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Welcome to the Revenue Rebels podcast, hosted by Alan Zhao, Co-Founder of Warmly.ai.
We feature B2B SaaS revenue leaders who have challenged traditional methods to achieve remarkable results.
In each episode we cut through the fluff and dive deep into modern tactics used to achieve success: intent-based outreach, social selling, B2B Netflix, video marketing, warm calling, customer led sales, influencer marketing and more.
On the show you can expect episodes with those who create demand - marketing experts, partnerships gurus and social media superstars and those who capture demand - outbound and inbound sales experts, leaders, and practitioners.
Our goal is to shine a light on modern, effective and unique revenue generating methods and equip you with the insights you need to unlock your next strategic advantage.
We're huge proponents of signal-based selling and signal-based, data-driven B2B go-to-market as a whole. Ask us what "Autonomous Revenue Orchestration" means and we'll be more than happy to shine a light on our vision of what the field of B2B revenue will become.
For more content, check out our YouTube page and LinkedIn newsletter!
Audio Only 3 FI
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Josh Neal: [00:00:00] Learned so much at Oracle and moved on to companies like Dropbox and Slack and Miro, to name a few, all part of true customer success organizations. Mid market SMB, this mid market segment started to catch fire. And by the time it hit about 20 million in ARR in the US, people started taking note. That's incredible
Alan Zhao: that you guys built that all in house and had that kind of collaboration within the company.
Alan Zhao: Welcome to the Revenue Rebels podcast brought to you by Warmly. On this show, we cut straight through the fluff and dive deep into the specific tactics that B2B revenue leaders across sales and marketing are using to find success in today's environment. I'm your host, Alan Zhao.[00:01:00] [00:02:00] [00:03:00] [00:04:00] [00:05:00] [00:06:00] [00:07:00] [00:08:00] [00:09:00] [00:10:00] [00:11:00] [00:12:00] [00:13:00] [00:14:00] [00:15:00]
Alan Zhao: If you're a fan of the Revenue Rebels podcast, please leave us a review on Spotify and Apple podcast. Your support goes a long way in helping us bring on more amazing guests. Thank you. That's incredible that you guys built it all in house and had that kind of collaboration within the company. You know, that this experience was working.
Alan Zhao: For example, like I deliver experience and they see it and they close it. How did you get, did you AB test it? Was it retention test? Yeah,
Josh Neal: all the above. And then when I say experiments and test iterate, yep, we did it all my friend. And I think that's where I should have started too. When I say we, I truly mean, we, one of the core values of Dropbox when I was there, I know they've since evolved, but the whole we not I quote unquote approach.
Josh Neal: That's what drove such heavy collaboration and trust in each [00:16:00] other's orgs and the proven and trusted business cases to get these things done. Um, also knowing that we've got a customer base that, um, is growing rapidly and we want to enhance that experience and continue to grow and retain. So that's where I'll answer you directly is between adoption, expansion and retention goals.
Josh Neal: We monitored them heavily. It was. Of course, we looked at quarter over quarter because again, when we started in Q1 of 2018, it looked like X, we piled it with a certain number of accounts and certain number of people and certain things in the market. How are we moving the needle on these 3 targets? And then once we started to show improvement, okay, we're moving into Q2.
Josh Neal: We're going to up the ante, but we're still looking at these things. But I think what I really want to hammer in with you across those 3 items, we never lost sight of that. And there was a really specific North star. That we were measured against, and as long as we continue to focus on that North star, we could still have [00:17:00] incremental experiments down the line to see how we continue to evolve and do better.
Josh Neal: But we never lost sight of that North star, and we couldn't have more than 1 North star, but across adoption, expansion and retention, we were able to break that data down to then parlay back to the North star to say, are we reaching. This target and that that's how we prove out success quarter over quarter and it just continued to amplify.
Alan Zhao: Yeah, it's not too unlike marketing where you have so many channels that you're testing and it's really hard to attribute the success of the whole company's revenue or pipeline to any one channel. Yep. So we typically just say that we did a bunch of these things and next quarter, it increased pipeline by 50%.
Alan Zhao: As a portfolio of this portfolio is looking pretty good. Yep.
Josh Neal: And I think you're so right. So heavy plus 1 on that. And I think ultimately, like, when I think of the early days of standing up this segment, and all of the support we had, Yeah. Both on and off the team, we're looking at [00:18:00] how do we prevent these customers from turning again, anchoring and retention?
Josh Neal: How do we continue to drive more adoption? Again? It was a license based model. So it's pretty black and white. You have this many licenses in your segment. How many have been activated? How many have been adopted? How much are they? How many of these people are actually active users on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis?
Josh Neal: And what does this translate to? And if you think about it, it was in that early to mid 2018 realm when we went public. So having the, getting this engine revving and getting this figured out, but also a lot of optimization that happened after IPO really helped us get really savvy on. Answering to the street what we needed to get really buttoned up on, but we had the tools and strategies in place.
Josh Neal: We just needed to continue to perfect. I think ultimately using those things across the turn prevention and the adoption strategies and the deployments and activations that we were driving within those accounts. And again, leverage leveraging the technology to do it at scale. Again, [00:19:00] there's so much to unpack, but those were the pillars of our success.
Alan Zhao: So we talked a little bit about leveraging the technology. How did you integrate the people? What did you know to bring the humans in? There was, I
Josh Neal: think ultimately, um, I'm thinking about where we are in our current environment and economic factors and just where we are like CS in general and the world.
Josh Neal: Throwing warm bodies at problems is not an option. I think we all know that again, to answer your question, I think, ultimately, you have to have really sound headcount cases and that for us at Dropbox, um, not only were we mindful of budgetary restraints and growth models, we had to prove, okay, this amount of business justifies ahead because we know once we apply a CSM to this book, it is projected to grow by X.
