Modern Post-Sale Revenue Growth with Haydar Al-Saad of Revsetter | Episode 063

RevSetter founder Haydar Al Saad discusses with Alex his new revenue-centric customer success platform and its unique approach to integrating both sales and customer success functions. He and Alex explore his extensive experience in SaaS and Haydar’s philosophy on the importance of post-sale revenue growth and the role of digital customer success tools overall in enhancing efficiency and customer value.

Chapters:

• 03:02 - Private Equity → SaaS
• 05:38 - Sales → Customer Success
• 10:19 - Importance of Post-Sale Revenue Growth
• 15:05 - RevSetter: The Revenue-Focused CSP
• 20:37 - Digital Tactics for Customer Onboarding
• 23:05 - User Experience: RevSetter’s Approach
• 25:14 - Modernizing CS with Flexible Tools
• 33:25 - Innovative Digital Motions in SaaS

Enjoy! I know I sure did...

Haydar's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haydaralsaad/
RevSetter: https://revsetter.com/

Resources:

• Topline Podcast: https://www.salestalentagency.com/topline-podcast/
• Customer Success Podcast: https://www.csmpractice.com/podcast

Shoutouts:

• Jan Young: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jan-young-cx/
• Daphne Costa Lopes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daphnecostalopes/

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This episode was edited and sponsored by Lifetime Value Media, a media production company founded by my good friend and fellow CS veteran Dillon Young.  Lifetime Value aims to serve the audio/video content production and editing needs of CS and Post-Sales professionals.  Lifetime Value is offering select services at a deeply discounted rate for a limited time.  Navigate to lifetimevaluemedia.com to learn more.

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This episode of the DCX Podcast is brought to you by Thinkific Plus, a Customer Education platform designed to accelerate customer onboarding, streamline the customer experience and avoid employee burnout.

For more information and to watch a demo, visit https://www.thinkific.com/plus/

Chapters

• 0:31 Digital Customer Success Revenue Growth Insights
• 12:42 Modern Approach to Revenue-Focused Customer Success
• 22:16 Digital Customer Onboarding and Engagement
• 28:18 Optimizing User Onboarding Experience
• 31:57 Global Customer Success Insights and Strategies

Transcript

Alex Turkovic: 0:31

Once again, welcome to the Digital Customer Experience podcast with me, Alex Turkovich. So glad you could join us here today and every week as we explore how digital can help enhance the customer and employee experience. My goal is to share what my guests and I have learned over the years so that you can get the insights that you need to evolve your own digital programs. If you'd like more info, need to get in touch or sign up for the weekly companion newsletter that has additional articles and resources in it. Go to digitalcustomersuccesscom. For now, let's get started. Greetings and welcome to episode 63 of the Digital CX Podcast. My name is Alex Terkovich. It's so great to have you back this week and every week.

Alex Turkovic: 1:11

Today, I'm excited about a conversation I had with Haidar Al-Sad, who is founder of Revsetter. Revsetter is one of the new generation of CSPs that we see coming up and one that is specifically focused on revenue growth, which is super, super cool given all the talk about revenue in the industry over the last few years. So we obviously get into that. His background is very much in accounts and CS, and so he's a founder who there's a lot of founders who are in product who found their way into CS. He's been in CS and found his way into founding a CSP devoted to it, and I hope you enjoyed this episode with Haidar Alsad, because I sure did. All right, are you ready, sir?

Alex Turkovic: 2:04

Yes, sir, I want to welcome you to the Digital CS Podcast. It's nice to have you. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a while.

Haydar Al-Saad: 2:11

Great to be on Alex. I appreciate it and I'm looking forward to joining and for a while. Great to be on Alex. I appreciate it and I'm looking forward to joining and having a conversation with you. Yeah, absolutely.

Alex Turkovic: 2:17

I mean, for those that don't know, you're founder and CEO of Revsetter and we definitely want to get into that a little bit. But we'd love a little bit more on your background, because there's some interesting stuff there. I mean, you're California-based. Today you spent some time in stockholm, I see, and uh, you're just all over the place, so I would love for you to give the, the crowd, a bit of a background, so yeah, absolutely, absolutely yeah.

Haydar Al-Saad: 2:42

So so, like you said, I I've been all over the place in terms of uh locations and where I've worked in different markets. I'm I'm from Sweden, so that's kind of where I grew up and started my journey some 15, 16 years ago post-college there, spent a couple of years actually, first in private equity, kind of got into that randomly during college and got to management right away from a customer perspective. So I got to manage a team of about 10, 15 people working with different portfolios and companies and whatnot and I kind of pretty quickly felt I want to get on the operational side and kind of build my career there. So switched over to a SaaS company, global company called Meltwater back in the day, global leader in media intelligence. So that's where I started.

