The Untitled Leader: Empowering CSMs to Drive Change From Any Seat

[Speaker 1]
Well, thanks all for coming. Good morning. What a packed room.

This is pretty special. This is my first Pulse, and it's been a terrific experience. I've been over for about a week visiting customers in Ireland and Northern England.

And I've got to be honest with you, I'm exhausted. But this has been a really great way to wind up the visit. So thank you for coming.

I wanted to talk today about my team. I, like many of you in the room, I'm sure I wouldn't be here without my team. And the years that I've been doing this, my time at Concur and then elsewhere, has been transformative for my career.

And I think I've learned a couple of things. A very big topic today. And I've tried to distill as much of it into some bite-sized takeaways for everybody that hopefully you'll find something in here to go home with.

So about me. Yeah, at SAP Concur, I'm going into year 10, which has been mind-blowing. I've never been at a company longer than this one.

My general focus is our life sciences and health care business in the US and EMEA. About $130 million portfolio in change and 245 customers that we've got globally. I've been 15 years of customer success.

I've been in SaaS for 20 years, which is also crazy. Spent some time at big companies, spent some time in a startup, carrying a bag, learning a lot about that world. I think it's a good balance of experience.

But in general, I think my time at Concur has been the best of my career. And fun fact for me, today's my birthday. So here we go.

Thank you. Gainstead brought me some cupcakes. So I want to make our time today a bit interactive.

I hope people feel like sharing, or at the very least, raising some hands. Because nobody likes to just be lectured. And I don't like to lecture to people.

So number one, raise your hand if you work in customer success. We're in the right room. Terrific.

Keep your hand up if you have ever had to do something at work without formally being asked to lead it. Keep it up if you've done that in the last 30 days. So take a look around.

These are your people. One of the things that, again, as I was kind of covering this presentation and this topic for today is that there's so many varying experiences. And all of it seems to come back to this notion within CS that we do a lot of things.

We lead a lot of things around our programs, around our businesses, even if it's not necessarily in our title. Or we have folks on our teams that are doing these things, even if they're not a leader. And I wanted to kind of come up with a way to talk about my team and how we've built our organization at Concur over the last several years and share some experiences also across the room.

So that's what we'll be covering today. So a couple of things. Team pillars.

We'll talk a little bit about what that looks like. Identifying these untitled leaders in your organizations. Empowering that entrepreneurial impact.

Embracing automation. Aligning customer goals to what you're doing with your operations. And then we'll ask some questions.

I wanted to throw this out here, though. I'm a big fan of The Office. Maybe that dates me a little bit.

For those of you who like The Office UK, I have some David Brint later in the deck, so it's going to be covered. But I thought this was a pretty apropos Michael Scott quote. People will never be replaced by machines.

In the end, life and business are about human connections. And computers are trying to murder you in a lake. And to me, the choice is easy.

So this was from an episode where Michael and Dwight drove a car into a lake because the GPS malfunctioned. But a bit appropriate for the big theme of the week, machines, automation. But the human part of it that really is still super crucial.

And that's where we're going to focus here today. So I'm going to share a couple of things here, starting with our foundation. And I do want to set some context, too.

I concur. We're a pretty mature business. We're part of SAP.

We've been around for over 30 years. And we're not a startup. So I've got a couple of different points of view in here that are a little bit rooted in that.

But I do think a lot of this is pretty universal. So I did want to get that filter out there a little bit. But one of the things that we've done a lot and I've worked on over the years is building some solid pillars into our team and the foundation from which we operate.

And so as I was thinking about how to consolidate all this for today, these are the three things that kind of popped out the most. Number one, building that foundation with transparency. You know, CSMs are the tip of the spear.

These are the folks that are taking the message of the business out into the marketplace, helping customers understand where the organization is going. And so we like to ensure that our teams have context around where the business is going. Certainly, there are hierarchies.

And there is data that is need-to-know or not. But how can you have an effective go-to-market operation if that go-to-market operation doesn't have the business context behind what you're doing? Similarly, two years ago, we made a big change in how we organized our CS org.

