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.

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James Kaikis: Thomas, it's great to see you. Thanks for your time today. 

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Thomas Bieser: Absolutely, man. Really happy to be with you. 

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James Kaikis: Yeah, me too. You know, when I was thinking about this interview series and I was thinking like, who are people that I've known throughout my career and have been influential on me and my journey? And you actually come to mind. And so before we interviewed today, I was thinking, how do I know Thomas? And I went back through my LinkedIn messages and I cold messaged you in 2019 to ask you about org structure and org alignment. So it's kind of crazy how far we've both come in a couple of years. 

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Thomas Bieser: Yeah, time flies, man.

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James Kaikis: Yeah, it really does. And I think what's so interesting, right? And if I think about, people ask me, how'd you start PreSales Collective, right? And it was because I was a new solutions leader, I really didn't know what I was doing and so I was reaching out to experts like yourself to be like, hey, you know, how do you do work planning? How do you do KPIs? How are you doing ratio management? Like those types of things. And that's actually what led to the PSC. So I'm super thankful to you and all the contributions you've given me throughout the years. 

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Thomas Bieser: Oh yeah, dude. I mean, your journey's been incredible. So to know I played a little part is very cool. 

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James Kaikis: I would say the big part. Before we get too far ahead, talk about yourself, tell me who you are, what your role is, what are your responsibilities, and how’d you get here? 

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Thomas Bieser: If I haven't met folks, my name's Thomas Bieser, and vocationally, I work at a company called Cerby. There, I'm the Chief Customer Officer, so I oversee a lot of go-to-market functions. Personally, I'm married to an amazing woman named Nadia, and we have four kids. And four pets. Yeah, so life is very busy at home.

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James Kaikis: Yeah, that's incredible. And you know, I mentioned Okta before, right? So tell me a little bit about your journey at Okta because I think it really will bode well into today's conversation. 

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Thomas Bieser: To even go back a little bit before that, I had worked at a company called Opsware. Opsware for anyone that doesn't know was Ben Horowitz's company. Ben Horowitz was the CEO of Opsware. And it was honestly for me like a great experience to meet some top talent in tech. In some of those relationships, I still stay in touch with 20 years later. But that company Opsware, they did data center automation before cloud infrastructure was cloud infrastructure. And we had AWS and GCP and Azure. That company was bought by HP. And HP was kind of in their prime. They were a company of 350,000 employees at that time. And they acquired Opsware, I think, yeah, it was 2007 for, I think just over 1.6 billion. Back then was a lot of money. I stayed there for five years because I learned a lot about, you know, growth within a company, how to build things at scale. I had some leadership opportunity. But then there was one person I knew from HP and a sales leader that I knew from Opsware. And they said, there's this small tech company that you got to check out. And I was like, I'm in this really cushy position at HP. I don't know if I want to do a startup. And so anyhow, I flew off to San Francisco and I met with this team of folks off of Brandon Street, right by the Giants stadium. And I walked away and I was like, I want that job. There's something special about these people and this team and that was Okta. And I joined there initially as a sales engineer.

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James Kaikis: Amazing. And what year was that when you joined? 

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Thomas Bieser: I joined in 2012. So they had just raised their series C round of funding. 

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James Kaikis: Quite the journey at Okta generally as a company, but for you too. So one thing that I've learned in our conversations, and I'll actually give this out, is that you had a team called Customer Solutions. And when people ask me about solutions and customer solutions, I am proud to say that I took that from you. When I saw your title was Customer Solutions, it's one of those light bulb moments and I was like, that's it. That's the response. So tell me about that, right? 'Cause you just said you started as a sales engineer. But I know that your team was called Customer Solutions. 

