Video: Maximizing revenue and reducing churn for SaaS companies: Automate RevOps with Celigo | Duration: 1752s | Summary: Maximizing revenue and reducing churn for SaaS companies: Automate RevOps with Celigo

Transcript for "Maximizing revenue and reducing churn for SaaS companies: Automate RevOps with Celigo": Okay. Hello, everyone, and thanks for joining. We're just gonna give it another minute or 2 until we have enough people on here, and we'll get started soon. Alright. Well, thanks everyone again for joining. We have an exciting topic today to cover, and it's going to be around how you can leverage automation to maximize revenue and reduce churn for SaaS companies. I will be the speaker today. I work in product marketing, and I've been in the Ipaas space for a little over 5 years working at companies like MuleSoft and Trade. Io. Here at Silego, one of the key parts of my role is identifying new use cases in ways where you can realize value from Silego's platform. So I'm excited to present some opportunities today where you can leverage our platform to augment some of your critical rev ops processes. As a quick agenda, we'll first cover some headwinds that SaaS companies are facing, how this has led to the rise of revenue operations as a discipline, what some critical revenue operations automations are that you can automate within Celica, and then we will end with a quick q and a. So first, the headwinds. As I'm sure you're all aware, it's a difficult time for SaaS. Right? Funding, as you can see here, was down, by 30 per 6% year over year and 23% from August of 2023. And what this means is companies have gone from a grow at all costs to now they have to grow in a way that's sustainable and profitable so they can weather this storm. So they're thinking about minimizing their costs, maximizing their profit, not just spending to get customers, but spending in the right ways and allocating their funds effectively. Next, we're seeing a huge increase in competition. Compared to a decade ago, there's roughly 3 times the amount of SaaS companies created and established per year. Since this number has exploded, you're looking for new ways to differentiate in a crowded space, and it comes down to a really strong customer experience. And you're now competing against 5, 10, 15, 20 competitors. So that experience has to be top notch to retain your customers. And finally, we have really limited resources. So as growth rates have slowed, also hiring budgets have slowed in tandem. And what that means is you have to do more with less resources. You're probably not going to 2 x the size of your company. Next year, you'll have the staff that you have on hand and maybe a few more folks, but you really have to allocate those resources effectively and make sure that they're focused on strategic initiatives so you can set your company up for success. You can see this trend reflected in a graph from SaaSter. SaaSter is a company that's constantly surveying other SaaS companies and really has a good pulse on the trends. 2018, 2019, all the way through 2021, SaaS was on this role where things were easier. There was a lot of funding. It was easier to acquire customers because other companies had available budgets, and now we're seeing in in 2023, now 2024, that things have really tightened up. And this has led to the rise of rev ops. And the reason being is now all of these executives at SaaS companies, it's not just SaaS Companies, but in the context of today, we'll be highlighting SaaS Companies, are focused on increasing their revenue and decreasing their churn. Right? NDR or net dollar attention is the north star metric for a lot of companies. So how do I increase my revenue by improving my lead and sales process and speed to lead and efficiency and also provide a really strong customer experience? Well, it comes down to revenue operations. And so revenue operations is the confluence of marketing ops, sales ops, and service or customer success operations to drive consistency and predictability to your revenue pipeline. So when you think about it, whether you're reporting to a board, you're publicly owned, or you're private reporting to private investors, You wanna have a pulse on what's going on. You want to be able to close deals more efficiently, report them more efficiently, and cut and minimize costs wherever you can, and then also provide a strong customer experience. All of those processes that roll up to the outcomes I just mentioned are part of revenue operations. And you can see the rise in rev ops reflected in a few stats right here. So The title VP of Revenue Operations has increased by 300% in the past 18 months. Public companies, we don't have the private company data, but public companies with a dedicated RevOps function have seen a 71% higher stock performance compared to those without. Companies that are prioritizing and doubling down in revenue operations are seeing considerable results, and their valuations are going up accordingly as well. Alright. So what does RevOps and automation look like within Zaligo? 