ChartMogul: What happens when a sales leader takes over marketing at a B2B SaaS company

Renata: Welcome to Rebuilding SaaS Marketing, a podcast by DigitalHenge. I'm Renata, uh, a growth expert and co founder of marketing agency for SaaS companies. Together with founders from across SaaS world, we are figuring out what marketing and sales look like in the age of AI. In each episode, we uncover one what worked, what failed, and what still keeps them awake at night. Today I'm talking with Sarah Archer, Chief revenue officer at Chartmogul, a platform that tracks subscription metrics for thousands of SaaS companies. We'll talk about decisions made under pressure, things that broke, and what data from 6,000 companies shows us. Let's get into it. Hi, Sarah, how are you?

Sarah Archer: I'm well, Andyo.

Renata: I'm doing great. Thank you for coming to our podcast.

Sarah Archer: It's wonderful to be here. Thanks for having me on.

Renata: Let's start with some straightforward questions. Sarah. Chartmogul tracks data on thousands of SaaS companies companies and your recent report shows that only 3.5% of SaaS companies reach 20 million. When you look at what separates ones who do from ones who don't, what can you tell us what the data shows us? What is the biggest difference in these companies?

Sarah Archer: I think that stat is helpful because it reminds you that building a lasting and meaningful business is hard. It's, it's not for the faint of heart. And so often when we log onto LinkedIn or Twitter, we see success, uh, stories on stages at conferences and wonder, how am I going to hit that next revenue milestone? What I observe is that the companies that succeed in hitting 20 million and beyond, they have a voraciousness and an adaptability that means they can continue innovating because those that don't make it, uh, are trying to push the same strategy up a hill and fail to ask the hard questions about what should we be doing differently or how can we improve things across the board. So I would say those that make it, they reinvent themselves along the way. They're not afraid to try new things, even if some sometimes it's outside of their comfort zone and they do iterative testing to figure out how to make meaningful gains that compound over time.

Renata: I like this concept of reinventing because sometimes you see that just for making a good product, you need to keep doing what you do. But yeah, what the data shows and what you tell us is that sometimes you need to stop and think over of what you're doing. And if you're doing it right, yeah,

Sarah Archer: it's tricky, right, because it can be tempting to chase like the new shiny idea or industry trend and it can certainly be a distraction. It reminds me of that movie up where the dog always says squirrel. But I think the adaptability and the reinvention also requires a um, mature self reflection. You have to be introspective enough to know when to change and why to change and how to change, not just change for the sake of change, if that makes sense. So that's like the one layer of nuance that I think is worth adding here.

Renata: Yeah, totally. Let's talk about you and your path in Chartmogul. You came to the company when it already had some clients and already had revenue. But as you said that on the day two, your CEO asked you to build a forecast and you couldn't. And after that, as far as I know, head of marketing quit on the next day. You had a lot of challenges from the start and it's interesting for me, what have you improved first? What was needed to fix first?

Sarah Archer: Sure, yeah, I suppose I've been at chartmogul for seven plus years, is that right? And my story is one of just inheriting more and more responsibility. And when I joined in 2018, we had some early signs of product market fit. I certainly wouldn't say product market fit. Mhm. And I was in person in the Berlin office observing how the commercial team worked. And so there were a few sales reps and listening to their calls and seeing the objections that customers raised and the negotiations that were transpiring. I guess because I had been in an office in previous SaaS businesses, I just noticed a few things like off the cuff that didn't feel super scalable to me. So the first was, the first was the CRM. Um, so it is true. Nick, our CEO said hey, can you build a forecast for me? And I looked at the data that the sales team was putting into the CRM and I said no, I can't build you a forecast. You don't have the data required. So what I can build you as a new system of record, a new CRM, um, to track the meaningful data needed to build a forecast. But then that will take some time. So I swapped out the CRM system and started to re architect the commercial tech stack a little bit. And it's interesting because my background is in Salesforce consulting. And he said do you want to implement Salesforce? And I said sure, if you give me budget for a Salesforce admin. Because I didn't want to administer Salesforce like that's not a job. That's super interesting to me. And so we ended up going with a really lightweight Alternative. It's actually a product that doesn't exist anymore. Zendesk acquired a CRM M company and sold a CRM UM solution to be used alongside their support solution. They called it Zendesk Solutions Excel. And it worked really well for us because it married sales and support. And they could see tickets, the sales team could see tickets that the support team was working on and vice versa. And so we got quite a few years out of that product before we moved onto, um, what is now our own CRM, charitable CRM. And so the first thing I changed was the system of record. And then a few other things followed suit as I got more credibility and influence within the business.

