How Miro Rebuilt GTM Around Renewals, ICP, and Value Selling with Sangeeta Chakraborty

Speaker A: Foreign welcome to Go to Market Science. In this podcast we share tangible, actionable playbooks from the trenches, working as Go to market strategy and RevOps consultants for our clients here at Union Square Consulting and candid conversations with revenue leaders in the market that have been there. Now let's get into it.

Speaker B: There is strong community, world class ux. Then the pandemic slowed down and Miro became an easy target to replace with free alternatives. The problem wasn't that people didn't love the product. The problem was that nobody had ever tied Miro to anything strategic enough to survive a renewal conversation. Sangeeta Chakrabarti was brought in as Chief Customer Officer and promoted to CRO within the year to rebuild the entire Go To Market motion from the ground up. Today on Go to Market Science, she's walking us through exactly how she did it. The sales plays, the ICP redesign and the operating rhythm that took Miro from PLG inbound to enter prize value selling. So when you walked into Miro as Chief Customer Officer in late 2021, the pandemic was starting to wind down at this point. Um, what were you seeing in the business that told you that the existing motion wasn't going to hold?

Speaker C: Yeah, it was actually a very exciting time to be at Merrell because people had embraced a new way of working that would have taken so much longer to accelerate if it wasn't for that, um, for the pandemic basically giving us a tailwind. So it was very exciting time. Uh, amazing to see globally gigantic corporations deciding that we are going to collaborate on a virtual space. Um, so obviously being the leading product in that market, we saw a, ah, ton of interest and constant inbound coming at us. Um, so when I joined it was a very exciting time. But one of my first memories, Rachel was walking into our first QBR in Los Angeles and just looking at the amazing achievements and was very impressed. Everybody had, not everybody, but a very large proportion of the reps had overachieved and you know, they absolutely deserved those uh, achievements. They were m posting some significant wins on the board with many, many multimillion dollar accounts. Um, what got me thinking was I was curious about the closure of the renewal cycle. I always want to know what are we selling that I can go back and say, look, we delivered this for you and I was looking for what was the pain we solved and what's really a tangible use case that I can put my arms around. And that is what got me worried because I didn't get enough answers. Um, it was simply they were monetizing usage and that's a great place to be at. And there's a lot of AI companies right now that are doing exactly that. But what you have to think about is um, at the end of the day a software purchase is a business decision with a business case attached to it. And I couldn't see what that business case was ahead when they were buying it. And so now we needed to go and discover the business case after they've already bought it. That made me feel that we have to sell differently. We need to actually go figure out how do we anchor ourselves to a use case that we can then stand behind. We can say we delivered that for you. Now you go find the next use case and the next uses versus simply monetizing daily active usage or whatever usage metrics that you want to um, go after.

Speaker B: So what did that actually look like in the numbers? Ah, were you watching specific um, metrics that just weren't doing well or was it more of a qualitative sense that something was off?

Speaker C: It showed up in the retention numbers pretty quickly. So while the pandemic was rising, there was just a lot of increased. People had no really other better options. So they were using this uh, software. But to your point, as it started to abate and people went back to meeting in person, if there was no compelling business use case that they were driving using this, um, that usage started to slip and uh, there were some, I would say false metrics that looked like they were using the software, but not really for deep usage and we were not inexpensive. So when ultimately they look at the dollars to outcomes, we started seeing the conversations around renewals becoming harder. The other thing we noticed was competition coming in much more aggressively with a lower price offering and saying we can give you this, you don't have to pay as much. So that showed up in the competitive win rates. So we really had to rally around and look at the business differently and how we go after the business differently. Mhm.

Speaker B: Were you seeing that in the pipeline numbers as well? No.

Speaker C: Pipeline actually looked really good. Uh, because the way we drove pipeline was in any PLG business, essentially what you're looking at is are people in the software and then can I go find a way to monetize a group of people in sort of whether it's a team function or a department function or eventually a company wide motion where I can go and close the conversion of that usage. That's how we looked at pipelines. So it was a superficial sort of a parity metric in that sort uh, in that sense, right, you could look at that and say, we have sufficient business to go close. What I really wanted to understand is this is sustainable revenue or not? Am I going to keep that revenue for the foreseeable future or is it going to be one cycle? Um, so grr is where the problem started showing up first.

Speaker B: Okay, and so what was your first step once you started noticing these issues?

