In this episode James Kaikis sits down with Lexi Bohonnon, Managing Director at Roam, to explore how a solutions mindset in leadership can drive business impact. With a career spanning IBM, Yext, and now Roam, Lexi shares her unique journey from solutions engineering to senior leadership, revealing how solutions-oriented professionals are redefining traditional roles.
Lexi and James highlight the value of putting solutions-minded individuals in leadership positions and the impact it has on GTM strategies. Lexi explains how solutions thinking helps leaders break down silos, align teams, and focus on delivering consistent customer value. She also shares real-life examples, including how integrating SEs into customer success roles helped turn around a difficult client relationship and foster long-term advocacy.
Lexi delves into her role at Roam, where she’s challenging traditional go-to-market approaches with a focus on customer empowerment through frictionless buying experiences.
Key Takeaways:
Lexi Bohonnon is the Managing Director at Roam, a virtual work platform redefining go-to-market strategies with innovative customer experiences. Previously, Lexi spent over a decade at Yext, where she built the Sales Engineering team and led global Customer Success. Before Yext, she was an integrated solutions consultant at IBM. Known for her solutions mindset, Lexi specializes in aligning teams to deliver exceptional customer value and drive business impact.
Follow Lexi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexi-bohonnon-818b4418/
A solutions mindset isn’t just about solving problems; it’s about understanding the bigger picture and aligning every decision to customer outcomes.
Sometimes you have to take risks—combine roles, challenge norms, and push yourself out of your comfort zone. That’s where the real impact happens.
The instincts of a solutions professional always come back to one thing: delivering value. That’s what sets them apart in leadership roles.
Voiceover: What does it take to stay ahead in B2B SaaS? Welcome to The New Go-To-Market Playbook. I'm your host, James Kaikis, Chief Revenue and Experience Officer at Testbox. In our interview series, I sit down with go-to-market operators, leaders, and industry experts who are defining the next era of go-to-market by winning in the margins. These leaders are focused on incremental innovations and non-obvious advantages that drive big results. The goal of this interview series is for you to take action in your business. So sit back, grab a notepad and enjoy the episode.
James Kaikis: Lexi, it's so good to see you.
Lexi Bohonnon: Great to be here.
James Kaikis: It's great to finally meet you in person.
Lexi Bohonnon: Finally.
James Kaikis: I know we're here. It's like this has been the best thing about PreSales Collective is I've met all these amazing people over the last couple years and built these relationships, but it's all been done virtually. Like half the time I don't even know if I've met somebody in person or not, because I think like you, we've talked so many times. So it's so wonderful to have you here.
Lexi Bohonnon: Thank you for having me.
James Kaikis: Congrats on your new job and your new promotion.
Lexi Bohonnon: Thank you.
James Kaikis: I'm very excited to dig into that, right? Because for me, I've always looked up to you and like what you've done as a solution leader, right? Because I think we're wired similarly where it's like your solutions oriented, but you're business minded. And I feel being an SC has been a superpower, right? Being able to do so much more, right?
Lexi Bohonnon: Yeah, the best job that exists.
James Kaikis: It really is, right? People like you are really leading the edge of what solutions professionals can do, and so I'm excited to dig into that today. For everyone listening and watching, tell us a little bit about yourself, tell us your title, and really, because you have such
an interesting background, tell us what got you here.
