How AI and Organizational Alignment Drive SaaS Growth with Victor Ivarsson

Todd Kirk: This is sas therapy. Hello everyone and welcome back to another edition of SAS Therapy, the show where we help you save your most important business relationships, your customers. I'm your host Todd Kirk. I'm joined by my co host Tacy Trujillo. And we are super pumped to have on a new guest today, Victor Isaacson or Iverson. See, I already messed it up. We were just talking about your basketball career, but now maybe you're a famous fantasy uh, novel writer or something, I don't know. But welcome Victor. We're glad to have you on. Victor is the VP of IT and Telco at planhat and uh, he's also a recent move to la. So he's just moved from Europe to the us So I guess maybe first question, Victor is we got to know what has been your favorite and least favorite part about moving to California?

Victor Ivarsson: Good, good question. Yeah, I'm from Stockholm in, in Sweden. My family's from, from way up north. Uh, my dad's side is, is 14 hours north of Stockholm. So just to put, put that in perspective. So, so the weather here is, is quite nice in, in Southern California. Least favorite so far is uh, dmv. That's easy.

Todd Kirk: That's uh, that is everybody's worst nightmare here Stateside is going to get your license renewed.

Tacy Trujillo: So many people just nodding with agreement there. So, so Victor, give everybody a little bit of background if they're not familiar with Plan hat though I'm sure everyone is but I think it's always helpful to give a little bit of background about Plan hat and then your role there and what are some of the things that you're responsible for over there?

Victor Ivarsson: Yeah, sure, happy to. So Planet is originally uh, also Swedish company but we operate in 30 plus countries with I think a little over a thousand customers now. And Planet is a commercial platform to handle agentic commercial processes from pre sales, post sales professional services for B2B companies. And in my role specifically, I lead a go to market and delivery team that focuses solely on IT service companies, managed service providers and telcos, predominantly in Americas and.

Tacy Trujillo: Oh my gosh. Okay, so we got an expert here, TK with us. And so Victor, I'm going to start out with. I'd just like to dive into the controversial stuff. So the first thing I want to start out with Victor is I want to get your take. Is seat based pricing dead?

Victor Ivarsson: Good question. Uh, I don't know if it's dead. I think there's definitely a shift and I think there's definitely an opportunity for a lot of companies. To kind of reassess. Is seat based good for us? You know, depending on as a vendor but also as a customer, does it make sense? Are you getting the value of it? But if it's working, you know, let's not try to fix something that isn't broken. Um, so I don't know if it's dead, but I think there's definitely room for kind of a reevaluation, reassessment. And I think, I'm sure your next question is going to be, well, what should it be? And I think a lot of companies are going towards outcome based, which sounds good, but it's going to be very difficult and require a lot more to prove. Well, how do I price outcome based? Like, what does that mean? What does it mean for the customer? What does it mean for me for the vendor? How do I forecast it? What does it mean for finance? And yeah, that's a deep rabbit hole and I'm sure that's why you had that question.

Tacy Trujillo: Hey, guys. Okay, tv, I guess one more follow up. So how do you do this with AI? Because one of the things that's been flying on LinkedIn, and I think, I think I read it correctly, Uber took out AI in the product because it was costing too much or something like that. Like Uber just said, hey, we're scratching our AI budget right now because all of a sudden it's, it's more, it's cheaper to have humans do things and then I do things. So again, we're just three buddies talking, you know, watching, watching a hockey game and discussing some business over some beers here. But how do you do that with AI? How do you become outcome based with AI? Because right now it seems like. And again, we don't have to AI. You could do another model if you want. But how do you get to, uh, outcome based pricing? And is there any examples that you're aware of where it is working? Well, anything that you're thinking of here? Again, I started far left on this one. Todd. Todd says I do ask some weird questions. So I just, I'm just curious because I think this is a new model. Everyone's kind of feeling it around. And so people are loving the AI model and they're like, yeah, man, we're getting so much value. Others are saying, Good gracious, my CEO took all of our tokens and spent 65 grand in one month. And what was. And all they did was read their email like that wasn't helpful. So help us make sense of a little bit of this. And can you give uh, uh, us some examples.

Victor Ivarsson: Yeah, I think we talked about outcomes. Um, I think we plan hat I think in general, I think the industry is looking at, sure, you want to buy an outcome, you want to pay, you want to invest for an outcome. But what does that really mean? Well, it means, it means helping solve a process. Right. If a process means that you're saving time, time equates to. To time to. To. To save money. It equates to, you know, an opportunity cost, things we can do instead. And that can be, you know, that can be calculated in business cases, et cetera. And, and that's the same with if AI is a tool, not necessarily the only tool, but a tool to help you solve a process with more efficiency or with a higher level of forecast, you know, predictability, then okay, what is that worth? Right. And then that's going to be the story or maybe the, with the question that answers what can it cost? What should it cost? So I think we're thinking about these things as this whole new thing. And sure, it is new. It is a bit scary and it's right for some. It's not right for some right now maybe, but it is yet another tool. AI is another tool to help us do things that we were doing yesterday, but we want to do them m tomorrow a little bit better.

