044 | "Coordinating Price Points as a Key Value Proposition"

Documentation, documentation, documentation, documentation. We're big on that. That's part of one of those key tenants of business operations. If you're on a scale, you need to have some of the things that we're doing have to be documented somewhere.

With this fully distributed remote teams, that's one of the things that I've learned personally, just like, hey, what happened when we're onboarding a new team member and we are not sitting next to them in the office? What if you don't have some of the tribal knowledge that you want to share that usually you would get around the coffee or for breakfast or at lunch. Like so documenting, documenting that's becoming critical for companies to scale and be able to operate the most efficiently during this period.

Hey everyone, George Soto here. Today, I'm joined by Etienne Lignou, who is the head of business operations at Algolia. How are you? Good.

Hey, Jordan, how are you? Good. I hope I got that right. I know we were going to shorten it to E, but I really wanted to...

That's good. Did I do okay? Yeah, you did good. Yes.

Okay. Awesome. Thank you. You know, I love, as I was saying, I love French culture.

I love like jazz, French jazz. Oh, my gosh. French jazz and Brazilian bossa nova and Brazilian jazz, just some of my favorite stuff. And a glass of wine.

And a glass of wine, yes. And some, you know, like escargot, you know, the classics, of course. Of course, the classics, right? Well, why don't you tell us a little bit about your career background?

How did you get into technology and now heading up business operations? Yeah, well, thanks for having me on today. I started initially in the sales operations and sales strategy role in conferencing and cooperation technology companies. That was before Zoom was older age.

So it was quite a bit of time ago. And then I got the opportunity to jump in the startup world where I was fortunate enough to help open the U.S. headquarters for a French SaaS BI tool.

and we got lucky again because from there I landed at Zendesk after that startup got acquired and that's where I moved in more under the product ops side of the house and was able to learn quite a bit about product and how we go to market with some of the products and three years ago I joined Algolia to lead our business operations functions where my focus is very much helping and support helping the company to scale and support the growth through different initiatives. Awesome.

I was chatting with Michael Goldberg, who heads up business operations over at LogMeIn. Business operations and revenue operations, at least at LogMeIn, seem to be very much in line in terms of responsibility. All revenue generating organizations are supported by business operations. Is that the same structure there?

Yes. Here at Algolia, there is a little bit of overlap, but it's mostly cross-collaboration on a lot of specific topics. I'll take an example. Today, VisaOps own pricing and packaging strategy, but obviously we work very closely with RevOps.

Once we've got defined, hey, this is interpricing and packaging you want to do, how are we going to execute and put some of this in place? especially we train and enable the frontline revenue teams, right? For them to be able to extend the pricing to our users and position it, deliver the value proposition. So those are some of the areas where there is a tight collaboration between the two teams for sure.

By the way, you know, I know pricing is a pretty complex thing, right? It's like a lot of people, I don't think understand the actual impact on your business that pricing has. And it not just as easy as oh I going to steal this strategy from this product and this from that It really has to be customized organizations So you know in terms of pricing I don think that people really appreciate or understand the impact that pricing has on your overall business from marketing to efficiency for around revenue to even customer success.

Are there any sort of like tips or things that you've been able to see throughout your career, maybe right now at your current role that you have for folks out there around maybe learning how to optimize or maybe reevaluate their pricing? Yeah. I don't want to necessarily give any advice out there because it's never perfect, but there are a few things that I learned along the way. The first one for me is as much as possible, trying to have some value-based pricing.

and that's the direction that we've taken a while back here at Algolia and we continue to take it. And then some of the things that we've learned as well, because we are an API as a service, right? It's also how do you, out of that value resonates and how your users want to be able to consume that and pay for it. And so it's critical to be able to, whatever the metric is, right, you're going to put to drive your pricing, allowing that with the value that your users are getting out of it is critical.

and we strongly believe that usage-based pricing is the future and that's where everybody's going to go and we also strongly believe that for most organizations that is going to be in the context of a product-led growth strategy where you need to be crystal clear on your website, in your product, whatever the content you're putting in, what the value is delivering and how that can scale within a given user or customer. that can sometimes be a bit of a challenge. You reconcile that with the way sales is operating and all that stuff.