Lexi Bohonnon: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so I am a couple weeks into my new role at Roam. Roam is a virtual work platform, super fun, exciting. We came out of beta in February, so it's all very new. I'm managing director at Roam, so kind of all things revenue and figuring it out as we grow and scale. And before that, I was a decade plus at Yext, joined in 2014 there as an individual contributor. We were getting ready to build out the enterprise. Gonna have a core set of enterprise customers, but figuring out the motion, it was a really nice parlay for me from my background at IBM. I started my career at IBM out of school on the consulting side, but did a bunch of integration consulting work. So when I started at Yext, we were a single product, really revolutionizing what had been a manual process or kind of a cellular data process for a lot of our customers to one where we said, "Hey, we can do this in real time using APIs, but none of those people were really integrated in the way that they could see the value of that. And so that was my first observation when I started, which was my foray into the solutions world. Building out, kind of enterprise architecture conversations in the pre-sale, I found myself getting pulled into doing that with a lot of our AEs like, "Hey, we're going to be in Memphis for this customer. Can you come to the pitch with me?" Which I loved and was energized by.. And so that was really the launchpad to starting the SE org. Me, myself, and I for a while. As we were scaling and growing, brought in some Salesforce leadership, brought in some leaders who were used to, very used to that SE role, and kind of brought that excitement to scale and grow it. And so before IPO, we said, "All right, hey, let's do this thing. Let's scale it." And that was the beginning of the story. Yeah, so scaled the SCs, grew that team internationally as the company grew, helped open some of those markets. We built out a lot of those classic sub-functions in the SC organization, solution architects, value engineers, demo engineers. Kind of hit this inflection point that we realized our traditional CSM role was changing or needed to change in a way that the SCs were getting pulled in a lot. The SCs were kind of that partner in crime with the AE in the way that a CSM had been for so many years. And so what did this three party system look like instead of the two? So I stepped in to lead our global CSM team. Pretty quickly we realized we wanted to bring back that classic chief customer officer type role at Yext. So we brought the SCs, the CSMs, professional services, and the support org at the time together globally to really think about what those roles look like, what should they look like in putting the customer back in the center of those decisions versus the things we, you know, the special role here or the new role there as we scale quickly and say, "Oh, this will be a benefit to the customer," but really it created a lot of confusion.
James Kaikis: Yeah. I love that. And I love what you did there. I want to talk about it more because you're right. We create these silos internally and we have best intentions, but it just results and clunky handoffs and a poor customer experience, right? What were some of the learnings or maybe wins on that consolidated function and group that you created?
Lexi Bohonnon: I think the wins were ultimately for the customer, right? I think they were so
thankful when we came to them and said, "Hey, it's going to be a little rocky for a bit. "We're going to figure this thing out. "We want to hear from you, give us your feedback." And I think resoundingly what we heard was, we want to talk to one person. Yeah, we don't need, who do we go to when we have a question? And so I think that was resoundingly, at the end of the day, the benefit. I think we also learned a lot about the team themselves and kind of career goals and skill sets and what that looked like to be able to give people opportunity to tee them up in different areas. I mean, we'll dig into this, but I think we learned that the buyer and the customer themselves are upskilling in sophistication and their technical acumen and the things they're looking for and the access to information. I mean, the ability to find competitive battle cards and all the things that took a while or we all hoped were kind of behind closed doors are all out there.
James Kaikis: You can't hide anymore. You can't hide anything. You can't hide. Everything's out there, right? And peer review, social proof, it's all there. You know, one of the things that I know was really critical to this is the enablement aspect of this, right? Can you talk a little bit more about what you did from an enablement perspective to get the team up to speed?
Lexi Bohonnon: So our first bet was let's basically take our CSM organization globally through our SE enablement. A new SE that comes in and our whole idea was like, let's upscale the CS organization to be that foundational level level SE from a product and technical knowledge to allow the SEs to then take the next step to go up through their journey technically. And so we did that. We rolled out product by product. We kind of had a six-eight month timeframe where we wanted the team to go through. We brought a SE leader over to lead the CS in North America and kind of planted a few SE individual contributor SEs as CSMs to get that cross pollination and help build from the ground up. So that was the starting point. Didn't all go perfectly.
James Kaikis: It never does.
Lexi Bohonnon: It never does. It never does. And I think in a lot of cases, it was having conversations with the team on, hey, this is where we're headed. What's your career journey look like? Sure. And I think that that led to a lot of really fruitful conversations from a career buildings perspective of, hey, are you looking for a more commercially oriented role. And maybe some CSMs that were like, actually, I'm kind of allergic to this idea. I would want to maybe take the leap in being an AEin ways that they hadn't been ready for that yet. And so there was a lot of really good learnings across the board.