Todd Kirk: Okay. So, you know, Kasey did start a little bit out here in left field, Victor for sure. For me, I'm trying to wrap my brain around even why he's starting there because one of the things that I've noticed, at least in the world of customer success and SaaS, is that there is a fear right now around what the future is going to look like. And because we're in this place of a lot of upheaval, people are not really sure what the future is going to be. And um, and so obviously there's this whole question around, well, do people even buy SaaS anymore or does that completely go away? Um, and I think maybe that leans into Kasey question is like, well, a per user seat pricing model is something that's like we've now had as kind of standard in technology for at least a decade, probably longer. Really. I mean, SAS kind of started in the late 90s. Uh, but really it has become the standard in the way that people sell technology for the last decade, at least, maybe 10 to 15 years. So then if that's going to disappear, what does it replace with this whole concept of out camp outcome based pricing? I'm going to, I'm going to be honest that's the first time I've ever heard somebody actually present that idea. M. I really like what you're, where your head's at. I'm really confused of how you would do it. And you, you alluded to this point that it doesn't seem like a super easy thing to do. Because a lot of times if I'm in, like, if I'm in. If I'm a CSM who's trying to work with a customer and try to help them get some sort of an outcome, one of the things that's really tough is attribution to the outcome for the technology because there's so many different factors, right? It's like that you now get an argument with your customer about whether or not you actually gave me that value or if it was this other initiative that we did or, you know, how much of it, what percentage of that goes to you. And so I'm like, maybe help, um, help unpack that for me a little bit more because I, I really like this idea. I think there's, there's, uh, a lot of value in taking that mindset and that approach. But I'm not really sure, like, how do you do it? Like, and maybe you don't know, that's cool too. But I'm curious, what does that, what does that look like?

Victor Ivarsson: Yeah, yeah. No, I think we're also in a journey of learning how this works, you know, how will this work for us as well? But I think a lot of people think about, should it be, uh, outcome based pricing, should it be seats only? Should it be, you know, tokens or executions or data volume? It doesn't necessarily have to be one or the other. And I think that's maybe the first pitfall that I think I've seen in my experience, at least what we're trying to do. We still sell a platform, so we will charge for the platform. The platform has a bunch of costs, just like any model, right? It costs something to build and deliver and use and you get a bunch of features and that costs a bunch of things. So we charge for that. But based on what are we actually delivering, should the variable be seed based or number of logins or tokens or volumes or outcomes? Maybe it's a mix. So I think we try to consolidate and we know that, okay, we think that we're a market leader in delivering these five big core things, one of them being, for example, retention and driving adoption or driving scalable life cycle processes. What does that mean to us? Well, if you're not retaining more Customers, uh, next year than you were last year with Planet well, then we have effectively failed. Right. So that's kind of how we think about that outcome, is what we want to deliver. What is it today? Is your retention 90% today? You want it to be 95. Back to your point, we're not going to go and say, well, it's only because of us, but if we can play a small part of it, what are you willing to pay for that 5% delta, for example?

Todd Kirk: Okay, cool. So I. Before Kasey jumps in, since he rudely had his multiple questions. Okay, so this is, uh, Maybe I've. Maybe I'm daft and I've never thought about this before, but the thing that, that's kind of clicking for me is what, what you're suggesting is like, if you think about the way we pay people. The way we pay people, right, is I'm going to hire someone. I realize that you have cost of living that you need to have to be able to work for me. There's a certain amount that I know I have to pay just to be able to compete for a market rate. But then I, you know, if I'm hiring a seller or if I'm hiring a CSM or I'm. There's going to be some metric, there's some delivery.

Tacy Trujillo: Living that life for 20 years. TK I've been living outcome based metrics for my whole life, man.

Todd Kirk: Right. And so Kasey has, he has, he has a, uh, salary. Right. But then he has variable compensation on top of that. We don't typically. I don't think most people typically think about their software solution as something that a company is hiring. Right. They, uh, usually think of it as a tool that they're purchasing. And the tool can sit on the shelf or I can pick it up. But usually if you're hiring a company like Plan Hat, you're not just hiring software, you're hiring expertise. You're hiring someone who has a lot of unique insight into a market or into an industry. And, and they're providing that value too. So are you almost suggesting that maybe we should shift the mindset a little bit to think more about, like when you hire a software vendor, you're not just buying a solution, you're hiring that software vendor. And maybe you should treat them the way you would an employee. Right. You have a fixed. You have a fixed amount that you're willing to pay them, and then there's bonuses and variable compensation on top of that for how well they perform.

Victor Ivarsson: Yeah, I don't Know, if I've thought of it maybe exactly that way, but we tend to think of it as it is in. In sorts. Like, it should be like a marriage. Like, we're. We're trying to achieve this thing together. Right? And. And I think the way that at least our customer success or deployment strategy department have. The way that they're incentivized is on customer outcomes. Like, we celebrate those things because we. I think I've shared this with you, Kasey. We think of this as if, I want to get fit, I'm gonna go buy a pair of running shoes. Maybe I'll do the running. I need a coach. Like, the tool is still the running shoes. I'm not going to get fit just because I bought them. Um, I still need to start plugging. Whether I need a treadmill or a personal trainer or a coach or an app. Like, I need. Or I can do it myself, but I still need something to do the thing. I'm not. It's not going to happen automatically, so there needs to be a little bit of a push and pull, of course. But who is successful in the scenario will. Only if the person whose goal by. By purchasing the tool, the shoes, in this case, actually achieves their goal. Only then is. Are both parties, uh, you know, successful. And that's. That's kind of how we think about this. Victor.

