Ep # 190: How to Catch a Bad-Fit Customer Before They Churn ft. Andrew Loomis (VP of Customer Success, Sisense)

Speaker A: If someone came to me, a CSM came to me and said hey, I've got a great relationship with this customer and it's this one guy, I'm like you, that you've already made a mistake because you, you're only talking to one person. Right? So get to more people and figure out what the broad consensus is of the organization. Not one person. Right.

Speaker B: Welcome to across the Funnel where we dig into concrete, go to market moves across sales, customer success and account management so you can build revenue that lasts. Brought to you by hyper engage and dex2go. Hey, greetings everybody. This is uh, Krastefono. I'm your host, uh Adil. And uh, you know there's so much uh time that we bought in the past, uh, a few quarters to make sure we come come up with some unique stories. Uh a lot of these new age platforms are trying to cut off a little bit because of course they're experimenting a lot. There's uh, so much that they need to mature. They're so dependent on AI, uh, I would say over dependent on AI, uh and the model. So that's why we're trying to uh, hitch with more kind of post sales GTM leaders to explore like how this industry is moving, what kind of uh, well mature experiments, initiatives they have taken down in the post sales GTM and uh, what's been working uh, for them. So today we're going to be talking about sisense. It's a API first uh, predictive analytics platform for all of your business functions, be it go to market, be it uh product, be it industry or uh even like it could be like from technology to oil and gas to manufacturing to all of these industries. So today we're going to be talking to Andrew who's the VP of customer success uh at sisense. Been uh there for quite some time, more than five years now, been through the entire, I would say the post sales uh journey at Cisense most of the time and taking some really cool initiatives into streamlining the predictive analytics part and uh, of course the predictive revenue potential funnel. So thank you very much uh Andrew for taking the time.

Speaker A: Of course. Happy to be here, Love it.

Speaker B: So now first off like um, being a vp uh in the post sales function, I would not say customer success because customer success is now taken in a different perspective when it comes to um, you know, the engineering and implementation and a lot of this uh, over deployed engineer stigma that's going on these days, uh, this is more into heavily into that and then this is how it breaks the onboarding to adoption funnel too. Because a lot of this tooling, AI adoption, has been, uh, in place for, not on the internal side on your product or company, but also on the external side, on the other side of the table, which, which is the customers and how they're adopting to AI and all this. How do you see this role evolving for yourself in the recent times? I would say six, six to eight months.

Speaker A: Yeah. Customer success is in an interesting place right now. Um, I think that there are many different types of leaders who prioritize different things, right? There's been the classic CS motion. Like, you know, you go through the onboarding process, you start doing EBRs, you have your cadences, you do the renewals, right? And all of that is, I don't want to say thrown out the window, but it's being reimagined right now with the AI functionality, agentic AI in particular, that's coming in. And it's like, what do you offload to the AI agents versus what do you have the people work on? Right. Um, and so what I think about as a leader, uh, in a pusel function is how do we get customers to their outcome? Right? Like, that is sort of a classic approach, but it's more about, hey, I don't care about the EBRs as much as I care about are we driving the customer to an outcome? Right. What are the, uh, out. What is that outcome that we're striving for and what are the steps that we are taking as a partner to get to that outcome? Right. And that comes in the form of success plan. I think that would be harder for an AI agent to do on its own. Maybe they can help put some pieces together. But I think that's really where the value of the CS Org is right now, is how do we get customers to their outcome? And then we let the agent take care of, like, the meeting notes, the

Speaker B: uh, presentation, customer research, or maybe something like, uh, you know, meeting briefs and all. So this is quite an interesting point that you brought. Like, I know a lot of these tooling and a lot of these VPs of CS sales revenue, they're thinking about, uh, evaluating a lot of technologies built on top of these LLMs. They're like, um, AI native, they call them. But the biggest problem that they're facing and on their team is facing talking about success or account management is they're taking huge amounts of time training the LLMs with them. Like, a lot of times they think that, hey, we need onboarding. But, you know, it seems like we are uh, you know we are onboarded by, by AI asking a lot of these things to service and that takes like from a month to three months uh, to get to a point where they can get the outcomes which can replace like 60 or 70% of the human effort. Keeping the research part and all this uh, basic, I would say conversation, uh, analysis and all this uh, this part uh, beside. But how do you see it as a VP evaluating a lot of this uh, technology or even building um, agents internally like a lot of these uh, companies are doing that too. What, what is your approach as a vp?