Haydar Al-Saad: 3:30

But my now wife, back then girlfriend we have a long time we both wanted to come to the States and work in this market and be here.

Haydar Al-Saad: 3:38

So I got to move with Meltwater pretty early on after a year being there.

Haydar Al-Saad: 3:43

So that's when we kind of started our journey in the US some 13, 14 years ago and it's been great since I've had a chance to be in Miami and San Francisco and kind of in the central hub of SaaS and tech for a few years as well, and then now we're based in LA and Santa Monica. But throughout that journey I got the chance to really work and kind of function all the different market capabilities and functions that arise. So from initial sales then to the majority on the wholesale side and running regional teams, us, canada teams, global teams and everything from small ones 5, 10, 15, 20 people teams up to global teams with a few hundred people and half a billion renewal base and sales and across all different segments. It's been a really fun journey, switching from early days of product equity to really SaaS and going to market and spending time on that operational side. So I've had that chance to work with a lot of different perspectives and scales, which has been great, just in particular because I'm very passionate about post sales as well.

Haydar Al-Saad: 4:54

So it became a very good fit for me, building my career and my years through that.

Alex Turkovic: 4:59

Yeah, it's cool because it's rare that you see a leader who has spanned the divide, so to speak. You put in your time in sales, you put in your time in customer success and post sales, time in sales. You put in your time in customer success and post sales, and I would imagine that gives you a maybe not a unique view on revenue, but you probably have a deeper understanding of what it means to really drive revenue than, let's say, some others out there. You've got that complete picture. Is that something that you've kind of, I guess, purposely? Did you purposely kind of try to go pre to post sales, or did you just naturally kind of want to explore both? What was that journey?

Haydar Al-Saad: 5:42

Yeah, absolutely, and it definitely gives you kind of a fuller perspective on the revenue journey. I like to talk about that a lot, the kind of full revenue journey from initial lead all the way to close to onboarding, renewal and beyond. And I think that perspective is important but sometimes lacking, just because you kind of come up and you stay with one side or the other of the business. And so I try to kind of pretty early on start on the sales side. But I was always curious about the customer side and one of the main things. As I started my career in SaaS pretty quickly and I'm good with numbers and try to see a bigger picture, I realized well, majority of the revenue in most SaaS businesses is on the customer side.

Haydar Al-Saad: 6:24

While I got my kind of training and development and knowledge to all the things I need to do on the sales side, I was always looking at the customer side as well and wanted to make that switch and made that switch to get that full picture but also be part of the main revenue driver really in the business, which is sas customers and then I think, just by happenstance, the different roles and promotions and I was kind of developing through my career gave me an opportunity to, after I've done sales and CS, to do full go-to-market and manage both sales and CS teams and post-sales teams at the same time, which I think is also one of the things that sometimes can be hard if you're, as a manager or leader, only managing people within your function and that's kind of the only things that you've seen that your perspective is within that.

Haydar Al-Saad: 7:09

But as someone that's done both sides when I was managing teams on both sides as well there's a lot of cohesion between the teams and there's a lot of things and synergies that you can create within your overall function, your overall journey flow for customers that benefits. So I've always tried to kind of merge those two things together and try not to think in silos but rather as one big journey and a business that's connected in different ways. And fortunately I've had that opportunity to do that a lot of my career and it's kind of out of the world, because I think you've given me a good round for what I'm doing today but also some other startups and things I've done along the way as my kind of side job to my day job, which has always been really focused on startups and building and has other companies that have done and tried to marry those two perspectives together yeah, I mean it's one customer journey it's not like they don't stop between like the train's moving.

Haydar Al-Saad: 8:03

You might as well support and then you're at the end station there when it's signed, or then as a new customer that comes on yeah, I think a lot of companies now, alex, that is kind of how, even if you speak about it as one journey or you have the intention of it, that's great. That's a starting point and a key thing, of course. But then how you're actually structuring your teams, your resources, your methodologies, your work with all that stuff, systems play into it and, unfortunately, in too many places, those two things are still very siloed and they're not connected, which then creates that chasm between them.

Alex Turkovic: 8:39

Yeah, I mean, you said something interesting that I wanted to dig deeper in on, which was this notion that most of the money sits in post-sale, and I think a lot of folks, even who work in SaaS I think I would imagine founders get this by and large, but I think for the most part, people who work in SaaS they have this kind of traditional view of okay sales, that's who brings the money in and then we deliver the product or whatever it is. But it would be interesting to do a correlation on companies who have invested very heavily in customer success and post-sale and really driving revenue retention versus those that haven't in terms of what their churn rates are, and I'm sure that analysis exists.

