#119 CPQ in the AI era

Janis Zech: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the RevOps Lab Podcast. I'm here with Philip, and it's actually Philip's birthday today. Happy birthday, Philip.

Philipp Stelzer: Oh, happy birthday. No. That was not birthday. I know he this, but, you know, you know, forever thirty, I would say.

Janis Zech: Always. But, you know, not more important, but almost more important than his birthday is Augusta Day, you know, Colin Gerber, you know, who's joining us today to talk about CPQ. Colin, hey, great to have you.

Colin Gerber: Hey. Thanks everyone and yeah, happy birthday, Philip. Another summer birthday. Mine's in less than a month.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah, actually I read just this week accidentally stumbled upon this that for some magical reason, I don't think there's a magical reason, but actually there's more birthdays in July and August than the rest of the year, it's like somehow clusters in those two months for yeah. I guess there is reasons. Didn't go deep into that.

Colin Gerber: There there there are reasons. Maybe not for the podcast, but similar with — exactly. Similar similar to you after thirty, I don't even know, I asked my wife the other day or I said the wrong age, I think, and it was like two years, like less than I actually am, so I wasn't even sure how old I was.

Janis Zech: Can definitely relate to that. Doesn't make it better with kids, but, yeah, definitely time runs super fast. So going back to the topic today, so we're gonna dive deep into CPQ today, but maybe for context, I mean, who are you? What do you do? And then let's jump right in.

Colin Gerber: Yeah. So I'm Colin. I am the VP of Revenue Operations and Strategy over at Socure. Been in the RevOps, or I guess SalesOps or RevOps space over the last seventeen years, kind of in progressive roles at various companies. A few like large publicly traded companies went through IPOs with Uber and Affirm. A few like series A, series B startups in, you know, the B2B SaaS world as well as some in the payment data security space. So just progressive roles, a lot of different sized and stage companies, selling into like all segments from, you know, PLG, SMB, high velocity, mid market to like enterprise. So kind of been around the block there. But currently at Socure, what we do, we're basically a digital identity and fraud prevention platform, for, you know, any sort of like digital transaction, transactions of any kind. We kinda span a lot of different verticals. Some of our key verticals is, you know, traditional bank deposit banking, a lot of fintechs. So you think of like, you know, like the Chimes, the Daves, Revolut of the world, Robinhoods, a lot in public sector as you know, there is a lot of fraud in public services as far as around like, getting things like unemployment, digital, like driver's licenses, anything tied to any sort of benefits. And then as well as we have some, you know, more emerging verticals in what we call like gaming. So that's like, you know, online gambling. You think like the DraftKings, the FanDuels, the BetMGMs of the world. And then in addition to that, you know, marketplaces. So you think like, what we consider a marketplace like Affirm, Revolut, and a new one for us is actually workforce verification, which is very much entrenched with like the actual you are who you say you are, so anything around the entire employment life cycle, gig workers. It's a very, you know, it's not necessarily the sexiest technology, but it's something that is very necessary. You're never gonna see necessarily see Socure on like a website or anything, but it's very much embedded into the stack and embedded into like a lot of onboarding re-authentication flows and things of that sort.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. I mean, and today I wanna talk about CPQ, and maybe kick off with like, you have a long history in, you know, different CPQ solutions, so how would you describe the history of CPQ?