Speaker A: So everyone at sisense has access to um, different AI tools. We have an entire stack that our IT department has made available to the team. Uh, a lot of people have drifted towards CLAUDE as their ah, de facto tool of choice. Um, the only problem with CLAUDE can be that people can end up with duplicative efforts. So you want to, really want to focus on building org wide skills that everyone can use so that you avoid repeating the same uh, efforts across multiple people. The other thing I would say is structurally um, there is a team uh, at sisense focused purely on engineering these AI solutions. So within the post sale organization we have individuals uh, who are purely focused on building out these tools. It is becoming a full time job in many ways because uh, you're right, there's a lot of effort that goes into training. Yes, an agent can quickly learn the basics of customer success or any of those things. But to know what specific things are relevant for your company, for your product, your industry, your customers that you serve, that takes a lot of training and effort. So for us we made the decision that that needs to be a dedicated role and that's a role that we're going to continue to invest in and potentially add more people into as this takes on. Um, so long story short, everyone's using AI and we're trying to focus more on how do we make it an enterprise standard and how we use those tools right now.

Speaker B: Yeah, so biggest thing that, because we spoke to a lot of uh, a lot of SaaS, founders, DTM, uh, leaders too and uh, the data integration part and putting in place all of these integrations has been the biggest thing. Even with some of the competitors that I'm talking about like a lot of these BI tooling that have been uh, legacy tooling for like let's say 15, 20 years on average. The onboarding time is like bare minimum around six months. So this uh, is one of the things that uh, sisense has changed in the Past, I would say five, six years. How do you see the big, uh, you know, adoption to the product itself, uh, elevated during the recent years. And of course it's going to be. I'm just sensing that it's. There's some AI initiatives that you've taken as well as AI got more intelligent.

Speaker A: Yeah. And it's not just on the customer success side. Obviously we'll talk more about the sisense product later. But there's AI on both ends. Like we have to teach our customers how to use AI in our product. Right. So AI is everywhere. It's unavoidable, it's inevitable. Uh, at this point.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. So I was just looking deeply into the technology, uh, segment of yours, like how things um, are moving towards that. Because a lot of these technology, uh, companies they are thinking of like, for example, you're thinking of hiring engineers, uh, that need to get a lot of this tooling, uh, on top of LLMs or CRMs and all of those. So how do you see this? What's the shift towards the technology segment of like how they're thinking, uh, of building something internally versus using, uh, a technology like sisense.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I know Vibe coding is really cool right now and a lot of people want to use it to build their own applications. Uh, however, I don't think that Vibe coding has gotten to a point where people are going to put that in a, uh, production tool that it goes out to potentially tens of thousands, maybe a million people who are going to be accessing it. It hasn't reached that skill yet. It's great for building internal tools that you want to use for your own workflow, but I don't think it's there yet for deploying, uh, to tens of thousands of users. So that's why customers come to sisense. We are an enterprise grade solution. Um, we're not just for, and I use the term enterprise loosely because most of who buy size are emerging technology companies. Right. That don't have engineering teams that can build in an analytics solution from the ground up. Right. They need to partner with someone not only that has the technological, uh, expertise, but industry expertise, like, what can I build that will be a value add to my customers. Right. And so we're not just a technology provider. Um, a lot of my team is actually, uh, focus more on like consulting and subject matter expertise on like what makes a good analytics solution. Right. So that's where partnering is really valuable is you get the technology, but you also get access to the expertise. And uh, again, I Don't know that AI can really replace that expertise part at this point. Maybe in the future, right, it'll have industry experts powering LLMs, but for right now um, we really do have lean uh into our expertise as a ah, analytics provider.

