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: Elaine, good to see you.

‍

Elaine Zelby: Good to see you too, James. 

‍

James Kaikis: I appreciate your time and really looking forward to our conversation today. What's interesting is we've got to know each other over the last couple of months because you're actually the board member for TestBox. As we think about the journey of TestBox, you've seen this company pre-pivot, you've seen this company when they were in a different stage and they've transitioned a lot in the last couple of years. So what's that experience been like from your perspective? 

‍

Elaine Zelby: Well, if I go back to when I first met Sam, I think the thesis that was in my head when we made the original investment was the buyer's journey is changing and the way that people want to buy software is very different. I think there's a lot of things at play here. One: Nobody loves having to talk to salespeople over and over again. But honestly, if you look at the shift in demographics, all of a sudden you started having millennials in positions of power and in buying roles. They buy very differently. They want to self-educate. They want to have peer validation. They want to go and learn as much as they can and then eventually talk to a human if they have questions. And this idea of having a marketplace where people could come and actually test different things side by side and go beyond self-education and literally do like self-validation, made a lot of sense to me. I think what we learned over time is that the biggest existential risk was that you had to figure out how do you get the volume of people in there? It was going to be easy to aggregate the demos. That part didn't feel hard. It was how do you get people to actually go there? And I think that nut was a really hard one to crack, and I think what we learned over time was that where the revenue was to be made and where the biggest hair on fire problems were actually for sales teams. And it was for sales teams to accelerate their funnel process and really help buyers do as much of that education, but in something that felt authentic to them. And so I think that what I've seen, too, is they've really found this red-hot center of a pain where they were either throwing sales engineers at the problem, or even worse, customers were sold something and then they get into the product and now they're like, well, this isn't what I thought it was gonna do. So you have misaligned expectations. And so they're enabling sales teams to align expectations, to accelerate that sales process, and then also make sure that your customer success team has a much easier job. And that's really where now I feel like there's a lot of acceleration and you’ve really found product market fit.

‍

James Kaikis: Yeah, I love hearing your perspective on that. If we take a step back, did you feel like there was as much of an existential crisis with that previous model that maybe Sam feels and talks about today? 

‍

Elaine Zelby: I think it was one of those things where we could have banged our head against a wall for another year or so, and I don't think it would have cracked a nut. To that question probably, it felt like the business was not going to be, VCs like to use the term venture backed business. And so to continue to survive having taken venture capital, you need to be on a high growth trajectory. And with that current model, it didn't feel like they were able to figure that part out, whereas now you can clearly see the path to that. 

‍

James Kaikis: Right. Thanks for sharing that, because marketplaces are so hard, right? You're going to two different audiences that have different needs. I'm glad TestBox made the pivot and I will tell you how I got involved in this company. I'm an LP and GTM Fund and I know of TestBox through the investment. I was like, oh, I love this. This is amazing and when TestBox pivoted the demo automation I was like, oh no. All of my partners at PreSales Collective were in this space and I said I don't know if I can be involved with you anymore. And here we are a little bit later. 

‍

Elaine Zelby: What's actually interesting too is when Sam was first pitching the vision for TestBox. This was before the demo automation space existed. This was definitely not a category that was saturated like it is today. And I think then what you started seeing was some of these companies in the early demo automation, mostly just like the screen grabbing and video on top, were starting to get real traction. And I think that was where the hole in the market and the opportunity to do much deeper tech, much deeper integrations and make it a little bit more robust really became significantly differentiated when it came to that market. Yeah, but that market has evolved like that feels like a category. 

‍

James Kaikis: I want to talk about you for a little bit. Tell us a little bit about your role, your current company, where you came from before. We know you from your experience at SignalFire, but you're also a founder of your own company.

