming from

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payments, though, is the transaction.

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That usually gets overlooked, right?

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And that's a big problem, because, again, those consumers

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that are in their day-to-day lives doing business

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with the companies that are easy to use,

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they're bringing that into B2B.

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And what's the missing link?

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We feel it's e-commerce, right?

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We feel it's e-commerce.

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So I'm going to ask you one more question.

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What does e-commerce mean to you?

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If I asked you to write one word on what e-commerce meant

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to you, what would that word be?

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Go ahead and go in the app and type it in there.

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I want to see what comes up.

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Look at that.

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Incredible.

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And what are those words all having common on the stage?

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They're very B2C friendly, right?

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A lot of those experiences are B2C.

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They don't really translate to B2B.

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Our thesis is now they do.

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B2B buyers are getting more and more interested in paying

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online and through websites, right?

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74% use e-commerce site to buy their products now, right?

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83% say they want a rep-free process.

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And this stat blows my mind.

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73% would spend $50,000 or more on a digital transaction.

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That's pretty incredible.

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So start thinking about that.

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B2C is now becoming B2B.

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Those experiences are coming over,

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and they're coming over extremely fast.

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So what do we do?

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At Cleverbridge, we've broken down the lifecycle

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in a four key components.

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Customer acquisition, customer retention, customer

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expansion, and customer adoption.

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People think that in customer acquisition,

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that's where the e-commerce theme stops.

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We don't think so.

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We think you still need to have some sort of e-commerce

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involvement in the adoption, the expansion,

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and the retention.

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But what are some things that you guys

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could do today that help in all these, right?

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I mean, the theme is be easy to do business with.

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Some of you are Mario this, but like I said,

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this is-- these are some strategies that we're using today.

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How many are using self-service or buy now?

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OK, it lowers the cat.

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Our marketing people love that, right?

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Our business people love that.

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How many use free trials or the freemium models?

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Yep.

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OK, good.

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And then a digital assisted sales.

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Right, OK.

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It gets those sales reps focused on more strategic accounts,

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gets them out of the day to day on having those self-serve

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models come in and you could streamline those, right?

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What about adoption?

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So how do we get those customers that

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signed up through our e-commerce platform

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to start using the product?

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What tactics are you using?

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You got to touch them right away, right?

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So automated welcome campaigns, usage alerts, pulse checks,

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things along those natures.

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You have to get the customer talking to you right away,

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start leveraging the product.

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Otherwise, again, it gets room for a competitor,

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it gets room for something to go wrong, right?

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Giving them a self-serve portal, right?

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And increase the product adoption.

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You know, get them thinking about how

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to leverage your product without us telling them how to do it,

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right?

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And then obviously independent seat licenses to add on.

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My head of marketing and I, we're doing a talk

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with our digital outreach platform for our sales people.

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It's called outreach.

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And we didn't have access to the platform.

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And you'd think we could just pull out

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our business corporate card, add a couple seats,

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and go to the races there, but it's not the case.

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And that experience was clunky.

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So we started thinking about alternative solutions, right?

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And that's, again, what they already

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have us as a customer, but now we're

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already thinking about not adopting their product

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and moving on to something else.

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And then this is where, obviously, everybody in this room

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hits home, right?

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How do you expand the customers once they've already

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adopted the product?

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How do you get them buying new products, more products,

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things like that?

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So products and services recommendations,

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so bringing them in, our big customers,

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we always bring in to our P&E discussions, right?

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What's working?

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What's not working?

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What could we do better?

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What else would you like to see to enhance your business,

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to enhance your platform, right?

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Holiday season's coming up, Black Friday, Cyber Monday.

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How many of you guys have promotions for Black Friday,

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Cyber Monday, and your platform, right?

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Yep.

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Again, great, and improves the LTV, right?

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And improves the lifetime value of the customer.

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And then obviously, having that frictionless upgrade,

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so you could sell more upgrades during the mid-term

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of a sales cycle, right?

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So again, less resources, less money spent, less friction.

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And then finally, how do we keep our customers, right?

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We have a thesis that it's multi-channel renewal campaigns,

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right?

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Self-service renewals.

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Again, you're seeing a theme of self-serve.

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Making our customers go in and do things on their own

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gives them the ability to empower themselves,

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gives them the experience that they get to tailor

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that they want, right?

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And then voluntary or involuntary churn prevention,

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that's key, because voluntary churn prevention,

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if they want to leave, we got AI coming down the pipe,

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we have competitors that are sharpening their pencils.

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There's things that are out of our reach that we can't touch.

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But things like a credit card expiring

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or not knowing that the customer moved

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and the credit card's pinging, right?

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How many of you are on network tokenization right now

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in recurring billing or subscription models?

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Yep, perfect, perfect.

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That's important, that's coming.

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It's going to be a mandate for all the processors

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to do this moving forward in the future, right?

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So if that's not something that's on your radar,

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put network tokenization on your radar,

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'cause it's just an account updater,

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it updates the pan data,

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and it's crucial in a subscription model, right?

