Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  0:18

Happy Wednesday everybody. I am Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson, a digital strategist with BWG Connect and we are in networking knowledge sharing group, we stay on top of latest trends challenges whatever shaping the digital landscape, we want to know and talk about it. We are on track to do at least 500 of these virtual events this year, due to the increase in demand to better understand the digital space. And we will be doing at least 100 in-person small format dinners. So if you happen to live in a tier one city in the US, feel free to send us an email, we'd love to send you an invite these dinners are typically 15 to 20 people having a discussion on a certain digital topic. And it's always a fantastic time, we spend the majority of our time talking to brands, that's how we stay on top of the latest trends. We'd love to have a conversation with you, you can drop me a line at tippity tiffany@bwgconnect.com. And we can get some time on the calendar. It's from these conversations we generate the topic ideas we know people want to learn about and it's also where we gain our resident experts such as chargebee, who's with us today, anybody that we asked to teach the collective community has come highly recommended for multiple brands within the network. So if you're ever in need of any recommendations within the digital space, please don't hesitate to reach out we have a shortlist of the best of the best and we'd love to provide that information to you. Also note that we do partner with a talent agency Hawkeye Search formally BWG talent that we can put you in contact with as well. A few housekeeping items. We want this to be first and foremost been educational, conversational. Jeff has many questions, comments you have into the chat the q&a, where you can email me at Tiffany@bwgconnect.com. We will get to them. And we'll be moving pretty fast. This is a 30 minute session. So we'll formally wrap up at the 30 minute mark. So with that, let's rock and roll and start to talk about elevating your finance strategy and selecting the right platform for growth. The team at Chargebee have been awesome friends and partners in the network. So I'm gonna kick it over to our panelists. If you can give a brief introduction on yourself. That would be so lovely. And then we get indicted. Thank you.

Matthew St Pierre  2:09

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks very much, Tiffany. Joey, let you kind of kick things off.

Joey Quirk  2:15

Cool. Good to see everybody here. My name is Joey Quirk. I'm a Senior Solutions Consultant Sales Engineer for Chargebee have about a decade of experience in like it SAS digital transformation, all those types of things. Really looking forward to sharing with everyone today.

Matthew St Pierre  2:30

Over to you, Matt. Yeah, absolutely. My name is Matt St Pierre, I am currently part of our solutions marketing effort, formerly part of our solutions consultation team. So very, as a very recently, one of Joey's colleagues here. My background has been in accounting compliance software. For the past about four and a half years, I've had the pleasure of taking roughly 150 companies through various compliance projects, very standards, various systems. So excited to be here with you guys today. And excited to talk about finance. So what we are looking to kind of accomplish through this webinar is first and foremost, defining the sales process defining either a quote to cash or some other sales process that you might utilize, take a look at some hurdles to the sales process, and really the efficiency of that the efficiency of execution. And then finally, some of the best practices as you start to evaluate systems to help remove or mitigate some of those roadblocks. So that being said, what we're looking at here is a quick snapshot of kind of the quote to cash process, right. What it doesn't really show, however, is the other stakeholders who are either directly involved in this process, the other systems that are directly involved, or as a result of this process, require feedback from it. Whether that be your finance team on the back end, or whether it be the front end, what are your marketing efforts look like? Right, so an efficient quote to cash is driving not just your sales process and generating new revenue. But it's also driving a ton of other operational and strategic initiatives within your organization. And something that

Joey Quirk  4:13

we'll get to with all of this, as you'll see later on in the presentation is there's just when you're talking about stakeholders, it's very important to know who needs to touch what and when, during this process, and it goes well beyond just your sales team. And what we'll start to cover is a little bit more about how you can empower your tech stack to make these things drastically more efficient.

Matthew St Pierre  4:36

Yeah, absolutely. So when we think about the importance of efficiency, there's kind of two main areas that we want to touch on. The first is scalable financial operations. How do we do what we're doing today? But how do we do it better? How do we do it in a sustainable, repeatable fashion? And then from there, how do we start to build trends and execute upon those trends? Right, so we're looking to essentially improve the process to make better, more informed business decisions based upon the results of that process.