Speaker C: The first step was actually interviewing a lot of customers to understand what is valuable, why would you use it? If the pandemic is over and you're going into the office, what's a good reason for you to still feel the need to use this product? And some were tough conversations. We truly couldn't get any answers that we felt good about. And some were actually surprisingly amazing conversations. Um, for example, the cio, global CIO of a large manufacturing company in Japan said I'm trying to change my company culture to go from a sort of a state in office, very formal. He had 200 local CIOs that he managed, um, a team of this is a very massive business. And he said, everybody is sort of living in their own silos and they're working in their own corners. And when we do connect, we connect in this very long formal way. So it's blocking innovation, it's blocking our speed to go to market, it's blocking our interaction within the company. Our culture isn't changing. So I want people to come and interact on this product and I'm actually going to go measure and see how does that interactive work now translate into faster outcomes for us. So interesting business cases that we had not thought about. Uh, but the crux of it was we had something like 60 to 70 million users on the platform at that time. Now miro is over 100 million. We had to go and understand out of that what is the preponderance of use case? Where do people mostly use Miro and for what purpose? And we very quickly narrowed it down. It was mostly product developers like product managers, product thinkers who were ideating on products, who were working with cross functional teams like the designers, the engineers who are doing, uh, early levels of prototyping. They were then taking their product development workflow, um, mostly agile products development workflows like BI planning, uh, rituals that in the olden days they would have to go fly a whole team into a city and then sit and walk around the room and try and get everybody's input. This could be done much more better on a, uh, virtual whiteboard. So we understood that these were the sort of the um, key use cases, they were the ones that you would expect to see the most. And then we found more and more around this collaboration and culture change and innovation use cases that started to pop up. So the first thing was go and talk to customers and ask some hard questions where you maybe don't want to hear the answers to because some of it is going to be uh, you know, not what you want to hear, but that's the legwork. Um, so that coupled with a ton of data analytics to give us some

Speaker B: scale answers and when you were still trying to like diagnose the issues and see what's going on, I know you had like multiple teams across multiple geographies, um, all running their, or potentially all running their own version of the motion, um, what that do to your ability to actually inspect. Um, what was really going on here.

Speaker C: It was very difficult to inspect and every, every team had their own approach to understanding how to increase the business. The one commonality on the PLG side was you've got usage that we can convert, right? So if you have a set of people that are uh, that belong to an enterprise and that they're doing work without being on our enterprise license, it's an easy motion to go and go to the um, security or the IT team and say you really should have this under enterprise license because it's going to protect you in many, many ways. That motion was the first level motion that was fairly consistent across the globe. But when we went to the next level of complexity or to sell to a use case to really understand what is the highest value use case you could go and do discovery around, we had a lot of people doing different things, um, trying to understand. The first thing was realizing that they needed to do it. And then once they realized it, figuring out the discipline of how do I actually go about um, was inconsistent. Best of efforts. A lot of people trying to solve the similar problem, but it was many flavors around the world.

Speaker B: I like how you approach this because um, as you said, it wasn't that the pipeline wasn't doing well. Um, you had like a robust pipeline. It was just that the customers that you were selling to weren't sticking around long enough to have enough, you know, lifetime value to probably, you know, have the right LTV CAC ratio. Um, so trying to see like who is our actual ICP and who can we um, target and sell to more of so that they actually stick around and we, they don't leave within a cycle. Um, I think a lot of CROs and revenue leaders, they they focus quite a bit on the front end and the pipeline and seeing, you know, if the pipeline's healthy, then everything's must be healthy. Right? So we're just, we're selling more and that's great. And they don't um, the impact of what happens after the sale. And like if you're selling to the wrong people, like sure, you're, you're closing these deals, but they're still the wrong people. So I like that approach.

Speaker C: Our view case, I would say they're, they may be the right people, but they're not sure how to best use your product. Um, luckily we didn't see a lot of customers departing, but we saw enough signals, early signals that gave us cause for concern. And so we reacted within 2, 3/4 to say we're going to have to change how we sell, how we have them adopt what is our customer success team doing and what's our sales team doing and then what's the renewals team doing to go and close that next renewal so we can go upsell more. That whole motion had to be changed. But um, that early signal was what I think we recognized as risk and then started to change. Um, it was a hard change because to your point, when it looks like it's easy, uh, landing and you're closing the number, why go take the trouble to slow your deal down and go ask all of these questions. You just want to close the deal and move on. Um, but it wasn't sustainable revenues. Uh, that was our take.

Speaker B: I like that too. So, yeah, so not necessarily the wrong people, but just the wrong use case. So they're approaching um, the product in a way where they're not going to adopt it in a manner that's going to allow them to continue using it. So it's just a mindset shift, really.