Alex Turkovic: 9:27

I'm sure Greg Daines could pull it out of his hat, but I guess the point I'm making is, I think a lot of people just don't maybe take the time or really get into the weeds on that. They don't see the fact that, yeah, you know what, it's important to fill the funnel, but once the funnel is full, you got to nurture it.

Haydar Al-Saad: 9:47

A hundred percent. I think that's definitely the case and I think sometimes because naturally I keep thinking about it a lot of the CEOs out there not all, of course, but a lot of them have come from a sales background, not a CS background. A lot of the CROs today in promoted are VPs of sales before and that's kind of the prison that they have. So naturally the feeling is sales drives you and sales is critical, of course, right, because that's kind of the fuel right that you're adding to the company every year.

Haydar Al-Saad: 10:18

But as you get to a certain stage and scale and for someone like myself that's worked with 10, 15, $20 million ARR bases for a company and five, 600 billion or a billion ARR base as you start scaling, it's impossible to do it without the customers growing, without your net retention being good and there's definitely a lot of numbers around that in terms of growth, arr growth connected to net retention numbers and, when those are good, how your growth expands over time.

Haydar Al-Saad: 10:47

But I think that's a dynamic that sometimes you miss until you're at a stage where your growth slows and you start analyzing why we're not growing and then you uncover this massive hole which is your attention and on the customer side, where you've underinvested for a long time, and the bigger that ship is at that point, as we know, the harder it is to move it, because in CES versus sales, everything is lagging. So whatever you're doing today in CES, in six months you'll probably see the results of that effectively right, whereas in sales you can make quick changes and see quick results a lot of times, and that's, I think, something that a lot of people get there, and that's when their eyes kind of open up a little bit and say, like we have an issue now and this is why we're having this issue.

Alex Turkovic: 11:30

Yeah for sure the bit and say like we have an issue now and this is why we're having this. Yeah for sure, the word compounding comes to mind, if you have a good sense for what compounding?

Alex Turkovic: 11:40

is all about then you will invest in your post-sale teams. Um, I definitely want to get into. You know what you and the team are building at ref center, but one of the things I I love having I love having founders on, especially founders that are catered towards solving specific problems in CS and other places, because a lot of people have this notion that digital CS is just like a set of automations and a set of things that you do and whatever, but digital CS is also the tools that you surround yourself with and the technology that you surround yourself with in order to make your team successful and to be successful. That said, I wanted to ask you the question that I ask all my guests, which is what would be your own definition of digital CS if you had to explain it to somebody in an elevator for 10 seconds?

Haydar Al-Saad: 12:28

Yeah, that's a great question because I think it's interesting, right. I think it's a term right now digital customer success. That's thrown around a lot. People talk about it in different ways and there's really no clear definition of what it is. But for me, kind of how I would define it, digital customer success is really about, I would say, both the art and the science of how to elevate, improve and really increase efficiencies with your workflows, your processes, your methodologies and how you do that through digital systems and resources like platforms, apps, software, ai and beyond. So I think it's something that could take many different shapes and forms, but that's kind of my general definition of how I look at visual customer success.

Alex Turkovic: 15:20

I like that blanket term of efficiency because it can denote so many things. But ultimately what you're trying to do is you're trying to really drive customer value in the most efficient manner, and that's through efficiencies in your customer facing stuff, but then, especially in startup Bill. Resources are limited so you got to be as efficient as you possibly can.

Haydar Al-Saad: 15:44

Yeah, absolutely, and it's, I think, one of the things too right.

Haydar Al-Saad: 15:49

When you think about efficiency, a lot of times we equate that to just saving time or do things faster or fewer steps right to get something done.

Haydar Al-Saad: 15:59

But what you see, when you work as a startup plan myself now, or when I've worked with large enterprise customers and processes, it's really about making the process more seamless for the customer right, easy, easy for them to do things. That can sometimes mean fewer steps right, like on Amazon, you can click one time and buy something. That's really efficient. But when you look at, let's say, onboarding a platform, sometimes actually doing a few extra steps will guide the user to do less mistakes and, through the process, more seamless overall and actually complete it faster because you're avoiding some of those things that might happen when you're reducing steps. So I think, depending on your customers, kind of the way that you think about it, you just think about it from the perspective of making things more seamless for them to accomplish what needs to happen and you do that and the most efficient way. That's how I think you can really leverage digital cs through those technologies and workflows and best way possible it's really yeah, so well said.