And we built out what we call our customer franchise. And a big part of that was realizing that we've got a lot of disparate organizations that are working together. CS, sales, pre-sales solution, consulting, marketing, support, services.

Bridging these asymmetries really is important. And one of the big things we found was like, let's have everybody understand how everybody else is paid. Not what they're getting paid.

They don't need to know amounts. But what are their incentives? How is each part of that customer-focused franchise incented to go do their job so we can all start to work together?

Because how else are you going to work together in a big matrix franchise team if you don't know what drives other people's behavior? You know, similarly with the comp plan. Who's been in a company where your comp plan has been a little bit fuzzy?

Raise your hand. Who doesn't get their comp plan until like Q2? Yeah.

So that's something that, again, you know, we've tried to constantly accelerate, bring forward, and make transparent to our teams. The second one is really a big one. Strategy building.

And it dawned on us, I think, years ago that, you know, our CSMs, they're contributors to our strategy. They're not recipients. And when we really think about, you know, the go-to-market plan, like, it's their plan.

It's their activity. It's their engagement. It's their strategy, customer-to-customer.

And so the ownership of that planning model, in addition to the execution, you know, really belongs to the CSMs just as much as it does the leadership team. And then also ownership of the numbers, you know, goes into the strategy, too. Who does QBRs with your CSMs, if you're a team leader, who does, okay?

So who does QBRs that are financially focused, meaning that you're actually walking through a forecast with your CSMs? A couple people, okay. So we made a big shift a few years ago where we actually, even though our CSMs are not incented towards a number, so to speak, individually, but we started building a financial operating rhythm around our QBR.

Every quarter, our folks come in with the beginning of their quarter ARR, the end of their quarter ARR. They're forecasting top-line bookings. They're forecasting potential churn.

They're forecasting shelfware. And they're actually building a top-to-bottom number that, while they're not held to it specifically, it guides what they do. And then we're able to make bigger decisions at the team level and then rolling it up, you know, around our risk, around our opportunity.

And getting the CSMs in that motion with understanding the financial outcomes has made a huge impact on our strategy because they make different business decisions as the ownership of their portfolio around numbers as opposed to just a list of accounts and who are we gonna go meet with this quarter, you know. The third important piece of this, too, is inclusiveness, you know, a range of voices. I think years ago in CS, and don't take this the wrong way, but I even had somebody tell this once to my face.

Well, CS is just a bunch of salespeople who can't sell. I mean, that's just a load, right? I think when I look at the teams that we've built around SAP Concur over the years, we have such a huge range of voices.

We have folks that used to sell, sure. I'd spent my time doing that. But we've got all kinds of tenure.

I've got one gentleman on my team who spent the entirety of the 1990s selling telecom hardware in China. He had never done CS ever. Now, he's been at Concur for 10 years and he's one of the top performers.

It was a completely different career change for him. I have folks on my team that never went to college. You know, that isn't necessarily a prerequisite.

So that range of background, the range of diversity, it's a crucial thing to building a team that really works well in a big market. So next, identifying leaders. How do you find these untitled leaders in your organizations?

Again, another thing, I tried to take a very big topic and make it into some bite-sized chunks. And I actually spent some time doing research on this. I have hired well north of 100 CSMs, and I actually did, I had to go back into some old files from even a previous company.

I've conducted 167 CSM interviews over the years. And that kind of blew up in my face. I thought, wow, there's really a lot of experience that I've seen and a lot of pattern matching that has come through that.

And these three things are things that always popped up when I looked at that just entire breadth of experience. Number one, curiosity. They ask why.

They play in the business. As my sixth grade teacher liked to say, they reach beyond the obvious. These are folks, and I think we heard this from Chuck yesterday and a lot of other discussions just around the show, it's such a huge, crucial part to our discipline and our operating model in CS.

Being curious about our customers' businesses is the only way we're gonna find what their goals are. Help them define their goals. Help them drive business outcomes with our solutions.