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Thomas Bieser: That's right. Yeah, so when I joined initially, if I would look at that offer letter from 2012, I would say sales engineer, right? Very small team, just like a small group of us. Very quickly within a year because the company was growing so quickly. I was given more responsibility. We needed to hire a lot more and so the team was expanding. And then over time, every 12 to 18 months, I was being promoted into some new capacity, which is why I love startups from a career standpoint. In the first two years, I was just kind of looking at what we were doing, and I thought, "Okay, there's kind of this almost antiquated term, ‘sales engineer.’” I agree. And there's kind of a mentality of, okay, these are the rails. You do these things like we've talked about before. You're the demo gal or the demo guy, and the salesperson does all the work, right? That old school mentality. But as we were growing the business, I realized we're doing so much more than that. We really were the core liaison between engineering and product as things were just being built out. Early days, there was no notion of a customer success team. We didn't have a customer success team. We barely had a professional services team. But we did have what we would call some solution architects. I thought we're very much thinking about solutions in an overarching way. And so over time, that's what grew into this notion of customer solutions. Customer at the center, solutions, quote unquote pre and post sale. Of course, you and I probably like to do away with that whole notion. Yes, exactly. But yeah, that's kind of where it came from. 

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James Kaikis: Yeah, I love to hear that. And thanks for leading that right,? I think it's so interesting where you just say hey like sales engineer doesn't seem to make sense. We're focused on solutions. Let's build an org structure with a customer in the center right? And I've got a lot of point of views that generally what's happened in the last 10 years of SaaS is we've forgotten who matters — and that's the customer, right? We build these org structures and these silos and we care about these titles which have their role but the end of the day like we all exist to make customers happy and deliver value to them, right? One of the things that hit me when you were talking about that I think it'll be a fun topic just quickly to touch on is the concept of sales engineer. So when I was at PreSales Collective, I was a major advocate of changing the term of sales engineer. There's a couple of reasons why so one sales has a connotation to it generally, right? I understand that we are in sales just because sales is not in the title doesn't mean you're not in sales and engineer if you're not an engineer can be a deterrent, right? And if we think about trying to build more awareness to this general profession the term sales engineer is not the greatest term and I think that if we are focused on solutions the term solutions engineer is better if your hands on the keyboard, but really solutions consulting is a term that I think more people in the profession should have. You would be so surprised the number of battles that I would get in over this title. I've had some people say some pretty nasty things to me just because I believe that sales engineering is the wrong term for that role. I don't know, what do you think?

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Thomas Bieser:  Totally agree. I think when we go back to Okta, over time we had solution engineers, solution architects, all sorts of various types of solution roles. The company I'm at now, Cerby, with intention, the folks we have on that team are solution consultants. Just like you said. And the reasons are very much aligned. 

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James Kaikis: Yeah, I'm happy to hear that, and I love that you're leading from the front. So I want to talk about Cerby, right? 'Cause amazing promotion to Chief Customer Officer. Congratulations to you on that. 

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Thomas Bieser: Thank you.  Appreciate it.

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James Kaikis: One of the things, even when I talk about chief solution officer, people are like, oh, you know, that's kind of like a chief customer officer. And even when I think about a traditional chief customer officer, your remit is well beyond just customer success. So can you talk about what roles and functions you oversee at Cerby? 

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Thomas Bieser: Yeah, absolutely. I think you're right. A lot of times when people see the Chief Customer Officer title, it tends to be what traditionally would be called post sales, right? Customer success, support, maybe services, etc. I would say that my remit is very much go-to-market at large. So I'm very much thinking about, you know, in terms of marketing speak, top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel, and what is the mentality of a person or an organization who's never heard of Cerby before, right? So from that point of view, I'm thinking about digital ad spend. I'm thinking about search engine optimization. I'm thinking about content. I'm thinking about a lot of marketing things in terms of how do we get the name out there for the people that don't even know who we are? And there's a lot 'cause we're a series A company.So marketing is part of that. You know, we work incredibly closely with sales. VP of sales and myself talk probably multiple times a day about what's in the funnel, what's in the pipeline, what do we need to optimize across the teams of the customer journey and those touch points are better. I oversee customer success. So for us, we have a team of CSMs, very technical CSMs, more technical than some of the CSMs I've seen at other companies. And then we have a support team as well. We do have solution consultants. I think in the near future, I will start to build out what we call a solution architect team to kind of have tighter interlock between the CS team and the solution consultants. Although right now our solution consultants, they are in a context where they don't just close the deal, they do stick with the customer. Right, and there's an incentive to make sure that they go live. Partners are part of the remit. Yeah, there's a number of different functions, as I described there, that are really all about where the customer is experiencing us all throughout the journey. 