Speaker B: Love it. So you already mentioned and of course keeping human relu is super critical for anything at scale being a product or solution platform, anything. So now um, you mentioned earlier that you were taking some huge health scoring models like building uh, predictive models internally and of course uh, using size. So you talk about customer success, you talk about technology segment uh, of yours. So how has that been in place? Like what kind of tech stack that you guys have uh, internally to measure success? Because health scoring has become a pretty vague term and with this AI, a lot of these uh, uh, these, these platforms or models or any techs that VPs are using, they are still having human in the loop and some exceptional behaviors that is not giving them 1000% visibility because that's what they need uh, to measure the success around any account or user. Um, you know, talking about the top tier accounts, uh, it's about big money. Right? So how do you measure success as a vp, uh internally for um, Sisense

Speaker A: in terms of uh, leveraging AI or just in general?

Speaker B: In general, like of course if you, of course there's strong chance you implement AI solution or anything built off of AI. But uh, health scoring and making and imagining that success point that you mentioned earlier to making your customers widely successful is the bigger uh, purpose we all want to advance. Right. As a, as a CS leader. So how do you measure it? Uh, uh, what is it that you want to.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean I think all of us that are working in a success organization, we, our bottom line metric is always going to be retention. Right? Like that is how we look at success and failure. Now I will say there's only so much CS can do on its own as far as retention is concerned. Um, but how do we get there? Right? Like that's, that's the real tricky part. It's easy for me to say, oh, if our retention number is uh, high that means we're successful. If our retention number is low, that means we're not successful. Right? But the, that's a lagging indicator, right? What you want to figure out is like how do I prevent them, how to prevent the customer from getting to that non renewal state. Right. And that's where the health score comes in. I think gainsight was the one that really popularized the concept of a health score. Um, but I Don't know that it really like again every customer is different. And so it was, it's somewhat difficult to kind of have a one size fits all solution for, for the entire customer base where AI and LLMs have come in. It's like okay, great, we have all this usage and product telemetry on our customers. Right. We could plug it into Gainsway, which allows us to do some analysis on that or we could connect it to an LLM and allow the LLM to kind of learn and we will teach it like what does a healthy customer look like versus an unhealthy customer? And then it can just go, it's off to the races at that point. Right. Once it knows what healthy looks like and what unhealthy looks like, um, a lot of that legwork. That's where AI really does come in. And then it can build at scale. Right. You can use AI to actually build the views that you want, which I think is great. But what I think is even better is now you can build an agent that says hey, this customer is trending in the wrong direction. Right. So you better take action now.

Speaker B: Forecasting.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly right.

Speaker B: Forecasting supreme. Yeah.

Speaker A: And not wait until you have your call with them, look at their you know, health dashboard and realize oh crap, things are going in the wrong direction. Right. So now the agent really is that assistant or the csm, uh, that can uh, prevent you from getting on that call and not being prepared for that conversation. Right. You're, you're coming in with an action like hey, I see this is, let's try this, this and this. Right? So that's where I see a lot of value in health scoring in the age of AI.