James Kaikis: I love that. I think one more thing I want to dig in on the idea that customers want to talk to someone who is delivering value at all times, right? I have traditionally had a lot of points of views that, "Hey, I don't want a CSM to come into the conversation just to give some update that I could do on my own and I have to go get someone that can deliver information." I also have taken a little bit of heat on my points of view around customer success generally. I think I've got a camp of people who really believe in this but at the same time are also a little bit averse to the change that needs to happen. I also have this thesis based off all the research that I've done over the last couple of years is that when you take a solutions professional and put them in charge of the CSM function, it has a massive, massive impact on the business because the way we think about value. So do you have any examples of that that you could share?
Lexi Bohonnon: Yeah, so we had one of our top SEs in North America had been in the SE came from a consulting background for a couple of years, stepped into the SE role, was just absolutely crushing it. He said, "Hey, from a career perspective, diversify, "step into the CS role, we're making this big change. "You're gonna have a huge impact on the company "because you're gonna have a bigger impact on the team "to get them thinking the way you think. "And it'll be great career-rounding for you to see a different perspective, own the customer. So we convinced him to do that, he immediately stepped into a book of business with a customer who had been a long time customer that was not happy with us, not happy with us for a variety of reasons. And I think some of the ways that the team had previously been trying to solve those problems were falling short for a variety of reasons. His mindset, his thinking, going back to value and solution orientation and kind of going back to why they'd bought in the first place. And trying to help understand and put those pieces together wasn't easy, certainly. But he was able to, through relationships, through proving value in every opportunity, had to interface with that customer, turn that relationship around. So much so that they were willing to speak at our Investor Day like six months later.
James Kaikis: That's a big turnaround.
Lexi Bohonnon: You know, a spokesperson for value and what they saw. That was like one of the best, it's like, this is the shining gold star of what we're trying to do here. Let's help everybody be in a position to have those conversations and really focus on value.
James Kaikis: Yes. I love that. And thank you so much for sharing that because I think you need those wins and you need to share those wins amongst the company to get people bought in, right? Because I think when you make shifts like this and even I've experienced this at TestBox is people are like, well, what does this mean for me? Right? And we know from an organization perspective, this is the best thing for for the customer, right? And you're gonna need to get those wins and to get people bought into the journey and aligned to what you're doing and why it actually matters, right? I love that you've talked about career journey and diversifying because people like ourselves, diversifying has been the best thing that's ever happened in my career, right? Being able to try different things. And so I wanna shift our focus a little bit more to what you're doing in your new role and at your new company. And one of the things that I'm really curious, right, is everyone is talking about go-to-market shifting, right? I think we know the playbooks that we've been running over the last decade are likely not going to work. And so is there one big trend in go-to-market that you think is shaping the future and how are you as a company responding to that?
Lexi Bohonnon: Yeah, so one detail that I'll give, 'cause it'll be helpful in my new role, but before I left Yext, I was leading enterprise sales in North America you know having not really been an AE at the company myself it was early I think for a lot of people it was like oh how is this gonna go right and being an SE minded leader you know much of my team I had worked with just on the other side of the house and so it was I think a shift in one of the things I'm asking for how are we preparing differently as we go into the sales process, which was really a lot of learning. And I think I'd bring that into my role here at Roam as I thought about my next chapter and where I wanted to go, I had grown up and seen over the last decade at Yext, so much change, right? I started in 2014, pre-IPO, small team, 30 million in revenue to post-IPO, 400 in revenue, ton of change, kind of different roles, global experience, all of that. But it was all kind of the classic SaaS, sales led, go to market, selling to a marketer, kind of a consistent ICP throughout that. And so as I thought about, really, again, back to the theme of diversification and seeing new, to be the next generation operator that I want to be, I needed to see something different. And so at Roam, we’re on the complete opposite side of the spectrum, right? We have very little on our website in terms of, you know, the traditional things that you'd have there. We want to drop people right into an immersive experience for the product. So what, you know, an SE would probably traditionally do or would be gated behind like talk to XYZ person. We want to get it out there and we want people to be able to self serve. And in many cases, that means we're skipping a lot of the people that traditionally are in that kind of revenue flow.