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James Kaikis: I love it, and congrats to you for overseeing that. As someone who also oversees all of go-to-market functions, I know how hard it can be. What has been one challenge for you? You know, one, making a transition from solutions professional to overseeing multiple functions in go to market, but two, just overseeing everything at the same time. 

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Thomas Bieser: Yeah, I think that's a great question. When you're strictly kind of within the rails or the confines of, you know, a team that's called PreSales or SC, it said or whatever those things are, you very much are thinking about what I would call the solution validation events or how do we get a technical win in the sales cycle? Stages one to four or five or 10, whatever the case might be, you're very much focused on those things. I'm done. Yeah. And I think 80% plus of the time, that is kind of the general experience for the customer as well. Hey, this woman to this man that I built a lot of trust with. They're gone. And now I'm being connected to somebody else and they're great and that's okay, but I just spent six months plus with this person.

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James Kaikis: I call that transitioning trust, right? Like you've built so much trust with somebody in a sales process for you just to go away is insane. You have to transition trust and bring new people into the fray. You can’t  just disappear, so I'm glad you brought that up. 

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Thomas Bieser: Yeah, and that's very much what we're trying to do, is we do want the solution consultants to obviously focus on sales and new business, and at the same time, they are a trusted person. It doesn't mean they're going to be full-time you know, involved in that customer, but we still want them to have that relationship and to provide input and guidance into the success for the customer. 

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James Kaikis: And how about just generally overseeing new functions, right? Marketing, we've talked about this off-camera of just like overseeing marketing. It's definitely different. So do you have something to share there for a challenge? 

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Thomas Bieser: Yeah, I think for me personally, part of what helped me is when I was 18 -19 years old, and I won't go into this whole story, but I actually founded an independent record company with three buddies. 

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James Kaikis: I think we need to go into this story.

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Thomas Bieser: Yeah, so I was in the music industry for a while. I was the guy that owned the website. So this is early 2000s, even late 90s. Like I built the website, I owned the content, et cetera. And so I learned a lot about what is the world seeing on the public internet and what is the website, what is the face. So even back then, I didn't even think about it, but I was like, oh, I've got digital marketing experience here. Yeah, and then I had the opportunity as you know, things evolved at Okta over time to work really closely with a lot of functions in marketing. I worked with our field events folks in marketing. I worked with our partner marketing people product marketing folks. Some of the most talented people. I became friends with the SDRs and SDR leadership, like all those different functions and I just thought there's an opportunity for the solutions function and role to be more integrated with a very product marketing right and we we even had a stint where we had a really solid team of technical marketing folks at Okta and we saw sometimes people go from technical marketing into solutions roles. Or vice versa, and  I think that it really opens up the door for people in solutions to realize there's an opportunity for you to be a lot more business savvy and business oriented than then maybe you feel like you have permission to do. Does that make sense? 

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James Kaikis: Yeah, it absolutely does by the way fun fact love to hear about the record situation. I used to be a sports writer and I've actually owned a couple of sports websites throughout my life. And so I've actually got a very similar, like owning the media and digital marketing that I actually, I lean on, you know, nowadays. So you mentioned a number of things that I want to dig into there, right? I think the topic that's top of mind for me is going back to the transitioning of trust, right? Of like the SC staying involved in the the customer lifecycle. We at TestBox have actually done away with Solutions Engineers as we know it. We actually don't have Solutions Consultants, we have Solutions Architects. And the reason being is that we have such a technical product that the team that sells the deal actually implements the deal. Because I found that, you know, inherently handoffs don't work. And even if you have a knowledge transfer, we lose time. And, you know, this person has become the expert. I would say I've received a lot of pushback on this, especially starting the PreSales Collective and having such a network there, but I'm actually starting to see more people come around to this idea. And that's the one recently telling me, like James, I didn't agree with you at first, but I've realized that a handoff is inherently flawed. And I absolutely agree. So I'm curious, what are the ways that or SCs are staying involved. And like, what type of, you know, let's get tactical. What type of activities are they doing with those customers? 