So that's where sometimes it's a bit of a balancing act. How do you get there? And again, I don't think we're far from perfect today. And there's still a lot of things we could do to improve, but it's fascinating to see how through iterations you're able to still get to a point where you're finding that balance.

And then the last one I add is, and that has been said multiple times, it's a mix of science with collecting as much data as possible to make sense of that data. But there is always a bit of an arc to it as well, which is a, that's part of the contextualization on understanding what your user are doing. And some of that you don't necessarily know. Sometimes there's quite a bit of ambiguity before you get there.

And so that's what's making it exciting as well, because you always have different levers and you can experiment and improve. and until you find the right model and then from there you continue to improve as well awesome now you know you mentioned product led and that's such a trend right now even though it's not a a brand new concept i think just category it's kind of like sales development right the the activity of cold calling and qualifying doing outbound is not new but of course sales development now has been a category uh for a number of years so i i sort of see product led whether it's growth through product-led sales or whatever, sort of following the same trend.

From a business operations perspective, how do you typically think about the demo environment, particularly how do you measure its effectiveness? And now you have this product-led movement that's really all about bringing the product in front, right? Yeah, and to me, that's one, especially in the product-led growth context, the demo environment, and I'm going to characterize that a little bit more. It also depends on how technical your product is, but even that we could argue that.

But I see that really as one of those critical items that you can leverage to demonstrate the value to your users and your customers, and to get them initially excited about your product or your solution. And so for us, for example, our solution is, someone can say, somewhat fairly technical. So having a demo environment that can help remove some of that initial friction and some of that initial apprehension from your users as they check us out that is something where I believe that there a ton of value there I also see that as a scalable way for us and companies like us to engage with user and prospect Let me explain that a little bit more.

Once you've identified that you've got some repeatable use case, so you're seeing user coming through and then you're starting to see as you're engaging, you're giving the same question over and over again. That is starting to help you define a bit on some of those templates, if you will. That again, you've got that demo environment and that you can continue to deliver some type of a tailored environment for each one of your users, but you don't have to rebuild everything from scratch all the time.

I think that's where there is a lot of value here because again, that can still be a tailored personal experience for the end-users, but you don't have to join fully customize everything from scratch because that obviously won't scale, right? And so to sum it up, I see some of the things that you guys are doing in other companies out there, right? I see that as a great way to accelerate some of that initial acquisition, right? And I truly believe that when this is associated with a product-led growth approach, that could truly be a winning combination.

Awesome. You know, we're all in this pandemic situation and it's been really rough. It always comes up in every conversation, obviously, right? How is it possible to not see the effects of it on our business and our personal lives?

What tips would you give other revenue side leaders, business operation leaders around getting through this in an effective way, particularly when us as humans are really having a difficult time and that could impact a lot of things, right? Not just the sort of technical aspect of the business, but also us as human beings. Yeah, and again, not yet to give advice specifically, but maybe share a bit of some of the things I've learned throughout the last year, because it's been a year since we started this.

The first one for me, especially as a leader, is lead with empathy, right? you really don't, we don't know what's happening in everybody's homes, right? Like, again, I've got a very nice background behind me, but I'm in my daughter's bedroom right now, right? Where it's pink over me, right?

So I'm just squirting her room so I can take calls during the day and be able to get work done. But we don't know what's happening in everybody else's life, right? And so empathy is the thing that, for me, that's one of those things that it was important before. It's even more critical today because we don't know what's happening at home.

We don't know people that have the single mom with three kids and then she can't really take a call or something because she has to take care of the kids. Those are real-life situations that we need to take into account. And that has to be part of, as a leader, part of how you interact with your team members and collaborators. Because at the end of the day, everybody is here to help deliver, get to whatever the target is and all the things.

but we have specific situations at home that we need to deal with. That's the first one, leading with empathy. The other one for me, it's also always assuming positive intent, right? I don't know about you, but I know for me, like the emails, the Slack, like they just pile up.

