Why Strategy Is the New Operating System - C1's CSO on the Bold Moves That Matter

Speaker A: Um, hospital system. It's going to touch their phones, which in an operating room can never, ever be down. Yeah, zero percent of the time.

Speaker B: You partner with Cisco Palo Alto Juniper. How do you perceive differentiation from your lens? Like, how do you think about differentiation?

Speaker A: Which isn't sexy. It's not like, flashy. It's the things that help build the trust.

Speaker B: April Danford, where she spoke brilliantly about. Every client is more afraid of making the wrong decision than they are interested in making the right one.

Speaker A: Very disproportionate amount of our revenue comes from a very small percentage of our customers. We're not a product company.

Speaker B: What does chief strategy officer actually means at C1? Because you just don't, uh, own strategy. Own marketing too. What is your say no framework?

Speaker A: It's a use case funnel management tool. We're having people use that type of tool to submit their ideas and then we use a prioritization framework.

Speaker B: Welcome to CXS Spotlight. I'm your host, Chiraganijo, and today's guest is Candace Halt, chief strategy Officer, uh, at C1, a global technology solution provider with nearly half the Fortune 500 companies. She doesn't own strategy at C1. She owns marketing too. And that's very intentional. Before C1, she spent eight years at Accenture and, you know, running business operations and leading global alliances. She saw transformation from the consulting side. Now she's executing it. No, planning, not operating. Actually executing it. And that's what is the intention of today's episode, is that what does modern strategic leadership look like when you're actually making bold moves and not just presenting them? In PowerPoint, everything has become about AI, about small tactical moves, about bolting in AI everywhere else. But there are very, very few companies who are bringing it at a strategic level who are taking a step back and saying that, m, we need to have a strategy officer to really make the right move and do it right the first time. And Candace is doing that. And that's what we are trying to hear. Welcome, Candace.

Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you for the introduction.

Speaker B: Awesome. So I think I want. The first thing I start is walk me through. What does chief strategy officer actually means at C1? Because you just don't, uh, own strategy. Own marketing too. How do you back work?

Speaker A: So we don't think about strategy as kind of, uh, an ethereal kind of pontification. What are we, what are we thinking about? We think about strategy as a function that helps to bring clarity to the business, bring insights to the business that are executable. And it was really intentional for us to bring strategy, the strategy office, we call it, and marketing together. Because if you think about the overall strategy of your business and you think about where you're prioritizing and focusing, strategy is going to bring clarity to help you make decisions. You want those decisions to flow through your go to market and how you show up externally in the market. So by bringing our overall broad strategy together with how our offerings are developed, how our messaging is developed, and how we bring that to our customers, it just made sense to kind of align those together because then we have that connection that we bring to operations, which drives a lot of the execution within the organization as well as sales and enabling our sellers on how we're showing up in the market and where we should be focusing to drive growth in our business.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think a strategy in a lot of mindset has become cliche as strategy. Oh, this is strategy. Right. And I, the way I perceive it is that a lot of times for strategy to really have teeth, you have to start touching everything and know everything. Right. Is that what your role entails at C1M?

Speaker A: That was actually the joke I made at our sales kickoff, is that strategy is a word that people throw around and it's always like, oh, you gotta be more strategic. Uh, what the heck does that mean? We have to have insights. We bring insights to, to make decisions. It is 80% science, 20% art. So you bring kind of some of that science together with the art, and then from there you can actually make decisions in your business. To execute what you need to do, that's going to give you the biggest bang for your buck. That's exactly what we doing.

Speaker B: Super. So I hear that many CSOs make nice PowerPoints in a very beautiful decks. Right. Um, you are operating strategy, you're executing it. That's what we spoke about just before we started. And you're making it happen across two functions, which is as a strategic operation for all day to day. So how does a planner's role differ from operator's role? If you could explain your words.

Speaker A: So, uh, I think when you're operating, you're actually making changes, but when you're planning, you're thinking about, you're just planning for what you would continue doing. But if you're really operating, you're actually making choices and then you're making decisions that change the trajectory of what you're doing in the business. Because you can plan and you can have, I mean, uh, you can make an, an annual operating plan. You can make the plan. This is going to happen. And then that's going to happen. That's going to happen. Well, it's not. It's not going to happen. So operating is actually using the insights that you have, making choices and actually making changes because of that, not just writing out kind of the order of events and how the plan is supposed to go.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's very interesting how the balance, the beauty is in the balance, because on the other side, we see a lot of companies making a lot of practical moves with AI. Right. Every time, every offering, every service becomes like a bolt on AI. AI powered this, AI powered that. But you said something very interesting, which is that strategy is the new operating system. Um, somewhere you mentioned that. I really like that because I'm thinking, what does that actually mean when most companies are stuck in this tactical mode? How does strategy become sort of the guiding principle for the company?