‍

Elaine Zelby: My journey in general is very nonlinear. I always tell people, you know, some people have a North Star and they're like, I'm going to be a partner at this law firm. And like, that's my life dream. And I'm just not that person. I get bored quickly. I really like to move fast. And I started my career as a mechanical engineer of all things, doing biomechanics, thought I was going to do med devices, learned very quickly that it’s super slow and I'm very impatient. So out of college, I ended up joining an early stage startup as one of the first employees, and the founders were about 25 years older than me, had sold a company to HP for billions of dollars, felt like I had a lot to learn from them. I spent five years there, and when you're early at a company, you wear every hat and you kind of just get thrown in the deep end. And I found I'm extremely extroverted, so I love the go-to-market stuff. I love getting to talk to customers and prospects, translate the language that they're using back to the product and engineering teams, understand needs, value proposition, things like that. So, found a home for myself in the go-to-market world, and I started doing a lot of early growth hacking when that was a hot term. And through that, all of a sudden, I started getting these companies, mostly through our VCs, coming to me being like, "Hey, can you help us with this growth stuff?" And through that, I started my own little side hustle. Mostly consulting and doing what is now called RevOps. Doing the integrations between Salesforce and Marketo and HubSpot and all that, setting up automations with Zapier. I love getting in the weeds. So did that on the side, and that actually brought me closer to some of the VCs. One of which was SignalFire. I started working with a bunch of their portfolio companies and they all kept trying to hire me and saying no. And then one day the founding partner asked if I had ever thought about investing. And I always joke. I'm like, I've never to this day taken a finance class in my life. I'm the least qualified person, but they believed in me and also really made it clear that there's a lot more than finance in early investing. So, I spent five years working with SignalFire as an investor there, as a partner there, and always knew I was going to start my own company. So, how it came to be was I started playing with generated AI in 2018. 

‍

James Kaikis: Wow. That's early. 

‍

Elaine Zelby: Very early. It was GPT-1 and Google's text-to -speech algorithm called Tacotron. So I built a product called SoundSpot that could turn any corporate blog into a podcast. So it would suck in your blog feed and anytime there was a new blog post, you selected your voice and it would automatically transcribe it. It would then spit out a podcast episode and then post it on an RSS feed. If you go back in time and listen to some of these, you laugh. I mean, it's like so robotic, so cringy. However, at the time, I felt like magic. And ended up not pursuing that full-time, obviously. But I just was following the evolution of this. And fast forward to about 2021, GPT-3 launches. Huge step change in terms of quality, in terms of what you can do with it. And I really pointed my lasers from an investing perspective at what are the big companies to be built here. And coming from the marketing and go-to-market world, I felt like there was a huge gap for two reasons. One, if you look at marketing in particular, they've been the biggest offender, mostly biggest offender in terms of buying 27-point solutions and also having very specialized people that do one thing. And so the vision for what we're building at Tofu is really to re-bundle the marketing stack top and mid funnel, but also to enable teams to share information, to have omnichannel campaigns that are stitching together these disparate channels, one place with all the data that's aggregated, and then use intelligence and automation to actually help you figure out who to go after and how to increase revenue. 

‍

James Kaikis: Love it. And thank you for sharing that. I did not know about your background there and how it's led you to today. I will make a comment that's really funny about your mention of marketing being very specific and specialized. Coming from the Solutions Engineering world, when I was hiring our first marketer at Testbox, I got so much feedback from marketers in my network, like you're looking for a unicorn, like this role does this, this role does this, and I was so blown away because the SE role is just such a generalist role. Even if you have a specialty, it's a generalist role. So it's really interesting that you say that. But I think the thing that's really on my mind is, you know, you are an operator, you went to a VC, you worked with a lot of companies, and now you're back to building, right? What has changed the most over the last couple of years? 

‍

Elaine Zelby: Everything and nothing. I think one of the biggest changes, hands down, and this is, I would say in the last three years, is If you look historically at the rise of SaaS and the rise of technology companies, the way people got promoted was by growing your team, growing your little system, and that caused tremendous bloat. So every single person was incentivized to create headcount, hire people, collect my acorns, and what that built was a lot of other problems. I think Elon and other folks have shown the world plus the recession, that you can actually do a lot with way fewer people, kind of massive headcount cuts that we saw, people haven't rehired. And people have now realized that they can do a lot more with fewer people. And I think I'm starting to see the early signs of the incentives changing. It's all about incentivizing, right? So if you incentivize people to build their fiefdoms, they will. And if you can incentivize them to work collaboratively across the teams and all anchor on company metrics now you have a very different situation so I would say that's one of the biggest changes. I think the other biggest thing which also is kind of incorporated in this is in incorporating AI into every aspect of building a company. 