Speaker B: Love it, love it. And also this comes, become uh, this becomes even super critical like the agent mode that you talk about like that predicts forecasts and recommends an action or even can do an action to some point when, when uh it understand 100% about the different exceptional behaviors across any segment. So now talking about, and that's where become the segmentation part. Because I'm a, I'm a SaaS founder myself. We're building a platform that is uh, serving the post sales specifically with revenue, account management and cs. And the biggest problem that we first faced like in the first quarter was uh this, this piece that was a lot of these teams are missing like a lot of these journey mapping segmentation. They don't know like what, what kind of uh, signals or success metrics are defining a better health or retention, uh, possible retention or what are These like uh, signals that are like not, not good enough so you take action well before time and uh, if you get notified like any of the tooling out in the industry it's just going to be a notification that hey, this customer is quitting on you. Yeah, this is just a notification. So uh, this predictive forecasting, um, I would say the score was something that was missing and as these LLMs got mature a lot of platforms started building um, this piece. But there's one thing uh, that we're building is the memory graph. I'm uh, not sure you're familiar with uh this concept that have recently been uh, initiated by Tesla. The uh, former CTO of Tesla is building second uh brains this concept and harnessing concept and this is what we follow as our technology. There is one platform by the name of agency built by X, uh VP of Engineering HubSpot X founder of Drift. So this guy is really smart but like we spoke with them, they're still missing on the whole picture of let's say you talk about one um, account with like multi user, like 15, 20 user in the account and technology segment. But uh, they are near renewal. You're not 100% sure what are these business outcomes that they've shared during the sales car, during the handoff have been fulfilled or they have taken action? Because a lot of, lot of times people say like, customers say like hey this, this is what our goals, some features, some initiatives, this is the outcomes we want from your product. And over time, during the course of three months they are not been validating themselves, you know, and then you're taking it for granted, hey they're, they're good enough, they're using the platform, uh, their users are active, their champions are active. Uh, but those relationship has been missing that the memory of that context of those business goals have not evolved from that point to three months down, which is the contextual area we're working on uh, as a product. And this is a very hard engineering, uh that's why we took a lot of time. So this, this is the whole context that you're talking about too. Like nobody is going to understand this is it might be different. Like even within your customers there are customers that are perceiving value differently. You know you have like let's say seven different modules. Uh, you know a lot of them they don't, they don't use but there are some of them that, that's how their business outcomes are tied to. So how do you think this is a vp, this contextual intelligent brand Layer for every segment, if not customer. This could be the same for one, like in technology there's going to be some repetitive standardized kind of playbooks. And if you break it down from onboarding to expansion, this entire life cycle, like you break it down success across onboarding and then adoption because this contributes to of course, the churn of retention. Uh, I've done a personal survey with more than 116 founders in the past four years. I've done a lot of these interviews. So what we've found more than 36% of the customers, they actually quit between the onboarding and adoption stage. This is like, uh, this is big thing, right? So measuring success, uh, in components is super important. Uh, and that's where you need a lot of context. Uh, because onboarding challenges are different to different segments. So how do you incorporate all of this as a vp? Uh, we all know that we are this pain. A lot of times in my second world, like back in 2017, 2018, big time, we've listed a lot of revenue and top line revenue on the expansion funnel. That was pretty broken. Um, because we didn't have those signals.

Speaker A: Onboarding is critical, right? It's sort of like the uh, newborn phase. The um, organs are very vulnerable. Right. Like if anything goes wrong, like onboarding is a time where the customer can make decision. This is just not a fit. Right. And it's. But if you can have a successful onboarding, right, Your chances of not only having that, like have a, having a lifelong customer are much greater. Nobody wants to rip a system out and replace. Like rip and replace is a pain for a reason. Uh, because it takes a lot of time and effort and, and there has to be compelling reason to want to do that. So I actually we, uh, at sisense, I've kind of like drifted back and forth. We had a dedicated onboarding function. Um, but then I realized like, the more handoffs that you have within an organization, the more chance that you kind of hit that reset button and you introduce risk again. Right. So now onboarding is back to being a CSM owned, uh, responsibility. Uh, right. Getting that customer. And the reason is because you want to establish those outcomes early on. Right. Your first conversation with a customer coming over from sales should be, what are you expecting sisense to accomplish for your organization? Like, what impact do you like not, hey, I want 10 dashboards in a chatbot, uh, in my application. Right. It's okay, well what impact do you. Okay, great. Now that I know that I can guide you on what you should be building or what you should be focusing on to achieve those outcomes. Right. And it's also important to get multiple perspectives. I say this to people all the time, like sometimes and this is a common trap in the customer success world. You find that person that you really vibe with, you really get along with and they're your best friend at the customer and they tell you everything that you want to hear. But that's just one person's perspective at the organization. Right. Your first mission should be okay, great, let me make sure that I'm talking to two or three or four different people at that organization at different levels.

Speaker B: Particular multi stakeholder.

Speaker A: Yeah, multi stakeholder. You can't, no one like if you're, if you're, if, if someone came to me, a CSM came to me and said hey, I've got a great relationship with this customer and it's this one guy, I'm like you, that you've already made a mistake because you, you're only talking to one person. Right. So get to more people and figure out what the broad consensus is of the organization. Not one person. Right. Because I can tell you from experience, people leave organizations all the time. Right. That person leaves, somebody else takes over. They don't understand why this person bought sisense. You're educating them, they're like oh, that doesn't make sense. Nobody else has ever talked to me about this. When you have that multi stakeholder perspective now you're like okay, I see what this organization is trying to do. I understand how we connect strategically to the bigger picture here and then you can build your plan based on that. Now the CSM has this perspective, they can build their success plan that is uh, uh, addressing all of the stakeholders, not just one person. Right?