Joey Quirk  5:07

And along with that, once you're able to do some of those things, it's going to bring you a level of freedom and flexibility where you'll be able to investigate new opportunities. And that can be anything from looking at the lifetime performance of different pricing models in an attempt to acquire new business and empower your marketing team, or even something as granular as a B testing some churn deflection strategies just to see what will help you maintain your book of business. And what's really important with this is, while your subscribers are obviously people that you'll want to think about, and they're going to love, having a great user experience making everything as seamless as possible from their end. From an internal perspective, it's also worth considering how efficient this process and how how nice it is to use from, from like a go to market speed or how quickly you can get some new pricing unlock for your internal stakeholders.

Matthew St Pierre  5:57

Yeah, absolutely. When we consider the requirements that we're seeing from the market today, we have kind of once again, divided these up into two main categories, how to improve our current process, or how to create as sustainable scalable financial process. And then to Joey's point, how do we unlock new opportunities through software? Right? So on the left hand side, this could be anything from how your financial back House office is conducting their financial reporting, the time it takes to generate accurate, reliable results. It could be something as we call it simple, but you know, as invoice automation, right? We have so many new customers that we're having a hard time managing the actual generation and sending of invoices for our recurring revenue streams for subscription businesses. Maybe there's a big issue with churn. If you don't have the data points for why folks are churning, how can you build flows out to mitigate that churn. And so data is really driving a lot of these different processes, and ensuring that not only to Julie's point, all of your internal stakeholders have access to that data. But it's done in a consistent, concise manner, is going to be really critical to being able to then use that as a springboard to make changes or to

Joey Quirk  7:17

grow. Yeah, no, all the new opportunity that can come from that is not just limited to the things that are listed here. But you can think about it from all other aspects of the business. And it's really useful as a as a thought exercise for where you want the company to be in the future, not just how you're doing things now, or how you can enable yourself to continue doing the same things that you are.

Matthew St Pierre  7:40

Yeah, no, that's what I was gonna kind of add on. It's not so much how we're doing things today. You know, the that old saying, if it's not broke, don't break it. Right. I often see that as potentially an impetus to improvement, right? Just because you've done some something one way for quite a long time doesn't mean it's the best way or even doesn't mean that it's the right way for you guys currently. So as we go into some of those challenges, a couple of quick key statistics regarding some of these roadblocks to success and more importantly, to efficiency

Joey Quirk  8:19

is I think, the one from HubSpot on 29% of sales leaders think they have efficiency issues or like to improve that I've reasonably that's probably 129%, or if you if you pull all leaders across any different aspects of the business, they're going to cite some level of efficiency issue.

Matthew St Pierre  8:41

Yeah, absolutely. And then when we take a look at the 17.3%, of financial statements, coming from Bloomberg, seen as as the number one cause of her statements, the way that folks are accounting for their revenue, that is pretty significant. Right? If your back house, your finance, your CFO, your C suite, whatever it is, doesn't have the capability to go ahead and get reliable data, it is going to cause a extremely painful, costly restatement. Right, so having something that does this right the first time, it's going to mitigate a lot of headache for your back office bugs,

Joey Quirk  9:19

when something else to consider about just the cost of these things is the the human cost of it. So the really good, really good Harvard Business Review study that they did that determines I mean, this is specific to sales, but 9% of a sales reps. Work year is spent just changing between applications, and filling out things in certain areas. And if you break that down to like the expected amount of time that you put in in a year, that's 180 hours, which is nearly five weeks, a year that the sales rep is just going back and forth or kind of changing their frame of mind. put something in a different place or even looking for that information. Just imagine that outside of their salary, what what that time cost, but how much more they could be doing in terms of direct selling, if they get that time back and don't have to spend it context switching between internal applications,

Matthew St Pierre  10:18

right, especially in the sales world where time surely is money, how many missed opportunities or had because simply toggling between the CRM to the quoting engine to the contract delivery system, whatever those systems might be, if they're disaggregated, that's a ton of time that could be spent capturing your next huge lead. So to break these down into a little bit more detailed fashion, the first one that we wanted to highlight was really on data silos.