Speaker A: I think it's really common when there's new trends and things that are happening in the world, and AI is the biggest trend and movement and shift that we've seen in maybe ever, but certainly in quite a while. And it's easy to say, oh, my God, we have to do something about this. And then you buy a tool and you think, I've got to buy this tool because it's going to automate this, or it's going to help me do this better. But if your tool. I think one of the things I learned actually working with tech vendors at Accenture, is that it doesn't matter how good the tool is if it's. If you're actually not thinking about what the outcome you're trying to gain is, and you're not actually thinking about the processes that have to change in order to deliver that outcome. You're just spending money on a tool that's going to either expose the challenges you already have because you haven't actually solved the existing process, or it's just going to be expensive and it's not going to actually do anything and people aren't going to adopt it because they're not going to feel the value they're supposed to feel by incorporating that change. So tools are fine. And I completely understand the pressure, we all have it, of how are you incorporating this into your business but really understanding. And I'll just go, like when we. When we talked about our AI strategy, we took. We actually took time to look at the market of what's happening, our specific obtainable part of that market. What does it mean for us? And then how can we look at what's happening inside the walls of our business. And where do we have the most friction where incorporating a new process would actually disproportionately impact what we're doing already. So we looked at the full kind of lead to cash process and there's parts of that process that are extremely. That add just a lot of friction to how we get through from, you know, the beginning to billing, uh, and invoicing. So we prioritize where we could get the most strategic impact, most disproportionate impact of those changes. And, and we prioritize those first. And it's a process change before any kind of technology is introduced. So that, that's kind of the way we've been thinking about that.

Speaker B: Uh, well, since you started it, then why, why don't you give us the details like, so you managed two critical areas, strategy and marketing. Right? Give me one bold strategic move that you meet made each in each of those areas something that felt risky or contrarian, but position C1 for what's coming.

Speaker A: So I think. I don't know if it was contrarian, but from us, uh, when we rolled out our, our operating. We actually call it an operating strategy. It's. It was an exercise that was really necessary for the whole business because it brought clarity to where we actually sell and where we actually make money and where revenue is actually brought into the business. And so because the work that underpins that brought so much clarity, people understood some of the decisions and some of the focus areas because it's something that just hadn't been done before. This organization was built over a series of acquisitions, and each acquisition had its own kind of specific niche that it was quite strong in. But when you looked at the whole, there was some very, very clear industry trends, customer trends, strategic partners that disproportionately drove revenue for our business. And so bringing that clarity from a strategic perspective, while it showed where we should focus, I wouldn't say it was unpopular or contrarian because. Because of the clarity that, that the exercise brought to the organization and the way we brought the organization along with us on the journey so that they could understand some of the decisions that we're making. That was a, uh, that was a bold move because for a very long time the organization didn't make decisions in that way with that much insight. So that was definitely kind of a strategic, bold move from the marketing perspective. Actually, that strategic move would feed really becoming explicit about our messaging. And so there were. We go to market through the channel, we go to market within our existing customer base. Uh, but really knowing how we're differentiated and what we do really well in the market and the strategic clarity that we found really helped to reinforce how our customers see us, where we deliver the most value to them. And bringing that into our messaging and how we show up in the market was a shift. It was very much a shift to looking at how we. How within our services, whether they're professional or managed services, that we're really differentiated and we're really helping our customers do really hard things, things that just make a lot of the things within their business work well, which isn't sexy. It's not like flashy. It's just. It's the things that help build the trust that we have with our customers because it makes stuff work and they rely on us. And so being able to take some of that and bring it to our messaging is. It's another bold move, and it's very intentional, and it is very aligned to how we know that we're differentiated. So it's. It's definitely understood. There's. There is a lot of clarity on that across the organization. So, you know, I don't know about Contrarian, but certainly we did the. We did the legwork to bring the clarity so that, uh, it was understood.