1st, let's before we get into the actual processes you can automate and how it looks in our platform, Let's first talk about current approaches to rev ops and why a lot of them are ultimately not sufficient. So we have a lot of customers that come to us and they say, all of our marketing, sales, customer success processes are actually hard coded out of central IT. So we don't even really know what's going on within our line of business. And central IT is already dealing with an extensive backlog from other lines of business, a variety of projects. They have limited headcount. They have limited context on the underlying processes. Is someone who works in central IT really the best fit, and the person who should be automating a lead life cycle management process, for instance? Well, no. It's probably someone who works in marketing operations and lives and breathes leads and prospect data every single day. So they have limited visibility. It's almost like a little bit of a black box. And then when someone in an IT function leaves, it's hard to get under the covers and really understand the code that they wrote, and it just creates a little bit of friction between departments and between central IT. Next, there's manual processes. Maybe you don't even look to create code or turn to an automation platform. You just try and manually key in data. Right? So maybe you have a quote to cash process, and you just try and key in all of the Salesforce data in your NetSuite to match up the records. And this is really time consuming. It takes away time that you could be spending on strategic efforts, and we've seen consistently that there are a lot of errors made that lead to duplicate and inaccurate data and a time suck from the other teams that are consuming that data. And all of this is leading to decreased revenue and increased churn and a frustrating customer experience. So these are the outcomes you basically don't want based on what we talked about earlier. Right? You wanna increase your end NDR. You wanna do more with less. You want to drive towards profitability, and leveraging custom code and manual processes is taking you in the opposite direction. So now let's get into where we start with automation. And I would actually love to see a poll here and see what what you all think, the most critical RevOps processes you're looking to automate are. So I'll give you a few seconds to take a stab at that and participate, and I'm curious to see what the results are. Okay. Interesting. So so far, lead management is the winner by unanimous decision. Okay. So it was lead management is what you all thought was the the most critical process that's interesting. We will definitely touch on that later. And also can answer some questions on that at the end if anyone has anything additional or more custom to what you're working on. But for what we'll be highlighting in this session, we'll be highlighting processes across marketing ops, sales ops, and customer success ops. So first, lead life cycle management. So it's the process of really tracking, nurturing, converting leads through various stages. So when they first come into contact in the beginning of the funnel all the way to when they get routed to a sales rep. Next is quote to cash. So it's basically the process of taking a a closed one lead to, turning it into, so sorry. Transferring that data to NetSuite or ERP and making sure all of your systems are up to date so you can collect cash. And then finally, we have product usage. So product usage automation is a way that you can get data out of your data warehouse, so maybe your Snowflake or your BigQuery, and make sure that that data gets to your customer success team so they can react accordingly. If there's a dip in usage, they can be proactive with follow-up. If there's an increase in usage, they can treat it as an upsell opportunity. So all three of these automations are really critical towards increasing your revenue and decreasing your churn, and we'll walk through how this could look in the silico platform. So first, lead life cycle management. So everyone wants that clean and clear funnel where a lead comes in, they become aware of your product, then maybe they fill out a demo request form. They're captured, rated automatically as an MQL, passed to a sales rep, and they're closed, and everything is perfect and fine and and dandy. What we have realized is this is almost never the case in reality. These leads are traversing a wide variety of different systems. So it could be everything from an ad platform like Google Ads or Meta tore to, being captured at an event via Eventbrite, being recorded in Google Sheet. And then these leads need to be enriched, and we need to make sure that they have all up to date information before they're entered into a marketing automation platform. And then you also need to make sure that your CRM and marketing automation platform are fully synced and up to date with all of the custom fields and custom objects. And along the way, what we see is companies that don't have a clear strategy in place here, they start to lose leads throughout this process. So leads don't get routed to the right reps. Leads have inaccurate or duplicate information, and it leads to a way slower speed to lead process and ultimately lost revenue. And they've done studies where the companies that that follow-up the fastest, ultimately, there there are companies that, or, sorry, there are customers that, like, 