‍

James Kaikis: I'm so happy you brought this up because I'm very passionate about this. I feel like in the last decade of SaaS we've just had growth at all costs. We've built these fiefdoms. If you think about the Multipliers book, they talk a lot about fiefdoms. And it's so much easier to throw heads at problems, right? And now we're being forced to do more with less, whatever you want to call it. But the reality is things are shifting, like the software landscape is going to be different than it was over the last 10 years. And I think companies have to adapt to that. And I like to think that I'm one of these people that are trying to help lead this motion of an aligned go to market function. Like I'm in a CRO like role now, but I have never technically owned revenue in a software company. I ran my own business, I ran all the revenue there, but I come from a solutions background. And I think the way that I think about the customer journey and overseeing every aspect is probably the way more companies need to think and not just from a pipeline and forecast perspective. So one of the things that we've talked about with a couple of guests is just the roles that are evolving in go-to-market, right. So I'm curious, you talked about the marketing aspect, but do you see this evolution of the CRO role in organizations? 

‍

Elaine Zelby: CRO wasn't even a thing even like a decade ago, head of sales, head of marketing. I was just with one of my favorite people who is now a VC. She came more from the operating world. She and I love to chat about this fact that go -to -market is not marketing. Go-to-market is sales, marketing, and customer success completely combined. We need to make sure that these teams are one unit. I always use the analogy of a relay race. I used to run, and when you run track and you're doing the handoff, you have a point in time where two runners are running in the same direction, and then two hands are on the baton. And that's how you do the handoff. And if you think about a customer lifecycle journey, the same thing has to happen. If they're starting with marketing, there has to be a two-handed baton handoff between marketing and sales, and then from sales to CS. And I'm starting to see the CRO coming into play to make it more cohesive. Just like Revops is now stitching together systems, the CRO is stitching together the go-to-market people, and also aligning on metrics, aligning on goals, shared vision, things like that.

‍

James Kaikis: This is so fascinating because this is something that I've been trying to talk about for a while, is I feel like handoffs are inherently flawed. Do you have a point of view on that? 

‍

Elaine Zelby: Yes, absolutely. Now in the founder role, when I think about our customers and the handoffs, obviously the most seamless thing is, I do the marketing, sales and the CS. Super seamless, the customer has one person, they know me. But as opposed to the way most companies approach it, they're thinking about, from my company perspective, how do we do the handoff? Not from the customer perspective. What does it feel like to them? Like what is their day-to-day situation and how is that gonna affect them and their success with my product? And I think flipping the script a little bit and really taking a look at the handoffs and the lifecycle from the customer perspective makes a lot of difference. So I can give you a really tactical thing that we've changed. Previously, we ran our sales process, spent a lot of time with the champions and the buyers. We all aligned on everything, felt great. They never touched the product until we did an onboarding. And that was the first time they were introduced to CS. CS person to come and be like, great to meet you all. I've heard all about you. Let's go and show you the product. Now, that was the first time they had hands on the keyboard. And often there was line expectations in terms of functionality, in terms of workflow, things like that. Because they saw me do my wizardry. Now, what we've done is we've moved that part into the sales process, where we do a 90-minute POC. And the customer, we create an instance for them. The customer has hands on the keyboard the whole time. We incorporate CS in that meeting. So they're actually part of the sales process. They understand the workflow. We walk through a real campaign, so it's almost like they're actually a customer already. And at that point, it's a go/no-go decision. But we've now baked it into a 90-minute POC, so we do nothing for free. We do no free trials, nothing like that. But now, they already understand, like the CS person's been involved in that first campaign, and now the handoff feels seamless. 

‍

James Kaikis: Yes, that's a fantastic tactical example. And as a solution professional, my entire career, I was taught, don't do POCs, avoid trials, avoid that at all costs. And in my opinion, because at Testbox, you know we do technical validation or a POC in almost every deal that we have to show that what we’re doing isn’t magic and that it actually works. And I think a lot of companies have oversold over the last ten years and broken trust. So I think that concept of the POC, especially the time bound motion with the intro of CS in the sales process, builds trust and actually sets your customer up for success long term. 