Speaker B: I'll. I'll come back to Contrarian. I won't leave that, I think, because. But. But I want to, because I heard something more interesting, which is the process that you just explained that a strategy officer should lead with. Right. Which is so insightful that how do you first understand your TAM and then the service addressable market and your most propensity to win, and then you think about the friction points, which is so nicely laid out that you did. I would go one step further and ask, can you give an example of when you did this? A strategy or a marketing tactic jumped out to you and you executed that so that people can visualize that.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I would say one of the things that was the most clear when we did this exercise. Because to your point, when we did it, when we did the exercise, it's. It's some research. It's market research. Tam. Tam Sam. Som. You gotta get to your obtainable market. And then we also looked inside the walls of our business, and then there's. There's convergence of that information. And so every strategic exercise we do, we look external and we look internal. Same with our AI work. We look external, we look internal. One of the things that became abundantly clear is that a very disproportionate amount of our revenue comes from a very small percentage of our customers. And so it's not an uncommon thing. But I think the, the actual reality of that was surprising uh, because it was such a disproportionate percentage of those customers. And so one of the things we did is we wrapped a program around those customers and the uh, the client executives who support those customers, making sure that we disproportionately focused our engineering talents, our executive leadership, that we spent more time and focusing on those customers because that's where most of our revenue actually came from. And so putting programmatics around it, they're continuing to evol today. You know, we have new sales leadership today who is really going to take that to the next level. But the just bringing the visibility to that and then being able to wrap something programmatic around it to support those customers, but also those, the people who support those customers and bringing as much to those people as we can to not only protect and protect that revenue and protect those customers, but also to grow our relationships there and do even more with um.

Speaker B: I think what I love is that in an organization which has been existing for a long time, what happens is that functional leadership governs control of their area. That this has always happened in this way. But it's very hard and I think it takes a strategy officer to look at the company's outcome as the uh, or the customer as the guiding principle and say hey, everything serves the priority order of the customer. So it almost looks like aligning it based on the, based on the end goal of the customer. Right?

Speaker A: It's true. And I think one of the things when you think about doing kind of a strategic exercise, that's why it's really important for it not to be a strategy only owned exercise. You cannot do this type of work without bringing in sales services, operations, leadership, finance, the CEO like you all need to be aligned and kind of work through some of the insights and the, the AHA's and the hypotheses together. Because not only does that, it just brings people along the journey with you, but it also helps bring ownership across everyone because everyone's going to feel like the things that they brought to those discussions are actually being incorporated into the broader strategy. And that's not just executive leadership. When we've done this more broadly and with our AI side of things, we bring people in from across the organization at ah, all different levels because you want them to feel part of it. And that's one of the ways that you really drive adoption in the organization is because people Feel like you brought them along on the journey with you. They got to give their own feedback on it. They can see kind of their fingerprints on this too. And that's just a, uh. It's a better way than having strategy kind of off to the side, pull something together based on insights, and then say, here it is. You're not going to get the same adoption across your executive team or even across the organization if you don't involve people in the process.

Speaker B: Yeah, it can go. It can go south very quickly if you have too many people on. On the. On the. On the team. Right. How do you. I think you. You said something which is very logical and the right thing to do, but I'm sure a lot of people would appreciate that. How does Candace balance it, though? Because it's hard to balance. So do you have levels of decision making that this committee is finally going to make decision and this committee is going to contribute? How do you. How do you manage that?

Speaker A: So, great question. And it's, you know, it may depend on the scope of what you're trying to do. So if you're looking at a very broad corporate strategy, you need your entire executive team aligned on that because. And the way it worked for us is our broad corporate strategy. The operating strategy we're executing against feedback feeds the priorities of the business and how we measure ourselves as a leadership team. So everybody has to be involved in that. We also have members of our board that advise on some of this. And so we have different moments where we spend time with them and get their guidance and feedback, and they help to impart their own experiences into the things that we're experiencing. And then what do you get when. From the broader strategy, there were work streams that emerged thematically. So one is the customer portfolio, so that had a work stream. One was around optimizing our business operations, so that one had a work stream. Each of those, you actually get recommendations from. From people. And you want different levels of people in those working groups. And it's a great way to really raise up some really, you know, younger talents and bring some new and, um, energizing ideas into things. But you're right, you can't have it too big. You try to keep it. You want to identify what are the key areas. You want to be able to make decisions in action. And then you look for people there. And it's always nice when you get people who are volunteer or who volunteer into it because you know that they're doing because they're passionate about it, which is exactly what happened with our AI strategy, there was a number of different. With the friction points we talked about, you look at who your subject matter experts are in that specific area, and then there's people who are innately interested and want to get involved, really leveraging those people to come in and support. And then we keep the executive team informed. But it's a smaller group that's involved in that. You have it, you have services, you have strategy, and then you have operations who are really kind of the key stakeholders for the internal side of our AI work.