Colin Gerber: Yeah. So, been kind of through, I'd say like a half dozen actual CPQ implementations, come into places there's already been CPQs in place. But if I really think of CPQ over the last fifteen years, I kinda split it into, kinda three phases. First phase being kind of, you know, when I came into the job force like, early twenty tens. That was like kind of my first exposure and that was, you know, with like predominantly the main player was Zuora. That really was a CPQ or a quoting functionality built on top of a billing system. So they were very much coupled together. And basically that was created to remove a lot of, you know, manual tasks, potential human error, like actually, you know, signing a deal instead of like your billing or accounting team going in and like entering all the details after the fact through like a flat file or like a PDF or something. This essentially like was the front end wrapping for the end user or the, in this case, like an account executive to essentially put together a service order, customer signs it, everything, you know, transfers directly to the billing system. That was like really like Zuora days, very much a wrapping on a billing system. Fast forward about five years, really that was, you know, I'd say the preeminent or dominant player at the time, was like Salesforce CPQ formerly Steel Brick. And that's really, you know, Salesforce being like, hey, like, we already have, you know, some rudimentary quoting functionality. We had products and pricing modules within Salesforce. This was essentially, you know, kind of cutting out the middleman or like a third party integration and really making it closed loop within the ecosystem for the entire kind of like quote to cash running in the Salesforce ecosystem. SaaS really was a phase two. And so, went through a couple of Zuora implementations early in my career, mid career to this point. It really was that like doubling down on the Salesforce ecosystem and it was a little more closed loop. It wasn't very clean. A lot of companies working at them were, I'd say just like typical kinda like SaaS, like seat based, annual licenses, works very well for that. Just, you know, there's not really a sort of usage component or, like, reconciliations after. It's just like really adding seats, adding entitlements to an existing customer account. So for like the amendment purposes, like that was really like kind of what I call like that period of, you know, where we're really using Salesforce. Fast forward to today or at least like starting, I guess, like four and a half years ago when I started at Socure, when I came in, we had just signed with a provider, which I consider like part of the new wave. I think there is another wave coming that's more AI native or AI built on AI, but essentially like the provider that we're currently using is DealHub. And kind of the nice thing about this phase within CPQ, it really is, I'd say platform agnostic or CRM agnostic. It is extremely flexible. And the great thing about it is, is we are a consumption based business and a lot of the, I'd say like more legacy providers didn't really play well with like the consumption based model. So the, you know, the metering, the forecasting bookings, the actual like expansion piece is on this and like really like, it has been a two way door for us because we've gone through like several different kind of like overall like GTM pricing overhauls. And this tool has been really flexible for us essentially to, kind of build and morph into what we need at this time. We're kind of on what we call our three dot o build but that's really, you know, with the amount of pricing structures we've had in my time here. So our current pricing structure, which is, I'd say like if anyone's familiar or anyone listening is familiar with like an AWS pricing model, it really is like a value based or ROI based spend model. Essentially, like our pricing, it's, you know, we sell workflows that get to like fraud decisions like yes or no, like this is a real person or not. Our workflows are made up of, you know, a combination of, you know, thirty five modules. Some of our modules would be like, you know, email, phone risks. So, like, essentially, like, are these valid? All the way down to things like document verification, scan, like your passport or like your driver's license. That's kind of a final one to, like, capture, like, is this who you say you are? But essentially, like, we have thirty five modules, any combination of which is sold for various use cases or solutions. So essentially, what we have done here with our new pricing model, it's like one list price across the board. The customer then has two levers essentially for discounting. It's either doing a commitment or using more of the product. They're seeing more value. They get a better price. So it's mutually beneficial, very transparent, easy for, I'd say our GTM team to actually articulate to the customer, easy for a customer to interpret and understand what they're spending on, you know, which products once they actually get like an invoice at the end of each month, we charge in arrears because it's usage. So it's very much, you know, more transparent, easy to understand, and it's, you know, accelerated our business and, you know, kind of removing a lot of the, not confusion, but I'd say, things that need to be explained or interpreted with this pricing model we're currently on.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, I think pricing can be such a big lever, right, and we talked about this actually in our prep call, like, you know, how you sometimes switch the pricing model and you align it more with the value of the customer and, you know, that then comes with specific challenges. So in the way I understand it's like it's huge usage based, right, it's like priced after the fact, so there's like either commitment or no commitment based on the consumption, you know, of, you know, could be API calls across different modules, then, you know, like or identifications, you know, like preventions, you would essentially, you know, come up with a price which obviously then, you know, creates different challenges on the CPQ side. What are those, you know, like, CPQ challenges when it comes to specific, like, you know, consumption based pricing? What are things to consider, you know, and what are some of those common things you've been seeing in them?