Renata: I think building a CRM um is not the first thing. Like it doesn't show result in short term. So I imagine that was a, um, hard decision maybe to go into that. But it's great that your CEO agreed.

Sarah Archer: I don't know. I also reflect on that decision and I wonder, is that just what I went after first? Because it was my comfort zone? Right. Maybe I attacked the CRM UM problem because it was the problem that I could wrap my hands around fastest. And it is true that in any business, like, you do need to show some initial results or outcomes before you can start to disassemble or push the business in a different way. So had I come in and said, hey, let's change our pricing on day two, I probably wouldn't have had quite as much success. So I think there's probably a few reasons why I landed on that project. And the good thing about diving into a CRM UM migration is it gives you a lot of intimacy with the data so you understand what are the salient data points that are important to the business? What kinds of information do we need to know about who are our customers and how we convert them? Getting your hands messy with the data points and the kinds of customers our team was talking to and how they converted definitely laid a nice foundation for me to take on some other projects later on.

Renata: Yeah, I agree that sometimes you do what's comfortable for you first, and after that when you get acquainted with everything, you just continue improving. Okay, let's move on to the. I would say the very interesting part for me because I saw in your report about companies who reached 20 million or who don't, that there are actually a lot of mistakes. And what's the most common mistake in SaaS companies between their maybe like first traction and a real success?

Sarah Archer: Yeah, good question. I think it depends. I've worked for a number of founder, CEOs now and different SaaS businesses. And the mistakes so sometimes have to do with the DNA of the business. So it could be a commercial mistake because you don't have enough. You have a very technical founding team and some of the commercial nuance is like lost on them. Or you have, in the case of one business, I worked for a very strong commercial founder. But finding product market fit, uh, was like a really big challenge. It goes back to that idea of introspection. You have to know your strengths in order to maybe anticipate some of your future challenges. So it depends, like at chartmogul, what are some of the mistakes that we've made? Probably like lack of product focus was a problem for us in early days. We actually we built and sold a revenue recognition product as a secondary product to our subscription analytics platform and hindsight's 20 20. But probably we shouldn't have built that product. We built it because we needed a revenue recognition solution for ourselves and so did some of our customers. And so we were responding to what we thought was latent demand in the market. But over time we realized that revenue recognition was really not a good line of business for us and we built the product too prematurely. So one major problem was we, we had a small group of engineers trying to solve two very different intellectual product, uh, domains. And then our support and our sales team, they didn't really know very much about revenue recognition, uh, FP&A questions would come flying in from customers and we'd be asked a lot of accounting questions when that was not a domain expertise area for us. And I think that's a common thing thing that you see in the data that you need an expansion lever. And so you're thinking, how can I increase my average revenue per account? What is my expansion lever? So your brain naturally goes to, okay, we could build additional products. But then choosing the right problem sets I think is not easy.

Renata: Can you somehow find the answer if to this question if you're doing something wrong in metrics and numbers, in your example, how did you find out that this was not the right decision to build this product?