Alex Turkovic: 17:06

I mean that you would think that the best way to onboard a customer is like the fastest path to like getting users to log in and all that kind of stuff, and in some cases I guess you could say that's correct. But there are those things that you know as having built your product and knowing your product, that if they do this, that'll make their downstream journey that much simpler, and so focusing on those things is is super important. Do you want to give a I hate I don't like putting words in founders mouths about what it is they're building, so do you? Do you want to give us like a little bit of a sense for what ref setter is all about and what you're focused on?

Haydar Al-Saad: 17:48

yeah, absolutely happy to ref setter as a founder. It's interesting. So it came about from my experience being on the other side right as an executive, a global market leader buying different technologies, especially on the wholesale side. And the reason why we built Repsetter and what we are we're a revenue-focused customer success platform and what we focus in on is really both sides of CS. So we have CS teams that don't have revenue responsibility, that can be inside of Revsetter and use the tool and work with everything that you equate to that, right from health scores and journeys and all the things that you want to do success plans, playbooks, etc. But also the other side of the CS coin, which is the revenue side. Sometimes that will be referred to as account management, sometimes that's CES with revenue responsibility, whatever you call or kind of talk about that in a context of but driving renewals, expansion, net retention and doing those things. And we try to kind of build all that into a really modern, easy to use and powerful platform that really takes a modern approach to how you do CS and really frame it around the different roles that you have in post-sales and different goals that they have, all working within one platform with one data set and finding those synergies together. It's really a modern CS platform.

Haydar Al-Saad: 19:10

Today. We're also really excited because one of the things that we've seen is how buyers and users, how their behavior, is changing right when from the old school sales led and sales bought motions that we've seen to now actually usually be more sophisticated, expecting a lot more from time to value. You don't want to spend two, three months setting up a new platform and maybe six, nine months to get value from your CS platform, but you want to get started right away. You want to start getting value very quickly. We're also actually launching the first PLG version of a CS platform here in the next couple of months, which we're super excited about and really enabling all the users out there whether you're an individual CSM, a director, team level or higher to start using Revsetter for free.

Haydar Al-Saad: 20:00

There's free packages. There will be different paid plans and all that stuff and enterprise, of course, but I think that's one of the things that we really try to focus on is building it in such a modern and customizable way to really allow for anyone to use it with different kind of options and functionality that fits what they need and they can scale from there. So that's kind of what RegSery does today and it's interesting as well because we have a lot of other teams now starting to use it. So we have more of a gold market product as well and CRM product coming expanding from the CS scope for sure, that's great.

Alex Turkovic: 20:31

I mean ultimately, if you can have all your teams in one place, that's great. I mean ultimately, if you can have all your teams in one place, that's ideal, because then you don't have to worry about integrations and those weird field handoff things and all that kind of stuff that makes a lot of sense and I love the notion of PLG. I mean, it's kind of what HubSpot has been doing right, it's super easy to sign up for HubSpot, but it's kind of hard to leave.

Haydar Al-Saad: 20:52

Yeah, exactly yeah, and HubSpot is one of the inspirations for that right and, like I said, as someone who's been on the other side, I always found it curious that you look at the CRM space where Salesforce was obviously the initial big giant and then you have HubSpot, mondaycom, so all this coming now, but HubSpot came and said you know what we're going to go to market a little bit differently and of course they were targeting a little bit more SMB, mid-market versus enterprise, but they did that and they kind of launched it and obviously very successful right and now potentially going to be acquired by Google, as it looks like very soon. So that'll be an interesting move, but then very soon. So that'll be an interesting move. But then you look at the cs space and and everyone and gainside obviously initially came about and became the sales force of the space and modeled after sales force, but everyone else just modeled right after the same exact thing.

Haydar Al-Saad: 21:46

And now it's really hard for any of the legacy players to change right. It's hard, going from a specific product that you built to be sales-led and emotion and customers, to then do something differently and no one's really done it. But I think everything is changing and how buying behavior is changing. So we had an opportunity to do so with how we built the product and, yeah, we're excited to get that out to the market here very soon. We've already gotten some really great feedback and a lot of early signups and all that stuff beyond our just regular sales motion, which is fine.