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Thomas Bieser: Okay, yeah, I mean, I think across the board, obviously our folks do demos. There's custom demos. Yesterday we had a meeting in the South Bay with a customer and we're on a whiteboard doing a solution architecture workshop. We've got some folks on the team that are utter studs when it comes to Lucid Chart. That's such a helpful tool in being able to do on-the-fly ad hoc whiteboarding per se when you can't actually be on-site. I don't think anything beats being face-to-face on a whiteboard with people. I know that some people are 100% virtual, et cetera, but maybe I'm a little old school, but there is nothing that beats like seeing the whites of someone's eyes and having that conversation about what are the real challenges and how can we address these? 

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James Kaikis: Yeah, the creativity that happens. 

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Thomas Bieser: Precisely. The collaboration. These folks are also very heavily involved in how we think about delivery from a statement of work standpoint. And clearly articulating, this is what we're gonna do, this is not what we're gonna do. And communicating the needs to product and engineering in terms of here are new capabilities that we need to see to either get this deal done or here are the things we're seeing trending from 10 customers that we would like to win, but we don't have this core feature, right? And being able to build that trust. So I think all of those things are part of it and there is overlap, I think uniquely because of the remit that I have where they're working closely, not just with sales, but they're also working closely with marketing. So as we do big events, there's a really tight relationship in terms of who's the audience that we're speaking to at that event? How do we wanna show up? How can we make an impact? And let's think about that from a demo standpoint, right? So it's not just, hey, here's the SE doing a demo. It's actually really wound into the thesis or the theme of what we're trying to communicate. 

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James Kaikis: Yeah, I love that. And if I actually reflect back, I don't know if you were at Cerby or not, but you messaged me on Slack and said, what's your point of view on SE's in marketing? And I remember actually referencing some examples I knew from Medalia. And Medalia used solutions with marketing pretty effectively in my opinion. And they used them very, very well when it came to analysts relations. And so I always thought that was really interesting. And so now that you oversee the functions, does your team work hand in hand with marketing? Are incentivize to work together as well? 

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Thomas Bieser: This is a great question, and you actually triggered a thought for me. So I think when I asked you that, I was probably at Forter, so it was prior to Cerby, but I do remember reaching out, 'cause I'm like, I know that there's more to this. There's this opportunity here. There was actually an individual, I don't want to embarrass the person, but there was an individual who I knew at one company who owned analyst relations. And so they were in marketing, just focused on analysts. Incredibly like sharp, bright, intelligent person and they would spend their time on a weekly basis talking to Gartner, Forrester, et cetera. And at one point in time, someone introduced me to that individual and said, they wanna move into solutions. And I thought, okay, let me have a conversation with this person. And within 30 minutes, I realized, okay, this is an incredibly intelligent person that has this analyst, marketing background, I think in school, did political science, but wanted to become a solution consultant. And now the company that she's at, she's doing an incredible job. Like one of the strongest solution consultants that they have at that company. And I just think that it's even a greater point that for hiring managers, right, for leaders, we often think that people need to have a cookie cutter prototype, right? And I'm sure we've talked about this before. The best leaders are the people that can be creative enough to see what are those competencies that this person has that can be transferable absolutely but also have the confidence and the boldness to fight for those individuals, right? Because you may have a leader above you or stakeholders across that are like well they don't meet the template. But I've seen so many incredible individuals Be very successful in solutions types of roles that didn't check off all the boxes.

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James Kaikis: Yeah, it's such a great topic I saw this firsthand at PreSales Collective right? Because when 2021, 2022 was happening. There was so much growth and there were enough solutions engineers and solutions consultants to fill roles. And so with PreSales Academy, we were helping rebuild a pipeline and we found that teachers were absolutely incredible solutions consultants. And I think what's shifted for me that I love your perspective on is because the market has changed and it's so hard for people to break into this profession now without that on their resume because when you open up a role you are getting dozens of if not hundreds of applicants. 

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Thomas Bieser: Sometimes within 90 seconds. 

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James Kaikis: It's unbelievable. 