Tacy Trujillo: I love it. I think. I think it's fantastic. I'm. I'm going to take us one other place next, but I love the thought. And this is a shout out to. Gosh, I can't remember what the movie is, but it has Steve Martin in it. And it's when his daughter's getting married. And he goes, father of the bride. And he goes to the grocery store and. And he buys a pack of hot dogs, which are like six. And then he buys the hot dog buns, which are nine. And then he rips open the hot dog buns and takes out three. He's like, I'm only paying for six hot dog buns because I only get six hot dogs. I'm like, I feel that. I feel that. I would love to be able to pay for things that are outcome based. Like, yes, that worked. I want to pay for that. Right? You go to the mechanic, they're like, yeah, we fixed your car. You drive your car off, it still has the same problem. You go back, and then they charge you more money to try to fix it again. My gosh, if someone could figure this out in a way that this would work, I think. I think it would solve a lot of road rage issues, but. Okay, exactly.

Victor Ivarsson: And one, one, you know, one. One note that I thought when you were mentioning that Todd as well, I think I heard. I can't remember where it was from. It was someone from, from I think Sequoia. Who, you know, I don't know if they, they wrote a blog or whatever it was, but you know, they were saying that the next billion or whatever trillion dollar company is going to be more services maybe masked or sort of concealed as software. Again, you're buying, you're buying for a solution, whether it's a tool or AI or someone coding it. Like it is going to be more services that are doing stuff for you. Right?

Todd Kirk: Yeah, yeah, I love that the, uh, you know, wizard of, wizard of Oz, man behind the curtain type approach there almost. Which.

Victor Ivarsson: Yeah, sorry.

Todd Kirk: No, yeah, I think that's really a really good point. Right. Is like. And I love your, your point about running. Right? Is even if you buy a tool, it's still, it's still the. What really matters is did the. Did the goal happen? Right? If I buy the pair of running shoes, did I run the marathon? If I didn't run the marathon, if I didn't get the time that I wanted, then it doesn't really matter ultimately. And so like the end thing is, do we get to the state where we want to go? So. By the way, Casey, do you realize how old that movie is? It's like 25 years old. Most of our audience probably has never even heard of that. I just didn't like.

Tacy Trujillo: Well, I'll tell you what, uh, when you have your first, first child, get married, go watch it and you'll just cry your eyes out. It stands the test of time.

Todd Kirk: Father of the Bride is a good movie.

Victor Ivarsson: I very much agree.

Tacy Trujillo: Solid. Okay, Victor, so we've talked and we did licensing. We went a little crazy with outcomes. So let's go back a layer. Let's go down a little bit. In today's model, it seems that there's still the confusion about who's owning upsells and renewals. Victor, your opinion. You're CEO of a company, you just took it over. What are you implementing, what are you doing and why are you doing it? And you can't give me the answer if it depends? Nope. Not. We're not doing that. Victor, I want your thoughts. How would you run it?

Victor Ivarsson: Yeah, okay. I'm a pretty strong believer in revenue or renewals is for most companies

Tacy Trujillo: your

Victor Ivarsson: biggest portion of your. I mean, it is literally your revenue. It's your biggest asset. It's your most important asset. It's your customers, your relationships, your money. And whoever is closest to that revenue should be owning renewals. That normally means depending on the title, customer success, you know, account management, whatever the title is, the people that are working closest with their customers and driving value, making sure that there is outcomes that they can see and articulate from your products and services should be the ones that are then asking for, hey, do you want to stay with us, do you want to renew, etc. Um, and I think maybe that when you're doing that well enough, shouldn't even have to be a question.

Tacy Trujillo: Okay, I'm giving my take and then Todd, I want yours. I am, you might say, just because I'm a seller, I'm making my sellers sell the deals and renew the deals until after three years. And then after three years it gets passed over. The reason why I say that is I believe that if a seller owns it for three years and the compensation needs to stay strong for three years is I don't want my seller selling bad deals and I have to want them to feel the pain of uh, working with the customer. I think it makes smarter sellers and it gets them to think more long term. So that'd be my take. Uh, I'm doing a hybrid. You own it for three and then you pass it off. So if you sign a three year deal, you gotta stay through that first renewal. If you sell a one year deal, you gotta make sure I think people are stable after three years. So I'm going sellers pass off to CSMs after that. TK, what are you doing?

Todd Kirk: Well, okay, I'm gonna pull the classic advisor card here and say it depends because one of the things that I think is important, Kasey, is that your, your thought there only makes sense if you uh, the, the cost of acquisition for the customer is really high. So the reason why I like your thought is if your CAC is really high, what tends to happen is you put a CSM in which actually increases your cac because now you have two people and on top of that you have to keep the customer for three years in order for you to make any money off of them. Because you're likely losing money on year one or year two. So for me that makes a lot of sense if you're selling an enterprise. But if uh, you can figure out how to bring on customers much cheaper pre sale, then it doesn't necessarily matter if you keep the seller involved post sell because you don't have to keep them as long and you aren't necessarily set up in that position where renewals matter quite as much. So for me it uh, really comes down to how easily and how cheaply can you acquire customers and then what is going to be most effective in keeping the customers taught in a perfect

Tacy Trujillo: world, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Todd Kirk: But I like, think about it. Yeah, you're right. If it cost you nothing to acquire customers, well then, then I wish the

Tacy Trujillo: product just renewed itself too and then we don't have to pay anybody. Right?