Speaker C: It's a, it's an education. It's a education shift. Yeah, education of how to really think about getting the most value from the product. It is also doing some deeper business discovery to understand what is the biggest problem you can solve for them. Because the thing that was in Mira's favor and continues to be is the product is amazing to use. The user love is real. But at some point user love does no longer contribute to keeping your margins and you're keeping your product revenues. Uh, so it's about taking the person who's happy to happily doing a workshop. The workshop is a fleeting use case. I could do a workshop with you, Rachel, and never need to look at that any again. I'm done with the workshop, my day's over, I don't need your product after that. But the point was the workshop is just the tip of product building. All through the product building life cycle, you have to constantly interact with so many cross functional teams and you're creating artifacts that you have to keep back, coming back and referring to. And as long as we built deep integrations, we built workflows into the product, workflows that are pertinent to how you build product. Now for example, now you would need to have deep integration with, let's say cloud code. Right. In those days it was figuring out how to have deep integration with products like Atlassian and figuring out how to go build those things, those hooks where the product team could say, oh, now I understand I could actually use Mirror to do far deeper things than I'm doing right now. That was the difference in motion that we had to. And I just see around the world all of the um, product development, uh, tools that are now AI driven. I see the same trend. I see people using it, they love it, it's so easy. I don't need to be a coder. But really a year from now, are they going to pay a million dollars for that product? Unless you're really truly using it for valuable things. That's the question I think CRS have to keep asking.

Speaker B: Right? That's so smart too. And it really loops in everything from sales, marketing, product, customer SaaS. Everyone needs to be working together on these kinds of issues to ensure that you're not just selling this product, but the product is actually making your customers money so that they can keep paying for it and coming back and they have a use case to their, their CFO and their CEO and they can get budgeting for it and everything. Absolutely.

Speaker C: That's the boring concept of the buyer's journey has never gone away. Uh, we might be fooled into thinking it's getting somehow accelerated past. But at the end of the day someone's looking for the business case.

Speaker B: And that's a huge thing with AI these days too. I think it's like everyone's using AI. There's so many different AI tools out there. Everyone feels a pressure to be implementing AI into their businesses because every, their competitors are doing it too. Um, but I find a lot of, a lot of companies are struggling to, well, it depends. I think it's getting better now. But they used to definitely struggle quite a bit with finding roi, um, with AI tools. Uh, we're definitely, people are figuring it out and we're definitely seeing more and More ROI being found there. Um, but yeah, that was a big issue with uh, with these AI companies for a while because uh, no one's going to keep paying for AI if um, it's not actually doing anything useful or, or I think we are getting for revenue.

Speaker C: Sorry. Yeah, I do think it's getting better. I still think there's a lot of exuberance that needs to be tempered back into ground realities because the cycles we've seen many times before. Right. So what happens is you've got all of these point solutions and then there's the one or two large entities in the space that sort of threaten to start to encroach in your. For example, we were all these point solutions, right. But we knew Microsoft was always going to have a whiteboard. How can you be different and much more valuable than simply a um, good uh, enough product? I would say in the AI world we have to always think about now the large LLM providers because they're coming in one way or the other into different parts of that space. So what is your unique niche that you are offering? It's maybe vertical integrations or templates or some kind of a user generated, um, unique to you value prop that you have to deliver to separate yourself from the large bundling that's going to happen for sure. Consolidation and bundling is going to come into every software cycle. So we're just seeing the beginning of the cycle where it hasn't quite happened. But it's coming, we're going to see it.

Speaker B: So you're looking at all this stuff and you realize that you finally need to change how the company sells and onboards and coaches customers. Um, walk me through how you built um, that plan to make these changes. Where did you start other than talking to customers?

Speaker C: It started with understanding what use cases that we thought were our core use cases. Then it started with building the playbook. So just saying this is our core use case means you have to understand, um, how big is the pain point? How do you scope that out? Who is the ICP that you have to go and do the awareness? The buyer journey to me is awareness building. Then they do the evaluation, then they do the negotiation, then they do the adoption, then they start to become actual advocates and go buy more. So this is the cycle. So along that cycle, marketing and product in the beginning had to be very clear what is the ICP we're building for and what does that ICP need? And you should continuously experiment and learn. So from there we looked at, okay, if we, this is the icp, this is the problem we're solving. That means that we needed to understand what is the messaging and for what Persona, uh, and how do we understand the biggest problem that we were solving that started, uh, to design our playbook. And the playbook said, we are going to go after this part of the market. One thing that I truly believe we have to think about in Go to market is when you're creating a go to market motion, you have to think like a product organization in the sense that you are constantly building the leanest version of what you're testing. And then you go get data and validate or invalidate your hypothesis and you go and do the next level of testing. So we set up this sort of experimentation basis where we tested the first round, learned a few things, failed in a few ways, and said, okay, that's not the right approach. Let's do it this other way. So we did that sort of constant iteration to understand the core use cases. So that was one on the product and marketing side. And then it was training the sales team on using the command of the message methodology to go look for these pain points and then solving it. And then when we closed the deal, it was very important for the CSMs to make sure those use cases were actually adopted. So that was the end to end life cycle.