50% of the time will buy from the company that responds them the fastest. So you're really leaving revenue on the table if you're not able to dial in your lead management process and make it as efficient as possible. And, also, doing so will make your sales reps happy, they'll have up to date information, and they can focus on closing deals versus having to deal with inaccurate lead information that they need to correct in the CRM. So in Soligo, just a little art of the possible. Again, this is a high level. I think customers who they set up lead capture workflows where, from sources like Eventbrite, let's say that you just send an event, Lead can be captured and enriched through something like Clearbit and then recorded into HubSpot, and then we set up bidirectional syncs between HubSpot and Salesforce. So any changes that are reflected in HubSpot are also reflected in the Salesforce system. And then there's also lead routing. So let's say you have a form fill out that's a contact me now. I'm very interested, high intent form. You want you might want that routed immediately to, a sales rep in Salesforce. Maybe you also want to tag that rep in Slack and make sure their manager's aware. We can also, help with the lead routing process, And this is increasing your speed to lead, and it's giving your sales reps more accurate data, making sure that the leads are enriched before they enter your marketing automation platform or your single source of truth. So next is quote to cash. So the quote to cash process is pretty essential for managing the life cycle from generating a quote to receiving payment. But a lot of times, we find that it's reliant on manual work from the finance team. So, if this is the case, not only has the finance team taken away from their strategic work and forced to do more of the the manual pieces, It could also lead to incorrect pricing, discount calculations, customer details, all things that are really harmful to the business. And as you can see here, there are a lot of different systems depending on how your organization, what your organization's tech stack is, but there are a lot of different systems that could be involved, from CRM to ERP in this whole process. In doing this poorly, it could also, getting back to the speed and efficiency thing, lead to slower approval workflows, which could ultimately lead to you losing a deal that that you had in the bag to a more efficient and nimble competitor. So this is just one example, but you can create these bidirectional syncs, mapped to custom objects for things like customers, opportunities, and products, and different line items. So your Salesforce and your NetSuite are fully up to date, and as soon as a deal is closed, in Salesforce versus you need to generate a quote, sorry, in in Salesforce, you can do the same in NetSuite. And some of the key results here, like I mentioned, finance teams can focus on strategic objectives, and you can operate with increased efficiency. Alright. Another interesting automation that we've seen is around product usage. So as a SaaS company, oftentimes, your product data is housed in one of the below data warehouses. But there seems to be inherent silo between the product data and your customer success and account management teams. Right? So maybe they don't have full visibility. So let's say your customer success team doesn't even know when product usage has dipped for a customer, and they become aware way too late in the process. And by that point, the customer has already churned. On the flip side, let's say that the customer has actually been using a lot of your product, and the customer success team has a meeting with them, but they don't even realize that the utility has increased, and they miss a potential upsell opportunity. There's a lot of ramifications here, but, mainly, there could be a huge increase in your churn rate if your post sales team is not intimately aware of all of the product usage for a given customer in their portfolio or within their territory. So here are a few, interesting automations we've seen. So from Snowflake to Slack. So let's say there is a dip in usage, and you have a certain threshold where if you you can set this rule, but if usage dips to x point or y point, we want our account management team immediately notified in Slack, and maybe we pull in the VP as well to get the situation under control as quickly as possible. You can set up that automation. So the customer's usage dips. Immediately, the account management team is notified. They proactively set up a call on the customer's calendar, and they're able to mitigate the situation and get usage up in the coming months, preventing a churn. And then as an added cherry on top, maybe you also want the snowflake data constantly being updated and visible in Salesforce. So through a single pane of glass, that customer success rep or that post sales architect can see exactly how they're using your product just by viewing the Salesforce page, and they can be fully up to date and have context going into nuanced conversations, whether they're at renewal or some other juncture in the year. So what we've seen with all of this, and just to back things up, when we talked about the custom code and the manual approaches, a lot of