Curiosity, huge. The second thing that popped up to me, natural influence. Peers gravitate towards these folks without having to even try.

These are folks that are very transparent. They tell it like it is, even when it's something that's uncomfortable. And they're natural mentors.

These are the people that you wanna sit your new hires with that you want to share best practices across other teams, that you wanna be driving cross-functional initiatives because it's just something that they do. And then the third one, too, that I loved, the GSD. Everybody knows what GSD is, right?

Get shit done? Okay, I said shit. But they do it quietly.

They see a problem in the business and they go fix it. They don't advertise it. It's something that they see the value in doing and they go get it done.

They're not self-promoters, right? They're not the folks that are always out there raising their hands, asking for the cushy assignments, pushing for the big accounts. But there's also no gray area with their execution.

And I think the biggest trend that I've always ever seen is everybody has one-on-ones with your team once a week. These are the folks that you only talk to for 15 minutes. You might have 30 minutes on the calendar.

You might have 45. But in 15 minutes, you cover all the ground that you need to cover. You know exactly what they're gonna be doing.

They know exactly what they're doing. They're asking you for the things that move the rocks the furthest. And you're doing that in half the time and everybody gets on with their day.

It's an interesting trend. So here's the audience interaction part. Who wants to share an example, you don't have to name names, but of an untitled leader that you've worked with who was really awesome and what made them effective?

Great examples, great examples. So flipping the coin for leaders and managers out there, who's made a mistake in trying to develop one of these folks? Who's maybe not looked at this untitled leader in the right way, maybe put them in a role too soon or incorrectly, who's not fostered that kind of person well enough?

Great examples, great examples. So empowerment, the next thing we wanna kinda look at, and again, it's this big topic that we're trying to make simpler, smaller. The entrepreneurial impact is a huge component of I think that untitled leader, right?

Somebody who's gonna be taking ownership. We've heard that just now. But empowerment is a big thing because you have to get results, you have to get execution, you have to build the landscape in which these folks can thrive.

And so as David Brent, the genius once said, a good idea is a good idea forever. There's some actual real, I think, wisdom behind this because it really is basically what this is saying is that if it's just gonna be an idea and you're not gonna act on it, it's just gonna be an idea. And the execution around that is only gonna happen if we're out there empowering our teams to do things.

So a couple of things that we've done, and I'm gonna tell a story here in a minute. But when we break it down, again, bite-sized chunks, three things come to mind. Empowerment is a leadership practice.

It's not just a project, it's just not something that you do. It's about having that impact-oriented mission. We've got a theme around our group that we call Fortune Favors the Bold.

We'll talk about that here in just a second. But having that impact-oriented mission is really all about ensuring that you've got the structure, the metrics, the numbers, and everything aligned with the team that's showing them how to go make impact in the business and that you're supporting them to do so. The second, the system can't punish ownership.

We talk about solving problems, seeing something, owning it, raising your hand, going for it. You can't have a system that punishes that. And I think that's a big challenge we have in our discipline within our businesses.

A lot of the time, we have a lot of process drag. We have a lot of asymmetries within our different departments. And there's a tendency to just be reactive, to punish that kind of proactive change.

But you gotta get the air cover in there. You gotta put the guardrails in there for your folks so they can thrive. You gotta trust their judgment and then verify the execution steps that they're taking.

Otherwise, nothing's really gonna move. And also, empowerment as a leadership practice is not about dumping stuff. Or my favorite topic, executive initiatives.

Hurrah, you signed up to do one of the five executive initiative things for this year that may or may not ever have any sort of practical application to the business when you're done with it. That's not helping anybody. So this is where I think, again, the empowerment as a practice piece comes in where folks are bringing this type of change themselves.

And those entrepreneurial leaders, those leaders without title, they do that naturally. Coaching becomes really important, too. Coaching with insight, coaching with intention.

We're gonna talk about coaching here in just a minute when we get to some of the AI stuff. But I think that's a huge thing in this role, especially as leaders in CS. Coaching never stops.

It's my favorite part of the job. And it's not just customer strategy. It's not getting into what's going on with a specific account.