Speaker B: Who did you land on being? Um, that ICP for you?

Speaker C: So for us, the ICP was the product manager.

Speaker B: Okay. And, and what made you, like, confident that that was the right buyer?

Speaker C: We looked at the data. The majority of our users were actually product managers. And they had a problem that we knew we could solve because their problem was, how do I get quick alignment with everybody that needs to understand what I'm trying to build so we can increase the speed of going to market. So, uh, and all of these teams are generally remote teams. They're distributed teams. Going to market took a long time. Um, and we were taking products that were not just software products. You could be building a car for Volkswagen, you could be building a shoe for Nike, you could be, uh, even creating a potato chip for Pepsi. Ah, Lululemon with a new athletic wear. So pharmaceutical companies coming up with new drugs. Uh, we had, uh, Volkswagen building a car, Ford building a car, and Pepsi actually was coming up with a new flavor of a potato chip, which we created a whole story around. They, uh, were releasing a new potato chip for the younger generation in China, and they had to collaborate with their design teams in France, with manufacturing teams in other locations, and with the. Obviously the target market was in China. So across the globe, this huge distributed team had to go and understand how do you put a product development process for a potato chip together? And they said it used to take them three years, it took them 10 months to get this to market. So we took these hard numbers and built business cases around the thing that everybody wants to get done, which is to increase the speed of market. Right. Speed to market was what we anchored on. So that was the use case, uh, the broad use case. There were use cases underneath it. And depending on the product that you were building, if it's a software product, we went heavily into agile. If it was other kinds of product, we helped them understand what is it that they needed to get done differently to make that speed faster. Uh, and that's what the sales team started to go searching for. Like these are the use cases, these are the pain points, that's the discovery you have to do, and that's how you anchor the business case around. Quick pause.

Speaker B: Everything we talk about on this show, Diagnosing go to market ops, prioritizing projects for revenue impact, processes, metrics, insights, building a predictable go to market engine. We've built frameworks for all of it. They're free and ungated on our website, unionsquare consulting.com frameworks. The link will also be in the show notes, so make sure you check that out. All right, back to the episode. So can you walk me through, um, how you build specific sales plays around specific use cases and what one of those plays actually looked like end to end? If you could pick one.

