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Join UpYourStack host Noah Berk, Co-CEO of Aptitude 8, every week as he chats with industry leaders and top app developers to help you optimize your HubSpot tech stack. Tune in for expert insights, tips, and recommendations to take your HubSpot experience to the next level!
2412 - UpYourStack with PandaDoc 16x9 DZ v0.1
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[00:00:00]
Noah Berk: Welcome to Up Your Stack Podcast. I'm your host, Noah Burke. I'm also the co CEO of Aptitude 8, which is an elite HubSpot solutions partner. Every week, we feature some of our favorite app developers who've either built their apps on HubSpot or who have integrated with HubSpot to help you get the most out of your HubSpot tech stack.
Noah Berk: And today, Man, I've been excited for this guest. He is with PandaDoc. His name is Keith. He's the chief revenue officer over here. We go way back. So this will be a really fun conversation. ~Uh, ~we're like, heck, Keith, welcome to the show.
Keith Rabkin: I'm so excited to be here. It's good to see you again. I feel like we were just in person and Atlanta a few weeks ago. Nice to be catching up a few weeks later and on a positive upswing to close the year out.
Noah Berk: Agreed. Agreed. Well, Keith, let's just dive right into it for the audience. You may or may not be aware of PandaDoc. What does PandaDoc do?
Keith Rabkin: So Panadoc is a software app that is a single solution to all your agreement needs. So I like to think [00:01:00] we help people get those agreements closed. Those agreements could be, you know, typical contracts. They could be sales proposals. They could be complex quotes. ~Um, ~but that's what we do. And we do them particularly for sellers and ops folks.
Keith Rabkin: Rev ops and sales are primary buyers, but of course we also service small companies that, you know, don't have defined jobs, right? You know, I, as a co CEO, you know, you can't define your job. Just by like one title sales ops. You're everything. So we do that for a lot of smaller companies. We do it for HR for, you know, employment agreements, legal for NDAs, any kind of agreement that you need.
Keith Rabkin: No matter how complex, PandaDoc is the single solution for it.
Noah Berk: Gotcha, and
Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: so obviously you're solving this from the standpoint of making it easier for people to be able to send over contracts versus,
Noah Berk: I guess the alternative is
Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: put together a word document, download it as a PDF and send it to someone, they have to PDF sign it. [00:02:00]
Noah Berk: And is that even legit? Yeah. Would that even hold up in court?
Keith Rabkin: So it's, so it's so interesting because a lot of them are legit, right? Like you can, I remember, you know, a couple of years ago, not even that far ago, people would get a document, they would actually download it, print it. sign it, scan it and send it back. We're a little more advanced than that now, right?
Keith Rabkin: But even other solutions,
Keith Rabkin, PandaDoc: what you'll see is people will download the PDF, open a tool on their desktop, sign it in the tool, send it back, or they'll do it online, but then
Keith Rabkin: they still want to sign it.
Keith Rabkin, PandaDoc: They still want to download it and resend it. And we've created the solution that Not only makes it easy to send,
Keith Rabkin: but
Keith Rabkin, PandaDoc: it keeps everything together.
Keith Rabkin: ~Um, ~and where we really differentiate ourselves and think that PandaDoc is the best solution on the market is that we talk about time to value. We talk about how do we help our customers get those documents out quickly without a lot of [00:03:00] pain. I don't know if you've ever done this, Noah, but like, do you ever like look to upload a document off your desktop into the browser and you can't like You can't remember what's in your folder, which folder it's in,
Noah Berk: the
Keith Rabkin: all that stuff.
Keith Rabkin: Yeah,
Noah Berk: time.
Keith Rabkin: so we solve that. We help you do that. And then we have a lot of like smart content. I wouldn't call it AI, but smart content that helps you customize the template and the information in that template based on what you know about the person you're sending it to, whether it's their title, the state they live in, the vertical.
Keith Rabkin: You can pull in different content for that.
Noah Berk: Why do you suppose pentadox gone so much traction over the years? ~Um, ~like, what's led to that growth was led to that traction. How did you gain all that traction?
Keith Rabkin: So I think there's a couple of things,~ um,~ one of which I know you're going to love, which is that relationship with ecosystem partners. You know, we've really tried to build a better together solution. There's a lot of solutions that pre existed on the market. They've built integrations. Those integrations are just clunky or they're there to check a box on the [00:04:00] website that says, Yep, we've got an integration.
Keith Rabkin: With upspot. What we've done is we've really tried to make our integrations as native as possible because we care about the customer experience. And so I think That integration, that being part of an ecosystem is a big piece of our success. The second is that we've really focused on the user. So our founders are great.