Sarah Archer: Sure. So it's qualitative and quantitative. I think qualitatively it was visceral. You would see a revenue recognition demo come in and our sales team would be like, oh, no. Because we excelled at selling to ambitious CEOs around SaaS metrics and growth. But we struggled to sell to heads of finance. And part of that was like a knowledge and credibility issue. And then you see that in the data as well. Right. So the sales cycles would be like longer or there would be more objections. And then over time what we realized is that retaining the customers we did sell to became challenging. There would be more support tickets and the support tickets would take longer to resolve and there would just be a bit more, I guess dissatisfaction across the whole experience. Which is probably a testament to the fact that uh, we didn't have great product market fit. And that's in part because we built a compliance product if you will, and a lot of our revenue recognition users wanted to buy the product. And then voila, uh, compliance was done. We sassed it away, but you still need accountants to review. In the end we decommissioned that product and we didn't actually collect all that much cash from the customers we sold to. And then fast forward a few years later we built CRM capabilities inside of Chartmogul which was a much better, which was a much better decision. And then that was born out in the experience where it was like fun to sell and people adopted it and they were like aha, this makes sense. And I can imagine other businesses struggle through similar decision making.

Renata: That's a great example because from both sides, basically from sales people and from the product side as well as from the client side you felt that tension. But I think it is clear only after some analysis that it is so not inside a process of building and selling. And regarding selling, I know that in a lot of companies there is a um, founder led sales motions. What I think about, it's really great to start with but sometimes it starts to be a bottleneck in the growth of the company. When is the stage when you start building a scalable system? When you need to move on from founders led sales to systematize this?

Sarah Archer: Basically yeah. So my thoughts on this are pretty prescriptive. So what I would say is sell to your first. However many customers. I don't know what the right answer is. At some point it's your job to lead the vision um and, or product for the company and you no longer have bandwidth to sell and it probably takes longer to get there than you think. Especially if you're uncomfortable with sales is a domain because you have a bad stereotype about sales and you want to get it off your plate. But the advice is sell to your first. I don't know, let's just say 100 customers at the point where you can no longer provide a meaningfully good sales experience throughout the evaluation of a prospective customer. That's when you'll need to hire and what you should do Is you should hire two salespeople if you can afford it. Two allows you to see what constitutes good. And so two sales reps will compete against one another. And if you only have one, you'll never know if they're performing at, uh, 60%, 80%, 120%. And you should hire two, which also gives you a bit of redundancy if something doesn't work out. And then they'll compete and hopefully the system will start to better itself, basically. And you should manage those two people basically as long as you can, until it's clear you no longer have the knowledge or capacity to manage them well. And so when your sales reps start asking you questions about negotiation tactics or objection handling and you don't know how to help them improve, that's when you can hire a first line sales manager or sales leader.

Renata: That's actually so simple. I think this is what a lot of people miss, because when you hire only one person, sometimes the problem can be in the person, like not in the product or something. But yeah, when you hire to, it makes sense to understand because they are

Sarah Archer: not identical anyway in everybody's sales methodology, that's probably not the right word to use. Everybody's sales style, if you will, is a little bit different. And the best reps will adapt something that works for their personality. Like some folks can use humor, but then when another person tries those same jokes, it's very awkward. And so you have to figure out what works. And there's definitely a learning curve to it. But what I would say is if you're a founder and you need to hire sales, hire someone you would want to buy from where you enjoy speaking to them. There's a likability factor where you're like, yeah, I'd love to have a cup of coffee and go for a walk with this person. They're interesting, they don't have all the answers, but their style of thinking or communicating is attractive to me insofar as I would want to spend time with that person. That's true of hiring like pretty much across the board because, uh, every hire should bring you energy, which helps you build a business for many years. But if you hire folks that drain your energy, it becomes really challenging, not just across your business, but your personal life. You start to spend time thinking about, oh no, I have to help this person or coach this person and it's uncomfortable and that can be really demotivating.