Speaker C: Yeah, we picked, um, PI Planning as a very standard use case that we could go after. The reason we picked it is that 65% of our user base was in product and developer, uh, groups. And of that a huge number of them were just building software. So there's always these other industry examples. But truly the core of all of it was software building. Software companies, high tech companies. So we went there and we tried to understand what is it that is the biggest pain point that they absolutely needed to solve other than workshops. Because like I said, workshop felt lightweight. You could see, see another product easily replace that. So what was unique to us is that we could actually help a complex set of workflows happen, uh, on this one platform and bring distributed teams together to solve that problem across time zones, across groups, across different ways of working. So to us, the most, um, sort of the best example of that was the PI planning process. And so if people, I mean not everybody's aware, so I'll just walk you through it. But essentially what happens is that, um, the beginning of a period, let's say a planning period, could be three months, the teams come together and say, we are going to build product. We have all of these potential things we could build. So the first thing is to bring that number down. And to bring that number down, it takes so much collaboration and discussion and arguing and arguing and sort of bargaining and uh, even estimating how much one takes versus the other, that usually is done either in person. You could have 60, 70 people all in one location. And we had these pictures of people coming together for this gigantic workshop. And then you bring all of these people together. There's no actual effective way to get the voices of 80 people out. And so some way or the other, some ideas would get dropped, maybe great ideas would get dropped or real problems would not get surfaced. Plus it was extremely expensive. So we started going after that use case because it was clearly something we could solve. So the business case was less travel cost. You could hear the voice, you could get the voice out of everybody in the room. And because of the product you could actually get anonymous voices out. So there's nothing hidden that somebody's afraid to say because the software would now allow you to be able to put anonymous feedback on the board. So that was a very core use case. So that was what we anchored on. So then we started looking at how do we go to our, ah, target, use our uh, account list and create really specific accounts that we wanted to go after first or P0 accounts. In the P0 accounts, who's the development team leader under them, how many product teams exist? And then let's go after those product team leaders. So that was the marketing sort of campaign generation that we did. We also could see the data within our software itself because many of them were existing users. So we just had to go find the person who had the biggest influence on this, who typically did run BI planning. And then we started doing some examples. So for example, BlackRock Massive customers, they had this exact same use case, lots of people flying in. And we were able to showcase to them how using our templates, they could get this work done much more effectively. And it became a really sticky use case for us for them to really get the value. They saw a lot of value in Miro because of this one use use case, which then generated other use cases for us. What it needed was discipline on this campaign, discipline on figuring out the icp, and then a lot of discipline for the sales team to really hunker down and get this use case. Content out. It's a uh, much harder, higher friction, seemingly difficult process. But what we really saw was once you got that done, the CSM knew clearly what is the outcome they needed to make sure every PI planning was done on Miro. So it's a much more measurable outcome. And at the end of the year when he went back and said you saved X number of dollars on travel costs, you made sure the culture of the company was all inclusive, you got your product to market faster. That's a much better business discussion than you have 5000 users and your daily active usage is 0x numbers. It doesn't really mean anything to somebody who's trying to figure out do they want to spend a million dollars plus on this?

Speaker B: Absolutely. That's awesome that you're able to show like a dollar amount that they saved on something directly related to using your product. That's awesome. Um, not a lot of companies are able to show that.

Speaker C: It's a tough problem. And we invested a lot on the value engineering function which was part of our sales engineer team. They did that estimation upfront to make it easier. Because I also feel that as sellers we need to do a better job of helping our customers buy. I think we assume they know how to buy, but many buyers are for the first time putting a business case together and for the first time going through a paper process. For the first time they're thinking about a buying center and influencers and detractors. So you almost have to help them go through that process. And once we started doing that it was um, much easier.

Speaker B: And so what we're um, operationally looking at like the way that you changed your sales process and uh, how you trained your reps to sell these um, use cases, um, what kind of like entry and exit criteria did you have to input into the CRM to ensure that they're um, selling to these, these new hyper specific niche down buyers.

Speaker C: Yeah, we had at every step of the sales process before you went from one stage to the other, um, exit gates. Uh, so for example for the first gate, which is awareness building, you needed to have attached yourself to an ICP and a potential use case. The second stage you're trying to validate if there's truly a business case to be made at the end of that stage, before the end of a technical evaluation, you now know there is a buyer, they truly have a use case that is dollars attached and all they're trying to see is if the technology works, they're going to use it. Right. So we needed them to get to at least the use case identified and the buyer identified by them. Oftentimes we had a champion identified but not the buyer. But that's at least the use case needed to be identified. Then the third stage was the technical evaluation. And it could be in some use case, in some simple ones it's a demo, in some cases it's an actual poc. Uh, and as part of that we worked to figure out that value engineering case to, to make sure that they figured out what the business case at the end of it. So the end of stage three is technical evaluation done. Stage four was entering negotiation. End of stage four was negotiation done. And it's either a close one or a close lost.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: So those were the broad gates that we put in place.

Speaker B: Okay, cool. And how did the reps react to having much more of that responsibility on their shoulders? Because, uh, it's a lot of steps to go through for a team that's been previously converting self service accounts.