‍

Elaine Zelby: That's my idea too. And again, we're even just seeing since we implemented this change, the shift in terms of time to success, and for us that is literally “time to the customer is self-sufficient on our product and using it repeatedly,” so much shorter. Our product is complex and we know it, but it can do a lot and the entire idea is it is a platform for the entire (today marketing, but eventually) go to market team to automate a lot of stuff. Now, because of the complexity, we have to handhold at the beginning. No question. And that's okay. It's okay. And to your point, sometimes you have to throw humans at the problem. However, we are trying to shorten that time to success and self-sufficiency as much as possible. And things like this have just moved the needle tremendously because, again, it's a lot about the expectations. It's a lot about the momentum, and it's working.

‍

James Kaikis:  Yeah, how do we get more leaders bought into this concept? Because I try to defy as much conventional wisdom as possible. And sometimes it could be too contrarian, but why are we doing what we're doing and how do we do it differently? And a lot of the topic of these conversations are the playbooks we've been running, we think are best practices and we think that they're facts, but they're not. So what advice do you have for people who you want to say, "Hey, go and get more hands-on in the sales process. Do something that you wouldn't typically do or you've been taught not to do because it builds more trust." 

‍

Elaine Zelby: I think there's a couple things here. One is, founders need to trust their leaders and give them the opportunity and onus and freedom to go and try things and come back with numbers. I think people that are data-driven tend to be able to build trust with leadership very quickly and if you've built that trust and have that trust you're much more likely to have that leash to go and do things like that and then report back what worked and what didn't. One other thing that I'm just seeing is a little bit more sharing among peers. I think right now community groups as opposed to more of a mentor role or things like that it's one to many. You can actually learn from what a lot of other people are doing and I also think experimentation. Go try some stuff, logically think through it, but see if it works, get feedback, ask the hard questions. I always joke with people. I didn't make this up. I learned this from somebody else, but they were joking around when they got into the CRO role and they were trying to figure out why there was such high churn and figure out the customer success side. And so they're like well have we asked them if they're gonna churn? It seems like such a crazy concept and it's an uncomfortable question. And I think even in the sales journey too, asking the uncomfortable questions, where you're like, I just want to get the deal across, ask the discovery questions, ask  what the process looks like? Ask all that stuff. More communication in general is useful. 

‍

James Kaikis: Something you said earlier I want to double down on is you talked about people being incentivized the right way and being incentivized on company goals. What shift have you seen and can you find more tactical examples of what something like that would look like? 

‍

Elaine Zelby: One big shift I've seen is marketing used to not be tied to revenue goals. And I think that was one of the biggest mistakes companies made was because you always talked about the friction between marketing and sales or sales and CS or whatever. It was because go-to-market teams were not all incentivized by revenue goals. That meant that marketing was incentivized to create MQLs, which is an arbitrary thing. What is an MQL? SQLs, opportunities, nothing matters except for closed won business, net revenue retention, things like that. So if you align all the teams on those core metrics from a top-down perspective, comp on those metrics, comp more variably. I'm willing to comp marketing as a variable comp, which no one's ever done. But why not? 

‍

James Kaikis: Why do you think it hasn't been done though? 

‍

Elaine Zelby: I think marketers are less risk tolerant. Salespeople are very risk on. They want uncapped opportunity. They are very comfortable to eat while you kill. And that is, it's a little bit more of a lone wolf thing, whereas marketing historically, the personalities that go into marketing are less risk-tolerant, more collaborative, more team-oriented, and a little bit more of, as we were talking, siloed in a specific function where it feels harder to impact revenue directly. Where I think this starts to change in this kind of new paradigm is that you have marketing leaders who can be incentivized because they're really controlling revenue, they can. And then also as teams become less siloed and people are wearing more hats, but using AI or tools as glue, I think you can start to shift what that looks like. Customer success is an interesting one because if you think of typical comp, it's like marketing, it's 100% base. Sales is usually 5 /50. CS is like 80/20. But again, in my mind, if they're responsible for NRR, if they're responsible for upsell, cross sell, why are they not comped 50/50? 