Speaker B: Yeah. And also um, of course a lot of these CSMs, uh, I would say and account managers, they're thinking about uh, usage and product analytics and they're so merit to like how they're interacting with our platforms. Multi modules, multiple users, that's fine. But when it comes to qualitative uh, uh, data analytics, um, like what discussions they had during the last meeting, the cadences, any follow ups that they have, any segments that they drop in the first like the context from the beginning is super important. Let's say uh, you talk about multi stakeholder, there's going to be one would be, let's say for us you are like VP or CCOs are like the top level stakeholder. Uh so what is that, uh, top level stakeholders talking or thinking about some of the business goals or compliments they want out of this platform. In the last record, uh, meeting, any notes, any email communication, any support. So those qualitative data is also being uh, kind of like overlooked or I would say for, for CSM's account menu. What do you think, what's your viewpoint on this? Uh, in a larger context, I know they, they'll be sitting in the moment at the meeting that they had three weeks back themselves, that's fine. But in a larger context, uh, how they like they do the decision making and follow ups, uh, is it, I

Speaker A: don't know that it necessarily gets overlooked. I um, think that CSM have a lot on their plate, um, particularly here at Sisense. Right. We're helping people. Silence is not a workflow tool. Right. It's something that actually needs to be engineered and implemented, integrated into a customer product. That takes a lot of time, effort. It's the CSM has to be on top of not just the customer but internal resources, sometimes our partner network as well. So it's, it's very easy to get lost in the details of like checking boxes. Is this thing getting done? Is this thing getting done? Is this thing getting gone? That's why it's important to have an executive sponsor program at a company where somebody who's not necessarily in the day to day, like I am not in the day to day, the customer, I come in maybe once a month or every couple months and take a look at, okay, how have we progressed since the last time? Is the customer in market? How many customers do they have using the platform? Um, I'm not mired in day to day operational. I'm looking at, okay, is this thing generally moving in the right direction? And if so, that's a great sign, right? And it's that then I come in and like, okay, I see that you're getting more customers on the platform. I see that, you know, uh, that usage got up. How has this impacted your market share? Have you won any deals from any competitors? Right. Have you noticed higher customer satisfaction scores in your survey responses? Right. And those are the levels of discussions that uh, executives can have with other executives because again it's very easy. Any product is going to have implementation issues, you're going to have support issues and those can be very distracting. If that's what you talk about during every meeting, that's what's really going to drive the sentiment. But if you talk about top line metrics, right, then it's a uh, healthier conversation around, okay, great, the business is healthy. We have some issues that we need to deal with on a product level. But your business is benefiting from our partnership and that's what really matters to us. Right?

Speaker B: Uh, of course living closer to the value that they are yielding out of the product. Whether they know it or not. You should know it as a partner. I would say, uh, more so now thinking about like of uh, course uh, you're at the VP role as cs. Like a lot of this has to go through expansion models. So what kind of expansion models that you have laid out with this? Yeah, a lot of these uh, VPs are thinking about going slightly adjacent use cases of the product, working closely with the product team. Hey, this is some of these, uh, we can go multi product. We can have uh, some more modules that are going to help us expand this install base, uh, with the founders, these conversations. So how you're positioning and I'm sure any analytics platform is sticking up like it's so hard to get out of it, which is a good news for uh, post sales. But again at the same time at some point you're now thinking about increasing the lifetime value of the customer expansion model. What is that uh, you guys are thinking about in the near future or have uh, as yet,

Speaker A: uh, expansion is a very important motion. Uh, I will say this is where you know, having a disciplined sales team is very important as well, right? Like you can only control so much based on the contract that is agreed upon during the sales process. Right? So uh, I know that for years ago sisense used to offer like these all you can eat contracts where basically if you spend enough money you can just do, you know, unlimited users, unlimited storage, unlimited like and then that creates