Speaker C: Yeah. So, um, I talked with a lot of people, other CROs who have done this transformation. Um, one very important advisor to us was Luca, uh, Lazron from. He was the ex sprinkler CRO and he had done a very big transformation, taken the company from 400 million to over a billion, taken them public and he went through a very big transformation as part of that. So I would pick his brain. I was like, Luca, uh, I'm going to go to this team and say you have to do things differently. But what they've done in the past has worked. So there's going to be resistance. And this is what he said. And um, it turned out to be true. He said, what you'll find is that there's going to be 20% of the team that kind of knows what you're saying. They're doing it anyway. They're the ones that are actually getting you the big deals. They're the successful sellers. So in some ways you're actually looking at what they're doing and trying to scale that out. So that's the 20%. There's going to be 30% of the team that will absolutely disagree with you and feel like what they've done is the right way and there's just no other way. And you're just making their lives harder. And then there's the people in the middle that are saying, I want to be like the top 20%. Just tell me how. And so your job is to work on that middle and showcase the top. Like, don't neglect them. They want, they need Validation and appreciation and support and they can be your champions. So take the champions, give them more support, take the middle, help them become the champions. And there's 30% that you know, you just have to know they're not a good fit. And so we saw that sort of shift not exactly in percentage terms but there were some people who never thought it needed to change and there were some people who were driving the change and were learning from them. And then the middle, once we started creating the playbooks and the enablement and giving them the support board, they started to shift. And nothing speaks better than results, right? Once you see that you're able to actually not just close the account but you keep the business. Um, because they did have GRR targets to think about. Um, the other thing that we had to do was change incentive plans. So in the beginning we had sort of CS was worried about grr, uh but not sales. And sales was worried about bookings and it wasn't enough. We needed CSMs to think about bookings as well. We needed them to think about growing the business, not just protect existing revenue. And we needed sales to think about selling long term viable business. Um, so we began to find a way to merge and do sort of an 8020 here and a 2080 there. And we saw the behavior shift, um, where they were all leaning together as a pod to say how do we both protect and grow the business? So we saw the behavioral shift um, by giving the tooling and also looking at incentives.

Speaker B: And how did you help um, your managers enforce these new processes and enforce um, this meshing between departments.

Speaker C: Um, I think enforcing is always a very um, short term thing. Ultimately people need to be convinced this is the right thing to do. So a few things happened. Um, every change we drove, we drove in a sort of a cascading manner. So first thing we did was we went to the GEO leaders and said here's what we are thinking, what do you think? And got a lot of feedback but buy in. And they would say okay, here's how we do it. Do we do it this way here but this other way there. So we got alignment at that level. Then we said okay, let's jointly now go to the next level, the directors and say here's what we are thinking, what do you think? So we got feedback at the director level and then we went to the most important which is the first line managers. By the time we went to the first line managers they were seeing that their sort of their chain up all the way had aligned. So it made more Sense to them that people had validated. It wasn't coming from some ivory tower CRO office saying tomorrow we're going to be different. It was all coming through their leadership chain. Understanding and adjusting along the way. And then in terms of getting the two disparate teams like CS and sales to work together, it took some doing. Um, there's always a little bit of a big or small disconnect in incentives and the way they look at the problem. Um, but getting people together in the same room and doing workshops together. We did joint workshops for GTM problem solving together. Giving people a chance to be human together allowed people to understand the disconnects themselves. Knowing that they had to solve the same problem at the end of the day got that behavioral shift going and this sort of cascading communication constantly, um, helped us get buy in. So it took a few quarters, um, but we got there eventually.

Speaker B: And so you also built a ah, value engineering team and a professional services team essentially from scratch. Why were those necessary for the new motion and what did those teams actually do on a deal?

Speaker C: Yeah, so they were absolutely crucial because the value engineering, when you're closing a uh, $2 million deal or even retaining a $2 million account, you have to have somebody who can do the math behind the tco. And it's not fair to expect that the sales rep will magically figure something out or the SE will magically figure something out. You want it to be repeatable. And I very strongly believe in specialization and repeatability. So we had um, a few people under our sales, um, engineer leader who began to put this function together. And it took us some while. Just as we were understanding the use case, we needed to know the levers for putting a business case like this together. But once we had understood it, it became a repeat place. So for PI planning we knew here was the package, um, very crucial in this way of selling. It wasn't important when we were converting usage to dollars that that didn't really need that function at all. Similarly on professional services the reason we needed it is we were going after these large companies that didn't know how transformation worked. They understand software, they understand their business. But if you say to, let's say BlackRock for example and we say okay, tomorrow you're going to be doing your business differently. And we just sort of abandoned them with some education courses. That doesn't help them do change management. There's no bumper rails. When they get stuck, who's going to unstick them? We put in this professional services team. Initially we didn't need it because in a PLG motion, onboarding isn't a thing. You're using the product from day one, so you didn't really need a services onboarding. But when we started getting to these harder use cases, we realized that transformation definitely needed services. And so that was the reason we started Putin professional services. Again, as with everything we tested, experimented, we had a very small team, gradually added more people and started to see how we can scale that out. Um, but it gave us a lot of stickiness and better outcomes once we put the services team in.

Speaker B: And were there deals early on where you personally had to get in the room with the economic buyer, uh, to prove that this could work?