Alex Turkovic: 22:16

Hey, I want to have a brief chat with you about this show. Did you know that roughly 60% of listeners aren't actually subscribed to the show, on whatever platform they're listening to it on Now? As you know, algorithms love, likes, follows, subscribes, comments, all of that kind of stuff. So if you get value out of the content, you listen regularly and you want to help others to discover the content as well, please go ahead and follow the show, leave a comment, leave a review. Anything that you want to do there really helps us to grow organically as a show. And while you're at it, go sign up for the companion newsletter that goes out every week at digitalcustomersuccesscom.

Alex Turkovic: 22:55

Now back to the show. So I would imagine as part of that, you are probably focused on some pretty hefty digital motions. I mean, part of the PLG model is really focusing on self-serve and making sure that folks get onboarded correctly and all that kind of stuff. So can you walk us through a little bit of the tactical kind of boots on the ground of what you're doing digitally to help your customers?

Haydar Al-Saad: 23:21

And the way that we approached it. So we tried to think about it very holistically. The first thing is we try to make sure our product is built in a way that reduces as much friction as possible and makes it easy for customers to do things. So we've built in templates and guides and things of that nature to make it really easy to get started, to get things up and running, to have things from day one. And then what we've done is we've kind of mapped out a few different journeys. So the user journey, from initially landing on our website to either have a click sign-up we have an AI-based sign up that you can also do, which is pretty cool to getting into your platform and then what you do from there. But then we also have a lot of digital motions surrounding how we do our go-to-market outreach. So the different groups of prospects and customers that we want to target how do we want to activate them? And then, once we get them into our environments whether that's website sign up and the platform how do we want to continue that process. So there's a lot of emotions around that.

Haydar Al-Saad: 24:24

I think some of the most important things that we've found so far in terms of building all this up is outside of the product. Being really flexible around these things is that you have a ton of really good analytics around what people are doing where they are, so you can build those specific touch points and automations around that. And so if we don't know who's getting stuck where, if we don't know where people are specifically in that journey and what they're doing and what is converting to success in terms of and we're also identified success metrics for usage in these things, then it's really hard to build anything around the CRIDE. You're kind of just following your dog there. So that's been a big project to make sure that's all in place. So now we can really see that journey and we can see where does the customer need help. And then we're using our own automation tech within Revsetter to engage those users and help them at the right spots with the right things and make sure those sequences are playing out in the right way.

Alex Turkovic: 25:20

Yeah, you just mentioned the digital CS sweet spot, which is basically a thing I came up with, where it's Venn diagram basically, and it's like that intersection between customer journey and healthy data. I don't think healthy data really exists anywhere, but like healthy-ish data yeah like that's the intersection there is like where the sweet spot is for digital programs to really flourish, because you know you miss in any one of those three and it's like you're.

Haydar Al-Saad: 25:52

It's an uphill battle all the way it is for sure, because you're kind of throwing spaghetti on the wall at that point. Okay, well, let's try this, let's do that, but you don't really see what's happening and why not yeah um, but yeah, I think that's a great way of describing as well, with that kind of, those three elements of it and how they intersect I'm.

Alex Turkovic: 26:13

I'm a new rev set of customer on your PLG motion or whatever. I sign up and what is my experience? Are you tackling things in product or email or SMS or like what are your vehicles?

Haydar Al-Saad: 26:27

Yeah, absolutely. So we're doing a few different things. So, as a new customer, you sign up. Like I said, there's two ways of signing up. You go through a few onboarding steps. It takes two minutes to do. As soon as you come into the platform, you'll have value for you right there. So you come in, let's say you sign up I just want to try this thing out.

Haydar Al-Saad: 26:48

Here's one of my customers Click, go Two steps of onboarding and they're in the platform and we're already enriching those customers with our AI and then our data app. So infographics, news, competitors, all that stuff. And so the way that we then start engaging with you is an app. We're going to help you identify different things that, based off of some of the onboarding information you provide us. Let's say you're a CSM, you're focused, which means your driver, you know, was an expansion.

Haydar Al-Saad: 27:19

Then, when you come in, we're kind of guiding you to specific available templates, journeys are available, automations that you can set up, as well as things that you should do from a workflow perspective that will help, potentially help you yeah, using or company mapping, whatever it might be. And then, as you start going through this, we'll have different kind of touch points through email, through your preferred communication methods. So, for example, you can say I want to link up my Slack or my Teams or something else where I can start setting up notifications which you can then leverage, whether that's setup notifications or AI ones or our kind of journey flow notifications. So those are the main vehicles that the customer will kind of see us or engage with us will be through email and not primarily, and then some, if they wish, through some of their other kind of day-to-day work workflows, which for a lot of people these days is either Slack or Teams.