It's really getting into people's heads, understanding how they're thinking, understanding how they're breaking problems apart and pulling them together. Because that's where you really develop the muscle memory for folks. And it's, again, it's a practice.

It's an empowerment thing. All right, so I wanna tell a story. I mentioned this concept of fortune favors the bold.

This is not something that our team came up with. It's a bigger picture idea. So this is actually a slide from our 2022 kickoff that we had with our team.

So four years ago and change. So to set some context, the year before, well, two years before, there was a pandemic. Everybody remembers that.

Had no impact on business travel whatsoever. But 2020 was a rough year. In 2021, we had six plus months of just our teams getting hit in the face with a big product migration and retirement that occurred.

And I mean, we were beat up. Everybody was tired. Everybody was overworked.

Like it had been six months in heightened escalation mode. So when we turned the page into 2022, the world's starting to come out of the pandemic a little bit. Our business is starting to sort of come back to normal.

But we made a decision, like we've got to reset with the team. We've got to come with a new plan, with a new sort of vision for everybody. And we came up with this, again, this kind of mission-oriented statement, fortune favors the bold.

And so these are the three things that we kind of built into that and started the team off in the year with. Number one, lead with intent. You are empowered to hold stakeholders accountable, to set good goals that are attainable, and to go take this out into the business, out into the market, and do it with some intention.

But take a calculated risk along the way. Do something new. Put the customer first, but raise your game.

Innovate with something else. If it's broken, fix it. And then make an impact.

Find a way to influence the broader group. Find a way to influence the bigger enterprise, business unit, our segments. Help with our SAP counterparts, giving them some different ideas with shared customers.

Let's kind of pull a bigger sort of motion together that is bold, that's adventurous, that is driving us into something new than we've had the last couple years. And we've hung on to this concept of fortune favors the bold ever since. It's the rallying cry that we start every year with and that we kind of all have built around for the last almost five years now.

And it got results. In that period of time, we've seen some great KPI impact. Our top line growth has increased about 60% on a run rate.

We've only had two quarters out of the last 18 that we didn't have net positive growth, and that was some stuff that was kind of totally out of our control. We're continuing to grow our base. This is a mature business, and certainly in our life sciences and our healthcare world, we're not driving new customers like crazy, but it's a very mature business.

So this is still kind of growing from our install base that is still producing every year. We've started looking at some interesting metrics around ARR coverage ratio. That's kind of a, it's a lagging indicator, but it's really kind of taking a look at out of every dollar that we lose, what are we building back into the business?

So essentially, we're running right now for the last four years. For every dollar that goes out, we're putting $1.19 back in. So we're still getting a little bit extra push, a little bit extra value in every transaction that we're helping move forward.

Net revenue retention over 100% are gross, about 93%, which is great. And then in this timeframe, we've only had, I think it was nine non-M&A logo losses in five years. And then our engagement in the field has just gone crazy, right?

When we're empowering folks to take some new ideas out in the market, they're meeting with customers more. They're getting on planes, they're getting in cars, they're more excited to get out from behind Microsoft Teams and go be in person with people. Right now, we just exited Q3, and we've got over 300 of these customer meetings across our team year to date.

Everything from your traditional business review to innovation sessions, workshops, value engagements, as well as bigger strategic customer program engagements with our SAP counterparts. And we're also seeing over that 18 quarter average, 69% of our top line bookings are CSM influenced. I think this was a topic that came up somewhere yesterday, you know, how the CS qualified leads or how do you start to really quantify the impact of your activities on the business.

And so yeah, out of every dollar that's closed, top line every quarter, 69% of it on the run rate has come from activities that came from our team. So this is huge. And this is attributable, quite honestly, to this.

And really changing the narrative on how we go to market and empowering our teams to go out and really own the business. But of course we have this thing now called AI. How do we jump this next curve?

Humans first. I think we're all in agreement. We heard it from Chuck yesterday, like there's still, and this was the greatest quote that I wrote down, as AI continues to commoditize the work that we do, the human in the middle becomes more important because that is the context, that's the insight, the decision making, the relationship building.