Speaker C: Every deal, uh, ultimately you have to go to the economic buyer and help them see that this would work. Yes. It's only the early adopters that, you know, you've got the economic buyer ready to buy. But for after that, you absolutely have to go and help them understand why this is the right choice.

Speaker B: But at this point, you were, I believe you were the CRO at this point in the transformation.

Speaker C: Yes, a year into it, I was the CRO.

Speaker B: Yeah. Do you have to, like, personally go into these rooms, uh, and talk to these buyers?

Speaker C: Yes, yes. I think what the buyer wants to know is not necessarily I need to have the CRO in the room explaining it to me. They want somebody who understands how the business works and they want somebody who can say, here's the benefits. Whether it's the CRO or the product seller, it doesn't matter, but here's the benefit. Here's how you will think about your business differently. Six months from now, you're going to see this change. Eight months from now, you're going to see this change. And a year from now, you're going to see this change. In many of those organizations, they wanted to hear from somebody senior, but that's what we had to do across the board, up and down the chain.

Speaker B: Do you have any interesting deal stories from when you had to do that? I know you drove deals with, uh, Novartius, Amgen, Red Hat, Lululemon, uh, Fujitsu.

Speaker C: Yeah. So, um, I don't remember who I'm supposed to name for what story, so I'm going to keep it gentle. Uh, but, uh, the large. Right, so very large. Um, pharmaceutical company, they used Miro in the pandemic just like everybody else did, which is. You are not in the same room with me. Let's get on a whiteboard. Um, but that whiteboard use case is the one that we would dread because it had the least value. So what we had to do is to understand how do they do their drug discovery, how do they go about interacting with the different parts of the business. One is doing drug research and discovery, one is taking drug to market, one is internal. It, um, there's the marketing team. So there's all these different entities and we had to actually go and sit with them. This is where professional services came in, understand how they worked, and then came back and said, okay, what are you doing right now? You could do differently with Miro. So it literally had to do this before after use cases with services that got us a lot of success. And uh, Novartis and Amgen are pharmaceutical industry companies. Um, Fujitsu is doing the transformation of their culture and the transformation of their business. Pepsi, like I said, was trying to build very quick ways to bring up international product to market with teams across different time zones. Um, so that is how we went after it. Um, uh, I think Fujitsu was an interesting story where the CIO came in and said, I'm just going to change my culture. I have 200 global CIOs, I want them to look differently at our business. Came into our office in San Francisco and said, how do I do it? And so we went through this whole workshop, showed him how we behave. We in our distributed teams work together and for him that was eye opener. Um, and he's a very influential CIO in Japan. So once he started becoming a proponent, it really helped us open up the Japan market because we could say this is, this is what he was, um, talking about. And it was a very common use case for Japanese companies to be wanting to go into this sort of transformation.

Speaker B: So yeah, yeah, copying culture is a big thing in Japan. I lived in Japan for a year, um, when I was in high school. Just a fun fact about me. Um, and so like I lived with a bunch of different host families and I got to know their lives and their jobs and stuff like that. And yeah, like company culture is huge over there. So I can absolutely see something like this being a big use case for them wanting, uh, to um, not, not enforce, but. What's the word?

Speaker C: Encourage.

Speaker B: Right, like encourage. Yeah, yeah, encourage collaboration and like more of like a family dynamic. Absolutely. So let's shift gears a little bit, uh, and talk about measuring and progress. So how did you actually measure either this transformation information was working. Um, what were you tracking that told you that the new motion was taking hold?

Speaker C: We were tracking use cases attached to deals because we still had so many Deals that were just usage conversion. And frankly we don't have the luxury of saying I'm not going to take a deal if it has absolutely nothing but usage conversion. So we still had to take some of those. Right. But we made it a point that the large significant deals be absolutely pressed forward the use cases. So we started checking to see did the use case get attached or not. Um, the smaller upsells where they said we just need another 10 seats, that's fine. But if you have a large uh, account in your patch and you know you have a renewal coming up and it's $2 million of revenue, you need to know how you're going to go defend that revenue that needs use cases attachment. And if you have um, you know, 500k plus deal or even 100k plus deal, you don't have a use case attached, then that's something that we would question hard and sort of gently encourage or enforce that identification. Go to the workshop, go figure out who's going to say this is the business value. So we started measuring that on the front end. We then measured on the adoption to see how many use cases were actually put into place. What was the initial business case method? It's a very big important thing for the CSMs to take care of. And then we started measuring the lagging indicator which is actually, are we now seeing better retention? Are we able to protect our business from competition at some point? Just around the time I took on a CRO is when we saw the more smaller product companies come after us with lesser offering. But they were able to come after our business saying you don't really have a complex use case, you can do what you're doing on our software. And they were right. Um, so once we saw those one or two really big signals happen, that's when we got our, our um, our competitive battle card in shape. And then very aggressively defending and actually taking business away from those competitors. That was very, very fun and very rewarding.