Todd Kirk: Like, come on, some people maybe.

Tacy Trujillo: What life are we living in? TK Rebuttal us. Give us, give us some feedback off of what you would say now.

Victor Ivarsson: I, I, I, I agree with, I think your point, Kasey, of I think churn starts with sales typically, which is a very, uh, unpopular opinion also coming from someone who leads both sales and CS teams in the past. But I think you can solve for that with compensation models, incentive models instead. I've always been an advocate for, I believe I agree with you. First year renewals should be tied to maybe a seller's customer acquisition sort of compensation because you don't want to bring in bad deals. You want higher icp. I agree. Learning, you know, understanding and getting that pain of really onboarding a customer is valid. However, I think there are two different types of people. There are hunters and there are relationship builders. And again, you know, without, you know, using the word, I wasn't allowed to use depends, but Todd was allowed to use it. So I'm going to say depends.

Todd Kirk: That's true. Go for it.

Victor Ivarsson: It depends on the complexity of what you're selling.

Todd Kirk: Right?

Victor Ivarsson: If you're selling something more transactional, maybe the seller and the relationship builder, the renewal person, the growth person, can do the same thing in other cases. You cannot. If you're selling a complex ERP or this or that. Right. Maybe that's a different story.

Tacy Trujillo: That's fair.

Todd Kirk: And I will say like, uh, again, the part that I think is interesting, right? It's always this. There's the math. Equations of stats are always so fascinating, right? It's like how, how much does it cost me to get the deal? How quickly do I close the deal, how long can I keep the deal and how much does it cost for me to keep the deal? All of those are really important things to then work through. And like I, you know, I've talked to other, I've talked to some vendors before or to other, uh, software leaders who have said, well, you know what? Like we know we have to invest in support of the customer after the fact. We have to have that relationship builder there. We're like we kind of think or we kind of think we do. But what's interesting is when a lot of times people say well the, the number doesn't really seem to change that much no matter what I do. Like I can spend more money, less money. My renewal rate kind of stays around the same. Um, and so what I would be curious is is like again if you can increase your renewal rate now all of a sudden that's a really big deal. And so but what have you seen tend to work the best? Is it, is it a combination of a bunch of different factors and when you've. And maybe I don't know, maybe not done this analysis specifically but like what, what have you seen as the biggest, the best lever to pull and increasing the, the renewal rate that you, that you see with your customers?

Victor Ivarsson: Well, I think looking at, let's, let's use HubSpot as an example. I think they are long term industry leaders and experts in NRR and I think how do you do that in very simple math? Well you lower the threshold in sales if the price should be 100k, 200k, whatever it is. You know, I, I know stories where they lowered it to, to 10 to 20 to 50. Right. So drop the price down without maybe removing scope or uh, without removing too much in, in pure discount but rather removing scope. So you're actually just saying hey, we think you should start here because we're interested in making sure that you are adopting to the products and services at hand and calling year one phase one very similar to maybe our thoughts this model as well. Let's grow from there but let's have a plan already. The AE in this case should be maybe the orchestrator, the quarterback, whatever this is phase one. Maybe I still want to be incentivized on growth Phase two. Phase three, perhaps I stay with you because this is a land and expand case or maybe I have a comp model or incentive model that allows me to reap those benefits. Even if Kasey's my CSM and you're, you're doing the growth work later on that I've already kind of teed up. I think very well.

Todd Kirk: Well it helps you with the math too right? Because yeah, you know, expansion, you can definitely move the number so well, the

Tacy Trujillo: connection I just made and Victor, you said planet does this a little bit so I want you to dive deeper into that in just a second. But we just said outcome base. How do we get to Outcome Based pricing. You just described it right there. If I walk in and say, hey, for phase one, we're going to do this, and once we get to this, this thing, we're going to recommend we get to phase two, which is adding in these modules or expanding out C count or whatever. That's outcome based.

Victor Ivarsson: Yep. Right.

Tacy Trujillo: If you're planning it that way and then that's getting people. Because my, my suggestion, TK for the things that I've seen work best on renewals, is you got to, um, upsell. If people buy more of your product, they're more likely to stay. They buy less of your product. Crazy thought. They're not going to stay. Right. Or they stay pathetic or they stay standard where they're at. So I love that idea. So, Victor, talk to me a little bit about how plan had approaches that you say you do something similar. Is that, is that right?

Victor Ivarsson: Is that what you said we do? So, I mean, Planet can be, can be a large, complex and powerful platform. So that also means that we're not going to rock the boat and, you know, use all the analogies of boil the ocean and all those fun things at once, because that's going to decrease our chances of really being successful. We talked about, in customer success, we talk about time to value quite a lot. Well, it's up to us and the customer together to define what is value and what is the necessary time to get there. Um, that's a conversation. It's not a metric that we make up. And we say, hey, we want you onboarded and out of onboarding in 90 days, 180 days. Well, where do you need to be by when? And that conversation starts before you sign. Right. Because that's going to drive urgency. It's going to help me with my business case. It's going to help me articulate what the outcome hopefully will be when we start so that I can plan my resources and we can plan together. So. So I think that's how we try to do that. So if this, this is scope, we want to do seven things. Let's start with one, and then two, and then three, you know, and we try to be very not, not, not, not, not tough on our customers. I'm using a Swedish analogy, but we try to be pretty, uh, pretty hands on in our onboarding and say, these are the things that we've heard in your evaluation. Let's choose three, maybe four things to focus on in these next 12 weeks or so.