Keith Rabkin: R and D team, our great CSM team really try to bring all out stops to make sure that our customers get to value.
Keith Rabkin, PandaDoc: And so I think what you would see if you use PandaDoc
Keith Rabkin: and I know you have,
Keith Rabkin, PandaDoc: is that it's this very elegant, easy to use solution. It's easy to find where things are in the product. It's easy to get to value.
Keith Rabkin: And I don't think that's the case in software that was built, you know, 20 years ago and then kind of refreshed for the market. Like
Keith Rabkin, PandaDoc: we've
Keith Rabkin: sort of
Keith Rabkin, PandaDoc: built this with the end customer in mind.
Noah Berk: Agreed. And I think a lot of people would agree that a lot of the existing solutions on the market feel bulky.~ Uh, ~they're cumbersome. ~Uh, ~they're difficult to make changes. They're [00:05:00] difficult to push changes to the rest of the organization.
Noah Berk: And, you know, for everyone who's listening today, we are a Panadoc user. ~Uh, ~and not only that, we're also partners with Panadoc. So I'm a huge fan of the product to begin with and everything that Panadoc's doing. ~Um, ~but how do you suppose you differentiate from the competitors in the marketplace?
Keith Rabkin: Yeah. So I think one of the biggest, well, first off, thank you for being a customer and a partner. I mean, I think it's one thing, like everybody, we have a lot of partners because you know, there's a mutual business arrangement. But the fact that you're a customer means that you continue to get value and we continue to have to earn your business year after year because we are a SaaS company.
Keith Rabkin: So it makes me really happy that we've done that. ~Um, ~so I'll start with that, which is we took a lot of pride in our customer service, right? There's a lot of companies out there that take advantage of their customers. ~Um, ~their pricing practices aren't transparent. They don't lead with the customer. And again, as we talked about a second ago, I think that is something that really does differentiate us.
Keith Rabkin: I don't, [00:06:00] but as a CRO, I don't just run sales. I run customer success too. And the renewal is just as important to me as the initial business. And so that means that I've got to continue to drive that value throughout every engagement with the customer. Same as, as you guys do at Aptitude 8, right? You're not looking for, let me implement and move on.
Keith Rabkin: You want this continued relationship. So we care about that. That's one important thing. The second is ease of use, which is we are just much easier to use than the competition. And when you think about like the consumerization of B2B software, we have all come to expect so much of the consumer products, whether there are phones or the browser or apps.
Keith Rabkin: That we now expect when we consume business products and panda duck brings out, we're a delightful, you know, easy to use product rather than something that is clunky and designed, you know, from 15 or 20 years ago. So those are probably the top two, I would say, but I think the other one is [00:07:00] just like that persona specific more and we're leaning into what is the job that you as the CEO want to accomplish.
Keith Rabkin: And how can Panadoc help you get there for sales? It's the same thing for ops. We really think about making sure there's no errors. We think about making sure that you can spend your time on more value add instead of like dealing with approval workflows. And so that's really important and how we built this product.
Noah Berk: is this a product that requires like you are like an ops team to set up for you or is this a product that in your opinion, just your, your standard frontline salespeople, you know, they can go ahead and set up the templates like,~ uh,~ walked, walked me through, like, is there a differentiation in terms of function of who's actually set it up versus who's using it from the end user perspective or they wanted the same?
Keith Rabkin: I think it depends on the level of complexity you want. ~Um, ~if I go back in time, you know, over 10 years ago when Makita and Sergei. are my CEO and CTO founded this company. They built it for [00:08:00] really small businesses. They built a product that they wanted to, they call it like bus bureaucracy. ~Uh, ~cause they came out of Eastern Europe where, you know, everything was this like, you know, the evolution of the Soviet machine.
Keith Rabkin: And they wanted to. make it easy for small businesses to have the power that software was bringing to larger companies. And so they started with ease of use as a, as a core principle. And that led to being able to send out easy contracts and quotes,~ um,~ that any company could set up. Like you can go start a trial for PandaDoc today, and you can get a document out the door, you know.
Keith Rabkin: in 10 minutes easily. ~Um, ~but then you start layering on more complexity, right? You want branching logic for rules or you want something that's more complex, like a true CPQ that has complex pricing mechanics in it. That's where you do start to need a little bit of ops help. Like I personally would have trouble setting that up myself.
Keith Rabkin: One day, maybe a I will do it for us, but I [00:09:00] think today we're still at that place where that does require a little bit more.