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So what's the problem?

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For us to all generate a really good,

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fully functioning e-commerce stack,

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you probably need 10, 12, 14 companies

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to run it through efficiently, right?

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What's the first name you guys think of

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when you, what's the first name you saw, right?

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Stripe, okay?

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2.9% in 30.

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It's easy to sign up for,

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but that just only covers payments in recurring billing.

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Shopify, right?

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The e-commerce shopping cart.

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Then you need SIFT,

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Abolara, right?

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If you're doing business, you know,

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overseas or with global currencies,

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you got to figure out the tax and things like that.

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So again, it's messy.

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You want payments, go to Stripe.

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You want an all-inclusive tech platform.

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You're gonna need 14, 10, 14 vendors, right?

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It gets expensive.

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What's our solution?

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We think combining them all into one

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and having an e-commerce stack like this

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that solves for all these problems on the left is key, okay?

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Vendor consolidation is the moral of the story here.

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Again, you go to Stripe, 2.9% in 30.

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Okay, that's fine.

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That's the first transaction.

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Then you go to Shopify, you're adding another percent.

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Now you're at 3.9 and 30.

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Then you add Zora.

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Then you add Salesforce.

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Then you add Abolara.

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Pretty soon you're at 10, 12,

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maybe even sometimes 15% per transaction

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when it all comes down to one.

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Or there are companies called

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merchant of record companies out there,

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like CleverBridge.

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And we consolidate that into an all-in-one platform

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for half that price, okay?

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Or half the rate or half the transaction fee.

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And we do everything for you, right?

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Here's a great story of tenable one of our customers.

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They wanted to, you know,

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they wanted to, with their high velocity customers,

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just get more efficient in their self-service

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renewal process.

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So we just, we gave them tools to combat that, right?

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And to combat the voluntary and voluntary churn.

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Really cool story.

16:01

12% reduction in churn.

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21% increase in recurring revenue.

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That's huge, right?

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That delta there, I mean, it changes their year.

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Changes are year in the amount of money that we make.

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'Cause if they're doing more business,

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if they're not churning as much,

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you know, CleverBridge grows, right?

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So, through a lot out at you,

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the last 20 minutes here,

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how do you get started, right?

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We've broken this down into a crawl walk run.

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Give the long tail customers the ability to process,

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right, self-serve, renewals,

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and make sure their needs are met.

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That's key.

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If you wanna walk, that's where we recommend you start.

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You know, I mean crawl.

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If you wanna walk, the approach you could take,

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introduce self-service management portals

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that allows customers to process simple upgrades,

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things like that.

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And then if you wanna run, it's incorporating, you know,

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this all-in-one, robust payment system

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that we call merchant or record.

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That makes sense?

16:59

Man, we buzzed through that.

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We got a ton of time for Q&A.

17:08

But again, thanks so much, guys.

17:10

My first pulse, I'm happy to be here.

17:12

We'll be coming back and it was great up here talking to you.

17:16

(audience applauding)

17:19

All right, let's throw some questions on the board here.

17:25

What's the cost of a customer buying online

17:28

and circumventing the rep?

17:30

That's a good question.

17:32

I mean, it's a cost of the rep as well.

17:35

But I mean, you could have a self-service model

17:39

that it's, you know, again, buy before you try,

17:42

or, you know, if you're in, within a certain volume parameter,

17:46

you fall on a certain tier to where, hey, you get, you know,

17:49

X% and X transaction fee, and you just go from there.

17:53

You eliminate that rep process altogether.

17:55

That's, I mean, again, it's a reduction in cost for you guys.

18:00

We'll move on to the next one.

18:03

In my experience, we're the most meaningful metrics to track

18:06

when implementing e-commerce and customer success.

18:09

That's a good one.

18:10

You wanna track really everything in a QBR, right?

18:14

You wanna track how many times your customers are renewing.

18:17

You wanna track how many times, you know,

18:19

their customers are buying and coming back.

18:20

You wanna track basically everything we talked about, right?

18:23

The churn rate, the retention rate,

18:25

and then the profitability of the customer.

18:29

And then how much we track how much they're spending as well.

18:32

Like I said, people are spending more and more

18:34

in digital e-commerce.

18:35

We track those trends and measure those KPIs as well.

18:40

(audience member speaking off mic)

18:43

How does Cleverbridge approach balancing self-service options

18:46

with the need for personalized customer engagement,

18:49

especially for not complex products?

18:52

Balancing self-service options.

18:56

And that's, well, that's something that we're trying

19:00

to work out today.

19:01

You know, we still got a lot on the roadmap for 2025.

19:04

I think AI is gonna have a lot to play in this.

19:06

You know, customer engagement is huge,

19:09

but having these people come in

19:12

and have complex products and solutions,

19:15

you gotta play both sides.

19:16

So having AI mixed with a human is key,

19:19

and that's what we're doing now,

19:21

but we're leveraging more moving into those AI, that AI world.