Todd Kirk: Okay. All right.

Tacy Trujillo: We're solving the world's problems today. TK like this is all coming together with me.

Todd Kirk: No, no, no, no, no.

Tacy Trujillo: Sellers selling a good deal.

Todd Kirk: I don't like the idea, um, outcome based.

Tacy Trujillo: Like I feel good about this right now. I mean, you're going to have a meeting after this, Todd, and we're going to discuss some things.

Todd Kirk: I know, but see, here's the thing. I don't want to solve problems. I want to stir the pot a little bit. So you know, we've been talking, we've been talking a lot about, you know, who should stay involved and you know, who's going to m. Have a better impact, take to, to build better, stronger, longer relationships with our customers. I want to flip the tables a little bit. And you know, Casey, as a seller, who, who is a bigger. Who's. Who's more likely to actually cause the pain? Is it the seller or the CSM or something else like cause the pain?

Tacy Trujillo: Describe that.

Todd Kirk: Meaning where what is. What is the what? Who is more responsible? More like more likely to be responsible for a customer journey.

Tacy Trujillo: A seller.

Todd Kirk: Casey, you're just going to accept, you're just going to accept that you're the problem. That's good.

Tacy Trujillo: Yeah, for sure.

Victor Ivarsson: I'm glad he means the other sellers. Yeah.

Tacy Trujillo: Oh no, I, I think, I think for sure the seller is because my incentive and that, that's why Victor, I'm saying I love the idea of you have to do more than a, uh, one year deal is because seller will get a deal across, across the line. Because that's, that's what I'm based on. That's what I need to do. I need to bring in revenue into the company and that's what everybody looks at. Now do I believe that lets the CSM off the hook? No, I believe, uh, a CSM could, should go in there and like Victor saying, if I'm having that first conversation and saying, okay, I get that you want to do that, but here's what I would recommend. And they take, you know, Taylor, teach, take control. Right. And they go through that process. I think a CSM could still do that, but I'm making the job way harder. So the person that can cause the most pain is obviously the seller just because of how they're maybe even, even structuring the deal. And hey, you know, I'm going to give you a massive discount. And then that sets everybody up, uh, for challenges with the renewal because I gave you 60% off. And now not only does the CSM have to renew it, but now they have to talk about how they're going to get them back up to a price point that makes sense. So it's not hurting the ARR of the company and everything. Right. So for sure, the seller.

Victor Ivarsson: Yeah, and I, I, I agree. And you know there's, there's so many, there's so many examples with you know, selling, selling the roadmap or you know, promising features or, or this or that. But, and just maybe just being transactional at heart because you're pressured, hitting quotas. Are you making the best long term decisions for you, for the company, for the customer, all at once when you're 20, 25 years old? Uh, I don't think we all are on the last day of the quarter. Right. But I agree. Of course CSMs or whatever the title is on whoever's managing the customer are of course also responsible and potentially someone who could or will impact the outcomes of a customer. But if a seller doesn't even give you the chance, that's a very difficult job. If your baseline is this and each seller can say, well hey, each customer is going to come in, they're going to be neutral, at least content with their onboarding, great, then we're giving everyone a chance. Then it's up to the csm. But that's not always the case. Some sellers will bring in customers here and some down here at uh, tk.

Tacy Trujillo: I do say if you would ask me this like 5 years ago I would have been like it's all, it's almost 90% seller, 10% CSM. I do believe that's creeping up a little bit. And the reason why I'm saying that is because there are the need for a CSM to be more sales. Like meaning having sales skills, being able to uh, look at things holistically, ask probing questions and be able to discover upsell opportunities. I think CSMs, you ah, know maybe five, ten years ago, we're just about relationships. I'm just the relationship person. I don't even want to bring up pricing to you at all. That can't happen anymore. I don't believe in that anymore. I believe a csm, yes, you are relationship based. You have to be more consultative. But you, you need to spot opportunities. You cannot just go off of the standard. You need to be looking for opportunities and saying, hey, we should be doing this, we should be doing that and you shouldn't shy away from sales type conversations. And Victor, what's your thoughts on that? I know you want to see something there on that.

Victor Ivarsson: Yeah, yeah. And I think we talked about this last time we spoke, Kasey. I mean Buyers are no longer buying the cat in the bag, so to speak. They're buying at least mini proofs of outcomes. I uh, think we talked about it last time. If I'm a seller and I'm promising 40, 40x ROI, I gotta show 1% in a trial or a proof of concept or something. I have to show something before, beforehand. And I think you're also expecting more and more uh, flexible terms, opt outs, making it more difficult for sellers to just say, hey, trust me, like that was before. Trust has to be proven now. Yeah, and I think that's it's good for both because it puts a lot of pressure, moves the outcome, I guess more to the left of the revenue bow tie than it used to be. Only someone in cs.