Joey Quirk  10:49

And that's, this is a very important one, because you really want to eliminate any single points of failure, if you can, I mean, inevitably, those will always exist. But it's good to understand where they are, and how you can help mitigate those. So things worth considering are, are there application based data silos, which just literally the data is in the wrong system? Or is there some sort of Data Silo in terms of like tribal knowledge and a single senior individual that that knows all of the process inside and out? But what happens if that person isn't there? To answer it? How much time? Is it going to take you to recover that level of knowledge? Or is it even possible? So thinking about those in terms of black holes, you just want to eliminate as many of those as possible and make sure that that data is available, which can really help streamline any process that you have?

Matthew St Pierre  11:45

Yeah, and the way I kind of see it is there's either one huge Data Silo, in terms of that single point of failure that Joey was talking about are many smaller data silos, those black holes where everyone's kind of doing their own thing. They're using different products. They're using different systems, they're using different processes, where there's no alignment. And so it makes it very difficult to get a clear, concise view of your data, if everyone's doing something a different way. Right, which kind of leads me into the next topic around process. These are the types of questions that as we start to think about what sort of problems we face, we want to be able to answer, how do we execute tasks? What do I need to be able to perform my daily functions? If my CFO comes to me and says, Hey, Matt, I want to see the revenue numbers for last month. Who do I need to go to if I don't have the access to our CRM or our our contract repository? Right? What is the effort once I get that access, or get that raw output, to then transform that into a cogent presentation that I can provide the CFO, who else needs to be involved once I have generated that data set, to approve it, to review it, to change it if they need to do we have a collaborative type of environment that we can go ahead and do that? You know, just the other day I was on with someone who described the process to do something very similar, where they had to reach out to their Salesforce admin, have them generate a report for them, send that report via email, download it, start manipulating it in Excel, upload it back to a data warehouse, for someone finally, to review it. Even before the CFO has ever had a chance to review that data, right. So we've now just created three or four or five sources of failure within a seemingly simple request. And all the accountants and finance folks are like when we talk about revenue, that's never a simple request. But the point stands, dual, our team members have what they need to operate autonomously, within our infrastructure. Well, that's, that's a very important

Joey Quirk  13:55

one too, because good luck wrangling sales folks, or getting them to all operate in the same manner, even if you do have the most efficient tech stack in the world. But that's a topic for another day, I do want to cover a bit of about tech stack here. And something that we'll get into a minute as if you're doing any sort of evaluation, what we're going to cover here are some really good points to consider when you're doing that evaluation. So the first question is, are your systems integrated? And it really follow on to that exactly? How integrated are they? Is it something where it's fully automated? Or is it now somebody's full time job to export data to a flat file massaged a little bit, put it into the other system? And then that leads, it's just a snowball effect of issues there. But just in in considering the data in general, is it accurate? Is it complete? Is it timely? And for the people who are using it internally? Is it easy for them to use? Is it easy for them to get the data into the right system? Do the right stakeholders have access to that data in the system that they're used to using so thinking about it from I guess quote to cash scenario, can the sales rep build something in Salesforce? Can it flow effectively directly into a billing system that's going to handle all of that? And then once the invoicing is done, can that flow directly into your ERP to make sure that accounting folks have all that visibility to the last one to call out is if you're doing any sort of reporting. In an ideal scenario, if you ran the same report from the data in any of those systems, it should be consistent.

Matthew St Pierre  15:29

Or even just a singular record. Right? If you're looking at one contract, does it say the same thing in between your different systems? Are the dates the same, or the amounts the same? Or the products that you know your customer may have purchased? Are they aligned? Any one of those items being out of sync is going to now create another manual, time intensive, and potentially costly when we start talking about the financial reporting impacts? Process to fix it? Right. So that being said, let's talk about selecting a system. Did you want to do a poll? Yeah, if we have some time, we certainly can.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  16:06

At least, we have some time. And I have one ready to roll. I think it'd be interesting going back to that. The roadblocks to success, so I'm gonna pull it up here. Yeah, should here. So the question is, which of these roadblocks have the biggest impact on your org today? So like, we talked about data silos, internal process, tech stack inefficiencies, or other? It is other? If you could put what that is, that'd be awesome. And I'm going to launch it now. We'll give about 30 seconds for everybody to input. Thank you. Yeah, you guys talking about? Internal buy in that way, say like, when you're doing cultural change and new systems, it's like, I'd never sold harder in my life than it did to get internal buy in on change. That that's no joke. It's, it takes a lot to get those silos broken down.