Speaker B: every other company that does it in the, in the early days.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And it creates a lot of problems on the, on the customer success side because number one, you're going to have more scaling issues. Right. Number two, right? If like what is the, it becomes a philosophical like what is the value then for the customer, right? Like how do they know that they're getting good value out of their contract, right? Because is 100 users active users good value? It's a thousand active users good value. Like when you haven't fixed them out that you're like, okay, this is our user base and of that like 60% are using it, right? Uh, that's very easy to measure adoption. When you have something that is uncapped, it's like, okay, the only place to go is down because they uh, have now figured out, okay, this is roughly what our needs are. We can scale down our contract now so Like I said, having good contracts matters in the sense of um, being able to expand and grow with customers. And you want contracts that make sense for both sides. So I'm not saying this selfishly for the technology partner. I'm saying this like you want contracts that make sense for both sides because we want our customers to grow. If our customers are growing, then that means they're getting additional revenue as well. So our motion, uh, for growing customers, once we call it a land and expand, it's not a new concept by any means. Get the customer in, figure out what is the way that they can get some immediate value. Don't oversell them too much. Right. Like we want to say, okay, why don't we start with this pilot group of customers or this, this, this product, right? And if we're successful, let's focus on getting into other products. Right? So we actually push back and say, no, you're buying too much right now. We need to prove this out before you buy more because you don't want to invite questions of I don't think we're getting what we imagined, uh, or what we thought we were going to get. Right? So focus on a concrete win that you can get for that customer. Keep the scope manageable and deliver it. Right? And then you just build on that use case after use case after use case. Right. Naturally the users will grow, um, they'll want to invest in more features. Right. By, you know, we have uh, credits that customers can buy for AI functionality. Right. All that stuff grows naturally as you drive adoption in the platform.

Speaker B: Love it. I love the way you guys are approaching it because of course, uh, before you move into the, uh, onto the expansion, retention and of course, uh, value realization, utilization should be the first, uh, and foremost goal. So now thinking about time to value what is like the ideal time post kickoff, you guys have talking about one module in a technology segment.

Speaker A: If size sense of various, quite, quite a bit. I will say like our goal, our targeted always 90 days.

Speaker B: The ideal goal, 90 days.

Speaker A: Okay, that's, that's a pretty standard baseline that a lot of companies have. It's like, let's get them going in. That first quarter's critical. Let's get something, get the value trickling in by the time we hit the second quarter of the partnership. Right. Um, it's a great target. In practice, it doesn't always work out that way. Um, again, particularly precise because we're integrating into other systems. Often these systems are going through software development life cycles which can take several months. Sometimes we end up at A six month mark. Sometimes it can go longer, hopefully not. But I would say you're in that 90 to 180 day window. You're in pretty good shape with Sison. So that's what we target because that's, that's a great timeline to launch a new product into the market, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. Now it's a pretty ample amount of time. Yeah. Even like think about sizing while you're thinking about building a product and you get it all done in less than 180 days. It's pretty doable. So now thinking about the planning, I know uh, the pricing and packaging talk about eight months back for less than $500 a month plan, was it not big enough for a company? Because now this, like there's so much of noise, so much option capabilities that they can build some of it internally to cut the cost and do more with less uh, uh, on the bandwidth side as well as the technology, tech stack side. So now companies in the, in the midsize, even like this pricing sits more on the mid, mid market size. So how do you uh, do all the education part and how is this, the funnel going from the sales and acquisition perspective?