Tacy Trujillo: I want to ask a question now, TK real quick. Who owns um, should, should sales and CSM be under same leadership so there's not such a fight so that the compensations could be more tied together? Because I often see when there's a head of CS and ahead of sales, they fight all the time. It's like, hey, this, this account should go here and this account should go there and you didn't do this and you didn't do that. Gosh, you know, it's a lot because how do you manage both sides? Because they are do both different things. Maybe it's just better compensation, better alignment between the two. I don't know. What's everybody's thoughts on that? Should it be under one leadership head? Like you have other leadership underneath you? Right, but should the, should that there be that? I don't know, maybe it's the chief revenue officer. That one may probably not, I don't know. But anyway, should that person own CS and sales ultimately or should there be head of sales, head of CS and their equals? What's, what's everybody's take on that one?

Victor Ivarsson: I'll let you go, Todd. I know what my answer is.

Todd Kirk: Well, I mean, I think the answer is probably, probably to some extent, yes. The challenge is the. When uh, you think about the uh, the goal that you have, as long as the goal is aligned, which is sell and keep more customers and everybody believes in that whole idea wholeheartedly and you can build systems that make that work better then yeah, for sure. However, like sometimes, especially in the SaaS world, uh, it's, it's very difficult for the customer in the buying process to understand all that's possible that you can do. And so what ends up happening is if you, if you're not, if you, if you try to paint the vision too early. Sometimes, in my experience, you can also turn off a lot of customers and you don't sell as much. And so, like, if you. Sometimes there's a benefit, like I've heard le or say many times, there's like, there's the things that sell and there's the things that renew, and they are not always the same. Uh, and that's what's hard, right? Like, a customer might be buying and shopping for something because they think it's what they want, but it isn't always necessarily the thing that they actually need. And so then you're in this weird position where you're trying to, like, help steer the perception of the customer and help them actually see you as the solution. And then once you get them in, then you're like, well, maybe I can just fix it after the fact. Like, they can come in with all these, like, misconceptions, because it's the only way I know how to get them in the door. And so if you marry that all together, you end up with kind of this, like, muddy, sloppy, very difficult message that you're trying to get across to the customer. Um, and I don't know, basically, I'm not taking a position. This is just me saying I don't know. But I can. I can see the benefits of both. Right? If you can create a unified message that's clear, that's easy for the customer to understand, and a path for them to go through, then absolutely. There's so much benefits of getting your entire organization aligned around that. But if your software is complicated and difficult to explain, then you're now also putting yourself into a position where maybe it's very hard for you to articulate that to the customer. See, I did it again. I did the it depends thing where I didn't even give an answer at all. I just kind of just said all the things I see that maybe are difficult in both situations. So now, Victor, you. You clearly have an opinion. So now I want to. Now that I gave you where my mind was at, I want to hear what you're thinking.

Victor Ivarsson: True, true. Diplomatic answer. No, I think I agree with a lot. With a lot of what you said there. I agree with there are things that sell, there are things that renew. I agree that I think they should be two different teams, but I believe they should roll up into one. One head, one CRO, one commercial officer, or whatever that means.

Tacy Trujillo: Because.

Victor Ivarsson: And I think for me, that the simple reason is. Well, the lazy reason is that's how I'VE operated before. When I was CRO, I had sales, cs, and PS all under me. That worked for me to. Most traditional 80% or more of your revenue comes from your customers, and that's. That's with an 80% retention rate, which is pretty bad. Right. So. Meaning you should be pouring more money into this bucket, even irrespective of if that means you should be growing, expanding that 80% more or if that should be your ICP that helps you grow the other bucket more. I think they're both the same things. We need to be learning from each other. And I agree it's very difficult to. Or it's easier to say and theorize than it is, um, to put in practice or put in motion. But we're effectively. We are. We're selling based on outcomes. We are selling more trust. Why are people buying from us? Well, because we've proven that we can do a micro version of what we promised that we're going to do for you. We're proving that we can do it for your peers or for other business cases like testimonials. Those things do need to work together. Can they work together with two different department heads? Of course. With better synergies and etc. I just prefer being under one. One roof. Amen.

Tacy Trujillo: Amen. I think. I think the leadership underneath, there has to be a healthy tension between the two. Right. Because there are things that need to be unique, but it has to have a single leadership because there's always going to be bickering in that regard, and it can be healthy in some regard, but the leadership has to be eyes on the prize for both sides. So. Yeah, that's awesome, T.K. i forgot, man. I don't know who we left off on. Is your turn to ask a question, Mike, because I've been skipping today. Right.

Todd Kirk: I do. I do have a thought, though, that I'm curious about. Right. So if Victor, if you were CRO. Right. So. Or the chief, uh, chief Commercial Officer, like, you're putting that position now, and we've got everything all set up, right. Sales and cs, everybody reports in. What's the first thing you would do differently? Like what? Like. Or what do you think is the most common thing that you think businesses are not maybe thinking about and putting in the forefront? Like, what would you change if you had. If you had keys for the day to drive, uh, for any company or for Plan Hat, however you want to take that, how would you. What would you. What would you approach differently, maybe, than the conventional wisdom that people are doing? Today?

Victor Ivarsson: Yeah, good question. Um, um, yeah, I, I, I don't know. The first thing that, that stands out to me without giving this maybe too much thought is I've always been chasing that uh, back to we know our majority, the lion's share of our revenue and our opportunity. And everyone speaks to this if you're a company's going public, the ipo they always talk about, we have, you know, this much revenue in our existing base, but we know it's 5x or it's 10x M. Okay, well how do we go and get it here? Right? And everyone's talking about it and you're kind of mobilizing but then you kind of end up just pouring more money into the old, good old, you know, customer acquisition bucket instead. That is something I would love to, without knowing exactly how, but just investing in, let's do that. Let's actually, let's actually monetize with, you know, appropriate experience and delivering the same retention and customer experience, voice of the customer and all those things. But really getting that 5x, 10x 50x or whatever it is from existing customer base. I don't know if that means referrals, that drives new customers or if it simply means expansion. That's something I would love to do.