Matthew St Pierre  16:59

You can be evaluating the best system that and we'll talk about this more in a minute. But you can be evaluating the best system that solves every single one of your problems. And if folks don't want to use it, you will have the hardest time adopting it. Right.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  17:16

All right, I think we get everybody inputted thank you for participating. I am going to share the results. So we can see basically that Okay, so 57% data silos 29% internal process 14% tech stack inefficiencies.

Joey Quirk  17:35

That's something interesting to consider here is how much are each one of those contributing to the others as well. So I know you had to select one, but it could be one as a result of all three.

Matthew St Pierre  17:48

Yeah, and what I'd be interested to hear a bit more about is whether those data silos or technology originated, or whether you have, we'll call it the guru within your organization who kind of holds all of your your data and knowledge. And that person leaving or being gone creates that single point of failure. Mm hmm.

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  18:10

I love that, too. Very interesting. Thank you. Oh,

Matthew St Pierre  18:14

but yeah, definitely appreciate the feedback there. As we move forward, the next section that we're going to touch on is selecting the right system, what that process might look like and how we've kind of divided this into two main phases. What needs to occur before you start your evaluation in terms of project planning, as well as things to consider when you're going through the actual evaluation, when you're looking at systems evaluating. So in terms of when you're talking about project planning, the first thing I would say is have a plan. There's a lot of times we'll sit down with folks and have conversations, and they have no idea what problems they're trying to solve. They don't know who else needs to be in on the conversation. They're just starting to dip their toes into the whole evaluation and jumping straight into the deep end with a 10 pound you know, lead weight. So having a plan of attack, when you kind of start this process is going to be huge in terms of the amount of success you're able to derive from it. In terms of the

Joey Quirk  19:24

I mean, the rest of project planning, it's definitely important to understand what stakeholders are going to be impacted as well. And just calling back to something from one of the previous slides is or something that Matt said is if you're if you're not going to get internal buy in then it's it's just going to be a costly process all over the place. But making sure that you have those people aligned and onboard in some way is very important to the project planning phase. And with that, I'll kind of

Matthew St Pierre  19:51

add a caveat. While it is definitely important to have internal buy in you don't want to have so much that you start to get scope creep where where everyone is jumping on your boat to get a new piece of software, a new piece of your infrastructure. And the original problem you set out to solve has now been compounded by finance, wanting a piece, legal wanting a piece operations, wanting a piece delivery, wanting a piece professional service. So it's important to set those expectations before you go in so that at the 11th hour when you're finally about to see all of your dreams realized something from an external influence is going to put that project potentially on hold in perpetuity. Well,

Joey Quirk  20:38

that's that's why it's so so important to really understand what you're facing internally before you even go out and start seeking vendors. Otherwise, you might end up running through the same evaluation several times over and over either from not being able to arrive at a decision, or maybe implementing something that doesn't get that buy in and ends up failing. But that's what's really, really important before you get into understanding what systems are actually out there to solve your problems is understanding what your problems actually are. And from there, then you have a decision to make because there's their vendors out here to do anything you could ever imagine. But do you want someone that's going to be the best in breed at one very specific problem and understand that that may end up causing some other issues as you integrate with other other applications internally? Or do you want to maybe look at a jack of all trades, but potentially Master of None solution that's going to be able to touch every part of the business, but may require you to do some internal process change in order to in order to accommodate that?

Matthew St Pierre  21:44

Yeah, absolutely. And then the last thing I'd mentioned, there is kind of back with project planning, set your go live date before you enter, and try to stick to that. And I know, Joey's going to say something to the effect of once you have that end date, add 50% of the time on to it. And it's not just an end date of when we want the selection, it's an end date of when we want that system lot. Given that there might be a six week, eight week, two month three month implementation process, depending on the type of system you're evaluating. Right, General Ledger implementations, for instance, can take a year, at sometimes minimum. So having that as a guide, and working your way back off of that is going to keep you on track, I would say from from that evaluation standpoint, there's so much

Joey Quirk  22:39

important stuff there. Just from even thinking about a data migration thing, whatever, whatever estimate you get, I would always just in the back of my head, add 50% of whatever that time is just to make sure you're meeting timelines, and even like that comes into play if you're having to offload from another vendor as well.