Speaker B: Super. Now, I'm curious about, uh, you know, C1 almost serves more than half of Fortune 500, if I'm not wrong. Right. You partner with Cisco, Palo Alto, Juniper, Genesis, and so many other companies. Right. And the focus that I read was somewhere was that you're trying to advance even into priority markets like these. Right. In a market where there are so many competitors sort of offering similar things like cloud security, AI, things like that. Um, how do you perceive differentiation from your lens? Like, how do you think about differentiation?

Speaker A: So it's a great question and it's, it is part of kind of what came out of our strategy. So we do, we do three things. We do cx, which is a lot of call center work. We do IX infrastructure, and we do security. A lot of the things we do around security are wrapped around the CCX and the IX. So you see a, uh, securitized network or you see securitized call centers. So we really look at very specifically, we do those three things and we have strategic partners across those areas that we partner with to go to market. And so we, uh, differentiate. A lot of the way we differentiate is through our services, our professional and our managed services. And we do a lot of work in some specific industries. So we really prioritize certain industries because we have a lot of customers in these industries and we take the specific offers that we do. We're working on AI enabling them as the technology evolves and as our strategic partners evolve their, their offerings and their technology. And we bring those, we bring outcomes to our customers with those. So one of the things that we know just from working with our customers is that they see the differentiator they see with us is our engineering talent. We have incredible technical expertise just, uh, across the board. And because of the incredible engineering talent we have, they have a lot of trust in our ability to make things work. So a lot of the things that we're doing touch a lot of systems. If you think about a hospital system, it's going to touch Their phones, which in an operating room can never, ever be down, 0% of the time, cannot be down. And so when you think about the customers and the experience that they're having and where some of these systems touch people's lives in real ways, having the right technical talent to ensure that those phones are never down is something that's really, really important. And so when I said earlier that we do things, and not necessarily sexy things, but we make things work for them and they trust us to do that, and that's what our services teams provide for them, that is one of the biggest differentiators for us is because within these, within these technologies, within these industries, we will make them, make it work for them in a way that others don't necessarily do.

Speaker B: Yeah, I find it very interesting and I actually like the answer a lot because I don't know how many people appreciate difference between a product company and a services company. And what it takes to differentiate a services company is like it takes a village, because you're not showing a product feature, you're showing people skill, partnership, customer experience, industry use, case. And you have so many Lego blocks that you need to connect, uh, for our customers and you need to do it for so many different buyers. A CX buyer is quite different from IX buyer. Right. And then you need to disconnect these Lego blocks that you just said that, you know, here's my engineering talent, but here's my security and identity. And then you disconnect them and reconnect them for another buyer on the fly. And you have to do it for all the industries. I understand the complexity and that's why I can appreciate that this has to land so well. You know.

Speaker A: It does, yeah. And it's, I think what's really, you know, our, our engineering talent and our services teams, they are very connected to our customers and they know what's on the line, they know what's at stake. When you're putting these networks in huge hotels or if you're doing the phone system of a hospital or banks, like, these are, these are really, really high, high touch, very important places to make sure you get it right. And so we, you know, that's, that's very important to us. And it is, it's something. We're differentiated and that's where partners trust us as well.