Renata: I totally agree with this. I also have a question about sales, but in a little bit different light. In your gdm report. There is a point when you say that at low price points, adding sales can create a friction and actually slow growth. What should a founder do instead? For example, if he wants to scale sales somehow, but he has a subscription model, self service, subscription, trial based and

Sarah Archer: all that kind of stuff, My suggestion would be to invert the problem. Right, so you said scaling sales without adding friction. And so what you want to do is actually first and foremost understand how do your customers want to evaluate and make a purchase decision about your product. And then you basically need to reverse engineer things. So if they don't want to interact with sales, how can you provide all of the meaningful resources to help them get to an evaluation and purchase decision? And if that means looking at your checkout flow or your trial flow and making things simpler across the board, then certainly you can do that. But the tricky thing is building it with some sort of agility in mind, because all buyers are a bit different. I'm old school. When I want to buy something, I navigate to a website. I find the phone number on the website and I call and I say, hi, I'm interested in your product or service. Can I speak to someone about a potential purchase? So across most domains you will have buyers like this. And um, so you need the agility to basically identify what kinds of buyers you have and then put them into the right funnels to begin with, but then also allow them to change. Because maybe I say, no, I don't need your help, I don't want to talk to sales, it's fine. But then as soon as I experience a friction point or I have a point of misunderstanding or confusion, maybe at that point, now I want to talk to someone. So I think it's not about scaling sales necessarily, but we always say being aligned with how your buyers want to buy and then building a process around that. So. So it sounds quite complex when I describe it that way, but that's how I would start is figuring out, like, how do your buyers want to buy?

Renata: I think it's a sustainable approach, not just trying to scale something, but understand your clients. And we talk about it, I think in every podcast that we have, uh, first, understanding what your clients want and how you can help them to make this decision easier.

Sarah Archer: Yeah, I think I'm thinking of a customer of ours and they said to me, we were speaking at a conference, I was talking to the CEO and he was like, I get a thousand trials every month, but I don't have sales. And, um, my brain is, wait, what? That's a great Problem? Lots of businesses would like to have this problem.

Renata: Ah.

Sarah Archer: I said, why didn't you call every single person that signs up for a trial? Just as soon as they sign up, within five minutes, just call them. Hey, saw you signed up for a trial. It's Sarah from Chartmogul. Is there anything I can help you with? Do you want some resources to get started? Anyway, here's my contact details. If you have any questions, just drop me an email. Maybe that's not the right approach to growth, but at the very m least, you'll learn a lot really fast. So if every single customer hangs up or you never get to speak to anyone. Okay, then I probably shouldn't hire a sales team and have them work the phones. What is the other. What are my other options? Or so I'll just say. Yeah, I guess it goes back to your point, Reneta, about knowing your customers.

Renata: That makes sense. Now, I want to get to the AI specifically, because this is also something that we discuss every time, because it's everywhere and we cannot avoid this topic. Yes. And I think this is also the problem that I see a lot, that using AI sometimes doesn't help. And I want to ask firstly about Chartmogul. You already have a lot of customers and revenue, and where right now does AI give the biggest leverage?

Sarah Archer: Yeah, good question. When I think about the commercial side of the business, understanding, um, your customers is actually quite an interesting AI use case. I just went through the exercise of I'm redesigning a page on our website that's all about our customers. Who are our customers, what kinds of people do we sell to, what do they do with the product, et cetera. And as a part of this exercise, I wanted to refresh, uh, our customer stories. So they're like case studies. Right. And so I reached out to some number of customers and I said, can I interview you?

Renata: You?

Sarah Archer: Here's the questions in advance. And I took all of the recording transcripts and worked with the raw recording transcripts to find the really nice sound bites and then to write these customer stories. And it was so fast. It took me like two and a half hours to go from a raw transcript to a final draft of a case study that I was really happy with or previously. I think that would take me like a week. And then another thing we did was took 25 or so. We took a sampling of recent sales calls, and we were like, we want to understand how our objections raised have changed over time. And so we again took raw transcripts and we asked a bunch of questions. What objections are coming up. Um, what trends are you noticing in the industry? And put put together this pretty impressive quick technical report that we then use to build a call coaching tool. And so twice a day the tool looks at sales call transcripts and does an analysis on what could have gone better and what should happen next to progress the deal. So I guess on the commercial front that's two use cases that I'm really excited about.

Renata: I agree especially with Casey status as I am from marketing team. We do it all the time and I'm really happy that you need to spend time with your customers not polishing every word after that. I think this is really valuable. And how would you describe what still should be human in this process?