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Thomas Bieser: If you or I post a role on LinkedIn. We will max out our applications within a few minutes. 

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James Kaikis: It's actually funny you say that because that happened to me when I posted the solution architect role and I was like oh my gosh it's crazy how am I supposed to go through all these. 

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Thomas Bieser: Especially you, right?

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James Kaikis: it's just the PSC background right? But I think what's what's actually hurting the profession now is that because there's so many people trying to break in, headcounts have really slowed and froze in a lot of places and leaders are less willing to take a chance on those people unless they've got like real, real clear domain experience, right? Have you seen that? Have you experienced that? And how do you actually fight through that? 

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Thomas Bieser: Yeah, no, I think you're totally right because we did see a post COVID bubble where lots of money was injected into the system and everybody was able to buy all the things. So you needed people to sell all the things, right? Yeah, obviously within a few years, the general sentiment was if you're a CFO for any organization, you're now scrutinizing every purchase, even if it's like sub-100K. But yeah, I've definitely seen it become more challenging. I mean, in the last year and a half, we've seen a lot of RIFs in tech. And there's some incredibly talented people out there that actually do check a lot of the boxes. And some of them are challenged to find a good role right now, and then you're juxtaposing them to people that are not the traditional candidates. So I think it can definitely be difficult to break in right now. I wouldn't give up, but I think if I were a candidate, obviously network, network, network, but I would be trying to identify those companies and those leaders that come across as more, we'll say, creative and they're thinking about work structure and team, et cetera. But Pareto's principle applies, right? Like 80/20 rule, if you're not familiar with that. 80% plus of leaders are not going to be willing to take a risk. And so you gotta figure out, how do I ask questions for myself as a candidate so that I can vet out those companies that are a waste of my time? And I know that sounds kind of rude, but don't waste your time if you're identifying that this is a very traditional mindset. They're not going to accept me as a candidate. Who are the 20% that will be open to that? 

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James Kaikis: That's a great call. And actually as we talked about that mindset, now that I'm in more of a owning all go-to-market role and I'm in sales cycles, I can typically figure out the solutions engineering function and their openness and willingness and just a single call. And I think that's where become like my superpower in the business has been like risk averse, doesn't want to take a chance here, wants to own the demo, doesn't want to make that evolution. And I see that a lot and I want to help break the glass ceiling, which is a topic I want to talk about with you because your career, first solutions, engineers and solutions consultants, I feel the next 10 years of SaaS is going to look very different for this profession. There needs to be an evolution. Do you have advice for leaders that need to maybe get out of their traditional ways and norms and lean in to try to evolve with what I think the next 10 years will look like, which is very different than what we've experienced last decade? 

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Thomas Bieser: I definitely agree with that. I think there's a lot of components to it. But I think one that we already touched on is just the the traditional mindset that Sales Engineer/solution engineer/solution consultant/whatever you want to call these people and functions tend to just kind of focus on the demo right? And/or maybe the the proof of concept and then that's it. But you know the folks that I've seen as individual contributors in solutions as well as the leaders in solutions, those that have really evolved very much are thinking about, how do I have a high growth mindset? And that can be a cliche, but what it means is from a career, vocation, organization standpoint, how can you get more connected to other functions across the board, right? People will talk about, you know, how do I do more with less? This is part of the equation. Like if you're a solutions person, whether you're an individual contributor or a leader, there are unique skills that you have that if you start to invest time in relationship with people across all these other departments and functions absolutely and just spend time using that gift of discovery and ask your marketing peer discovery questions with empathy, what are the problems you were thinking about? How are you motivated? What are you incentivized by? What are you worried about? What are you thinking about as relates to customer? What do you love about this company. Do you ask those types of questions? You get into their mindset and you go, "Okay, there's a lot of overlap that we actually have. How can we collaborate together?" And I think that is going to be a substantial change maker for companies that have that type of paradigm as opposed to the companies where everything is very much siloed off. 