‍

James Kaikis: With you, absolutely with you. And I'm so happy that we're talking about this topic, Right, because actually at Testbox, everyone in the go-to-market organization is either tied to the quota and the revenue of the company or has a variable based off the overall revenue success because revenue and customer success are everyone's job. You know, a little unconventional thing that I did is we actually don't have a customer success team anymore. Right, customer success is a company-wide initiative and I've had a lot of people push back on that. Right, but we have our AEs in our SAs as full cycle based off how technical our product is and it has really changed the incentives of the solution architect and doing the POC in terms of what they need to do to get it done because they have to implement what they sell and it has changed everything. 

‍

Elaine Zelby: It's really smart. I also believe fundamentally that everyone should be involved in CS.What we did was for the first 20 customers, we actually assigned one engineer as kind of the piggyback for each customer. So we do bi-weekly working sessions during the first three months, and we would have an engineer as you are the piggyback on this company, so they would join the working sessions just as a fly on the wall. But seeing how the customer uses the product, seeing where they fall in their face, seeing the bugs, it's so much more visible and tangible. That works really well. 

‍

James Kaikis: That is fantastic, and that's something I think I'm going to take from this conversation and go incorporate because you're right, you need to be able to see everything, right? You need to be able to see what you're building and how it impacts people at the end of the day. You know, one of the things that I've, you know, admired about what you're doing at Tofu is that I feel like you're really unlocking personalization at scale. Would you say that's correct? 

‍

Elaine Zelby: That is very much one of the core pieces of Tofu. 

‍

James Kaikis: Let's talk about what you're doing at Tofu and how you're achieving that. 

‍

Elaine Zelby: The vision for Tofu is very grand. I think for me to leave VC, I wantto build the next Salesforce. And I think that we did about 40 to 50 interviews with CMOs, VPs of marketing, to really understand where are the biggest pain points today, where is their willingness and ability to pay, and where is AI a really good fit? And we found two hotspots. The first is personalization at scale. And the second is content repurposing. It's remixing, remastering. It could be a combination of taking something big, like a webinar, and turning it into blog posts, social posts, ad for on-demand content, email follow -ups. Or it could also be pulling in different pieces, like a Gartner report, one of our key studies, a new product page, and turning that into an e-book. AI is very, very good. Where it's not good is like, write me a blog post from scratch. So we wanted to focus on the areas where it's good. And the personalization at scale, we fundamentally believe that kind of going back to the buyer journey and the buyer experience, if everything is more contextual to you, things that are actually your pain points, value props that are gonna resonate, language that your role, your industry, whatever uses, it's better for everyone. It's better for the buyer. Again, put myself in the buyer shoes, but it's also better for me because I can create more revenue, more opportunities with fewer people. So when we think about personalization at scale, we think about it through the entire buyer journey and across channels. Let's take it from they see an ad that's personalized to either their role, their industry, their company. They click that ad. They're taken to a web experience that's personalized to them by their role, by their company, by their industry. They fill out a form. The information they get after as a follow up is tailored to exactly what they need. And so really thinking through the entire channel mix and trying to personalize every touch point.

‍

James Kaikis: I just had a mind blown moment because one, I love that you're building this because everyone wants to see a product they're gonna buy or be talked to in their language, right? As an SC, I look back at my career, I used to get so upset with my team sometimes when they were calling using wrong nomenclature in a process with a customer. It was a prospect. We literally did discovery and they told us what they call their teams, what they call their segments, all of that, and then we're using general terms. It doesn't allow them to get that feeling. So they've got to paint a picture. So the fact that you're doing that at scale is extremely interesting, but I am curious, does it put more in the margin of error, right? If you are doing hyper personalization and you get that wrong, does that actually hurt you more than being generic? 