19:26

Where some first steps companies can take to incorporate

19:34

e-commerce into their customer success strategy.

19:38

Are there specified aspects of a life cycle

19:40

that should be prioritized?

19:41

Again, just high touch with those customers, right?

19:44

Are they specific?

19:47

Yeah, absolutely.

19:48

Just high touch with their customers

19:51

and partnerships and things like that.

19:53

Again, having AI become a part of this thing

19:56

is key when maneuvering in and out.

19:58

Next one.

20:03

How do you position upsell,

20:06

cross sell opportunities in a self service renewal

20:08

and making it custom for your customers?

20:10

When doing value based selling?

20:12

That's again, that's key.

20:13

Again, there's a human piece and an AI piece to that.

20:17

We position our cross sell and upsell

20:20

through our digital CS teams,

20:23

and then having our reps walk them through it,

20:27

again, for the upsell and cross sell.

20:30

And then when we're doing value based selling,

20:33

we always sell the problem,

20:35

and we're getting more and more revenue out of that way.

20:37

And we'll take one more here.

20:40

What role does AI play in all of this?

20:44

That's a great question.

20:45

Everything's moving down that path, right?

20:47

Does it get scary to where,

20:49

you see sales force come out with agent force

20:51

and having potentially AI replace some of our CS people

20:55

and move forward into the future?

20:56

I don't see it that way.

20:58

I still think there's a human element to this.

21:00

But in terms of noticing trends,

21:03

and being able to identify those trends,

21:06

and being able to do research,

21:08

and think about how the future of our business moves,

21:10

that's where we see AI playing a part of it.

21:13

Awesome, we got time for one more.

21:19

How does Clever Bridge help with the retention of customers?

21:24

Is that the next one?

21:27

Yeah, how does Clever Bridge help with the future?

21:30

How does Clever Bridge help with the retention of customers?

21:34

Again, we take everything in-house, right?

21:40

So your retention, your adoption, your expansion,

21:46

we bring everything into an all-in-one platform,

21:48

and we do many tools with that.

21:52

So automated campaigns, automated renewal,

21:55

emails, blasts, things like that.

21:57

So we have that high touch, high touch,

22:00

and then give them a self-serve platform to do just that.

22:06

Do you have some examples of how to boost

22:15

the self-service renewals with Digital CS?

22:18

Do you have some examples of how to boost the self-service?

22:27

You know, again, moving into this CS world for me is tough.

22:33

So yes, absolutely, these are things that we're thinking about all the time.

22:37

I don't have too many answers for you today on this one,

22:40

but again, it's getting involved with our teams

22:44

and making sure that everybody has their ideas brought to the forefront

22:48

so we can implement them moving into 2025.

22:52

How do we combat buyer's remorse?

22:59

If the purchase is so easy but not fully qualified, that's great.

23:02

I think you'll see that at the adoption model.

23:04

Buyer's remorse is a real thing when talking about B2B and SaaS.

23:08

Again, reassuring that that customer,

23:12

you'll see that a lot in the self-serve model,

23:14

where you go in, you click buy now,

23:16

and not necessarily you could implement it.

23:19

That's where a rep and that personal field does come into play,

23:24

which I really like.

23:25

But how do we combat the buyer's remorse?

23:29

Again, high touch, give them automated pulse checks,

23:33

things like that to make sure that they're going to adopt the product,

23:36

ask them what we could fix, how we could fix it,

23:40

things like that before we just let them walk out the door.

23:46

The last one, 12% decrease, ensuring it's tenable.

23:49

How did that distribute across the value?

23:51

How did that distribute across value brands?

23:54

Are there particular core customers where your product makes most sense?

23:56

I mean, we found that cyber security, CAD,

24:03

anything digital e-commerce is really where clever bridge fits in.

24:06

Again, wherever that stripe,

24:08

Shopify, Zora, Salesforce, like experiences,

24:11

all needs to come in together in one.

24:14

That's where we really play well there.

24:17

Not too familiar, again, six weeks in,

24:20

not too familiar with the tenable use case.

24:22

But again, we're seeing that success across all our platforms

24:27

and all our customers at Clever Bridge.

24:29

Thank you.

24:31

That's it.

24:31

Kevin, thank you so very much.

24:32

Very much.

24:32

Everybody, thank you very much as well.

24:35

Thank you for the engagement.

24:36

Thank you for the eyebrow raising topic.

24:38

I did that, man.

24:39

Absolutely.

24:39

It's a bit challenging.

24:40

I did that.

24:41

Well, that actually brings us to a close for day one of Pulse Europe.

24:46

Thank you again, everyone, for joining us.

24:48

The aforementioned cocktail that Kevin mentioned.

24:50

That will be happening at 6 p.m.

24:52

So everybody, please take a safe trip back to

24:55

wherever you're going to be dawling up for the after party.

24:58

We all look forward to seeing you there.

25:00

Thank you.

25:01

Thanks, everybody.

25:02

(applause)