Tech Sales Insights LIVE featuring Scott Harvey, Sprinklr

Hey Randy, doing great. Really appreciate your time.

Absolutely. And talent is the lifeblood, man. Talent is the lifeblood.

Yep, right. Just north of the big Microsoft.

Yep, Roll Tide. It's a phenomenal experience.

Happy to be here, really excited.

Love that. French fries, if I'm gonna die, french fries is the top of my list.

Oh, there you go. All right, I'll take the tacos too.

What's that?

Awesome. Right, well I do golf, but I'm very passionate about skiing, so I'd be happy to get an invite on that one.

All right.

Yeah, he's phenomenal. Builds a good team, very motivating, super genuine guy.

Yeah, a couple of the goats of the industry there in Schneider and Clayville. Clayville obviously long tenure between IBM and BEA, VMware, and then leading the wave at AWS for seven years, going from 2 to 54 billion. Probably be great on the podcast at some time. And then Schneider obviously, Data Domain and ServiceNow and now what he's doing at Cato, establishing so many different great young startup companies and then really helping coach them on the go-to-market side, which I think a lot of startups need. You see that with your startups too, that sales is kind of an afterthought sometimes.

So getting to success early is really important in those startups, and getting the go-to-market right from the beginning and knowing how to pivot through the different waves of growth are really important. And Dave's like one of the masters at that.

Yeah, I was going to be the next Vin Scully. Baseball player in high school and college, loved talking about the game. Really wanted to take that career path, but as you know, most people don't follow the path of what their degree is in and they get into something different. So out of school, I jumped right into sales.

Yeah, a grocery wholesaler. Traveling around and pedaling candies and cigarettes and goods, and really trying to drive order volume. There were spiffs that we were running every week, every month, and you really start learning about customer relationships and what they're trying to do and how to help them grow their business. And it's a tight margin business.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. So back in those mid-90s, if you looked at the newspaper for finding a job, running around being a sales rep, I was like, hey, where is this going for me? You look at the newspaper on Sunday and it's like half of it is healthcare and half is technology. So it was like, all right, I don't like the sight of blood, I got to get into technology. And at the time, Microsoft was really looking for warm bodies. They had just launched Windows 95 and they were hiring tons of support people. So I had a friend over there who was the manager of a support team who said, hey, you should come over here. Tech is where everything's growing now with the internet. So I jumped in and started doing support at Microsoft.

Yeah. So got a ton of certifications. Software startups were booming in the late 90s. Got into the consulting side and really implementation, setting up networks for banks and modernizing them from SCO Unix to Windows. And then from there got into the sales side, thanks to great recruiters like your company, and in a startup doing pre-sales and then leading pre-sales. Then jumped into VMware in the early days, 2001, 100 people, selling the workstation product over the internet, no sales team at the time. From there, participated at VMware for 13 years, got great mentorship from Carl Lenbach and team when he came in and just started building the career from there.

Yep. ServiceNow, great run. Learned so much at VMware going from 20 million to 5.5 billion with Carl, Clay, Valente, a few other guys, Jeff Cali, Rich, JFO, could name a million of them from that group. Brandon Sweeney was key there as well. And got the opportunity to do it all over again with Dave Schneider and Kevin Hy and Mike Sheehy and team at ServiceNow. They were about 400 million when I got there, we grew it to over 5 billion. We built a path to 10 billion. Really exciting to see them land on that path. The path we built, they landed on. Last year was phenomenal to see the success they're having during the pandemic. Went over to Stripe, payments company, top disruptor for multiple years, really looking to build out the financial infrastructure of the future for all sizes of customers. They grew tremendously during the pandemic, phenomenal growth. They got a great strategy around winning every startup, building a moat for developers, and a lot of product-led growth. And then Kevin Hy's on the board of Sprinklr and said, hey, Sprinklr could probably use your help. So I came over here and took a look. Sprinklr has a phenomenal AI-driven customer experience platform. The compelling value is they unify all the channels, from social to mass media to digital channels to voice. They have unification of all of them, so it's truly an engagement layer to engage with your customers and get bidirectional. And the platform is such a great platform that it's an orchestrated system of action. You can market, sell, and service to any customer through the platform, meet them in any channel that they're at with personalized engagement, personalized marketing, personalized ads, convert that to sales. You can actually do prospecting through any channel in very personalized prospecting and convert it to revenue. We've got customers doing innovative things there. So great platform. I think it's one of the hidden gems in tech that many people don't know about, and I expect us to have some high growth over the next four or five years.

