SentinelOne's Journey to 3 Billion Dollar Valuation

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I hope we don't have a lot of them. My name is Eran Ashkenazi, I'm SVP of Global Support and Services at SentinelOne. I actually joined SentinelOne about six and a half years ago when the company was just over 10, maybe 15 people. We're now about six hundred and fifty employees worldwide today. Our company has just finished its Series F valuation at just over three billion dollars. We're a cybersecurity company. We cater to the B2B enterprise market more so on the endpoint space, but a little bit also beyond that. And I think that my journey with SentinelOne started in a place that made me ask Guy, 'Where was your freemium model five years ago?' It could really have helped me. But I started and I had a different kind of path through customer success in the various growth stages of the organization. I'd be more than happy to talk about some of the mistakes that we've had and how Totango, mostly in this recent year or so since we've implemented it, helped us get into the next level of our expansion and growth.

So my employment history really goes back to technical roots. Back in the early 2000s, I started as a solution engineer, QA engineer, and eventually as a professional services consultant. Then I actually went through the ranks at a software company called Checkpoint Software Technologies, a firewall vendor, eventually leading the department before I joined SentinelOne. And at SentinelOne, I was still considering myself the professional services, the support head, and I think that it took a while until I figured out that my role is really around the success of the customers and that owning the entire post-sales journey basically means that you need to really go way beyond the technical aspects of solving problems for your customers. You need to go all the way back to the funnel to collect those metrics and act on those metrics proactively.

So right now we have a customer success director that is building that department. We have about one hundred people in my organization, but only eight people are solely in customer success today. So we're orienting a lot of businesses, a lot of support. This is the third iteration of our customer success. You said something about we're not going to get things right the first time, so I'm living proof for that. When it started, I think initially it was like trying to cover everything everywhere. Today we're a little bit more mature, both as managers and as a company. And the charter started with, in this iteration, happy customers. We have a top level company OKR for happy customers. And everything that we do has to eventually get us to the point of making our customers happy. Yes, there's NPS and all sorts of other things, but happiness is the end goal for us.

Well, I had the luxury of kind of bringing in a lot of systems into SentinelOne, including our CRM, which is Salesforce, and our support system, which is Zendesk. And initially, I was slightly naive. I thought that I could actually make everything happen on Salesforce. In fact, we hired an external contractor firm and even paid a couple of tens of thousands of dollars to start to glue in a bunch of pieces together. I'll get to the end of that story. It didn't work, and it's really not worthwhile to go that route. But again, I had to go through it. I had to make my mistakes for myself and now I know.

Totally, yes. Salesforce was there. To be honest, I underestimated the workload. I looked at a couple of platforms in the past, you and your large competitors, which obviously we didn't go with. And I thought to myself, 'What? I could probably do this myself. It's just doing like a little bit of a red and yellow and subtasks in Salesforce.' But it's much more than that. And I think I was super naive and too young in my success career to understand what is actually needed. And that's obviously changed.

So, we had a lot of changes through the years but not at all times. There was a time that I kind of stepped away to build a managed service and during that time, there was someone else that led customer success. I think that there wasn't enough consistency there. The challenge that we've seen is that we just had more customers. So when I first built that little kind of flimsy thing on Salesforce, we had like 40, 50 customers. A couple of years, like two years later, we already had hundreds or a thousand. Today we have about 4000+ customers. And I think that during that time where we started to scale, it was clear that we're not geared for that task. So we were still with those old systems, with a bunch of CSMs and there wasn't really a good tool or process really to do what we're supposed to do. So it didn't really work, unfortunately.

Yeah, it's a good point. We did like a proper POC. We looked at a couple of tools. It was Totango, Gainsight, Churnzero. We really gave everyone a fair chance. But I think that at the end of the day, what we wanted is to make sure that we have a very quick time to value. We're a growth startup and everything runs super quickly. We don't have the ability to run through a project that goes through a year. I need to be able to show my CEO and the board that within months of implementation there are results.

So with the implementation itself, we started seeing things within the first couple of weeks. The thing about implementation is that it's super easy to get the tool to like 80 percent capacity within a very, very short period of time. Like literally weeks. But that 20 percent, that will take time. It's a lot of customization, bringing more data points, understanding all the flows. If you ask about success criteria, once we brought the data and then we just ran a couple of very basic anomaly reports, a couple of alerts. We wanted to see customers that have uninstalled X amount of items in the last 30 days. We started getting some alerts and made some reach outs to get in touch with customers before they potentially go downhill or the wrong route. So I think that we already saw that initial benefit then and there.