Speaker B: It's very fun. Are you competitive?

Speaker C: I'm competitive, yeah.

Speaker B: Same. What was, what's one of your favorite stories of like competing and being able to win out in one of those battles?

Speaker C: Well, we competed with another product that primarily um, had a diagramming use case. And we didn't know, but kind of as Miro has diagramming included in it, we kept treading on their business and so they came after us hard. And I have a lot of respect for them because they truly built their product, uh, made it very, um, very close, um, to what we were going after, and if we had not pivoted and truly gone after that product management entity, I think we would have been far more vulnerable. But once we saw that coming, we went very aggressively in saying that you actually want one platform that does everything equally well. And we were already built for collaboration. We already had diagramming. We are now doubling down on diagramming. So you just need the one platform. So we were able to go turn around and actually go get a lot of significant business. Um, and I think we were in much stronger position because of competition. I think that's the main thing. But one thing I've learned about competing, Rachel, is it's not the product features. It is about attaching yourself to the bigger problem. And so we just constantly went and did that. This is the bigger problem. It's not about diagramming, it's not about a workshop, it's not about the one use case. It's about truly driving your entire product to market much faster and more efficiently. And to do that, you need one product that gives you future proof you want to not have to go change your product again in a year. This is the product that you're going to be betting on. Um, so I'm grateful for that competitive pressure. It made us better. And then we got a lot of joy out of getting big deals. What we would do is, uh, we would convert our existing product, our existing footage footprint into, um, enterprise license agreements. So we just went one after the other and took away the rest of that business.

Speaker B: Nice. Just hunters, headhunters. That's awesome. I love that though, like, not focusing too much on the features and just connecting yourself to the business outcome and the actual pain and the actual problem. I think a lot of, um, SaaS, companies and, and sometimes rightfully so, like, focus a lot on their features, but sometimes too much. They get a little bit wrapped around the axle on features and they lose sight of the human being on the other side of the screen who's looking to buy something and the actual pain that they have and the thing that they're wanting to, to do, uh, in their job or in their life. Um, yeah, if you can tell a better outcome story, then, yeah, I think

Speaker C: it's a better, it's a bigger problem story. And I, I got this tip from, uh, one of the co founders at HubSpot. He was talking about how you compete better. And I thought about it. I said, that's true. Because the more I talk about features, I'm relegated to the junior people. They're the ones who are thinking about features. I Actually have to think about the bigger problem. So I get attached to a bigger entity in the organization who has more budget and more say, um, so that's how we started pivoting our problem statement. We are solving a bigger problem, which is if you can go to market faster, you get revenue faster, your outcome changes, you're beating your competition. Can you afford not to be doing that or do you want to sit here talking about diagramming? Right. So that's what we pivoted to.

Speaker B: I love that. That's like, um, that's relevant advice for me as well as uh, you know, at usc we're thinking about like our marketing and positioning and stuff like that. We're just the way that our sales process is. We kind of have to talk to people who are higher up. So it's difficult trying to find that positioning to get those people into the room with us. So I love that. Uh, yeah. If another CRO came to you and said, you know, I need to take my PLG company through the same kind of transformation, what's the first thing you'd tell them to get right?

Speaker C: Um, I think the first thing I would tell them to get right is don't get fooled by vanity metrics. Really try to understand what problem are you solving and why is it the right long term problem for you to solve and the biggest problem that you could be solving. And um, what I mean by variant metrics is simply usage or dollars or upsell numbers or LTV to CAC ratio. These are all great initial metrics, but they may be fleeting. Um, so, so at the end of the day, what is the business problem you're solving? How do you size that roi? And if you can't answer that question, then I would say there's risk to the business because somebody else is going after that question and saying, I'll give you a better roi. So sooner or later.

Speaker B: Awesome. Um, and Sangea, where can people follow you if they want to see, um, you know, if you post online or on LinkedIn.

Speaker C: LinkedIn, yeah, I'm fairly active on LinkedIn. Uh, I encourage conversations there also.

Speaker B: And we will have links, uh, to Cynthia's LinkedIn as well as Miro in the show notes too. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Sangeeta. This is amazing. I appreciate it so much.

Speaker C: Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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