Noah Berk: And it's good. I mean, sometimes people are afraid of the complexity. ~Um, ~but in reality, for certain organizations is because they have all these edge use cases, they need that certain degree of complexity to make it configurable for their teams. And I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. I think what you guys have done really well is have a product that is both to your point, simple for an end user to come in and set something up and send a contract out in 10 minutes.
Noah Berk: But also something that's complex and configurable enough that a large organization can use it for their entire team and push it out to everyone. So on that note, who is your ideal customer at this stage? Like who, who is there someone coming in to buy Panadoc?
Keith Rabkin: I would say any small to medium sized business that wants to automate their document workflows to get agreements out the door. Like I said, that that's probably a bit more broad than what I would say is an I. So let me let me reframe my answer, which is sales and ops [00:10:00] leaders that want to drive optimization of their workflow to prevent errors and give their teams time back to engage with customers.
Keith Rabkin: That is. the focus. Now again, we do a lot for H. R. Companies, healthcare companies, staffing, legal teams. ~Um, ~but we've chosen really to focus on these sales and ops leaders because those are the people who continue to see the most value out of our platform and find a truly differentiated solution.
Noah Berk: That's awesome. Now what I'm really excited to talk to you guys or talk to you about today is what you announced and what you shared at inbound hotspot inbound conference for all of you who may have seen. Thank you. Was the integration of Panda doc built with HubSpot and how you're able to essentially have a fully functional CPQ within HubSpot,~ um,~ let's talk a little bit more about HubSpot and kind of gaps are filling an ecosystem and what you guys have been working on, because I think this is the one of the most exciting developments in the ecosystem.
Keith Rabkin: Yeah. So HubSpot has been a tremendous partner and they opened [00:11:00] up access to us early to engage and develop our CPQ within you know, the user interface of sales hub itself. And so I think when you think about CPQ, you hear these horror stories of nine month implementations, 120, 000 spent in services. ~Um, ~and then people still aren't happy with it.
Keith Rabkin: Like at inbound, I was actually walking the floor and talking to people at all the different booths and I was saying, what CPQ do you use?~ Um, ~and almost regardless of what the answer was, The people who are manning the booth, which typically are sellers were saying, we hate it. We just do not like our CPQ.
Keith Rabkin: And I heard five different CPQs mentioned, all of them, the sellers did not like. And then I asked, you know, how does your rev ops team like it? There were a couple of rev ops people that are not, not too many. And For the most part, they're like, you know, it took a really long time to implement and it's really hard.
Keith Rabkin: And we still have to kick back sales agreements when we have to redo the quote, which you inevitably do, right? The deals change so fast. [00:12:00] You get the first quote out. Somebody wants a revision, some CVQs, you've got to start over. ~Um, ~so what we did and again, all the credit in the world to our amazing R and D team, they built this directly in HubSpot and they built it to be easy for the sellers.
Keith Rabkin: The sellers spend their time in their CRM, you know, as much as I love PandaDoc, they probably don't want to go into PandaDoc. So they spend it in the place they're already, which is sales hub. And then we've made it really elegant with a guided flow that just steps them through all the steps because CPQ can be complicated if you are a seller that your job is not to be an expert in pricing or configuration, like there's rules around it.
Keith Rabkin: Let's program the rules into the system and let the system dictate the next steps. So we've made it elegant. And then lastly, you know, for the ops team, we want it to be flexible. You know, your business is changing rapidly, so you can't. Go back. Sorry. I mean, I know, you know, it could be to aptitude AIDS benefit to like have another implementation, but I I'm kidding.
Keith Rabkin: Cause I
Noah Berk: I do like those [00:13:00] additional implementations when they need help on a CPQ. So I do like that, Keith, but keep going. I know where you're going with this. I want to easy for my clients too.
Keith Rabkin: But, but you're, you are a customer centric organization. And so I think we want you to get to value in the initial and then we want it to be easy to change, right? Like the lightweight changes, your skews change shouldn't be a re implementation case. And so the team built it in a way to accomplish that.
Noah Berk: Yeah. And I'm, I'm 100 percent agreement. I think it follows kind of what we talked about in the HubSpot ecosystem as an elite partner is that there's other various CRMs out there that require heavy dev, heavy admin to support you, and oftentimes in HubSpot, even for complex use cases and large,~ uh,~ you know, upmarket enterprises, You're spending maybe a third to a quarter of the amount of time on outsource resources to do what would have required, you know, let's say you need 10 hours a month from one organization, maybe only two to three hours in the hotspot comparison.