So right now, we're about 750 million revenue, about 2,000 customers. Publicly announced we have over 150 million customers. We have a strong following in the Fortune 100, about 81 of the Fortune 100 brands are our customers. And Global 2000 is really our sweet spot, so we're looking to grow our Global 2000 base and really focus there. We do have commercial mid-market customers, but I think our big focus is in the enterprise.

So historically, when they were really just focused on social media, they were kind of at the director level looking at business problems. With the platform expanding, we're really looking to sell at the C-level: CMO, CDO, CIO, CCO, and CRO.

Yeah. So the great thing about where we are today, it's a pivot in a growth that we did at VMware and it's a pivot and growth we did at ServiceNow. Everyone starts really at that manager/director level looking for business challenges within departments, single use case, try to land in that department, try to get a new use case in that department, or you go try to go to another department with the same use case, and then you try to work up the chain and do an enterprise agreement at the C-level. At VMware, we were really focused around CIO, CTO, and VP of Dev, VP of Technology, and then we expanded from there when we really got into strategic software-defined data center. At ServiceNow, we were IT service management director or manager at first, and then we really scaled up to CIO and making our homies, our friends and our champions. And then we expanded: we went to CHRO, even CFO. There's one customer where when we started looking at the system, we saw that they were doing more workflow through finance than they were through IT. When we brought that to the attention of the CFO, he got really excited about what he could do with the platform. So at ServiceNow, we pivoted, we got up to the CIO, the COO, the CTO, and then we pivoted to the chief product officer, the chief digital officer, and then of course the COO, CCO, CHRO, and CFO. Really a C-suite sale, and that's where they're at today. And even at Stripe, same thing. When I got there, they were in the director of finance, VP of payments, and we pivoted and we got into the chief product officer: how do you embed payment into your commerce platform, into your strategy? How do you embed the financial services they offer into the strategy? So we got to CFO, CTO, CIO, CPO there. And now at Sprinklr, it's really the same model: if you focus on the outcomes, talk about outcome selling, it's at the C-level that you need to be.

Absolutely. So I think the things that I focus on are one, what's the relevant conversation today in the present in the C-suite? Which means you have to know the customer's priorities and their key initiatives. So if you know their strategic priorities and their key initiatives, you can start to understand the outcomes they're trying to drive for their business, and then you can map your capabilities to those outcomes. It is a consultative selling approach. As you know, value is very personal, and then there's also value that's very measurable. The first thing you got to do is hit the personal value with the customer. So if you're with a CIO who is tasked with, give an example from Stripe, getting Apple Pay into their mobile application, and their metrics and their bonuses are tied to that by the end of the year, personal value and how we build a plan with them to go do that and achieve that for them and for their company. So personal value is important to find, and then the overall measurable value, because as you know, we are competing with every other vendor for the customer's budget, the customer's time, the customer's resources. So if we can tie to their key priorities and initiatives that are at the C-level, then we can build a value mountain, for a better term, to say, hey, this should be our top priority initiative. So we're all competing for budget, we've got to get that initiative as high as we can.

Right. I'll give you a couple examples. You know, I see the ghost just open your door. That's pretty good, that's for America's Got Talent if your dog can go up and open the door and come in. Exactly. But let me give you a couple examples. So if you're a major airline and you have an on-prem call center and you want to move it to the cloud, Sprinklr is a great platform for that because again, as a customer experience platform, we provide customer service and call center as a service, all the way through to the social media marketing and advertising piece. So there, we would work with a COO, VP of Customer Service, and really their call center leadership and help them drive that outcome. Another one could be, hey, I want to increase my membership program 3x. So how do you attract and acquire more members to your membership program, whether you're a large big box retailer or an airline or something else? And we can help them do that through personalized engagement through social channels and direct channels and the marketing and advertising you can do through the Sprinklr platform, as well as the sales development work you can do. If you're a retailer who wants to move your business to 50% direct-to-consumer, or a manufacturer wants to go direct-to-consumer and wants to open new markets, we're a great platform for that. How do we help you go open new markets? We have one customer right now who's going into 22 new countries with their products and goods. In a lot of those countries, they don't know the brand, the native language of the company is not the same as the country, and they don't have presence there. But we can help them because they can go in and build their brand through social media, marketing, advertising, engagement, listen in that country for how their brand is being received, how the messaging is being received, and they can tune it and fine-tune it so they can get higher conversion rates within that country. And then of course, they can focus on certain demographics of audiences so they can attract certain audiences and use the channels where those audiences are that are best purpose-fit for what they're selling. We have financial services companies coming to us all day long now because of an integration with Reddit and how there's so much influence in financial services learning how to do stock trading, learning about wealth management on Reddit, that the financial services companies want to engage with those people who are really interested. They're looking to really one, pivot their brand so they can attract new high net worth earners, and two, bring them into their offerings and their capabilities. So they know they need to provide hyper-personalized insights and information, not just generic retirement and wealth management information. Our platform gives them the capabilities to listen to the customer, synthesize, really understand what the customer's looking for, and then take action on it and engage in a personalized way.