Josh Neal: So it was very sound, but also very simple. Once we started to think about the growth of. The business is [00:20:00] such that we started heading 2. 5 to 3 million incremental to what the team was already managing. We knew to bring someone else in, you can break it down by revenue. You can break it down by number of accounts.
Josh Neal: You can marry that together. And we had just a very simplistic model of that sort that mapped to our segment, but also mapped to revenue with the expectation. You would grow that 2. 5. To 3. 5 to five. And that's how we continue to make that model possible. And then once we added people over time, we could prove that out to make sure it was working and make any adjustments that we needed.
Josh Neal: What was the core focus area for the CSM assigned to the accounts? It was just, again, back to the North star, it was, you know, adoption, retention, um, and expansion. So, when I look at those 3 nuggets, there's a lot of things we were doing to support those things. But I think ultimately, when you take on a segment that is completely unmanaged, [00:21:00] it's okay, you're growing.
Josh Neal: But the 1 thing we quickly noticed was, okay, we're landing all this net new, but our existing business. The bottom is falling out so you can go close 10 customers, but if you're losing 20, you're missing an incredible opportunity. I think we started to figure out. Okay. Plug the leaky bucket. What does that actually mean?
Josh Neal: And that means retain with retention at the center of everything that we did. Okay. When, in order for them to be retained and backing out through that customer journey. They have to be adopting. They need to be consuming. They need to understand the value that they're getting again, threading the needle with you coming back to the ability to start prompting and product.
Josh Neal: This is how you share a folder. This is how share store things in your folder. And then, as we started to mature and a multi product scenario down the line. We started to phase in, okay, there's heavy bets on this feature. It's going to drive this virality and value up adoption. We start to intertwine those things and give CSM's [00:22:00] focus gives customers focus, but also allows the machine learning to continue to do better and better.
Josh Neal: But I think preserving and growing your existing base, and of course, the cost savings that are derived from that, in addition to then attacking the net new. With those strategies from go, it, uh, it prevented those accounts from fizzling out. Once we started to close the gap and then infiltrate the net new, this incredible bridge of success was built.
Josh Neal: And again, you see this growth trajectory of mid market, as we called it, just start to hockey stick. It
Alan Zhao: seems like a beautiful system you guys created. You found the playbooks to activate, which also helps with retention. It helps with activation for net new and expansion. And it became a product. An extension of the product team in general, providing that feedback for future iterations of what features to
Josh Neal: build.
Josh Neal: Thank you for saying that I, it was magic in a bottle. And again, I think for the audience, there's so much I could be saying, but it might sound foreign. So I think in order to keep it simple and keep [00:23:00] it poignant, we also knew from the digital realm that, okay, there was a renewals function that was born out of this.
Josh Neal: Okay. CSMs are, they're doing a lot of things, but we can't, we decided, okay, we just scale this out. We got to own the epicenter of what the value and the adoption and strategies are. We can also be the renewal manager. So as the business grew, we were able to solidify investment and standing up a renewals function.
Josh Neal: So again, our team spun off and a cousin team was born, if you will. And then also a true digital success team was born. So you could see these little pockets of tentacles coming off this segment, where again, it was supporting the entire business. And then also at the end of the day, Ensuring that the collaborative actions was one thing, but we had a, what we call an activation checklist and it was the top 10 things that every customer must do to be the creme de la creme, the healthiest, the savviest, the most adopted.
Josh Neal: Therefore our value assessments were rock [00:24:00] solid. This is what we're delivering from you. And again, heavy partnership with data science and our product teams and so many other, you know, leaders and teams in between. But that activation checklist also became this. Kind of like hit list, if we could do this at scale in our books of business for customers and say, okay, you've got eight out of the 10 done.
Josh Neal: Here's how we can get you to do the other 2 and here's what it will unlock for you. It became super simple. And like I said, pretty black and white, we were careful not to over engineer. We were dedicated in keeping it simple. And then 3. Foundationally, it was measurable and both internally. And both internal and external consumption was non debatable.
Alan Zhao: Has anyone in your career made a big impact on you that you'd like to give a shout out to?
Josh Neal: There are so many people I could probably talk to you for another 30 minutes on rattling off a list. I think first and foremost, the man who challenged me and encouraged me to [00:25:00] take this on stepping in to a mid market function with nothing and being supported in building and driving strategy, Ross Piper, hero, legend on so many levels, shout out to him.
Josh Neal: And then our VP of strategy and operations at Dropbox during that time, who is also a legend in her own right, Yamini Rangan, is such an inspiration to me as well. Sitting in rooms with her and having strategies critiqued and challenge and debate, but also the encouragement to go do it better. She was a force and a third one that I would shout out was a mentor and Arden Hoffman.
Josh Neal: She was our chief people officer who is now at General Motors, but between those three legends and ultimate rock stars, I am, I am indebted to them. I admire them. I love them. And I. As I navigate my career and even reflect on this time, it is impossible not to think of those three. How can people find out more about you?
Josh Neal: You [00:26:00] can drive to my LinkedIn page. I am probably there more often than not. I think I'm very active on numerous channels, but I think ultimately LinkedIn is what I'm striving to do more of, uh, just professionally. Um, however, I'm active on many channels, social or otherwise. Don't be shy to reach out. I'm always happy to have these conversations Dig deeper where there might be interest and also network with wonderful people like you or otherwise.
Josh Neal: Uh, again, I welcome any sort of outreach connection anytime, all the time. Thank you very much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Thank you [00:27:00] too.