James Kaikis: And that's so interesting and I want to dig in this a little bit more. Well one, can you go maybe one step deeper into like what that actually means, like what is that experience as somebody comes to your website, you said it's not traditional, the product's there, talk to us about that.
Lexi Bohonnon: Yeah. I mean, so oftentimes, you know, on, you can think more forward looking companies put a video of a demo or there's so many tools out there now that allow you to do that. But in many cases, like videos can be edited, you know, all the things, right? Howard, our founder talks a lot about, you know, the riskiest thing to do on stage is a live demo, right? Almost no one does it, it's scary. And that's what we've kind of decided we wanna try to do for every prospect that comes to the site. Like, give them that experience to go through, click through a self-guided self-demo, feel the software, be in it, really then get someone to wear what they want to go without having to have human intervention as far along as they can go. So for us, that means a big chunk, like over 50% of people are opting to go their own way and kind of drop into a free trial in a self-guided flow, and the conversion from free trial is so high.And I we've done a ton of testing, we're in the process of doing a ton of testing of kind of those easter eggs of do I want to self-guide or do I want to talk to a person? And so there's certainly people who have those questions want to talk to a person but rather than saying hey we'll get what schedule we'll send you an email and we'll calendar it for a month from now like it's so often the way we're trying to come up with ways to make all of ourselves available so that you know if you want to drop into our office that afternoon to talk to a person or right on the spot, you can do that rather than the schedule for two weeks from now and then your mind has gone off to the next thing. So that kind of immediate gratification, instant gratification, you go to buy like $1,000 shoes and you can buy them on the spot. You have the intent, you go into the store, you try to size, you buy them. You should be able to buy software in the same way.
James Kaikis: I love that you're doing that and I think it's so intriguing. With PreSales Collective we talked for years about speed and personalization and B2C bleeding into B2B. And so this is the epitome of that right now. I'm curious, so for you, how do you have to rethink that first time user experience then because you're saying someone could drop in the office, they can drop on a call with you. There's all these things that go against the traditional way that we've approached buying software, so talk about that a little bit.
Lexi Bohonnon: Total mindset shift. Yeah. I mean, total mindset shift and it's not just, I think I've talked a lot about the pre-sale experience, right? And that POC or trial experience and the decision to buy because you see value enough, there's, I mean, we could spend a lot of time talking about that design, but what happens then once you've come out of free trial, for us, it's not an annual contract, it's monthly, so total mindset shift.
James Kaikis: Total mindset shift. Wow.
Lexi Bohonnon: Versus the lock -in annual upfront, you know, get that ARR. We talk a lot about the shift from an annual to a monthly, puts the pressure on us to deliver and earn your business every month. That's literally the next question I was going to ask about. Yeah. And so when we think about customer experience, when we think about value on a day-to-day basis, month-by-month basis, we're shipping software all that time, right? The influence of a product request is a lot more impactful for us when we have to deliver a monthly than it is like, hey, get in the queue and sure your renewals, when's your renewal? Oh, okay, we'll get that in the queue. And I think that that is just a total shift in thinking on what does the customer experience look like? How are they contributing to the way we think and build a product versus, you know, here's how we're going to build. Maybe we'll add your suggestions into the road.
James Kaikis: Maybe, right. And then when you get to renewal, like, oh, we got a plan to do it. - Can you highlight your ICP though? 'Cause I can tell there's people listening, they're like, well, that's not going to work for my business, right? So, like, talk about your ICP and why this works for them.