Yeah, yeah. So Spotlight is a great tool to really drive our value selling calculation and metrics and build great business cases with customers so that they can justify the spend and really align on the return on the outcome that they're looking for that ties right back to their overall priorities.

Yeah, absolutely. I think what we've seen the last four years is we've gotten away from some of the core things that are really important in selling, and one of those is relationship management and building relationships. So getting face to face. The other thing is talking to each other. Text and email and LinkedIn connects are great for certain things, but not to build the real relationship. Inbound was coming in pretty fast in 2021 for all companies because there was cash and everyone was trying to connect through text and digital because we were quarantined. Now, prospecting is really important. Outbound is so important right now. And the funny thing is, I think you get a better connection giving someone a call on the phone and chatting to them there than you do through email. Email bounces all the time, it's kind of a big pain. So going back to some old school lead gen capabilities are really starting to work.

Yeah, and I kind of teed up a little bit of it before. To me, the best thing to do is know so much about your software and capabilities, your ideal customer profile, and your product-market fit that you don't have to think about it and that you can just totally turn and focus on the customer. If you can really understand the customer's priorities, their key initiatives, the outcomes they're trying to drive, help define those outcomes with them, and consult to the customer and map your capabilities in, you can drive so much more value and you can drive a faster sales cycle. You become a strategic consultative partner versus a vendor to the customer. I was with a CIO recently of a big consumer products company, and he quite frankly took the meeting being gracious. He's like, hey, I got 512 vendors, you're one of 512, and I have to do app consolidation and rationalization, so we're really looking to you as a toolset that we could get rid of. You're a commodity. And I said, great, I understand that. Let's talk more about what your strategic priorities are, what you're trying to do. And learning what he's trying to do around revenue growth, delighting customers with new self-service capabilities, and then obviously getting back to the tool rationalization, he's got to cut cost and drive efficiencies within his team. Having his team support 512 different apps doesn't work real well. So obviously all the big players, the Salesforces, the ServiceNows, the Adobes, the Microsofts, and SAPs, they're coming in with the platform: buy us and we can do everything for you. So for him, I talked about how Sprinklr is that workflow for the front office that can connect his Adobe marketing stack with his Salesforce commerce and sales stack and service stack as an end-to-end front office for engagement and action for his customers. And he's like, wow, I didn't know you guys could do that. He goes, I really should be looking at you as one of my top 10 platforms versus one of 512 vendors. And when he realized that hey, we can consolidate his tech stack, his service stack, and a sales stack for him, and he could have three platforms that he operates from, and that we're so interchangeable that he could swap out his commerce platform if he wants to do a Shopify or whoever else, he started seeing us as a strategic consultant. And now you're really starting to talk about the outcomes. So what are you trying to do with a GenAI chatbot? How are you trying to deliver better experience? Are you looking to have more folks land on the website and convert to sales? So if you want to increase your sales conversion by 30%, you want to increase your support deflection by 50%, those are outcomes. Those are outcomes we can go work with you on. You want to reduce your cost by 25% of all your IT tools? So now we start working on those outcomes with them as a strategic partner. And then just being honest with them, hey, we can't help you here, we don't have the capabilities to help you here. I always try to recommend other software partners or vendors who do have best-in-class there for them and that we work with so that we can still provide a solution even where we're not right for that capability. And I think helping them achieve their outcomes in that capacity provides you rewards for your lifetime value with your customer.