And again, we are so busy. Like we just sometimes, it's not like we don't want to put the form. It's just like a train of thoughts. Oh, let me share this.

Let me get it done, right? Sometimes some of that stuff is coming across with, hey, why are you dumping that on me? Or why are you being so aggressive? It's on both sides.

When you're on the receiving end, assume that, hey, again, we don't know what's happening at home, we don't know when that message was sent. Then on the other side, it's also like, hey, just take the time to say hi on your Slack before you start dumping a question. I get it goes both ways. The third point for me, it's documentation, documentation, documentation, documentation.

We're big on that. That part of one of those key tenants of business operations If you on a scale some of to have that Some of the things that we doing have to be documented somewhere right With this fully distributed remote teams that one of the things that I learned personally just like, hey, what happened when we were onboarding a new team member and we are not sitting next to them in the office, right? What if you don't have all of that, some of the tribal knowledge that you want to share that usually you would get around the coffee or for breakfast or at lunch?

So documenting, documenting, that's becoming critical for companies to scale and be able to operate the most efficiently during this period. And I got a couple more. The next one is trust, right? Trust that people are going to do the right thing, right?

And align with them. And I'm big on that, too, is autonomy is key for people, in my opinion, for people to feel like they are contributing and all that stuff. And so trust that they're going to do the right thing. and then you can always check on them and make sure everything is doing well and all that stuff.

Then the last one is data, data, data, data, data, data. Again, that's what I'm telling the team each and every day is, hey, how can we inform our decisions? The best way to inform the decision in the context of ambiguity is try to remove a little bit of that ambiguity. The way you do that is with averaging data.

Awesome. Thank you for that. That's awesome. Yeah, empathy has come up when I've asked that question quite a bit.

So I'm glad that we're in 2020 talking about empathy because it's easy to get into that like ABC, Wall Street business culture that I think was sort of the perception that a lot of people thought business or doing really well or successful business had to be like. And I just don't buy it. I don't think it scales anymore. It may have worked at one point.

We are all human beings. Yeah, we're human beings. Absolutely. Amen to that.

If you think about one actionable tip that you would give revenue leaders out there around finding stable, predictable revenue, especially in this chaotic, ever-changing environment, what would that, and this is sort of in line with the previous question, but what would that tip be right now? Like something that someone could implement next week. Yeah, and I know, well, I don't know about next week, but I know that may also be a little bit controversial, but one thing I say is, hey, start exploring what usage-based pricing could do for your business, right?

And how you align your pricing with the value during your delivering to your customers. And again, some of the things you can start already thinking about it and testing with some of your customers, right? And so, but more broadly, and also explore what the product-led growth strategy could do for your business. That is, again, there's that massive wave.

And I think you nailed it on the end earlier. You said, hey, PLG, it feels like it's all the rage right now, but it's not anything new. It's just like, hey, now we're starting to see that, A, the companies that have adopted this type of strategy are growing much faster. And there is a reason for that, right?

Because people don't want to necessarily talk to those people every day, right? They want to be able to get the value and see what that product is all about and experience it by themselves before they engage with somebody else to discuss, do I get a discount? How much do you want me to commit? And all of the things.

And so look at usage-based pricing, see what that could do for your business and then stop thinking about maybe product-led growth could be something that could be good for you as well. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time. Very, very much appreciate it.

If people want to follow you on social media or maybe reach out for some advice, what would be the best ways to contact you? Just find me on LinkedIn. Yes. Awesome.

So everyone, LinkedIn, that is where we're at these days. Well, have a wonderful day. I know it's Friday, so hopefully you enjoy your family, your daughters you mentioned, and hope to see you in person soon. Hopefully we'll do some sort of like community mixer in person whenever we can.

Whenever we can. Yeah, I know. That would be great. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, have a wonderful day. Take care. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.