Sarah Archer: Care and intent. You raised an interesting idea which is sometimes folks will pick up AI tooling to solve a problem and AI is not where you should start. It was some months ago I was trying to resize an image and I like open ChatGPT and I was like resize this image and, and I must have spent like 20 minutes and I was so frustrated and then I was like why am I using chat GPT to do this? I'm just going to go to a web app that I know can resize an image and resize an image. So it's a little bit like use the right tool for the job I guess first and foremost. But to your question, where should you not use AI? I'm still, I guess by virtue of who I am skeptical um, about AI for one to one interactions. And like for example a lot of our sales cycles involve answering complex questions over email about the product. And so someone will say hey, in chartmogul how can I identify sale transactions by country? For example, they want to see which of their customers transactions are failing due to like credit card failures or authentication issues etc. And so I had the sales team try an AI sort of email draft response mhm solution and it would be like in chartmogul here's how you xyz in the product and it failed pretty miserably firstly because it just struggled to answer complex product questions. And I think that if we tried it again and we trained it on our documentation, we would be able to overcome this failure quite quickly. I can definitely answer questions about chartmogul's product capabilities but it also needs to layer on this understanding of why you are asking the question as the customer. Right. So if the customer is trying to understand failed transactions by geo oh they're worried they have an involuntary churn problem and uh, they're Trying to retain revenue or customers in a certain region by providing a better checkout experience. And I haven't seen, although I'm sure someone could probably find something that would impress me. I haven't seen anything that was like, I can go one step further to put myself into the business context to understand. Oh, the reason you're asking this question is you're trying to solve this problem because it's important to your business for this reason. So there's like layers and layers of theory of business that you get by developing your business acumen as a sales professional or working in a commercial department. I'm protecting my own career and saying AI can't do one tool themselves. But. And I'm sure it will, but uh, it's just, it's not there yet.

Renata: I totally get you. Because sometimes when I think about what AI can do in marketing, I'm also thinking, no, it can do that. Like for example, it can decide a strategy for a uh, business like a long term or something. But after a couple of months suddenly it can do something that I thought it was impossible. And yeah, it's crazy. Yeah.

Sarah Archer: The AI on the AI front, like the marketing use cases are pretty aplenty. Right. I pulled out all of our one to many marketing automation messages from customer ao, which is what we use for like email marketing. And I was like, it just does great things with data, right. So I was like, analyze all the communications we've sent over the past three years. A much more nuanced prompt than this. And I was like, tell me what constitutes a good performing marketing email. Show me what subject lines work, what time of day, like things are sent, what day of the week, what kinds of content to what kinds of audiences. And it is much faster and less, is much faster and less biased in analyzing data because it doesn't start with a hypothesis, which is where I think most people start.

Renata: That's true. And actually going a little bit back to what you said about one to one sales and that AI can't go to one more step. I think the problem is that people can ask wrong questions and other people can understand that and just help you with this. But AI can't read your mind.

Sarah Archer: Sure. It doesn't understand intention necessarily. Right. Like I have a call tomorrow with a customer and there's so much nuance to it. So she's like, hey, I had this support ticket with your support team and they provided the answer. But I still don't trust chartmogul. I don't trust my numbers in chartmogul. And I was like, cool, let's talk about that. Why is it important for you to understand your metrics? Okay, you're reporting to a board, you're reporting to a CEO. This particular person is going out on maternity leave and so she's trying to make sure that everything is working before she takes an extended time away. And so there's so much nuance I think to understanding maybe not just intent, but also like motivation and what drives people. In sales we always say that when someone makes like a purchase decision, they do so for the company. I think this is the best solution or product to solve this problem. What we have, they also, they're making a personal gamble. They're using their political capital to say, here's how I think we should solve this problem. And I want to be right because my professional success depends on it. And uh, as sellers it's like our responsibility to help these people succeed using our product or service and so making them kind of the champion of whatever problem that business is trying to solve. And AI is really far from being able to co create a solution like a salesperson with true understanding of like intent and motivation can totally.