Matthew St Pierre  22:58

Absolutely. And as we are running short on time, now, we're going to just jump into best practices, things that we've seen work well, for a lot of our evaluations, this and considerations, first one being a single source of truth. So kind of what Joey was alluding to, with some sort of hybrid between a jack of all trades, master of none, as well as the best and predict Best In Breed approach. You want one system that can either support the rest of your tech stack, or be that single point of truth, where all your data lives, and is that source of record. And you have talking Go ahead.

Joey Quirk  23:39

Yeah, sorry that we're talking about texts, it's always always best to ensure that integration is as seamless as possible, because a lot of times if that integration is manual, is it really an integration? Or is it another point of failure and broken process?

Matthew St Pierre  23:54

Yeah. And it's also important to decide what the single source of truth is. You may already have your single source of truth, and you're looking for a supplemental system that will help that. Well, to Joey's point, if it's not going to integrate well with that, quote, unquote, source of record. Is it really worth the time to invest their longevity of partnership? So something that we've seen quite a bit is folks looking for immediate relief? Right, putting a BandAid on a huge pain point or taking some Tylenol as opposed to what is going to work for me today? What is going to work for me tomorrow and what is going to work for me in three years? Right, a lot of your SAS contracts are generally multi year in length by default outside of some cases, and you want to look at not only the functionality, but also the community that you'd be joining. Right. Is there a well structured support network? Is there positive feedback? Do folks utilize this for what we want to do? In the future, whether it be a growth opportunity and new market, whatever it is.

Joey Quirk  25:05

And in talking about use and that the longevity of that partnership, it's also important to consider the user experience. So we've we've said it a couple times, definitely about having your, your internal folks using it. But if there's any sort of it that is customer facing, you also want to consider that as well. Something we see very frequently is, you know, coming from the perspective of billing, if it takes any one of your customers more than five clicks or anything on their cell phone to be able to get in and change their card information, they're probably just going to give up the service. Because it's such a difficult thing to do. Where that's a very, very important thing to consider is like how easy it is for your own employees to use, but how easy it is for your customers to use.

Matthew St Pierre  25:49

Yeah, that's a great point that I don't think we've touched on too much as what is the customer facing implications of the new system. And then finally, I know this is a little bit counter to what I previously mentioned, regarding scope creep. But always consider additional value propositions, right, maybe you don't want to completely loop in your legal team, but there are areas that they can derive value from this, maybe your BDR is now having an easier time entering new opportunity data as a result of a new system. Where can we derive additional value that makes other folks within your organization happy, or solves a potential pain point for them? And I think we are right at time. You guys are right at that time. Look at that. That's awesome. So I just wanted to say thank you all so much for joining us. If there are any further questions, please either feel free, as Tiffany said, to reach out email, leverage this neat little QR code here to get some more information regarding the Chargebee product. And thank you. Awesome. Thank

Tiffany Serbus-Gustaveson  26:58

you guys so much. For the Intel you always bring fantastic information to these webinars. If anybody has any last minute questions, feel free to pop them in the chat we can get to him. Otherwise, we do encourage follow up conversation with the Chargebee team. And we also want to let everybody know if you're going to be in the Manhattan MidTown area 1212. So December 12, there's gonna be a BWG full day event. It's in Chargebee will be one of the guest speakers. We'll have a panel and it should be an awesome day of build a lot of great content, awesome speakers, happy hour afterwards. So definitely check that out on our website. bwgconnect.com, if you would like to register for that it is complimentary for people within the community. So with that, I think we are good. I don't have any thing in the chat. Matt. Joey. Pleasure. Take care. Have a lovely Wednesday, everybody. Thank you for joining and we will see you on the next event. Thanks, guys. Thanks.

Joey Quirk  27:55

Thanks Tiffany and BWG.