All of that is still gonna be a human approach. But it's not only humans. We have to embrace the automation.

And here's how I'm looking at it because I'm not saying that I have any sort of plan for this at all. And I thank everybody for coming to this who has shared with me here the last couple of days that I'm not alone in being the only person that doesn't really exactly have a plan. But this is how we're kind of looking at it within our team right now.

Embracing the automation. It's about balance, right? The biggest thing that we've been leading with in our group this year, if we as leaders aren't using these new tools, our teams aren't gonna use them.

I've made it a challenge in Q2. I set out with my teams, their QBRs were gonna be entirely run through our Jewel desktop AI application at SAP. They have the data sources they need for their QBRs.

I gave them some prompts that I played with myself and said, here you go, go make your QBR happen. And it was an interesting challenge. And speaking of untitled leaders, it was very clear in some of those results where those untitled leaders took that assignment and ran with it, came up with some great insight.

You had a population of people who had absolutely no idea what they were doing. You had a population of people who were literally just reading what the robots told them. But it was a huge exercise, a great exercise to get people comfortable doing this.

And we're gonna do it again this quarter. Which reminds me, I need to actually send an email later. So, again, it's all about reducing that capability overhang, right?

Brian Solis, who follows Brian Solis on LinkedIn, he's an influencer guy, Salesforce Chief Innovation Officer I think he is. He kinda coined this notion of an AI capability overhang, which is basically, you've got all these tools, you've got all this capacity, but it hangs over your team, right? And as we evolve into whatever this next sort of vision of CS looks like with all these tools available to us, we need to constantly be working to reduce that capability overhang by pulling down pieces of these tools, of these strategies, integrating them into the business every day.

So, that's how we've been operating. And again, setting up a challenge like that with the QBR is a great way to do that. And we've also seen a creativity explosion amongst our team.

The untitled leaders, the real empowered folks, they're coming up with great stuff. One of the coolest things I think I've seen my team come up with here just this year is they built a prompt in our Juul desktop app which actually goes and looks at our concur release notes and they upload just a QBR summary slide with our customer name, the products that they have, our basic kind of business review stuff. And they built a skill that actually goes and looks at those release notes and matches those new product releases with the products that the customers have and prioritizes what's most important for that customer to go enable immediately, or it's gonna be most impactful for their business.

And then we even had one of the guys on the squad started putting in 10Ks, public filings for earnings from customers, which then connect that prioritization of enabling product features to goals that were stated in the earnings releases. And so when you really start thinking about up leveling a customer conversation and going into especially, you know, your bigger global enterprise shops, what better way to do that than connecting product feature sets to corporate goals? All things that would have taken us hours, if not days to do before these new tools came.

But the creativity behind it has been fantastic. You know, but here's the balance part. Like there's gonna be some things, and I've heard this this week, and I think it makes sense, that robots are better at things that our humans are better at.

And so we're just constantly balancing these things. I think I bolded the down in the bottom bullet, coaching and preparation. This has been huge for me.

Using automation tools to go gather a bit more information has been helpful for me coaching CSMs, planning meetings, challenging them to think a bit more outside of the box or reach beyond the obvious by considering their points of view and then using, again, some of this research from our customer base, publicly available things, challenging folks to think harder and deeper and come up with a bigger conversation when we go into customer engagements.

And then there's obviously gonna be things that humans are better with. One of the big themes that we have also this year is equal business stature. So when our CSMs walk into customer meetings, we are walking in on an equal level with our customers.

We are equal partners in this business relationship and we're gonna present ourselves and our ideas in a way that's on the same level. Humans are better at doing that than robots because I'm sure everybody has seen why you just start to read stuff that comes out of AI and you start to sound like AI. Who's actually started to speak like AI?

Actually, you're right. That's a better idea. Oh my God, drives me crazy.