Alex Turkovic: 28:15

Essentially, Sure, yeah, that's cool, I love it. Yeah, when you started describing kind of the onboarding, it got me down this thought kind of rabbit hole of making. It's so important to make that first impression when a new user signs in and it can be really hard to do but like providing that instant amount of value. Again, I'm going to use, I'm going to use HubSpot as an example, cause I was in there earlier today. I added a company that I'm working with to HubSpot and I just added the domain name and it filled in all the rest I got the address, I got the logo, I got the and it's. Those kinds of experiences are critical, right. But also I would imagine, from a founder's perspective and given the tools that we have and the artificial intelligence that's available to us and the low cost of development these days, that those kinds of experiences are much easier to build than even five, six years ago, right.

Haydar Al-Saad: 29:15

Oh, absolutely, absolutely, and that's definitely exactly the case. And, like you said, and that's part of why I mentioned, as you land, you get all the infographics, get the logo.

Alex Turkovic: 29:26

You also?

Haydar Al-Saad: 29:26

get things like. Here are the key people that here here are this summer in the news and all these things. And what is interesting when news and all these things and what is interesting when, as from a developer, development standpoint and as a founder, you kind of as you start building tech and I'm not a technology guy, so I'm not a developer and code but as a founder, you learn a lot about it. If you want to right, yeah, and it's one of the most important things to do those things well today versus five, six years ago, is the way that you've actually created and structured your baseline data models in your platforms. Basically, think about the foundation that you built the house on top of A few years ago, even just three, four years ago.

Haydar Al-Saad: 30:04

When you go back 10 years, if you look at Gainsight or something, the available foundations to build are very different than the way that you can do it today. But once you've built that foundation, it's really hard to start going back and redoing things in the house because you've already put that in place. So we put it in place where it's really flexible, which makes that development easier and faster for us, more agile. But that's, I think, where sometimes I speak to some other founders medium-sized, smaller, bigger companies that have been trying to make that shift from their current motion to PLG.

Haydar Al-Saad: 30:40

But it's been extremely hard from a product perspective to be, able to redo that foundation, even though it's always easy to say, hey, you can just rewrite the entire code, but it's extremely hard and while you've been around whatever foundation, you've set everything built on top of it. Untangling that is really difficult and I think that's why you don't see it as often and that's what we see. If you go to G2, for example, and look at this, the average time to set up is 2.3 months. The average time to value is 6.8 months, if not even longer. Right, which is crazy to me, they almost spend half a year to just start seeing value from a CES platform.

Alex Turkovic: 31:20

Yeah, that shouldn't be the case. Yeah, yeah, I mean, look, I think we're all familiar with the Gainsight example. They've been around forever. We are heavy Gainsight users, but you know it does. I don't want to knock them, but it does take an admin team to run it and to maintain it and those kinds of things, and it's got to be a hard place for them to be in at the moment because they're sitting on top of this tech stack. That's crazy powerful, but it's also like showing its age a little bit.

Haydar Al-Saad: 31:50

Sorry, GameStop, I don't mean to insult you.

Alex Turkovic: 31:52

Please sponsor the podcast.

Haydar Al-Saad: 31:55

Yeah, I will. And Gainsight are great. I think it always comes for us as newcomers into the market, or early at least versus Gainsight, they kind of trailblaze the space and open it up for everyone and I think it's a great tool.

Haydar Al-Saad: 32:12

But I think it's and which makes sense because they're focusing there. It's very enterprise-focused and we're seeing more and more Like if you play like, tatango wants to be there, kyla is obviously now acquired there, lionhut others are really focused on enterprise, which makes a lot of sense. But what has always been interesting to me as someone that's a devise worker also a lot of SMBs, growth stage companies, the kind of mid to low mid market. There's an abundance of companies there that need CS platforms or tech and to get out of just being in CRM or in a bunch of spreadsheets. But the legacy players are not really folks that are built for them. They're built for something different and they're really good at that. So that's why we try to focus in a lot and where PLG will be also an additional benefit.

Alex Turkovic: 33:04

It'd be huge because I mean, you've got a ton of organizations that are just not ready to invest in an enterprise level CSP. They're not ready to invest in in that kind of technology and in instances where you have one or two CSMs or you have the first CSM in an organization, it's an ideal move to just get going on this stuff, rather than just again like building this foundation in spreadsheets or Google Docs that you then later have to rip out.

Haydar Al-Saad: 33:27

And then you can just grow your way into that. And that's where it's always interesting. Like we have teams with 50, 60, whatever number of CSMs and some with one or two. Their lives are very different so you need to be able to kind of adjust for both. But it is a very different thing and we do our CS audits with our new customers, which we do their challenges and where their gaps are always very different when talking about a thousand employee company or a 50 or a hundred employee company.