Tacy Trujillo: You know tk, here's what I'm doing and this, ah, this could go up in flames. So anybody that's like looking at my

Todd Kirk: resume never hired him as a CRL

Tacy Trujillo: is where we, yeah, here's, here's what I'm doing. I'm creating an amazing digital experience. Amazing self service digital experience. Like it's, it's beyond amazing. Like it is rock solid, top of the line where people are like whoa, what you built was completely different. And the reason why I'm doing that is because I am charging for my CSM. I do not give CSMs to any account enterprise. Nope, you don't get a CSM. If you want a CSM, you're going to pay for it. And M, my CSMs are two things. They're change management specialists and they can do training. They can do those two things there. That's the skill set I'm hiring. Every CSM is they know how to do change management. They're you know, the pro size certified or some type of change management. I don't care what it is. And they know how to do training on our product like really good trainers. So they can spend time with executives, they can spend time with senior leadership and they can actually get them using the product so it influences everybody Else. Now, again, it's going to be. It depends on the product, things like that. But I'm, I'm saying you want us, uh, you want a customer success manager. My customer success managers do two things. They're change experts, and they're also trainers. Because there's. What do they say the average organization has? Again, like, we're talking about an Edward Jones or a Progressive Insurance or an enterprise account. They have, what, a thousand different applications, and every one of those applications assigns a CSM to that account. So there's a thousand or two hundred CSMs calling on Edward Jones and trying to buy one person's time at times. Right? Because that one person maybe owns 10 applications there at the organization. I need my CSM to stand out because I fear today, unless your products, like Microsoft or Oracle or SAP, something big, salesforce, you ain't getting the time. So I'm going to force time. And the way I'm going to force time is my CSM is going to be so valuable, you're going to have to pay for it.

Todd Kirk: Okay, so here's.

Tacy Trujillo: I'm going to. That could just go and boo and I don't really know anything.

Todd Kirk: Maybe it all blows up, but.

Tacy Trujillo: So that's what I'm doing.

Todd Kirk: It's interesting because, Victor, you. You mentioned this idea that maybe the. The next big. The next big company out there is going to be, you know, a service masquerading as a SaaS company. What's interesting here is Kasey's like, no, don't even hide it. Like, just make the service something that you pay for. Because the truth is, Kasey, I mean, I like your. Your thoughts really interesting. Except for the fact that everybody is already paying for the csm. They just don't know that they're paying for the CSM because we hide the fact that they're paying for the csm. Like, it's.

Tacy Trujillo: I think that's kind of my point.

Todd Kirk: It's baked into the price already of what the customer's paying for. So maybe I'd be curious, Victor, like, do you think there's something to that? Like, is it better to make it really clear that you're going to pay to get the access to this person and we're going to actually sell the value of the expertise that this person has. Or it's. You get a csm, um, it's just included. It's part. And really the reason you do that is because you need somebody there to fight for the renewal. So what. What's better is it. Is it Better to position the CSM as this expert genius, you know, change expert who's going to help you succeed. Or is it better to just be like this person is going to meet with you every month and make sure you get the invoice at the end of the year? You know, like what, what is the better way to position the csm? And you know, Casey saying just tell them, tell them, tell them the value.

Tacy Trujillo: That's actually I'm changing the expertise to the CSM. Like some CSMs are really good and they do, they knew, they know their product in and out. Right. Or I'm saying these are two skill sets that they have and they uh, have to be certified in these skill sets. Right. It's not just I'm renaming it and rebranding something that it's the same CSM I'm hiring. Right. Again, usually professional services come in and does a training. CSMs are usually have some type of change management expertise. Again depending upon the product.

Todd Kirk: Right.

Tacy Trujillo: Uh, but again that's how I'm approaching it. There's a lot of loopholes. I'm sure that Victor is going to point out. Victor, feel free. I don't feel bad if anyone shoots me down the ideas. But yeah. What's your thoughts about that approach?

Victor Ivarsson: No, I wonder to your question too, Todd. I wonder if people care or if they will care. Like if you really care. If it's. Is it the running shoes that got me across the finish line? Was it the coach? Was it the Strava app? Was it my Garmin watch? I like, I did it right. Do I care of like, is it packaged? Is it hidden? I mean, I don't know. I think that maybe that goes into philosophical sales and ethics. You want to be transparent. I think you should be transparent and offering what you can and should do. But if you're saying, you know, just to put in perspective, I'm Salesforce or I'm Kasey in this case. Right. I can help you sell more. Well, prove to me that you can do that. Do you have the same skill sets? Can you do that or do I trust the tool more? Uh, yeah, I wonder if you'd care.