‍

Elaine Zelby: So here's my take on it. It's a very good question, by the way. The reason I like doing this for marketing is the cost of failure is so low. If you're healthcare, if you're legal, if you're finance, the cost of failure of making some error is very high. Somebody gets the wrong medication shade. A bank account number is like the wrong bank account, high cost of failure. If you got an email that was like, “hi, Tom, I saw that you're the head of HR at some company,... you laugh, but like, whatever. You know, cost of failure is extremely low. Every time we onboard a customer, 100% of the time, they will make some comment, like, our data is so dirty, our data is so messy. Which is true. It's never gonna be perfect. A real story: customer is creating a campaign for finance leaders, CFOs, things like that. We're testing some of them and just looked at one. And it was to an HR professional, we're like, well, that's weird. Looked up the person, they're an HR professional. So the personalization was correct, but the person was not their ICP and somehow slipped in there. So also, different cost of failure, but I think that is a risk that most people are willing to take just given the fact that cost of failure is so low. 

‍

James Kaikis: That's a fascinating concept. I've never heard of that, so that's really interesting. And the second part of your answer earlier was about the content, right? Actually, we at PreSales Collective, we used to call it a content flywheel. So what we would do is we would have a webinar, we would transcribe it, turn it into a blog, and then try to turn it into microclips. And to me that feels like the most basic thing to do is to repurpose your content. But I think from your experience most companies are not doing that. 

‍

Elaine Zelby: Most people don't because it's a lot of work. So let's take the webinar thing. What most people do is they send a generic email after the webinar saying thank you for attending or registering. That's it. What we do out of the box. We've actually templatized a lot of common workflows. So for a webinar you just dump in the raw video file, we will transcribe it, we turn it into a blog post, multiple social posts, email sequence to the attendees, email sequence to the registrants, and then we also pull out, extract all the best quotations and then any statistics that were mentioned. And now this is all part of a campaign. Next one you do, you just dump it in again and rinse and repeat. 

‍

James Kaikis: That's really interesting and you said, if you have less people, you need to be smarter about how you work. And I think that personalization kind of tying both concepts together is really interesting, especially for us at Testbox, right? Is that we have had some success in a couple of different categories, and we have found that there's like almost a bit of like FOMO when you're talking to three or four companies that are very competitive against each other, they find out they're not using, they're the outlier not using the solution, and then talking to them having landing pages that speak their language, that show similar examples, that to me has got their attention faster than almost anything else. 

‍

Elaine Zelby: Literally this morning was with a customer, and the campaign we were working on is that they have three main competitors. They have lists of people that they knew were on the competitor, and they wanted to do an us versus them campaign. So we created landing pages, email sequences, then ads, but they were hyper-personalized to each company and talking about nuances of why they thought their product was a better fit.

‍

James Kaikis: Yeah, that's really interesting. I want to turn toward what the next couple years of software look like. I think your product generally itself is cutting edge and kind of on that bleeding edge of what organizations should be doing. But do you think that beyond what you're building on your own product perspective. Is there one big trend that's happening in go-to-market right now that you think is going to shape the future of software? 

‍

Elaine Zelby: Fewer tools, fewer people. And I think that means two things. One, people are looking to shed these point solutions. I saw this back when I was on the VC side before I even started Tofu. There was a clear, consistent need among revenue leaders and go-to-market leaders in general to have fewer tools and also to make them all work together because data silos are really hard to make sense of and then hit your numbers. So fewer things, better data, no question there. And then I think with the fewer people it's where can we use automation or AI tools as the connective tissue between the humans that we still need. I'm a still huge proponent that we need the humans on to go-to-market side to do the creative and the strategic. Now that means setting goals, setting strategy, understanding your ICP, understanding what should our KPIs look like, creative, branding, messaging, things like that. Also, relationship building, so I still think we are gonna have sales. I think sales is going to be pushed further and further down funnel, where marketing and AI and customer self-serving are to be a lot more upfront through middle of funnel, and then at the very end, the human is going to build the relationship, deal with legal, deal with procurement, deal with security, that kind of stuff. And so I think that's going to be a big shift over the next few years as well.

‍

James Kaikis: I love that response, and I'm going to dig into one thing. You said sales pushing further and further. I was talking to a company recently who told me that their AEs now get comped once a product goes live. 