Haydar Al-Saad: 33:59

They live in different realities, but they all have similar things?

Alex Turkovic: 34:01

yeah are there. I'm always seeing digital things in the wild. I'll get an email flow from somebody or I'll get whatever, especially in b2c. There's so much b2c is so good at the digital thing, but are there some cool kind of digital motions that you've observed in the wild where you're like oh man, we should do that.

Haydar Al-Saad: 34:22

Yeah, I mean there's definitely some interesting ones. I think one that's top of mind for a lot of people now, regardless of what they think about the product itself, is good or not. There's different values of it. But retentioncom's new product, rb2b, which isa very straightforward product, right, someone comes to your website, you see who it is, they slack you. I think they have a pretty interesting motion there in terms of the emails and it's a lot of email-based stuff but the follow-ups and kind of as you get active, as you get onboarded as you you know, progress throughout the trials and whatnot.

Haydar Al-Saad: 34:57

So I think they've done a good job with that motion. Again, product aside, and I think it's also what I think is interesting today as well, is we're seeing a lot more discussions about automated flows, especially on the sales side today. So if you look at Clay, for example, and what they're doing, or enabling companies to experiment and doing, I've seen some interesting motions there in terms of from early lead to leveraging some of the integrations in Clay and personalization and AI and getting those sequences out. I've seen some interesting things there, but I think it's still we don't see enough of it on the CS side. I think the CS side is still a lot of emails based on triggers and that's kind of the extent of digital for companies and they feel like they've done digital at that point where there's actually a lot more that goes into it and that you can do with it and a lot more ways you can structure it.

Haydar Al-Saad: 35:56

But I see it more on the sales side, specifically around that automation of how do we basically, how do we need less sdrs and less aes to do the same output kind of blows around that. I see that a ton, but I wish I saw more of it on the cs side and especially in b2b. In general, like so, bdc is great, there's a bunch of cool stuff and they're pretty good at activating people and doing these things, whereas in b2b it's a little bit more rigid.

Alex Turkovic: 36:22

I agree, yeah, I agree, and there's a weird hesitance to act like b2c in b2b. It's like uncool or unprofessional or something like that, and I'm less like what. Just have some fun with your customers. What's the harm in that? I will say that we've tried to have fun with our customers in Germany. Again, no offense to German customers but they need stuff straight and like to the point and not so much fluff, and I get it. It's cool. Whatever, I'm part half Austrian, so I get it. It. I'm part half.

Haydar Al-Saad: 36:55

Austrian, so I get it. It's cool. I got you, it's cool. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I work global, so it's very different, like German market, japanese market, for example, japanese customers also very much business oriented. But then you have US very different UK. It's very interesting when you work with global markets how different they are than we expect, but it's are different.

Alex Turkovic: 37:16

They are what we expect, but it's extremely different and if you are operating globally, you have to take it's not a one and done in terms of your digital emotions, like you got to be regionally sensitive. I don't think you have to go crazy by country by country in some cases maybe, but like region by region. For sure, I once did. I did sales training at Dell, so I was at Dell for five years and there was a stint there where I did.

Alex Turkovic: 37:44

I don't know how I got involved with this, but I would do these sales training sessions for our Japanese teams and I'd be in the. This was back in the day where you went into the office, but I'd be in the office at 10, 10, 11, 12 at night or whatever, running these calls and the. What always struck me at first it was really jarring, but then I just realized it was a cultural difference is like in in japan, it's like the ultimate form of respect is not to like interrupt the facilitator and to be, very quiet and attentive, but this was pre-webcam too.

Alex Turkovic: 38:19

This was all conference calls and stuff, so it was like I was just talking to an empty office, basically, and at the end they were like thank you, I don't know if you got anything out of that, but this is very interesting the cultural differences it is, I just dated myself way dated myself.

Haydar Al-Saad: 38:37

Pre-webcam jesus yeah, pretty like yeah, but hey, some people that's just pre-covid for them. It was like more uncomfortable to do video for people hopefully not too many of them, but yeah it is. I think the culture thing is really interesting, even just how companies operate and what they do.

Haydar Al-Saad: 38:54

We have some good amount of customers from India for example, tech companies that haven't really had access to the legacy. Csps haven't been really a good fit for them for different reasons, and we got a few in and then expanded and whatnot, and they have a ton of tech companies, but the things that are important for them over there in terms of just the way that they get built, the different type of integrations, are important and the flows that they expect is different than the US market, and then how you can communicate that and work with them on that is also different. So it's always an interesting learning experience working with companies or with people in different markets and different regions. One, you get get appreciation for the nuances and you get a better understanding for them. But two, there's actually a ton of opportunity for any company that's thinking about that.