that means your processes are being automated out of central IT. And central IT really doesn't have an intimate understanding of the underlying logic or the business process like you would in marketing ops, sales ops, or customer success ops, or or biz business applications per se. So what Twiligo allows you to do is actually we're democratizing automation where you can create the the mock flows that I showed at the line of business level. This means that someone who has a really good understanding of these processes can actually do the automation themselves and automate what they know best while keeping central IT's minds at ease because we have security and governance, and very strict standards baked in. So IT can kind of monitor these integrations, provision access to integration tiles. And then at the line of business level, you can create these critical automations for your business and move faster than you you ever have before. And so you see, Soligo kind of sits in between the IT organization and the marketing, sales, and customer success lines of businesses in this example. And here, you can just see, a few of the different components that make this organizational transformation possible. So we have everything that you need to be successful from operations and monitoring to AI powered services within the platform. So things like automatic error resolution where we remediate 95% of errors proactively, all the way down to our platform core. So security and compliance, we're very scalable. Connectivity, so we have connectivity to hundreds of out of the box connectors and then the ability to connect universally, via HTTP client or another method. So you can really connect to any new application that's thrown your way or that's introduced into your tech stack. But don't don't just take our word for it. We always say, listen to our customers and what they have to say. So we were, named Gartner Pure Insights customer's choice in in 2023 and then the number one I pass in g two spring 2024 report. And here are just a few of the results that that customers have realized. So 75% faster development time, 90% reduction in error resolution time, and 364%, increase in ROI. But I know we are coming up on time here. I think we have about 8 minutes left. I want to leave the rest of the time for you all to just ask whatever questions are on your mind and, yeah, open up the floor to you. So please post some questions in the chat, and I will get to them as they come in. Okay. Just had one question come in. We are about to implement Saligo into our company. What is the recommended training path? So I would say it does depend a little bit on your context and your preexisting knowledge of Saligo as well as the technical capabilities of your team. I think Saligo University is generally a great place to get started. But if you do need additional assistance, we also have our professional services team and, a great partner community who can get you ramped up as soon as possible. But it does depend a little bit on what your starting point is for me to prescribe the ideal training path and plan going forward. Okay. We just had another one come in. Do you also work through lead syncing use cases? Okay. Yeah. So that's one of the ones that I highlighted on the lead management process front, and we can do one way syncs or bidirectional syncs. So the example that I gave was Salesforce and HubSpot. If you want all changes reflected in HubSpot, also shown in Salesforce for a given lead record and then vice versa, you're able to do that, very easily in our platform, and it's a very common use case that we see. K. A question on how to get into contact with us. So, I think it's best and, again, this depends how far along you are in the evaluation process, but it's generally best to get in touch with our sales team, and they can provide you with a pretty custom demo or coordinate your use case. Or at the very least, you can talk through your use case with a sales engineer and really start to understand the value of Seligo in the context of your own tech stack and what you're trying to accomplish. Alright. Does anyone have any other questions? We'll give it another minute or 2 for something else to come in. Okay. One more on our most commonly used connectors. I I would have to say that just given that we started the NetSuite ecosystem, NetSuite is up there, and then Salesforce is very common as well. That being said, we've expanded into a library of 100 of different connectors, and we're now seeing use cases like you've seen today across sales, marketing, customer success, really the whole gamut. So those are probably our most common, but we see connectors and application integrations across every line of business at this point, and it's really interesting and exciting to see. Alright. Well, I think we finished up on all the questions. Thanks again, everyone, for taking the time, and I hope you found this enjoyable. If you want to follow-up with me directly, chris.ferrarotsiligo.com. If you want to get in touch with our sales team, you can request a follow-up here or visit our website, and you can, request a a demo there. Thanks again. And, yeah, please do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or follow ups from the session.