Speaker B: Yeah. I want to ask one question, which is that, you know, when this role is pretty hard at times, I can imagine that whenever somebody is given a title like Strategy Officer, that means big change is coming. I mean, it screams that maybe Big change is coming initially. What I mean is that then it becomes sort of the best guiding principle for the company. Like you will finish three years and like you were talking about, but when you are making those corporate strategy or strategic moves that you spoke about, oftentimes you have to make hard choices. Right. Can you think of any hard bet that was like unpopular choice at that time that oh, ah, we have always been doing it this way but you said no, but we gotta take and bite this bullet. Which turned out to be a great bet three years forward?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think everything that came out of the initial strategy that we rolled out, we were probably worried would be unpopular. But I think because of the way we approached it and the insights that we brought and kind of the journey of working teams coming together and, and like that, like I said, the clarity because I think for, for the, for this organization that was so many years of acquisitions, everybody comes from a different perspective. They come from a different place, they come from a different system. What they have visibility to, it's different. So this exercise was not necessarily one that was designed to change everything about the company. It was designed to give us the clarity so that we knew where to focus to give ourselves the best opportunity to grow the business. Because, and it was also part of another thing we, you know, when I joined here, one of the things we did was align the organization around a shared set of values which is be human, be bold and be one. And so which I love, our values are just outstanding. So we aligned around this set of values, but then we also needed to align around who we were as an organization and how we, where we do well, what are our, what is our ideal customer, who do we go to market with, who are our strategic partners? And so this exercise was also about aligning the organization around what we do really well, what we've always done really well, and how do we now move ourselves forward in these spaces with the market. And that's where the AI enabled solutions come into play because we're not changing that. We're still focused on CX and IX and sx, but the market has shifted and the strategic partners that we still have have AI enabled solutions that we now also need to incorporate in how we make things work for our uh, customers. And so it's really kind of an evolution. You have the clarity of what we do really well. And now that's the evolution and the rotation towards what's new and where the market's going and making sure that we're helping our customers as they go on that journey themselves, Themselves.

Speaker B: Super. Could you, let's say if other strategy officers or revenue officer are listening to this and even CEOs, CXOs who follow this are listening to this and they really like what you're saying. Right. And it's, it's, it's directionally really good. And I'm sure this is almost like, hey, I want to do that. I'm getting that feeling. I'm sure a lot of other people will do that as well. Is there a sort of a, uh, framework in your mind, like a 90 day strategy? 30, 60, 90 day plan that you follow that at a broad level that others can think?

Speaker A: Yeah. Yes. I don't know about. I wouldn't necessarily wrap ourselves into 90 days because I think it, it depends on where you are today, kind of how, what that would look like. But absolutely, I mean we, we. You take the, the first thing you have to do, which is sometimes frustrating, is you have to take a beat. You have to take a minute and actually look at what's going on. You actually have to do the work of understanding the market and understanding your own business. And so that takes a little bit of time. We call that discovery. So that's really understanding both sides of it. How is the market shifting? How is our market shifting? Just to be super clear like the rest you know, you have to, if, to know who you are and where you play. How is that, uh, shifting? Where do you do really well? And then what does your business look like? Are you growing? Are you retracting? Do you have specific industries that are dominant? Do you have specific offerings that are dominant? What's, what's happening in the mix of the type of work you're doing? You need to understand all of these things and then you have to make some hypotheses. So when we look at it, we kind of combine those two. You would say, oh, you do discovery, then you make a hypothesis and then you start to execute. Those would be like the, the, the different kind of tranches of work. But we like to combine discovery and hypothesizing together. Together because it allows you to kind of iterate a little bit. You have some information, you start to make some hypotheses. I think that this makes sense. I feel like we play here. Let's test that. Then you bring in your, you bring in, you bring the teams together because like I said, you've got to bring people along with you, help them understand what you're seeing versus saying we have the answer. It's just not going to go well, if you just give them an answer, bring people along with you, do the workshops, spend time really working through it with people, and then adjust your hypotheses as you, as you learn more information and you get more clarity on what you think you can do. And I like to look at things priority, like a prioritization framework. Where can you get the most impact for the least amount of time or effort. Because you really want to be able to show progress to your organization so that they can have the trust that uh, what's. What you're suggesting and what you're doing is going to work for the business. So you've got to show some of that progress to them as well. Um, and then you have to execute. And that execution again doesn't live just with strategy. The execution requires alignment across your leadership team. Your CRO, your sales leader is going to have to execute the direction of the offerings that you roll out. They've got to enable their sales team in order to do that. If there's decisions that impact the way you do your work and the way that people actually do their jobs because you're trying to incorporate new processes or AI, your COO needs to be aligned with what that looks like and to support bringing that to life. And when the organization sees that there's alignment across the leadership team, that's when you're actually going to be able to. You have each other's back without even realizing it because you're all speaking from the same songbook, because you're all aligned to what you're trying to achieve. So I think the collaboration is absolutely key, but you also have to give yourself a chance to understand what you're even looking at. Market and internally.

Speaker B: Super good. So three things. Discovery, hypothesis, trying to do it together so that there is a feedback loop and you are validating your hypothesis and then execute.