Lexi Bohonnon: It's kind of all over the map right now. You know, kind of companies in this size range of five to 200, five to 300 in scale. So certainly we're not their way up market in terms of size and scale right now. The type of company is kind of all over the map. Roam is a virtual work platform, so any type of company be in medicine and software, in media, agencies, like baby company, like anything where you have distributed employees. There's a lot to think about and there's a lot of different use cases, but for the most part It's it's a CEO/founder decision right now because if you're gonna have your company on a remote work platform You're all gonna do it. Yeah, or maybe one department is going to do it, right? So that's kind of the mix that we're in right now.
James Kaikis: Yeah, that's really interesting And so I want to kind of pair two things. So one, delivering value on a monthly basis is incredibly hard to do, right? So how are you rethinking that approach beyond just product requests? And two, how does that differentiate between a SaaS company versus a pharma company versus med device company? Talk about that.
Lexi Bohonnon: Yeah. I mean, that's such a great question. The monthly value and what we're doing beyond just product requests, really is how do we expose what they're doing, what their teams are doing for us? It's like, okay, you're engaging in a platform, but what does spontaneity, what does culture building, what does productivity mean to you as a company? Because in today's world, you know, remote distributed teams oftentimes feel the pain of challenges in building culture because there's nothing that replaces in real life and in person, but it's possible. It's possible to build relationships like we have yeah, it's like it's possible to do it. But how does how do you do it and how do you use software to facilitate? Spontaneity or you know the little things like I'll give an example I was chatting with a teammate last Friday in you know virtually and I had a quick question I dropped into his office, and because we were having a verbal conversation versus one in Slack, we ended. It was like mid -Friday afternoon, and I was like, "Hey, what are you up to this weekend?" Heard about it, learned a little bit about him, and then that gives me the opportunity, I don't know, a week or two later, to be like, "Hey, how was that?" Or next time I see him in person, we have something to talk about, whereas in Slack, I never would have ended it with, "Oh, how's your weekend?" And so that then extrapolate those little micro-moments into what does value mean? So how do you help articulate that to somebody who's trying to justify why they want to spend again the next month on that software? How do you look at things like productivity in new ways, meeting times for us? So the average meeting time in Roam is eight minutes, which, mindmeld there, right? Like standard meetings are often for most of us 30 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 45 maybe, or something wonky.
James Kaikis: And even if they are at less, they always go longer, right? They're always on the half hour, yeah. -
Lexi Bohonnon: Like, I don't know. You tell me before COVID, I feel like if we had a 30 minute meeting and we were done at minute 17 or 18, we'd probably all be like, all right, we good here, let's go. Whereas today, we fill each of those moving buckets because people are craving those interactions. I might only have James today, now for this 30 minutes, let me cram in these other things.
James Kaikis: That's totally how my life is right now.
Lexi Bohonnon: Like stay on, sadly, like maybe I'm not contributing to the rest of the meeting, but these extra 15 minutes, I can multitask and do something else, and no one else is going to snag me. And so as we think about, again, back to value and why delivering monthly is important, like things are changing so quickly. And so how can we stay on our toes and help our customers quantify what those value, those value moments are for them. So yeah, it's, I don't know, it's work in progress. It’s a journey.
James Kaikis: Thank you so much for sharing that. That's so interesting. And I think Slack and like these messaging tools are a blessing and a curse, right? Like I feel like they're, people always ask me at PreSales Collective, like, oh, do I need a Slack community? It's like, it does add value, but it's not the answer, right? And I think even for myself, I find that I tend to get things lost in translation when I'm trying to communicate via Slack. And I just have tried to just get rid of it now. But to your point, I crave that in-person. Like I've always been an in-person manager, right? And so remote in COVID just changed my perspective. And so that's why I love being face to face with this type of conversation. So I love the work that you're doing. And one of the things that I'm trying to figure out, right? Is what are these unconventional strategies that companies are doing today that will be more common in a year or two. And let me give you a little more validation on this, is that when I started posting about this aligned function, I had a lot of people who've known me for years, but like James, I totally disagreed with you, right? Like, you're wrong. And I just got really great validation recently where an executive reached out to me, it was like, you know what? I disagreed with you when you were doing this and didn't think it was the right approach. And the more that I've thought about it, I've realized that a handoff inherently is flawed. So, no matter how I've tried to fix it, it's always going to be broken because a handoff is broken. And he's like, "I've come around and I'm going to try to introduce this rule in my organization." So I love that, right?