‍

Elaine Zelby: I like that a lot because you want to incentivize sales to close the right deals. And so if you're saying, hey, sales, we are gonna generate better, higher quality pipeline for you, and you're not responsible for that. We're actually gonna do that. Now you really need to make sure alignment is there. You have all the pieces in place. You understand what the timeline's gonna look like. That should all be done in the sales process. So I love that. 

‍

James Kaikis: I do too. And I think a lot of traditional leaders that I've talked about, sales leaders, they push back on that because there's a conventional wisdom of like they should only be responsible for getting a deal in the door and that's it. But I just tend to feel like sales teams build so much trust to get to that signature and then they say, see you later, right? And the reality is, and I've presented on this at a couple of conferences, if you think about the customer journey. We've lost sight of the customer because the customer's journey is really just starting when the contract ends. And if we think about, you know, the leaky bucket or whatever it is, is like, they've been sold a dream. And then there's other teams that have an onboard nightmare, and there's no repercussions for selling a bad deal. 

‍

Elaine Zelby: And I think one thing I saw during the last recession was that the numbers everyone was anchoring on was net revenue retention. And I think if you really think through that as a number, you can also start to see how the sales, getting bad revenue in the door, affect that number. Let's go to re -incentivize them differently. How do we really incentivize CS to make sure that we're getting people through implementation as quickly as possible, up to speed as quickly as possible? And then you have the opportunity to do upsell, cross-sell. Which is also, actually, I'm curious to get your take on this. Who's responsible for that? And how do you align that best among the go-to-market team?

‍

James Kaikis: I wasn't expecting you to reverse questions on me. I like it. No, I love it. For us,  we've gone full lifecycle SAs/AEs, so they are pairing on the account. And when we close a customer, we understand the revenue opportunity. Are we wall-to-wall on day one, or is there upsell opportunity? So let's use a customer like Intuit, for example. Intuit is such a large customer and such a large account that even when the signature happens and we start the  implementation, the selling is not done. We've had multiple upsells in just a couple of months because we don't stop. I think I actually was highlighted in a newsletter recently and talked about that motion. I got a couple of messages about it, being like, "I wish more people thought about this because sales is a long game." If you have short-term thinking, you naturally get a deal, you wash your hands of it and move on, but the reality is there could be so much upside in those accounts. That's what we're building at TestBox, and when you have a full cycle solutions architect and account executive, they know this account. They know the business, they know all the key stakeholders, and then we are taking a programmatic approach to adoption, utilization, all those metrics to understand where they're finding value so that we can scale this.

‍

Elaine Zelby: I love that approach, and that makes a ton of sense. 

‍

James Kaikis: I think for me, going from solutions professional to entrepreneur, to like back to the go to market seat. I just think about things a little bit differently and I think about my own journey of one being a solutions engineer and selling a deal and moving on. I'm very proud of the fact that in 2017, I created an SE team just for our customer accounts because we had upsell and expansion. I was like, let's dedicate someone to this. And then I think about myself as an entrepreneur. We sold multi six figure sponsorship deals and I was essentially responsible for making sure that that relationship continued to go well. And I think that has just shown me it's a little bit different, but we were delivering value all the time. If I would have just sold the deal and handed it off to my team and said, "See you later," we wouldn't have that upsell the next year. We wouldn't have the renewal. We wouldn't have been able to sell $350,000 a year sponsorships if we were just kind of, "See you later," type perspective. 

‍

Elaine Zelby: Absolutely. And I think it goes back to the previous conversation around really putting yourself in the buyer’s shoes too. What is the best experience for them? That continuity, that relationship building, but also you being able to see, or the team, the continuous team, being able to see the pockets of opportunity, whereas if you're coming in a little bit blind, you can't even see them. 

‍

James Kaikis: I think it goes to your point earlier about the silos and the fiefdoms, we've just been kind of taught to live in this box, and the reality is customer journeys and customer success with your product, they blend, they merge, there's always people have joint responsibilities. I think we need to see more of that generally. 

‍

Elaine Zelby: Could not agree more. 

‍

James Kaikis: It has been awesome having you. I really appreciate it. Super excited for what you're building at Tofu and thanks for continuing to support TestBox and all that we're doing.