Renata: But there is a thing that you definitely automate with AI in sales. Tell me about it. Do you have some outreach sequences or something that you automate? Uh, and how do you do it into what is. Maybe you had to roll back something because it gave you your clients not a right impression of your company, for example?

Sarah Archer: Sure. I smiled when you said sequences because we have sequences within our own product. Our uh, founder was asking our director of sales, hey, why doesn't the sales team use sequences? We write pretty much all of our emails by hand in our email client. We use templates for expediency, but we don't use sequences by virtue of the fact that they're not a one to one sales experience. And the vast majority of our outreach actually includes personalized loom videos. So when you sign up for a trial of chartmogul, like you get a personalized loom video where someone greets you by name and says things about your business based on research that they've done, the research part's faster with AI for sure. So when someone signs up for a trial of chartmogul, we take that email address, we take the domain, we run that through an enrichment and then it fills out the details and actually has like a pre call brief for the salesperson if you will. So that's quite handy. When I started my career, I had to do prep call sheets for my account Manager and answer all those questions with manual research that doesn't really exist anymore. But no, I think there's nothing really on the sales front that we've had to roll back per se. It's just been really a matter of like testing different things. And the email automation solution that we tried for answering product questions didn't work. So we did turn that off. But in two months time I might tell the team, go try it again because the um, rate at which this stuff is getting better is remarkable. And so we're just in this process of iterating without losing focus on like our true top line goals.

Renata: Finishing up the talk about AI One of your reports I think I saw m a thought that there is a um, big AI churn wave that products use AI as part of their product and people try it and they just don't continue using it anymore. Why is that?

Sarah Archer: When we talk about recurring revenue, and I think this is probably from Sam Jacobs, CEO of Pavilion. Recurring revenue, when I subscribe to something on a monthly or quarterly or annual basis, I expect that the value I get in return for my ongoing commitment is consistent relative to the price I pay or the ROI that I expect. And so the idea is recurring revenue is a result of recurring impact or recurring value. And with AI specifically we see this concept of the AI tourist. This is the term that Kyle Poyar has coined, which is fun. A lot of folks that are trying AI tools or products, they don't intend to receive recurring value or impact because it's experimental in nature. They're um, trying something to see in. Is this interesting? Is this something I should implement? But the intent is not there. Right? And so that's why you see high churn. And so what we tell people is you need to separate out what is real intent to recur and onboard and stay and change their behaviors or habits. And what is experimental in nature, which is fine, you can still collect cash from those folks and iterate and figure out the best way in which to engage them on like a monetary basis. But yeah, we do see high AI churn as uh, folks figure out what is the right workflow in this changing world of technology.

Renata: I've never thought about experimental flow when you try if this works out for you, for your process or just the stability, I would say of the product, of the value that you get. It's really interesting actually. I have one more question about AI. Just curious. Do you use AI for your reports that you publish? For not gathering maybe data, but for creating the reports?

Sarah Archer: No, not really. Maybe for some of the promotional like LinkedIn posts to getting to our first version of a draft. But no, that's all the analysis is done in house. Maybe they use some tools here and there to speed things up but largely speaking it's all done by hand.

Renata: That's cool. I was just curious for myself how you did. Okay, I want to move to your decisions that you made during your career in church mool and what was the hardest decision that you made? But and even though maybe it was not clear that it's the right decision, but you thought it was right and now maybe looking back you can explain it.