Speaker A: Yeah, so sisense now has multiple ways that you can buy it. Um, you, so we have that um, you know, plg, you can go on the website, you can try it for free if you're interested. You're listening to this podcast, you can go to cice, this website, sign up for a free trial, um, start using it. Uh, now what I'll say is like we have those starter packages for, for those smaller companies that really just want to experiment, putting analytics in the product, kind of build something from the ground up and then as you see traction with that, right? That's when you can buy the scale or enterprise level packages where now you've got a full army of, you know, people behind you, right? You've got account managers, success managers, technical resources. Right now it's becoming, all right, let's take this concept of a thing, right? Let's get it into market, let's get the adoption right? So we appeal to people who are just experimenting with analytics and maybe small, you know, emerging startups, right? Who knows, like every day it feels like there's 10 new AI startups, right? And they all want to have some form of analytics and all the way to, okay, we have, you know, we are 200, 300, 400, 500 person company, maybe we're a couple thousand people, right? Like, but that's a different, that's a different um, Package. Right. That requires you know, maybe a few more bells and whistles, a lot more support and that type of stuff. So we're trying to make sure that everyone has access to build analytics into their product no matter what stage company you're at. And we will adapt no matter the

Speaker B: size and of course you're willing to grow with them. Right. So that's why I see the pricing is pretty much designed for that too. So now for all the VPs struggling uh, uh, with the retention piece and CHURN is a big hit that they're getting, uh, what is that one thing that you would like to share in terms of leveraging, uh, AI building systems and processes that can help them mitigate churn? Uh, uh, I'd be pretty vocal about it because it's one of the biggest things. A lot of companies are struggling, especially the companies that are in the first three years pre product market rate, um, they are going wide and it's so hard to go wide these times, especially with so much of uh, AI adoption on the other side and of course uh, the capabilities of AI costing them tokens and everything. So on average a B2B SaaS in the first three years takes like uh, minimum six months to get uh, the return of investment of the acquisition. So they need to retain the customer good enough. And the second piece that is uh, hitting them, the uh, Churn part as well is they're not getting a lot of annual contracts because it's more about like monthly quarterly contracts. You uh, know. So with all of this usage based uh, consumption based uh, pricing. So what is that one thing you would like to see, uh, and people would like to learn from Andrew that you have practically maybe applied or you're thinking of a plan.

Speaker A: First off, you're not alone. Like I think you've made it clear that a lot of companies are struggling with CHURN right now. Um, like AI has a lot to do with that. Right? Like uh, I think that's one piece of it. This, the second piece is at least in the analytics space there's been a lot of commoditization like I saw a couple weeks ago, like Claude can actually build a lot of uh, dashboards and analytics not meant for, you know, building into your product but so you have to make sure that you're also focusing on the right markets. Like one thing that Sisense has learned is we are not a great solution for every analytics use case. Right. We used to try and satisfy people who want to just do size internally.

Speaker B: Great.

Speaker A: That's one price point. Um, now, if you want to build analytics at your product and scale, that's a different price point. Right? And so it's important for you to look at how your customers are using your product. What are the, uh, attributes of your customers that are renewing, expanding versus the attributes of those who are turning. And we quickly identified, okay, the traditional BI is not a great fit for sisense. It's highly commoditized. It's an area that no matter how many resources we pour into it, we're going to see a lot of churn there simply because there are cheaper solutions on the market that can do 80 to 90%, if not more. Right. So focus on where you differentiate. Right. So how are we differentiating? We're AI powered, right? A lot of analytics products will say that, but I can truly say that we are not only we AI powered, but we are the AI powered embedded analytics platform that, uh, customers want to partner with. Right? You're. So you're someone building application, uh, and you want to introduce analytics, that we are your partner, right? I would say take, take a look at your contracts, know who's paying a lot, and don't be afraid to proactively offer them a better contract, right? Because if you're thinking about the fact that they may be paying too much money for the contract that they're in, they're definitely thinking about it, right? And they may think, okay, well, my way of getting a better price is to go look at some competitors, evaluate solutions and see how that, um, stacks up against what sisense is offering me. And when you, when you let them do that, you're introducing the fact that, okay, they may find someone that does what they need and they'll make the decision six months ahead of renewal, you're out the door. So if you identify that that risk is there early on, go to them, say, hey, we recognize your usage is not quite where you know it needs to be. As far as what you're paying us, we want to offer you a, uh, renegotiated rate. And it solves two problems. One, it, yeah, you're going to take a little bit of hit on churn, but it's better than losing the customer entirely. Number one second, you're taking care of a renewal much earlier than you would have otherwise. Right. Um, and perhaps you even avoid them going to market and looking at other solutions. So those are some things I can recommend is like, you really have to have an understanding of, hey, who's paying me a lot of money and who is actually getting the value that that, that they're, they're paying for. Right. And if there's a big mismatch there, if to figure out why maybe they're not an ideal customer even though they're paying you a lot of money. And you just have to manage that from a contract perspective. So um, that would be just some of what I've learned. What we've experienced here is I can