Haydar Al-Saad: 39:46

Hey, if you're really trying to stand the challenges or the expectations within a specific market and adapt to that in some ways, that can be a huge growth opportunity for you as a business, and I think I always find that interesting once we tap into new places and I've done that with my career how much opportunity there is, because I'm taking time to understand yeah, I mean, so many companies are focused on north america, obviously north america, mia australia maybe, but the rest of the world is huge yes, yeah, I saw somewhere, like you talked about india, I think was 750 000 tech companies there, or why are we talking about baby additional markets?

Haydar Al-Saad: 40:28

yeah, there's a, there's a few out there yeah, amazing.

Alex Turkovic: 40:32

Well, look, I've really enjoyed this conversation. As we kind of start to wrap up, I'd love to kind of understand what you do to keep yourself kind of in the know and what podcast, books, videos, whatever you pay attention to on a regular basis, if you can, because I'm sure you're in founder mode all the time.

Haydar Al-Saad: 40:51

Yeah for sure. No, I do definitely try to gauge as much as possible what's going on out there. I read a bunch of different things and particularly I like to listen to podcasts like this one. Of course, the Topline podcast is pretty good as well. The Customer Success podcast is really good and honestly I try to.

Haydar Al-Saad: 41:10

Also, the way that I try to consume a lot of it as well is through different communities. I'm a part of a lot of it as well is three different communities. I'm part of where that's working with some other cs kind of alum, let's say they've been around for a long time and kind of sharing ideas through some of the meetups and things that we do. So that's kind of the way I try to do. It is really engage a lot of different people, along with listening to a lot of good, good podcasts that are out there, and occasionally, if I have time, I'll try to read a couple books as well, but between founder mode and three kids under six you don't get as much reading time as back in the day. The audio versions are always audio version.

Alex Turkovic: 41:46

Yeah, that's a bunch of good stuff. That's cool. Any shout outs you want to give?

Haydar Al-Saad: 41:50

oh, and there's a bunch of people. Yeah, it's always early when it comes to shots, but I'll give one one shout out because I just love what she's building and doing and that's.

Alex Turkovic: 41:59

John.

Haydar Al-Saad: 41:59

Young, who's building CF Exchange and really working with a lot of CS leaders to take them to that next step into revenue leaders. She's also built a really good community there as well, so I love what she's doing. She's great. Daphne Costa we're at HubSpot. She has just a ton of great content, great follow and a lot of good ideas. But yeah, there's a bunch of other people I could definitely mention, but those two ladies, those two are excellent, excellent mentions Absolutely, absolutely.

Alex Turkovic: 42:29

That's cool. Well, look where can people find you and engage with you.

Haydar Al-Saad: 42:32

Yeah, I think easiest thing follow me and I put a lot of content on LinkedIn, so follow me there and me, of course, just email me as well and kind of. You'll find me on Revsetter and anything Revsetter related, so just my email is easy hydrarevsettercom Anyone that wants to just kind of ping me directly. But again, otherwise, LinkedIn is usually the best forum to follow some of my content or reach out.

Alex Turkovic: 42:56

Amazing. Thanks so much for the time. I've really enjoyed this chat. It was. It was really good, I always love chatting with founders and and and what you're, you and the team are building are really cool and and, yeah, thanks for the insights as well yeah, I appreciate it.

Haydar Al-Saad: 43:09

Thanks for having me on. It was great and, like I said in the beginning, I was excited for the conversation and I really appreciate a lot of the topics that we had a chance to talk, no worries, no worries.

Alex Turkovic: 43:17

Talk soon. Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Digital CX Podcast. If you like what we're doing, consider leaving us a review on your podcast platform of choice. If you're watching on YouTube, leave a comment down below. It really helps us to grow and provide value to a broader audience. You can view the Digital Customer Success Definition Wordmap and get more information about the show and some of the other things that we're doing at digitalcustomersuccesscom.

Alex Turkovic: 43:47

This episode was edited by Lifetime Value Media, a media production company founded by our good mutual friend, Dylan Young. Lifetime Value aims to serve the content video audio production needs of the CS and post-sale community. They're offering services at a steep discount for a limited time. So navigate to lifetimevaluemediacom, Go have a chat with Dylan and make sure you mention the Digital CX podcast sent you. I'm Alex Tergovich. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week.