But when we start to really take a look at what information and context that the robots can give us, that's when the human impulse kicks in where we can really start to put everything into context, understand how these dynamics work within our customer organizations and what that impacts in our business and especially help us communicate when we maybe even have a message that's not so great. All right, I'm keeping an eye because I wanna have time for questions. So again, all of this though is got to align towards customers, right?

And as we innovate our goals and how we're going to market, we have to do that with the customer in mind because that's really all that matters. So things that we've been working on and distilling all of this down, four big topics, customer goals that have to benefit. Number one, centricity.

Empowered leaders, empowered CSMs make the right decisions for customers and that's what we want. We wanna keep that customer centricity in the middle of what we do. Enabling these folks to have a handle of their portfolios, run the business on the numbers, be set up with the tools that help make their jobs a little bit easier and more insightful.

That's how we keep the customers in the middle. And also too, the idea that no customer is created equal. There's gonna be a focus that you have to have somewhere and there's gonna be a focus that you don't have to have somewhere.

A former leader of mine said, where's the juice worth the squeeze? That's okay. It's okay to look at it that way, especially when we really think about where we make impact.

Strategic advisory. These leaders lead against risk, they lead to opportunity, they become strategic advisors to their customers. That's the biggest transition that I think AI is going to help our teams make right now is really ramp up that advisory capacity that we have.

We are no longer reading business reviews. We're not doing a show up and throw up. We're not talking about the traditional KPIs anymore.

We have all these tools at our disposal to become much more insightful consultants for our customers. And that's gonna be the true North Star. Experience, customer experience.

The team culture becomes the customer experience. Who feels this? When you have the team really set up and running well, the customer experience comes along with it.

It's totally crazy to see. And if you don't have that, let's take stock. And then visible value, make value visible.

This thing has been around, this thing has been around in my career for years. It is as relevant today as it was 15 years ago. Making value visible is the number one thing.

An AI framework though is that value framework when you use it the right way. And as we all evolve down this path of AI and automation, it's kind of up to us to figure out what that looks like. All right, so closing it out.

Go home and do some things that everybody can walk out of the room and at least think about. So number one, build the culture. Audit your foundation.

Look at your transparency, look at your strategy building, your inclusiveness. Find where you're thin and bulk it up. Put human first values into what you're doing.

Build that system around humans doing the work. And then create metrics that illustrate value and impact. Impact on behavior.

Good KPIs drive behavior. Good KPIs drive results through behavior. Bad KPIs are just something you read on a slide deck.

Grow the leaders. And I noticed a typo in here, so don't read this. You know, go home and find a person leading without a title on your team.

Give them some air cover, give them some guardrails. Take a look at what they're doing. Kill a piece of their administrivia for a quarter and see how they respond.

And if that's something that works, replicate it. Coach for intention, coach for execution. Change the mindset around that.

It's not just going through a list of accounts. It's not just talking about activity. It's really getting in the heads of everybody and what they're doing.

And then lastly, balance the automation. You know, lead by example. Use the tools.

Reduce that AI capability overhang and start to figure out how you protect the human-first stuff and automate the stuff that the robots can handle. So three little bite-sized things to take away. You'll get the deck, you can take a picture.

See if it works. That's all I have. Any questions?

Thank you.

[Speaker 2]
Thanks so much. That was brilliant. We, just a reminder, you can upvote the ones that you feel are most interesting as well so we can push it up and prioritize them.

Thoughts on approaching the compensation question with these unofficial leaders when there's no budget for it?

[Speaker 1]
So is this suggesting that you've got these unofficial leaders and you can't compensate them or incent them to do more? Is that generally what we're saying? Yeah.

Well, and it is, and I don't think there's really, there isn't a really terrific answer for it. I mean, it's something that, you know, is a reality at our business. You know, a mature company, for sure.

Upward mobility is, you know, the opportunities are there, but they're few and far between. You know, I think one of the things that we've found really impactful with our group is in lieu of conversation, or rather compensation, perks. Finding the ability, you know, to have folks come to things like this.