Tacy Trujillo: Yeah. It's so fascinating because today as CSM's handling, again, it depends on accounts. But usually an enterprise CSM still has 20 accounts or 10 accounts. Like what's the impact you can really have on that? I'm saying like, hey, you get X amount of hours with this. It's part of your SaaS contract. You hire it, you can fire that person at Any time still outcome based around that. But I'm giving the CSM the opportunity to say, yeah, I did X amount of trainings for you and we had X amount of people attend. This is what took place because of that, right? Or hey, I did this change initiative. I wrote the change communication plan for you. I'm putting value to that part where today usually a CSM maybe not have that skill set and they're going to turn it over to prop professional services. I just feel right now the CSM and again I love my CSMs, but I just feel today a CSM reputation is you meet with me, you show me some data and you talk about a renewal. Like I don't see enough CSMs providing value, that people are excited to meet with them. And again that depends on the CSM. But I'm um, filling today's market with CSMs and it's showing in that people aren't hiring as many CSMs. I think there's just, there's an opportunity to be grabbed here because I think the CSM is so valuable. We're just not skilling them and presenting them in the right way to make it where the customer wants to use that time. Anyways, total side rant on that. Sorry I distracted from everybody. I've done that three times today.

Todd Kirk: Thanks.

Victor Ivarsson: Yeah, no, no worries. But, but I, I, I, I believe in, in my experience so far and I, I, I think this is where it's gonna start to, to shift more into if, if you bought, you know, before, let's say I don't know, 10 plus 20, 30 years ago, you bought only services to go and say hey, I need solve this, this thing. You bought a, you know, McKinsey Accenture or whatever, consultants, irrespective of quantity because they have uh, a large, large bench but their skill set is pretty finite. Either you do the thing that I want you to do if you, I want you to do something different, but I either have to switch person or switch company or switch vendor similarly to how platforms have been built and sauce providers like, hey, I have this platform but I want you to do this thing that's either a feature request or I churn and, and uh, I buy something else. Now we're kind of in the middle and now there's Claude and there's, you know, there's all these, these AI tools in the middle that are way more flexible and adaptable for better and for worse because the people that are asking for things aren't always the smartest and maybe best, best people to drive These things. But now you can say, well, hey, I want you, the change management person with its skill set of tools being platforms and, or Claude and AI and maybe access to different services, people as a mix. So that becomes a lot more agile and less finite, I guess. And I think that's where the shift is going more towards.

Todd Kirk: See, I like that. That's a very optimistic take. Right? Maybe, maybe there's a, uh, part of the way that we're going to see this whole world change over the next couple of, um, years is technology is going to change to where we're able to get the best of both worlds. Right? You get the product in the past hasn't been able to be responsive. The expertise was. We were spending too much time trying to cover for the gaps in the, in the technology. But now maybe if the technology can advance faster and adapt faster, then now the person who's being tasked to support the customer can actually be the expert that they're supposed to be, rather than wasting all of their time, you know, apologizing for defects in the software or trying to do a bunch of manual work to cover for the deficits that the software actually couldn't fulfill. And it gets us into a much better place in the future where the human's even more valuable because they can actually come with expertise that the technology can technically support.

Tacy Trujillo: Amazing. I feel like we're all smarter because of this conversation today. Todd, there's a bunch of good ideas I'm getting in my brain right now. I've written down that I'm super stoked. So, Victor, this is, this has been awesome. We always an SAS therapy with the same question because it's therapy. And in a therapy, if you had a therapist, they said, okay, Victor, hey, this is what we're going to work on this next week after we had this discussion. So, Victor, for our audience today, what's

Victor Ivarsson: the homework you're giving them?

Tacy Trujillo: If you can give them one homework assignment that all of them would go do, what would it look like?

Victor Ivarsson: Good question. I guess I would try to maybe learn a little bit from something that I'm trying to do more as well is, okay, what's the big thing? What's going to make me the hero in my role in the next 12, 24, 36 months? It's usually a big, lofty thing. It could be, um, a softer value. It could be a hard value. It could be something in my career. What is that thing? Okay, but then break it down. Like, what is the actual process that's going to help me get there. Um, I'll put this in perspective. A lot of companies will come to planet and say we need to improve retention, we need to drive adoption. Big lofty goals that are great. How do we do that? Normally, what that really means could be we need to automate our QBRs. We need someone to tell me when my renewal is due. Like there's little simple but complex and impactful things that help me do the big thing. So I guess, uh, yeah, in summary, like look for the big North Star thing, but go down to the very, very granular thing that helps move the needle so good.

Todd Kirk: I feel like it just came full circle for me. Like focus, maybe focus on the outcome. Is that maybe the thing we need to do? That's true Both for how we approach our act, work, life, how we approach supporting our customers is uh. And how we do that is awesome. Victor, thank you so much for coming. For those of you who have not, uh, if you. Because I said his name wrong at the start, it's Victor Iverson. Find him on LinkedIn if you. I'm sure he would love to hear from you. Victor, if people do want to contact you, anything else we should tell them about how to find you? Nope.

Victor Ivarsson: LinkedIn is fine, Strava, you know. No, LinkedIn is fine.

Todd Kirk: Yes, for you. Uh, you'll be able to see everywhere he runs, I'm sure.

Victor Ivarsson: Yeah.

Todd Kirk: So Victor, uh, it's been great. Thank you for joining us and for everybody, thanks. As we release new episodes every Wednesday, come back, give us a follow, let us know where you think Casey is crazy. And uh, we'll see you next time. Thanks again, Victor. Thanks. Sas therapy is brought to you by brainstorm, the SaaS platform for SaaS adoption. Learn more at brainstorminc.com mhm. Sam.