Lexi Bohonnon: Congrats. That's amazing.
James Kaikis: Yeah, that felt good. That felt good, you know? Yeah. I mean, I like to think that, you know, people like yourself, myself, some others have been on the bleeding edge of this. And so, I'm just curious on the unconventional strategy. Is it the website experience, right? because as someone who now oversees marketing, right, there's such a mindset of like, what your website should do, what should, you know, your messaging be, what is the first time user experience, how do you quantify impact, how do you measure, like. And I'm a solution professional, I'm just like, I don't wanna think about it like that, I wanna think about it differently. So I don't know, is the one unconventional strategy, the first time user experience that you're doing today, is it something else?
Lexi Bohonnon: Man, I think there's so many layers.
James Kaikis: There's so many, and that's a loaded question, so.
Lexi Bohonnon: I think some of the pushback you and I for years experience was, hey, that might work for the ICP of a more technical buyer, right? Like, oh, that works when you're in a consumption model and you want somebody to be along, like a solution professional to be along for the journey from the pre-sale to, hey, I'm a year and a half in, but more consume, consume, consume, right? But for the traditional SaaS license-based model, like maybe not, or for maybe the MarTech audience, like maybe not. And I think that we now are at a place to really have a lot more ammo to challenge that because it comes back to the buyer is becoming that much more sophisticated. And not to say that the MarTech buyer before wasn't as sophisticated, but there were a lot of other people influencing those decisions. And there were persistent relationships. It was like, hey, we're gonna renew because we've worked with these people. And there was a lot more to be said about relationships and what the traditional AE role looked like in that sale versus how that's changing today. And so I hope that maybe some of the naysayers, who, by the way, we always need naysayers, so love 'em, are maybe changing their mindset 'cause they're feeling that too and they're seeing it. And it's not just that from a more technical sale and product needs that way. It's kind of everyone wants it simpler, more consolidated. So whether it's obviously the experience, the buying experience from a website to honestly, like the day-to-day experience of a customer and who they're speaking with and somebody who has that context from their pain points in the beginning to what their value looks like as they're optimizing and actually using a product and what their decision might be when they're thinking about renewal and consolidation and all the things that are going into that buying journey today, the instincts of a solution professional are to always come back to that, which is value. And so to have somebody who's inherently trained that way in all facets of that user journey I think is ultimately what people need as, I mean, every buying decision is under pressure in ways that none of us have seen, right?
James Kaikis: You're right, so right, I love that response. And you know, I wanna shift our focus to you specifically, right? Because as we talk about the naysayers and we talk about thinking about this differently, it takes people like yourself that have been on the leading edge of this to make these changes and put yourself out there, right? So, you know, how hard was it to make that shift? Let's use the Yext example when you decide to consolidate the function. And how did you approach just being like, hey, I'm gonna put this out there, and what are the negative consequences of this not working?
Lexi Bohonnon: Yeah, I think in many cases, a little bit of my confidence came from, you know, being a known entity at a company. I'd been there for a long time. I was known, people knew me, I was trusted, which certainly helps a lot as you're trying to then put together maybe controversial ideas. And we started off from influence and inspiration from some of our friends at Datadog and Snowflake and some of the more technical buyer journeys kind of inspired of like, hey, we might be able to actually combine these roles into one. So when you and I started conversations, I think I was at that point like, hey, we're actually gonna maybe try to combine an SE and a CS role into one. And it certainly does work in some organizations. In other cases, it doesn't and having them separated or maybe that first leap isn't to go full consolidation, but it's to bring the functions together and then do what we did from an enablement journey and upskilling. The starting point for me was you know, you've asked me to oversee these functions for a lot of reasons of efficiency, of bringing teams together. We know something's broken here, but I wanna throw something crazy out there. Like maybe we actually combine these roles. And does that allow us to, you know, from a team and efficiency perspective? Like everyone was under pressure of like, hey, do we have too many people? And is this a way for us to consolidate, be leaner, be more efficient, but still have the value and impact to the customer. There was a lot of questions.