Yeah. So there is a lot of sales enablement and training that has to go on here. We really focus with our teams on a strategy deck, building a point of view of the customer. So really teaching them to read the 10-Ks, get the news releases, really walk the halls and understand from the directors and VPs what the business challenges are, what the company priorities are. I love walking the halls of the customer and reading the values and then aligning to their values. I get so much intelligence as we walk into a customer meeting and I'm walking through the reception and understanding from the person at the reception what the culture is like, how they are, and seeing all of the information on the walls, reading through it, seeing how people are engaging with each other, and then really speaking the customer language in the meeting. So teaching the team to be able to speak the customer language is important, and a willingness to be wrong, be vulnerable. It's okay if you ask a dumb question or you say something, because the more the customer educates you on their business, the closer your bonding to that customer and the better engagement and outcome you can have for both of you.

Yeah, no, it's a great call out. The last four years, there was a lot of promotion to retain, but without a lot of great coaching, enablement, and development of sales leaders. And then there was a lot of bringing in new people with very little experience, and it takes time to ramp them up. So we've been working across theaters and regions to really help train up the teams. I think one of the biggest challenges that everyone has right now is a resistance to change. Folks need to understand why they need to change or why this is better for them. So really highlighting the team members that are having great success and are overachieving. I'm really excited, you know this in sales, we always want to have a sales rep hit seven figures for the year. If you can get a couple of them to do that, that's even better. I'm excited right now with us that we have that where we're at, and we can even drive more of that. So if you can highlight the ones who are doing the great things and winning and have them be part of that training, that's really important. And then you want to show them the path. So the consistent rigor, and as you know, you got to expect and inspect what you expect, otherwise it falls apart. Whatever sales methodology you do, MEDDIC, Force Management, Value Selling, SPIN, Top Selling, all of these, no matter what you do, if you don't have it ingrained in your DNA and your daily operations, there's not a lot of value out of it. So for us, building out the strategy decks, the account plans, the territory plans, and then building that into our weekly, quarterly, monthly, and annual process is really important. And laying out with, hey, here are the relevant conversations today in the marketplace and the tailwinds in the business that you can leverage for those conversations, which will then bring out that point of view and allow you to map the capabilities back. There's a standard capability mapping to outcomes. Most industries and customers have very similar outcomes they're trying to achieve. You're either trying to make money, save money, retain customers, grow market share, stay out of jail. So you got five things you're trying to do. It's a matter of mapping to those and how you can do it.

Yeah. You mentioned a few of those folks how they said Scott was a great technology leader. At VMware in my early days, I was not in sales. I started as the alliance manager for Microsoft, and then Microsoft bought a competitor, so then I became a team of competitive marketing of one, tech marketing. And Raghu Raghuram, who was the last CEO of VMware, was my boss. We had a product marketing team of three of us at the time. So I was training the sales team on the products, and Carl Lenbach just started as our director of sales for North America, that's how small the company was. And he said after I was training his team of five, he's like, wow, we got to get you into sales. So I jumped into the go-to-market side and grew from that. Carl was a great mentor and an example of an inspiring leader. Leading with positivity, inspiring others to do their best work, that's something that I really took away from Carl. Love to operate from that, and just his authenticity and how genuine he was, even with customers. It's amazing the things that customers would do without Carl having to ask them to do them. They would do them because they wanted to have him as the person that they were counting on in the end. If something went wrong, they wanted to know they had someone of his qualities to go to. And then another one is Mike Clayville. Very engaging personality. He's the guy you want to go have a beer with and hang out with and really learn from. He brings energy into the room that excites everyone in the room and makes everyone in the room feel special. So another unique superhero quality. Going on sales calls with Mike Clayville is like cocaine, it's addicting, it's exciting.