Speaker A: Align and execute. We'll say align and execute.

Speaker B: Align and execute. Because I think to me align is like happens because you took the right people along in that feedback loop and that's why they feel aligned and they buy into that, that strategy. Right? Two questions on that. One is that, do you also, when you're doing this discovery, you're understanding your offering, what we offer, you're also offering. You're also thinking where my revenue is coming from. You're also understanding your ICP and everything, right? How about comparative alternatives? Do you think about comparative alternatives that. Because in, in, in my mind, if I'm the customer, I love the, uh, I don't know if you've Read the book from April Dunford, where she spoke brilliantly about positioning, which is similar to this exercise, which is called Every client is afraid of making the wrong decision versus more afraid of making a wrong decision than they are interested in making the right one, which is like CYA phenomena. Cover your ass that I don't want to make a wrong, wrong decision. That means that at any point of time, whoever is the incumbent M. If it's not C1, that means you need to displace them as a challenger. So do you computer that thought process in your mind? You do?

Speaker A: Okay, absolutely. It's really important. When we did our full strategy, there was a whole competitive swat that came with it. So you need to know who you're competing against. And what's interesting is that for us, some of the competition changes regionally and some of it changes in the industries. And as we have been executing against this strategy and really focusing on where we're strong, the competitors that we're running into have changed and they've become different than they used to be. So it's not something you can kind of do once and say, oh, that's interesting, and then put it on the shelf. Because they're evolving their businesses too, so you absolutely need to understand them. And then even when you start thinking about new technologies and you start incorporating AI, some people are moving faster than others. So your competitors might be different again, native. When you're starting to think about that,

Speaker B: yeah, they could be native providers, you know, just, just starting very, very early. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah. And then. Yeah, exactly. So absolutely, you have to think about,

Speaker B: uh, that second is that is board involved at any place in this is. Is the.

Speaker A: That may depend on your board. We happen to have an extremely engaged and unbelievably impressive board. And so they are not only very interested in helping because this is the. Also the work that we're doing right now, uh, is just generally very interesting work to be part of. But they've done this work before. So our board absolutely gets involved different members based on their core competencies and where they've kind of aligned themselves to supporting. Some of our board is focused on helping with sales and some are focused on strategy and some are on the technology and how the tech roadmap is happening within our organization. Depending on the what you're trying to achieve, are you doing a full strategy or are you just looking at AI or how are you thinking about the evolution of what you're trying to achieve in the business where you would bring them in? It's also kind of what expectations they have. So ours happens to be very involved. We involved our board actually in some of the hypothesis to test discovery phase so that they were actually part of the understanding of the insights. And they obviously have opinions too in terms of where they see us playing well and all of that. So we included them there. We meet with them at least every quarter, just around AI in general because we have kind of a, uh, multi pronged approach to the AI strategy. There's the how we go to market, there's the how are we incorporating this in our own business and then there's the responsible AI and kind of capability development wrapper that is surrounding that. So they stay very close to us on that. But I would say that depends on your specific board and what their expectations are and also what their competencies are and how they want to support. But uh, ours is very active.

Speaker B: Super. I have a fun question now, uh, uh, and I want to move on from one time strategy to living with that strategy, like living and breathing. Because I think once you lay down either the big scale strategy like the corporate strategy or AI like the individual strategies, what I liked most was uh, your hand in execution, in the execution of it. Not just that strategy part, but that comes with its own sort of privileges as well as disadvantages which is that everybody would want to come to you with an idea of hey, why don't we try this AI strategy. I just went to a conference, I saw this. Do you know our competitor introduced this. Can we do this right? So it's at every moment there is a, ah, no idea. There's a new idea on your table, right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Um, my question is this, that ah, what is your say no framework? How do you say no or yes? I know this will impact a lot of people internally but, but this will help a lot of people externally that how does a strategy officer decide when an idea come to them? What's their guiding principle?