Sarah Archer: Yeah, sure. So like one um, foundational belief I have is that demand generation and marketing is one of the hardest non technical aspects of running a SaaS business. So just getting people to care about what you're building with consistency is really challenging. And the demand generation side of things has been my focus and my challenge for the last year or so. Of course my background is like sales and sales operations and so I really like hard and fast. Did you hit the quota or not? That's ah how my brain works. And when I started working with the marketing function more hands on it was like less clear to me what constitutes success. And so we had previously had a system of marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads and all this like really robust reporting to see how web traffic converted to leads and how leads converted to trials. But I remember like opening up the reporting docs and just like genuinely not knowing what to do with it. And it's not like a data literacy or uh, terminology issue. It's just felt so abstracted from how I actually thought about running the business because at the end of the day, and maybe this is just my simpleton brain, like all I care about is I want the most number of qualified subscription businesses to sign up for a trial of chart mogul, import their data and then convert to becoming a paying customer. And so I guess to answer your question, like the hardest commercial decision that like I've made recently was pulling apart this system that looked healthy and looked, it was working on paper. We were doing conferences and we were doing content blogs, partnerships, we were doing panels every month. And it was certainly supporting the brand but it wasn't meaningfully moving the needle on number of trials. And so I disassembled that, that way of marketing and some of those marketing campaigns and programs to do a much faster adaptive technical marketing. This is more akin to growth hacking, although I hate that term. And yeah a bit of a reset on that front because you shouldn't do the marketing things because you think you're supposed to. You should have, like, conviction about the growth experiments that you're running and you should do them like faster, faster and more iteratively. This is like my style of marketing, if that makes sense.

Renata: Can you give an example maybe of one thing that you changed and what is the difference between this brand marketing and technical marketing, as you said?

Sarah Archer: Yeah, the customer case studies that I just refreshed, I think are a really nice example. And so the previous customer case studies were very like marketing for marketers or marketeers. I would describe. Connect your stripe data to Chartmogul. We calculate all of the SaaS metrics. It's effortless, it's easy. This, like, early 2010s SaaS marketing narrative that I feel is a little removed from reality. And so we've shifted to exposing some of the harder things. Like sometimes it is easy, you connect stripe and, um, you get everything in Chartmogle. But if you have 10 years of messy billing data from a sales director that was running discounts at the end of the year, or a mistake was made and some of your invoices are missing subscription service periods, of course chartmogul isn't going to tell you a perfect. It's not going to. If you import a bunch of messy, awful data, I'm not going to give you a beautiful dashboard. You're going to have questions. And so not shying away from that and saying, fine, you import a bunch of messy data, but look, I have cleaning tools that you can use to fix those problems. I can bulk edit things or I can surface discrepancies and help you solve them. And I think that's one example, is not shying away from some of the hard aspects of subscription data that's specific to our product domain, which requires, by the way, that marketing has an intense degree of knowledge about the product and its capabilities and the product domain. And you're not storytelling a vision without a deep understanding of the product. And that's a big change that I've forced us to make.

Renata: Do you see results after this change?

Sarah Archer: Yeah, actually. Revenue growth for the last seven or eight months has been refreshingly positive. I feel good about the stuff we're putting out. I think there's qualitative results across some areas of the business. But it's also, when I see some of the stuff we're putting out, I find it more authentic and I'm more proud of it because it speaks to the product itself that we've built. In short, yeah.

Renata: Great. And why have you shifted from sales to marketing? Was it because your career path or that reflect the global marketing tendencies?

Sarah Archer: I have an awesome sales director. I have a great sales team. I worked hard to lay foundations there. I recruited and have been lucky enough to retain fabulous sales and sales operations talent. And so when our CEO and I were looking at, uh, like different areas of the business, we had a former VP of marketing who took another job in her local market. And I said to our CEO, I'll backfill the position for you. I'll find you a new head of marketing that I'll work well with. And he said, no, I want you to do it. It's somewhat more to the inherited responsibility, but I think it's because I have an intense love for the product and the customers that we serve. And it's really enjoyable to challenge myself on different intellectual disciplines with still a ferocity for chartmogul the product and how it helps customers.

Renata: So basically, you don't have a special person who is responsible for marketing. You are this person.

Sarah Archer: Yes.

Renata: That's nice. And I love this approach. When chief revenue officer is responsible for sales and marketing and they are not conflicting, not contradicting each other. Because this is what I see a lot in companies.

Sarah Archer: Yeah, we had different ways of thinking about how to grow the business when we were separate, but now that's all unified.