James Kaikis: There always are.
Lexi Bohonnon: I think there was a lot of, like, from the start excitement about, like, "Hmm, okay, I see this." And I think it's, the way we presented it was all based on a lot of the things we traditionally think about, putting the customer first, the value, the why, the why, the why. The cons, obviously, okay, are we going to lose great talent, right? And very fairly, maybe they don't want to be part of that thing. And that's okay, right? It's probably best for them too, if they're looking to achieve something else. That journey for us at Yaxt landed in a, hey, we're going to keep the two distinct roles, but we're going to go on this journey to really upskill from a product and solution mindset orientation, one organization. But I oftentimes found myself, just as I just did, We didn't want to offend our CS talent by saying, "Hey, we're going to upskill you," right? That can come across as like a, "You're not skilled." And I think that the words we use, the way in which we approach it with the team versus leadership is incredibly important. And we certainly didn't get a lot of that right because top great fantastic CSM talent who had been brought in to do a role that maybe they were delivering and now we're coming around and saying is changing is sometimes a hard conversation.
James Kaikis: It is, yeah, I love it. And I think you have to take risks, right? My thoughts on the solutions profession is sometimes we're a little risk averse, right? And people don't wanna take the risk, but they've got the knowledge, they've got the understanding, they can make an impact on the organization, and sometimes you just gotta step out of the comfort zone.
Lexi Bohonnon: Yeah, like so many SEs that are like on the verge of being like, "We, I think I could make a lot more money as an AE. And you're like, you know, yeah, exactly.
James Kaikis: I would say I've talked to quite a few SCs recently that are trying to make the jump to, to AE as well. And I'm like, you'll do fantastic at this job. Even like you said earlier, like the prep, the way we think about value, the way we do prep, it's just, it is different, right? And there'll be places that the SCs struggle when they make that transition. But I love people that are taking a risk to diversify themselves. And, you know, one of the things that I have always tried to do through the platforms of PreSales Collective, GoToMarket Shift is how do we take people like yourself and share your learnings and give people that confidence that it can be done. Can you provide some tactical advice on leaders who are listening to this and they're like, you know what? They're right. I need to do something, but I'm not really sure where to start.
Lexi Bohonnon: A few years ago, I kind of had this realization that there were of course a lot of people like me out there. They were having these thoughts in their mind and I needed to make a more concerted effort to build an ecosystem and a network outside of my Yext network, my customer network, et cetera. When you're in your day to day, you're at a fast growing company, you're kind of like, I don't have time for that. And so one piece of tactical advice is make the time. Make time, start by setting aside an hour every other week. Or if that seems like too much, 30 minutes a month. Either reach out blindly to folks on LinkedIn, start following people. There's many steps of the journey, depending upon where you are. But give yourself the grace, give yourself the time to network and build a network because that then, just having those conversations and reaching out to folks to learn more about what they're doing, how they're seeing things, that gave me confidence to be like, "Oh, wait a minute. You're my people." And then that, having that network and people of the bounce ideas off of and asking what they're seeing, how someone reacted to their presentation of that same idea, gives you the more and more of kind of an amplified network, which then, I mean, undoubtedly grows your confidence in like, "Okay, we're onto something here."
James Kaikis: Yeah, I love it. It's been so wonderful talking to you. I really appreciate this. I'm glad we finally got to meet in person. I've always looked up to you and what you've done from a risk-taking position and trying to push the profession forward and push yourself forward. It's very inspirational and I hope more people aspire to follow in your footsteps. So thanks so much for joining me today and talking about this.
Lexi Bohonnon: Thank you, James. Thanks for having me, it's been awesome.