You know, giving folks the opportunity to be a part of other industry events. Ensuring that we've got, you know, some good relationships with partners that they can work on and actually kind of take the message out to other parts of the business and explore. It's kind of approaching it from a perk perspective, giving them a little bit more, not necessarily to do, but more to connect their expertise with and drive curiosity, you know, within the business and in the program.

Because I think my personal feeling has been, and my experience has been, you know, these untitled leaders are, you know, going to be, they're gonna find value in being able to contribute more to the business in different ways. And, you know, if you can't continue to pay people more, then find ways for them to contribute like that, I guess would be my answer, in what I've done.

[Speaker 2]
I do feel we have another question that is very similar to the one we just covered. So we might skip to the next one. What soft skills and expertise would you encourage leaders and individuals to go get in order to contribute even more to a team's success?

[Speaker 1]
So two things. One is kind of a formal communication method. It's something we have in the States.

I don't know how far the reach is. But it's called the Decker method, and Decker communication method. So basically what that builds up into is helping people really identify how to create a point of view.

And I think that's the biggest thing that I think I've seen people really grow in their roles within CS and our teams, is when they can really come up with a solid point of view on something with a customer and be able to really effectively communicate it. And Decker's a great way to help kind of break down how you build into that, how you bring a defensible set of evidence into it. And it really starts to impact communication both verbally and in a written form that gets to a point of view with impact.

And I think from a soft skill perspective, that's always just been the biggest for me, is how effectively can you communicate your ideas? Especially now in an age of AI, right? Where we're gonna have an overload of information, and our role as humans is gonna be to provide the context.

[Speaker 2]
I think we're gonna touch on compensation, Mike. How's the compensation plan looking like?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, so our comp plan is a quarterly variable with a base. We are tied at kind of two ends on revenue production and retention. Revenue is managed at the top line level, quarter over quarter within our business unit.

And then basically what we're paying on is effectively how well our sales team is performing against that budget for the quarter. And then we have the retention piece, which is pegged at GRR. And that's measured at the individual team level.

So we have a GRR goal, and then we get accelerators for how further past we make that metric.

[Speaker 2]
Super, one last question. You talked about empowering CSMs to drive change. How do you create an environment where people feel empowered to challenge existing ways of working, especially in organizations where decisions are traditionally made from top down?

Maybe an example as well.

[Speaker 1]
Keep pushing that rock up the hill. You know, I think it really, it comes down to just, you know, fortune favors the bold. You know, bold ideas get noticed.

And decisions, I mean, decisions are always gonna be made top down. Like no organization is truly flat. You can have flat departments, you can have some flat processes, but you're always gonna have a matrixed hierarchy, right?

But the bold ideas get noticed. And the bold ideas coming from these entrepreneurial people typically are gonna be ideas that are, you're getting from across the business because they're playing in it. They're getting to know other leaders, you know.

So encourage skip levels, discussions into other departments. You know, introduce your people to other leaders in the company. I mean, that's been, I think, the biggest transformational thing for me personally was just having leaders that put me in front of our chief revenue officer and made me squirm.

You know, like get in with your services folks, with your pre-sales folks, know your marketing people, grow your Rolodex. You know, that's gonna help influence some of these things. And it gives anybody who's coming up with these bold ideas a whole lot more credibility when they know more people in the organization.

[Speaker 2]
All right, I think we're at time. Maybe you can quickly just say how many customers your CSM's managing in a portfolio.

[Speaker 1]
We are at about 25 per head at the moment. All right. Enterprise, yep, enterprise, global enterprise.

The biggest of the big.

[Speaker 2]
25? With an average ARR of?

[Speaker 1]
Between eight and 10 million. Some, well, that's probably the biggest by the median. We're a bit higher with some of the, so some folks, yeah.

Yeah, happy to talk to you.

[Speaker 2]
Just stole my words. So if you have any other questions, I mean, I'm sure that you're also welcome to connect on LinkedIn and just reach out for any other questions. Or if you can stay over or find Hayes throughout the rest of the conference today, you're more than welcome.

But let's give it up another time.

[Speaker 1]
Thank you all, thank you.