Renata: Okay, let's finish with advice for a founder who has sales, who has a great product but can scale. What is your advice? What to do first and what's the next path, uh, he should take?

Sarah Archer: Listen to your customer calls. If you have a sales team and you're not scaling at the rate that you want, something's wrong perhaps. And if, uh, you've abstracted yourself away from sales enough that you don't know why you're not converting customers, then you need to probably take a step back to take two steps forward. And I bet you if you listen to three of your customer calls, it will become quite obvious and give you some direction of where to go next. Call recordings, you put them on the treadmill. Um, when you walk the dog, you listen to calls. Our CEO can open one of our sales calls and in three minutes identify what's wrong. It's when you've been in the business for so long, it becomes obvious to you quite quickly. But that's where my brain would go first.

Renata: This is the thing that we talk every time about. Understand your clients, understand what they want. Actually, we didn't touch theme about pricing changes. And I think you had some interesting experience in pricing, what would you recommend? Founders listening about the pricing? Sure.

Sarah Archer: No one wants to own pricing because it's really high stakes, it's high risk, high reward. You get it right, it can unlock huge growth for your business. Get it wrong, you can lose to competition and you can lose mind share. So what would my advice be to founders on the topic of pricing? It is true that pricing is quite complex. No one wants to own it because it's hard. You have to model the impact of pricing changes. And the thing about customers or people in general is they make unpredictable decisions. So there's no like linear equation that says if I change pricing like this, here's how folks are going to respond. My experience has been, uh, you should do two things. First is someone in the business should get comfortable with the uncomfortableness of pricing. So maybe that's you, the CEO or founder, or maybe it's someone on your commercial team. But force them to build knowledge about pricing and packaging as an intellectual commercial domain. And then just force yourself every two months or three months rather to look at it and just ask yourself, should we be pricing on a different value metric? Should we, should we have different plans and packaging? Is our pricing optimized? And so it's really, it's a muscle building exercise of getting comfortable with pricing and then a cadence of revisiting it as regularly as makes sense. And probably if you think you should change your pricing, you're too late.

Renata: Three months, it's so often. I've never heard of someone doing it so often. So I think this is a great insights because I also agree that pricing can be a huge leverage. But it's so hard to make this decision and go into doing that. It's always easier to just uh, think that, okay, let's hire a new marketing team or a new salesperson and everything will be great.

Sarah Archer: I mean you might look at it every three months and the answer might be do nothing. But if you wait for like a cadence of a year, you'll be too late probably. And there's lots of ways you can like silently test pricing and you can introduce different sort of experiments and you can do some pricing strategies that might point you in the right direction. But what we see in the data is that customers that have this muscle of regularly experimenting with plants and packaging, they grow faster, uh, across pretty much all growth sets segment. So that's a report that we put out recently. More plans, faster growth. And there's some data in there that definitely surprised me and challenged me. So it's a good read.

Renata: I also find it very interesting. Okay Sarah, thank you so much for joining this podcast. It was really interesting for me to have this conversation because with this path, uh, from sales to marketing to pricing, you have a great experience experience and a lot of insights for our audience. Where can people find you and learn more about you or chartmogul?

Sarah Archer: I'm on the world wide web. No, you can find me on LinkedIn. If there's something that you like, actually want help with or to discuss, you're probably better off. Email Sarah nohartmogul ah.com Otherwise happy to connect. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. This was fun.

Renata: That's a wrap on today's episode with Sarah Archer, Chief Revenue Officer at chartmogul. We covered a lot of ground, from companies who actually reach 20 million to things that you should focus on when you're scaling your business and how to use AI and still keep what makes your company human. Thanks for listening to Rebuilding Science Marketing, a podcast by DigitalHenge. If this episode gave you a spark or an idea, share it with a founder who is at the same stage of growth. Follow Digital Hunch on LinkedIn and find Rebuilding SaaS Marketing on YouTube, Apple Podcast, Castbox, uh, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcast. Join us as we keep redefining how SaaS marketing works in the age of AI.