Noah Berk: ~Um, ~and it sounds like you guys have built your product in a [00:14:00] very similar way. Yeah, there's always gonna be some need for resources, but not to the extent these other solutions needed and it enables organizations to move more quickly. And I think that is the big key here is the speed to get things done.
Noah Berk: ~Um, ~and what you guys have built in the hotspot ecosystem, I think is huge because it was a really big missing component. Now, one question people may have, and they're probably oblivious to what is CPQ.~ Uh, ~maybe we should talk about that for a second. And how do they know to go from sending a standard contract?
Noah Berk: Like a, you know, a standard document with a signature and you just put in your line items to a CPQ, at what point do they need to make that transition?
Keith Rabkin: Yeah. So I think CPQ, which stands for configure price quote is like a fundamentally a rules based engine that allows complex pricing use cases, which otherwise you're going to deal desk all the time and asking them to put together custom quotes where offline tool. a spreadsheet or even another system to pull all this [00:15:00] information based on how skews go together.
Keith Rabkin: So typically you think some skews you might sell together and they always come as a bundle. Some skews you can't put together. They actually conflict, right? If you're,~ um,~ you know, selling two versions of a CRM, probably not going to sell both of those. ~Um, ~and then recurring logic, right? Do you, does the skew change over time based on the renewal?
Keith Rabkin: These are all complex rules that need to be accounted for in the pricing and feed into the quote. So our system actually pulls this out of your product catalog and allows your ops team to set these up so that your sales reps literally can't send out the wrong quote. It's impossible. So you spare errors.
Keith Rabkin: You spare your deal desk and your ops team time from having to do these things manually. And you save the back and forth negotiation between the sellers and the ops team.
Noah Berk: It's a huge time saving. So if you notice you're having to go back to another team, quote your deal desk team as you describe them. Maybe we'll call them something else. And you're asking them to put together the contract for you. That's where you may say, okay, [00:16:00] I need a CPQ solution at this point and looking at something like Panda doc.
Noah Berk: ~Um,~~ ~how often are people switching from one CPQ to another? So how often is it a matter of I have a CPQ solution? You heard all these pain points and they're like, enough is enough. We need something different.
Keith Rabkin: So typically, it's been hard because there haven't been a lot of players on the market. And when you look at the different players, you see, you see a lot of the same challenges, right? Like, hard to implement. So am I going to switch from something that took me a year to implement and six figure, six figures to implement to another thing that's going to take me another year and six figures to implement?
Keith Rabkin: Probably not. Like it's got to be really painful. ~Um, ~but what we're trying to do is come up with something that is just much easier and solves all those pain points such that we get people to switch more often. And we, we really do think it's differentiated. I mean, it's one of the reasons we showed up in such force at inbound HubSpot CPQ story because It's a wholly [00:17:00] new way of interfacing with a CPQ right out of sales hub.
Keith Rabkin: And the implementation is just so much easier.
Noah Berk: Yeah, and if you haven't seen it, it's like, check it out. I'm sure there's a lot of videos out there that shows how it works. ~Um,~
Keith Rabkin: just did a case study today. So, you know,
Noah Berk: heck yeah. Now, this is probably being released in a couple of months. So, ~uh, ~today means back November 19th. Is it today? I think so. Maybe I just.
Noah Berk: Dated us. I've never done that on a podcast before. ~Uh, ~but now, you know, when this episode was produced,~ uh,~ so, ~uh,~~ ~let's talk a little bit more about what's a future roadmap for Panadoc look like, and then how is AI going to play a role in this?
Keith Rabkin: So for CPQ, we're going to continue to develop, we're going to add adjacent functionality, even more complex. Pricing rule sets, particularly for verticals. We see a lot of, a lot of customers coming for healthcare finance and manufacturing today, technology as well. So we'll continue to evolve there. We'll also add more of this billing [00:18:00] functionality.
Keith Rabkin: So a lot of CPQs do the subscription management behind the scenes today. Ours doesn't. Which means that you can plug into commerce hub. You can plug into stripe. You can plug into another platform. We'll probably integrate more of those to be out of the box plug and play. ~Um, ~so that'll be really nice because the companies that have a recurring subscription can actually do the billing straight from the platform.
Keith Rabkin: So that's a big one for us. And then I think we'll do more with AI to help with the implementation. So can we. even make the setup just that much easier by including like an agent that can help you configure and set up the rule set because that is still even though we think we have something much easier than the competition we think we can still do better.