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James Kaikis: I love that response. And something that you brought up earlier about like working with marketing is going and being curious and learning how, you know, these other parts of the business function, because if I think about where the profession is and where it's going, what I feel like is that solutions consultants are more generalists. And the reason I am even more validated by that is that when I had to hire in marketing, I had a job description and I ran it past like a dozen marketing people and they're like, you're looking for a unicorn. And I learned that marketing is very, very niche in terms of, you know, content and product marketing and demand gen. And that opened my eyes to be like, wow, I didn't realize how amazing it is to be a solutions engineer, a solutions consultant, where there is just such a broad spectrum. I want to call something out that is factually true about both of us. Talking about leaders taking risks on people with a non-traditional profile, both you and I are actually those types of people. Instead of making a move from non-solutions engineer to solutions engineer, we've made the move from solutions engineering leader to owning all of go-to-market. And so I feel like my solutions background has been a massive unlock for me. Because I've gotten so much exposure to so many parts of the business that I wouldn't have otherwise had. How do you think about that concept of all the exposure you've gotten throughout your career and staying curious and how it allowed you to make this jump at Cerby and that organization trusts you to give you the role and responsibility of all these other functions.

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Thomas Bieser: You triggered a thought for me and the first part of it would be that if someone hasn't ever worked at a startup, please dive into that at some point in your career, right? Because when you're working at a company that's 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 plus people, you inevitably are gonna be very and pigeon holed into doing a certain thing in your microcosm. It'll be almost impossible, not impossible, but it'll be almost impossible to really make a broad impact and also just get the time and the experience across different departmental functions. I think one of the things I'm most grateful for myself is having taken the risk on multiple startups startups throughout my career. Some of them didn't pan out. Some of them did. Even the ones that didn't pan out, there are things that you understand and you pick up very quickly when a company is really small about the unique challenges that they're trying to address. You talked about marketing, we keep going back to marketing, but you can apply this to customer success, to support, to et cetera, there are a lot of different very niche focused expertises and functions within marketing. When you're in a really big company, you in many ways are gonna take that for granted. Because it's all kind of built out. And it's akin to, I love to use holiday analogies, but if you're gonna just work at big companies. Everyone kind of has like an uncle Bob, right? It's like the family member that just shows up to Thanksgiving 30 minutes late. The table's set. Everybody's waiting. All the work has been done. Being part of a startup is, which table do we want to use? What are we going to cook? Who's going to buy the ingredients? Who has money for the ingredients? And so that I think is a huge gift in terms of being part of a startup because you get to see how the turkey is made. You don't really understand how the turkey is made if your uncle Bob, right? No, no offense to the folks that are at 5,000 plus person companies like there are good experiences to gain there. But I feel like you're short changing yourself in terms of what we're talking about If you don't get some experience with a smaller company and really understanding those ground-level pains. Because when you go through that, even if you're not the one running it or directing it or on that team, you pick up on it and it gets infused into your solutions DNA. So then when you move into other parts of your career, you go, "I understand a little bit about this." 

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James Kaikis: I love that answer so much. I love the Uncle Bob example, that is so good. And if I look back at my own experience when I worked in large enterprise, I used to always laugh 'cause we had an employee survey and it was like, you know, company operates like a startup and I always gave it a one out of five. And people would be like, why are you doing that? And it's because there are resources to do the job. And when you're at a startup, if you have an amazing idea, you are likely the one that has to go and execute on that idea. But what I really like the most about what you just, in your response there, is that being able to own and take on different responsibilities in a startup makes you very well-rounded as a professional. And I have learned a lot that it's not for everybody. The pace, the grind, the intensity of a startup is not for everyone, but if you are looking to reach a different place in your career, it's realistically what you should do to be able to make the leaps, right?

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Thomas Bieser: Yeah, I think the thing I wanna highlight, and some folks I'm sure have heard this notion, but many people tend to think of the career and the vocation as a ladder, right? And a lot of people use the analogy of like it can be a lattice. You know, my own experience, and this is just one anecdote, but when I was at HP, I was in a leadership role, and then I was going to Okta, taking an individual contributor role. Most people would go, well, that's a demotion. Why would you do that? And I even had people at that company, HP, saying, I've never even heard of this company before. Why would you go do such a crazy thing, right? But there are opportunities and cases where you're stepping back, where you're moving into a different cross -functional type of role. That'll, as you said, that'll give you a broader mindset. And it will benefit you five, 10 years down the line because you're gonna have empathy for people in those roles as opposed to being the person that is complaining all the time. Why can't sales do this? Why can't marketing do that? Delivery people are awesome. CSMs don't care. No, that's actually probably not true. You just don't know what their experience is. It's good for you to get that experience. 