Yeah. What happened for us is that when we implemented Totango, it created situations where we noticed we had data issues in other places because of the way that Totango consolidates the data. We noticed that we had data issues on Salesforce. We had data issues with the way that we calculate the number of agents on our backend system. It started a lot of side conversations and discussions. But once we got these things right, we were able to take Totango from just being a customer success centric system to a system that serves other departments in the organization. And I think that when I listen to your flywheel presentation, it was really talking about the fact of how a platform can expand into other places, and this is like really containing that full cycle of the customer.

It's a great point because I think initially it was really the reaction of like, 'Why do we need this? What is it? I mean, don't we have support? They could do this.' And obviously, there's a lot of education that needs to happen on the E staff and on the C-suite, especially if there are people that are not coming from a proper kind of ARR or SaaS model. And yes, I had to do a lot of that education and it took me some time to get the budgets for tools, for people, for the head of the department. Some things that helped, since this is for renewable business, was to talk about that bag of renewables and what does it look like next year? What does it look like in two years? And if you want to protect that next year and two years from now, you have to start today and this is what you need to do.

Right. The other part is that I'm trying not to step on anyone's toes. Everyone likes their own little pond, but I want to bring the entire data set to be unified and aligned between the organization. So the first thing, the easiest thing was to go to the renewals team, and the renewables team in our case is not part of the CS org. It's part of sales. And we got them engaged and we train them and we show them the light. And yes, they still work with Salesforce for their opportunities, but they look into Totango on a daily basis. All of the renewal reps do. And after we completed that part, that was kind of easy because it makes a lot of sense. In the second, we actually went backwards in time. So we went to Pre-Sales and we told Pre-Sales, 'Hey, you know, what about we bring in those accounts, which are the same, in an opportunity stage when they're in the technical POC and we provide the same insights that we have around usage, product insights, et cetera?' And so far, the feedback was very, very good. There needs to be some adjustments, but I think that it was very easy to convince the teams to use it. And for us, it's an easier transition. Pre-sale, we win a customer, and then starting the lifecycle of onboarding, et cetera. And we already have information on that customer. So we started early. That's good for us.

I'm pretty responsive.

So for us, the data that was the most difficult to import was actually product data because there's some existing connectors. So it's pretty easy to connect with Zendesk, with Salesforce, and with some other tools. Our product data is like hived in various levels. But what helped us in that case was instead of trying to create this crazy connector, we basically use an existing capability that Totango has, which is to take files directly like CSV or xml files from an S3 bucket. So it was pretty easy to paste all the data in the S3 bucket. And on a daily basis, Totango grabs the information and automatically populates and aligns the field. Another very important thing that we've done that I actually did on purpose way back in the day, was make sure they use a single identifier across all my data points. And used that unique key for everything. It's the contract data on our cloud, it's the data on our product, et cetera. And we bring all of that together, even on Zendesk support. We bring all of that together and then Totango easily correlates the data based on that unique key.

It really depends on the organization. Starting with a tool early in the game is easier than trying to implement it later down the road when you have hundreds or thousands of customers. If I had a freemium option like five, six years ago, I would have taken that. And more than likely I would be a Totango customer then because I would be accustomed to the tool. But of course, the option didn't exist there. So I would say definitely go with the freemium model. I mean, the worst case is you don't use it if it's not good for you. Right. It's easy to understand and validate what it is. I think that it's good for small teams that are just starting out. And if you don't consider yourself a seasoned manager in the world of customer success, make sure that the first person you bring to the team is a real leader that can also get their hands dirty. A mistake I made in the past was trying to be cheap while working at a small company, so not a lot of funds, and trying to bring someone who was a team lead somewhere else into a director role and things like that. Honestly, it doesn't really work. It might work initially, but then it doesn't scale. So invest in the right people and definitely use whatever tools, especially if they're free, initially to start the road.

I started doing POCs probably in the summer of 2019. And we hired our Director of Customer Success in September. In fact, I already made a decision by then but wanted to allow that person, the Director of CS, to make the decision, and he made the exact same decision that I did. At that point, the implementation process was that Head of Customer Success that we brought in and it took pretty much a couple of hours a week with a product manager that helped us coordinate things on the data gathering side, on our product side, and the folks from Totango. We did take a professional services package to help us get on there and get on the road quickly. But it wasn't painful, really. It was pretty smooth, smoother than I thought it would be.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Guy. Thank you guys for listening.