Speaker B: see them, they're absolutely uh, practical because uh, this point in time it's so hard to go wide. So it's always good to know where, go narrow and know who you're solving for. And second is uh, making sure that your contracts are absolutely market competitive and market is changing so fast so you can think of like even quarterly contracts, um, you know, uh, buy yearly contracts too and thinking m about like how the other platforms are in the market are doing the same capabilities and lesser price and that can prevent uh, the churn. So I really appreciate uh, you've been uh, absolutely concrete into everything that you've shared and uh, wish you best of luck for all that. You're thinking number one thing that you've uh, implemented uh, in the vp, uh starting out this VP role. I know that you were Director of Customer Sales prior to this too. But number one thing that has made the bigger impact into this organization, size is taken your only your initiative.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I would say uh, one of the things that I picked up early ON in my 10 years, there was a bigger drift or need for product expertise. Right. Uh, so one of the things in the customer success world, you have the revenue focused, you have the you know, engagement, uh, focused and then you have sort of the product focused. Right. And each customer base is going to be different. And what I recognized early on is that uh, we had a very revenue focused team which was lacking in product expertise on the CSM side. Right. And that meant that CSM were just kind of managing around renewals and not really talking much about the product. They were relying on other people to have that conversation. So the first thing I said is I want product expertise at every level of this organization. I don't want you talking, just talking to customers about contracts. That's how you erode trust. It's not how you build trust. Right. So I said okay, you're all going to learn how to use the product. Right. If you haven't before, this is now standard. Uh, and I have to say I am very impressed in uh, it's been a little bit over six months. I recently gave a presentation to this to our uh, Executive leadership team. It's impressive how quickly people can learn if you give them the right focus. Right. So now our CSMs are doing roadmap conversations with every single customer. They're talking about how to use features. Right. The dependency on these like, subject matter experts has sort of died down a little bit and they're able to focus on more complex tasks. So that would be my. Absolutely. The number one thing absolutely identified. There was a profile mismatch between our CSM team and what our customers needed and we were able to address it.

Speaker B: That you as a CSM or any post sales, you, uh, cannot even sales, you cannot have a business acumen without looking at the product and how as a software it's feeling down and making an impact and solving, uh, any problem. Um, you know, and this might have also helped you, uh, and your team in the expansion model too. You know, when a CSM knows, hey, this is a new module that we're launching, hey, this is how it's making an impact. This is the customer side of it. Like, this is the industry impact. You know, and then you look at like, hey, this customer is same industry. Like, why not, like, why not just bring this up in the next case or maybe a review, maybe during a success plan, keep it this inclusive. I love the way that you mentioned. So, uh, and on the channel part, Andrew, like as a leader, because no matter what, where you are, what team, what culture, uh, people look up to you. Like if you're a leader, a VP or head of CCO or founder, people definitely look up to you. And if you make the right decision on the top line, bottom line follows. So your job and everybody, every leader's job is to just channel them to the right direction because you're not as close to the industry and how AI is moving everything, you know, they're not as close as you. Right? So you're picking all of this, like, how does it want then keep feeding them and channeling them towards the right. And this is the half of the leadership, like going first and um, you know, challenging people and making people follow. So thank you very much for being that leader and you, it was really nice, uh, talking to you and I had so much to learn about sessions and you deal with pretty much did this justice.

Speaker A: Appreciate it and I thank you for having me on and, uh, you know, look forward to seeing, uh, future episodes. I like learning from all the guests that you have on your podcast, so I appreciate the opportunity.

Speaker B: You're the one, you're, you're one of those. Thank you very much.

Speaker A: All right, take care.

Speaker B: Thank you very much for listening to across the Funnel. If you got one useful GTM idea out of this show today, please share this with a teammate and hit, follow, explore, hyper, Engage at Hyper IO and dextigo at dextigo. Com.