Keith Rabkin: I
Noah Berk: Yeah. Absolutely. And it's great that you guys are working towards that and making life easier for everyone and leveraging AI in some capacity, which I know everyone's trying to figure out how, how do we use AI? In our software to make the job easier for our people. ~Um, ~Keith, this is, [00:19:00] I'm going to take a little turn here.
Noah Berk: ~Um,~~ ~being a CRO,~ uh,~ and having a lot of experience,
Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: what advice do you have for other CROs who may be listening to this podcast?
Noah Berk: You know,
Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: you're in an interesting spot. You're selling services to generally CROs.
Noah Berk: ~Uh, ~and,~ uh,~ but what, what advice do you have for them?
Keith Rabkin: think sometimes the CROs we look at problems and we tackle the problem at like the highest level. So pipeline is short or, you know, revenue is below plan. It's like a very high level. And I think one thing I found really helpful is to break it down into its components. So if it's pipeline pipeline by what source,~ um,~ let's take inbound pipeline.
Keith Rabkin: Okay, it's coming from qualified leads. Is it the number of qualified leads? Is that the quality of the leads? Is it the activity of the sales force? Is it the value of the leads? Like when you start decomposing things, I think you get a better handle on the activities that allow you to go [00:20:00] change the outcome and it allows you to find the right D.
Keith Rabkin: R. I. To go tackle it. ~Um, ~mhm. Cause if you say, Hey, I've got an inbound pipeline problem, probably you're probably going to like your marketing leader, but maybe the problem is actually on the sales team with how they're qualifying the leads. And so understanding and decomposing these things into smaller bite sized pieces allows you to tackle them much more easily.
Noah Berk: That's great advice. ~Um, ~you know, biting off more, you can chew or not having the opportunity to look at the right problem, but really biting smaller pieces and chunks and getting in there. I think that's great advice. And hopefully it will help some people tackle it more easily. ~Um, ~versus being overwhelmed for how do we solve this?
Noah Berk: Because I'm sure the C. E. L. is, I know from my own experience to my C. R. O. S. What are we doing to increase this?
Keith Rabkin: Yeah. I think probably the other one would be just like back to the don't bite off more than you can chew.
Keith Rabkin, PandaDoc: One thing,
Keith Rabkin: you know, probably
Keith Rabkin, PandaDoc: the best CEOs I've ever worked for would say is [00:21:00] don't have too many priorities.
Keith Rabkin: Thank you.
Keith Rabkin, PandaDoc: You've got to just narrow things down to the one that's going to move the lever the most.
Keith Rabkin, PandaDoc: And it's really hard for me. ~Um, ~this is my area for development is because I want to do it all in my team. is like, Keith,
Keith Rabkin: like, can you,
Keith Rabkin, PandaDoc: can you reduce the set of OKRs a bit?
Keith Rabkin: ~Um, ~And
Noah Berk: And you get three. Can you get three? All I need is three.
Keith Rabkin: Yes.
Keith Rabkin, PandaDoc: I think 3 is a good number, but like 3 big rocks that you're going to concentrate on to disproportionately move the needle.
Keith Rabkin: Otherwise you just fragment people's time too much and they have a hard time accomplishing everything you're, you're trying to do. Cause there is a cost of context
Noah Berk: agree. I agree. 100%. Well, Keith, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for joining and sharing your insights and talking about panda doc today. ~Um, ~and,~ uh,~ you know, Keith, if people are interested to learn more about you, more about Panadoc, how do they go about finding out this information?
Keith Rabkin: Yeah. Pandadoc. com or find me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active. Odds are there's a pretty strong chance if you're not selling to me that I will write you back. ~Um,~
Noah Berk: You get a [00:22:00] lot of sales emails and slacks and linkedin messages from people.
Keith Rabkin: Holy moly. It's crazy.
Noah Berk: Actually, I don't get phone calls anymore. I just get slack messages and emails.
Keith Rabkin: I get a lot of phone calls, but they go, you know, I've got like the voice filtering on or the call filter. I just go to voicemail.
Noah Berk: Yeah. Well, Keith, thank you again so much for joining and listeners. Thank you so much for listening today. And it really wraps up our call or should say our podcast. ~Uh, ~again, up your sack is a weekly podcast featuring HubSpot app partners and, and,~ uh, Uh, ~developers who built their apps on HubSpot are integrated with HubSpot to help you get the most out of it.
Noah Berk: ~Uh, ~again, I'm Noah,~ uh,~ co hosts, or the hosts of the show, as well as,~ um,~ co CEO of Aptitude 8. to learn more about,~ uh,~ leveling up your own HubSpot, feel free to reach out to us at www. aptitude8. com. We'd be happy to chat with you. And again, thanks for listening.