Speaker A: So I think it, again it depends a bit. So for AI we have, we're rolling out, it's a use case funnel management tool. And so one of the things you want and that's going to help with driving adoption is for people to feel like their ideas. And it's a little bit grassroots. You want people thinking about how can I incorporate uh, things into their business to make their jobs easier, to make their lives better, to make them more productive, et cetera. So we're having people use that type of tool to submit their ideas and then we use a prioritization framework which is back to the impact to the business. And that could be revenue, productivity, it could be margin improvements, et cetera. What is the impact and then what is the time and effort to execute those things? And we're prioritizing that way because what we can't do is everything. And we have to. We're being very intentional about how we're rolling out different use cases because it is a labor intensive. We want to make sure that the things we're doing are going to be the most, most impactful to the business. And we're making sure that people involved in it have the appropriate level of training and enable. Enablement to make sure that they can do that. Um, so for that one, that's, that's very specific. If you think about our broad strategy and where we, where we focus, whether it's from an industry point of view or with our strategic partners or what the offerings that we're bringing are, those are the questions we ask. If somebody says, oh, I think we should try this, how does it fit within some of the key areas that are a priority for us as a business? If there's three no's, they're not this, they're not that, they're not that. It's a bit harder for us to say yes to something like that. But if it's the right partner, the right customer, the right market or whatever it is, then yeah, we can do it. Even if it's not necessarily the right industry, for example. So it's, you know, you have to use some business judgment. We like to put some agreed upon. These are the areas we said we're going to focus on as a business because we know that they're going to make the most demonstrable impact to us. But also you have to use business judgment. So there is a bit of a framework. Is it aligned to our priorities and then also does it make good business sense? Is it at least adjacent?

Speaker B: Um, I'm sorry if I gave a lot of employees a way to get three. Yes, but then again, you will get better ideas because they'll be qualified. Right. Um, all right. Now I think this has come up few times, which is Sivan's AI strategy. I'm curious because in a lot of questions that I asked about where was the strategy applied, you mentioned your AI strategy and the three streams. Do you want to talk a little bit about what that is actually? What was the AI portfolio or the strategy of the company?

Speaker A: Yeah, so. Well, I'll tell you what it's not. We're not a product company. We're not creating Proprietary AI tools. We, that is not where we're, um, where we're going. We are very much focused on. There's like, there's three areas. There's. With a market, how are we making sure that we're going to market to our customers so that we're helping them with enabling AI within their businesses, and that's with our strategic partners. And so it's taking what our strategic partners have in the market and making sure that the services that we're providing around that tech are AI enabled and helping to give them real, meaningful outcomes to what they're buying, which is, that's the only thing that matters to them these days, is we have to make sure that whatever they're spending money on, spending time on incorporating to their business is going to get them the outcome that they're looking for. So there's the external side of it, which is focused on that. And then internally, I mentioned the friction points of where can we, where can we incorporate AI internally to actually help make things easier and better for our people? And so we see a lot of opportunity. Just our services team has already rolled out some specific use cases just for onboarding. So bring on new services talent. There's AI offerings so that they can get up to speed and onboard it more quickly. Then there's ways of ticket resolution. So as they're supporting our customers, there's opportunities with ticket resolution. And so again, there's seven different use cases that we actually are looking at internally. And some of them are in our services organization, some of them are in finance. So you think about billing and invoicing, there's all kinds of complexity in that process. So how can we incorporate AI to streamline and remove some of that friction in the business? And so they're rolling out in at different times because, of course, rolling out something to enable services people versus something that touches invoicing and billing, there's different levels of complexity to those things. And so obviously they're rolling out at different times, but we put them against the prioritization framework and we're rolling them.

Speaker B: Welcome to CXS Spotlight. I'm m. Your host, Chirag Khanijo, and today's guest is Candace Holt, Chief strategy officer at C1, a, uh, global technology solution provider with nearly half the Fortune 500 companies. She doesn't own strategy at C1. She owns marketing too. And that's very intentional. Before C1, she spent eight years at Accenture and, you know, running business operations and leading global alliances. She saw transformation from the consulting side. Now she's executing it. No planning, not actually executing it. And that's what is the intention is that what does modern strategic leadership look like when you're actually making bold moves and not just point? Everything has become about AI, about small tactical moves, about bolting in AI everywhere else. But there are very, very few companies who are bringing it at a strategic level who are taking a step back and saying that we need to have a strategy officer to really make the right move and do it right the first time. And Candace is doing that. And that's what we are trying to hear. Welcome Candace.

Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you for the introduction.

Speaker B: Awesome. So I think I want to. First thing start is walk me through what does chief strategy officer actually means at C1? Uh, because you just don't uh, own strategy. Own marketing too. Um, how did that work?