He has his cowboy hat. It's a caffeine high. Customers love it. We were actually on a call with Mark Cuban to talk about crypto and whatnot, and Mark sees the cowboy hat and just gets all excited. So great, just a really great engagement, breaks the ice, really gets you to be able to lean in and talk to the customer about what they value. He just brings an amazing energy with him. So tells me, hey, you got to bring the energy every day. The motor's got to run if you're going to be great in sales. And then obviously Dave Schneider and Kevin Hy, two very different folks. Not just because Dave's a big guy and Kevin's a smaller guy, but Kevin is a very high EQ. If you want a poker player, Kevin would be a phenomenal poker player because he is just so even-keeled, and then he'll just say something that makes everyone think and think differently than maybe they were thinking at the time. So really teaches you, I take away from Kevin, seek to understand, seek to partner with the other folks, and don't sweat the small stuff. That even keel that he keeps, that calmness, because if you keep that calmness, you can be really good at everything you're doing. And then Dave, another inspiring leader. He wears his emotions on his chest and he cares so much that he expresses the care. That to me is really important, making sure people know you're human and you feel for them. That's a great inspiring thing about Dave, you always knew he cared about you. He can be grumpy Dave when he needs to be and put some heat on the team, but they also know that he really cares and is going to bat for me, he's got my back all day long. But he's gonna hold me accountable. So that's another great thing, you call that the firm but fair mentality. So those are four tremendous sales leaders that I've been lucky and privileged to experience, and they're all business leaders. They've all grown to be great business leaders. So those are four that I take away key things from, and across the four, they all have very high integrity.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Because we built value selling at VMware, and then we built it at ServiceNow, and Stripe didn't have it at the time, we built it there, and Sprinklr had it when I got here and we're continuing to fine-tune it. A while back, several of us got in a room at ServiceNow and we built kind of what we called the value lifecycle. It's envision value, which is the sales cycle, really get vision and strategy alignment with the customer, envision value together, and that creates the momentum for the deal. Time kills all deals, buying is emotional, you got to get them the momentum and excitement there. You get that emotion and envisioning that value together, you can close a deal. Then the implementation is really about creating value. It's really important that the implementation is outcome-based and you're delivering the outcome the customer wants. That's where you create the value. And then day two, once they go live, it's all about realizing value. You got to make sure they're realizing value and that they continue to realize value through the contract, otherwise they're going to churn. Now from there, as they're realizing value, you got to champion the success with the customer and celebrate that success. Part of that is giving the customer the tools for them to communicate the success they're having to their executives. I was just meeting with a customer about four weeks ago and they were having a challenge. They really needed specific reporting and dashboards together. I asked them, when's your next ELT meeting or your next board meeting? They said, hey, we have a board meeting September 10th. I said, how would it be if we were able to produce this for you so you could show them? It was around media and advertising, paid media advertising ROI. Here's our spend, here's the return we're getting on the conversion rates, etc. They said that would be phenomenal, we want to show them how well we're doing on Meta, TikTok, Amazon, Google, etc. So I got the team together and they built this out, and now that VP and that director who were owning the project and owning our spend with us were able to walk into the board meeting with the critical paid advertising metrics they wanted. Think of the personal value to them. Huge. Huge personal value to them. We're now a trusted advisor to them, and they're going to lean in deeper with us. So I think the big thing on post-sales value is to understand that the ROI you did to close the deal, the CFO wrote that off the table. Don't try to come back and say, hey, you've saved $3 million by using us for the last two years. That's already gone. It's all about what's the present value they're getting and the future value they can get. That's what drives your renewal and your upsell. The rearview mirror is the previous value, the windshield is what's most important. It's okay to talk about the rearview mirror, don't try to sell them on it. Get the customer to lean in with you on the value they're getting today and then the future value, and then sell that together. That's really what value selling is all about, measuring realized value through the operational process in post-sales.

Yeah. So I'll tell you what, everything is data-driven these days. You need your customer insights and data in order to forecast your business. You need to partner very closely with your CFO on the revenue side. So we need to both not just think about bookings, but revenue and what's the revenue look like for the company. Budget-wise, we need to be plus or minus 2%. It's really down to that tight nowadays, especially in the big businesses, it could even be a half percent. So having a RevOps team that really understands the business, has great infrastructure, systems, process, and operating model, data insights at your fingertips in real time is super important. The RevOps team we have here right now, I think is a best-in-class RevOps team. We're really excited about what they're doing for us, and obviously the tools they're using are important as well to provide that customer 360 view so that you can actually make your decisions and project your revenue and your forecast.

Right. Selling is a team sport, that's why I love it so much. I played team sports growing up and love being a part of a team. Winning as a team is really about all functions in the go-to-market working together in service of the customer. If the customer wins, we win. So really being selfless and focusing on the customer. Your SDR team, we need innovative ways right now to go build pipeline. I think every company will tell you that their inbound pipe is running dry. It's kind of like our Alaska pipeline, it's not producing what it did five years ago. So you've got to turn around and you've got to have an outbound pipe that is double or triple what it was when your inbound pipe is low. So that's the SDR team using great tools to go out in creative ways to get highly qualified leads. Highly qualified leads are really what's important versus you get a lot of low qualified leads and you're wasting time and chasing things down. And then on the RevOps side, if you have AI and analytics that tell you, hey, here's the next product for this customer based on their customer journey and maturity model, we can start driving great upsell and cross-sell in the install base, giving them more value and us more value from that. So RevOps is extremely important to help guide us in where we're going.

Well, thank you, Randy.