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James Kaikis: I love that. Yeah, and thanks for sharing that, right? Because again, what I want people who watch this episode to see is your journey, your background, and how you've broken that glass you know, one thing I love for you to dig into is tactical advice, right? Like there are leaders out there that have felt like, hey, I've reached the cap of my solutions engineering, solutions consulting career. Yeah, you know, I run a global function, maybe I oversee professional services, but that's where they think the top is. And I don't believe that to be true. So what are some actionable takeaways that that those leaders can do to start expanding their own remit within their own company so that they can open up these doors that you have opened up for yourself in the last couple of years. 

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Thomas Bieser: Yeah, I think this is a great question. I'm thinking of different scenarios in my experience and people I've talked to. There are times where legitimately from an org point you may have topped out. You may have plateaued and it's just simply because of the context that you're in. But that doesn't mean just keep doing the same thing. I think for the people that feel like, okay, I've plateaued, I've topped out, partly tactical, partly strategic is to like open your eyes, look around you and go, "What are the other parts of the organization that aren't working? What are the parts of the organization outside of solutions? Which part of the organization do you complain about the most?" Pick a team. Pick a department. Go get to know the leadership and find out how you can help and be part of that, because even if you're not going to be promoted to X, Y, Z, get the broader experience, right? So there's times when you feel like you're plateaued or tapped out, it's actually an opportunity. It's actually a gift because you go, okay, I've achieved this level of mastery. What else is going around here? I've been at this company for three years, five years, 10 years, whatever. Great. Use your brand, use your experience, use the know -how that you have about the business that maybe other departments don't have. Because maybe it's a younger team, it's a newer team, it's a group of people that haven't been there as long, and be their champion. Keep doing the thing that you're doing, but get a side hustle within the company. Because even if you only stay at that company for 12 more months, that's gonna help you greatly. Like there was a company I was at where there was an opportunity to, based on a set of circumstances, really lean into strategy and ops because there were some gaps. There were some challenges. And I could have just thought they don't know what they're doing, if they would just do this and that and complain and gossip and spread rumors about how awful somebody was or a team was. Instead I thought there's an opportunity here, let me actually figure out what's going on, talk to the person or people that oversee that remit  and just find some ways that I can help. And sure enough, I got into it and I'm like, "Wow, this is really f 'ing hard. This is not as easy as it looked like it was," And then you start connecting dots. And it gives you the ability to have a much broader mindset. And I think that's one of the things that culturally we don't often have value on because we're always thinking about just give me the next promotion, rocket ship, straight up, like we have an emoji for a rocket ship, right? It's like, where's the like fence or the lattice emoji?

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James Kaikis: I like it. You know, Thomas, that is a solutions oriented mindset right there. So at a very full circle, I mean, really that's your approach. And I wish more people would be a little bit more proactive in their business to be like, Hey, you know what, there's a problem. I'm going to go solve it. And if we talk about the superpowers of solutions engineers, of solutions consultants. We already mentioned a couple times that we have such broad exposure to these other areas that sometimes taking that outside approach could really make an impact. You know, it's seeing the force through the trees. You know, go to the marketing team, go to the customer success team, and say, hey, what are you doing? Learn how they're doing things the same. There's an area of opportunity. And take that win. Get that first one. Get the second one. Get the third one. And then, hey, I've talked to a couple people recently who've now overtaken customer success because they got engaged with those businesses. So I love that advice. It's fantastic. It's been so great having you here, Thomas. I really appreciate you leading from the front and continuing to do what you do. I've learned so much from you throughout the last couple of years and excited to see what your future looks like at Cerby. 

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‍Thomas Bieser: I appreciate it, man. This has been fun.