Speaker A: So we don't think about strategy as kind uh, of an ethereal kind of certification. What do we, what are we thinking about? We think about strategy as um, a function that helps to bring clarity to the business, bring to the business that are executable. And it was really intentional for us to bring strategy, the strategy and marketing together. Because if you think about all strategy of your business and you think about where you're prioritizing and focusing, strategy is going to bring clarity to help you make. You want those decisions to flow through your go to market and how you show up externally in the market. So overall broad strategy, together with how our offerings are developed, how our messaging is developed and how we bring that to our customers, it just made sense to kind of align those together because then we have that connection that we bring to operations, drives a lot of the execution within the organization as well as sales and enabling our. We're showing up in the market and where we should be focusing to drive growth in our business.

Speaker B: Mhm. Yeah. I think strategy in a lot of mindset has become cliche as strategy. Oh, this is strategy. Right. And um, uh, the way I perceive it is that a lot of times for strategy to really have teeth, you have to start touching and know everything. Right. Is that what your role entails?

Speaker A: That was actually the joke I made at our sales kickoff is that strategy is a word that people throw around and it's always like, oh, you gotta be more strategic. What the heck does that mean? We have to have insights. We bring insights to, to make decisions. It is 80% science, 20% art. So you bring kind of some of that with the art and then from there you can actually make decisions to execute what you need to do. Going to give you the biggest bang for your buck. M. That's exactly what we're doing.

Speaker B: Super here. That many make nice PowerPoints in a very, very beautiful decks. Right. You, um, are operating strategy. You're executing it. That's what we spoke about just before, before we started. Um, you're, and you're having it happen across two functions, which is, uh, you know, as a strategic operation for all day to day. How does a planner's role differ from operator's role? If you could explain, explain your words.

Speaker A: So, uh, I think when you're operating, you're actually making changes, but when you're planning, you're thinking about, you're just planning for what you would continue doing. But if you're really operating, you're actually making. And you're making decisions that change the. What you're doing, doing in the business. Because you can plan and you can have, I mean, uh, you can make an, an annual operating plan. You can make the plan. This is going to happen and then that's going to happen. That's going to happen. Well, it's not, it's not going to happen. So operating is actually using the insights that you have, making choices and actually making changes because of that. Not just. Right. Kind of the order of events and how the plan is supposed to go.

Speaker B: Yeah. And, um, it's very interesting how the balance, the beauty is in the balance. Because on the other side, uh, we see a lot of companies, um, making a lot of practical moves with AI. Right. Every time, every offering, every service becomes like a bolt on AI. AI powered this, AI powered that. But you said something very interesting, um, which is that strategy is the new operating system, um, somewhere you mentioned that. I really like that because I'm thinking, what does that actually mean when most companies are stuck in this tactical mode? How does strategy become sort of the guiding principle for the company?

Speaker A: I think it's really common when there's new trends and things that are happening in the world, and AI is the biggest trend and movement and shift that we've seen in maybe ever, but in quite a while. And it's easy to say, oh my God, we have to do something about this. And then you. And you think, I've got, it's going to automate this or it's going to help me do this better. But if your tool. I think one of the things I learned actually working with tech vendors at Accenture, it doesn't matter how good the tool is, if it's, if you're actually not thinking about what the outcome you're trying to gain is the processes that have to change in order to deliver that outcome. And you're just spending money on a tool that's going to either expose the challenges you already have because you haven't actually solved the existing process, or it's just going to be expensive and it's not going to actually do anything. And people aren't going to adopt it because they're not going to feel the value they're supposed to feel by incorporating that change. So tools are fine. And I completely understand the pressure, we all have it, of how are you incorporating this into your business, but really understanding. And I'll just go like when we talked about our AI strategy, we actually took time to look at the market of what's happening, our specific obtainable part of that market. What does it mean for us? And then how can we look at what's happening inside the walls of our business? And where do we have the most friction where incorporating a new process would actually disproport, proportionately impact what we're doing already? So we looked at the, the full kind of lead to cash process and there's parts of that process that are extremely, that add just a lot of friction to how we get through from, you know, the beginning to invoicing. So we prioritize, get the most strategic impact, most disproportionate impact of those changes. And we prioritize those first. And it's a process change before kind of technology is introduced. So that, that's kind of thinking about,

Speaker B: uh, that, well, since you started it, then why do, why don't they give us the details like, so you manage two critical areas, strategy and marketing, right?