Colin Gerber: Yeah. Totally. Really, if we kinda like think about like something I'd said previously, you know, when you're going in like implementing a tool, the pricing you have today is probably not gonna be your pricing you have forever. You wanna build it in a way where you can adjust and you're not basically ripping and replacing your entire solution. With initial solution build, it's also very important that you do at least have, you know, a settled or agreed upon pricing model. The way like we did it is we essentially, you know, previous to our CPQ we had built something what we called like our margin calculator. It is essentially what we wanted a CPQ to do but in an Excel sheet. That was the blueprint for how we actually wanted the CPQ to work, how we want the pricing to, how we want the pricing to like actually like mechanically like show like the amounts, the products, the volumes. And this is what we had our reps using for like a year prior to actually implementing CPQ. It was like, you know, a very pressure tested model that we had settled on. And like using that as the blueprint and being like, alright, we're implementing, but like we want it to behave exactly like this. If you can't do this in the system, do you have like any best practice or other things your customers have been doing? You know, maybe something we haven't thought of or maybe something we could actually remove that was maybe an over complication. But just, you know, less is more and simpler is better as long as you're actually accomplishing the goals of, like, how you're trying to go to market. So for us, that was, you know, this pressure tested Excel model, translating it directly into the system. And that's kinda how we went about our initial implementation. And then there's other things to consider. I mean, you wanna have a very clear idea of like where your tolerances are as a business from things like discounting, margins, which type of approvals you actually wanna have, like which teams are involved. I mean, for us that's, you know, from like a frontline manager to our CRO or president to the CEO, depending on deal size and complexity. There are, you know, different approval sets for our billing and accounting team if there's any sort of like special billing consideration. So you really need to like, actually suss all that stuff out before you actually implement. And there's also like the legal team out there. They have a whole separate set of things that they are, you know, concerned with or things that are of value to them to know that you wanna incorporate. So you just need to have a really, you know, doesn't have to be completely buttoned up. You have to have, you know, some things nailed down. So when you implement it, you have the, you know, correct guardrails in place. Like, you don't want your implementation over to your reps, like, into the system. You don't wanna be, you know, having to teach them how to sell. You want them to be more like guided through the selling process, and it just be as frictionless as possible. And of course you iterate on top of it, hence why we're on our build three point zero. There's been a lot of iterations, transformations to our business outside of just the pricing itself. So it's just, you want it to be clearly iterative, two way door. Don't wanna kinda like paint yourself in a corner because you would have to rip everything else out, and that can cause a, you know, a major disruption to your overall GTM.

Philipp Stelzer: Like, every every time I I I hear somebody talking about CPQ, right, like, I'm I'm getting, like, scared just, like, hearing, like, CPQ because I just, like — I feel like it's it's this, like, monster of an implementation that I think a lot of companies spend or can spend a long time with to getting it right and going for different vendors and lots of frustration, and because in the end, like you already like pointed out, there's lots of different stakeholders getting involved and it can be an actual change management process. I think like using actually like a calculator in Excel is like a very smart idea to minimize that risk, but in the end, like there's a lot of people you gotta take along for the journey, so, I mean, that you've been around for a long, long, long, long time, Colin — also for different — you still look super young. Yes, I'm just riffing here on the birthday, but like, given that you've seen like a couple of different CPQ implementations, right, like, what are some, like, common mistakes that people run into and, do you have, like, some best practices on just how you should run like a CPQ implementation to get it right from the beginning?

Colin Gerber: Yeah. I mean, kind of what I was talking about, you know, simpler is better and less is more. I mean, just like any system, if you're building out too many like calculations or like too many like workflows within the system itself, it will become latent and then it will become more of a nuisance to a rep than a helper. So, you know, we had, you know, as we think about moving internationally, we have different price points for the same product across the different regions or even countries because, you know, we use various data providers for some of our modules. One interesting thing we ran into, like that facilitated us needing separate SKUs by countries. I mean, there's, you know, a hundred and ninety countries in the world. We can't sell into all of them but we can sell into the majority of them. So, you know, some of our SKUs, we need to really think about a scalable way to actually allow a customer to receive list pricing for, you know, a hundred and seventy countries and you think times like probably half of our modules are, you know, reliant on some third party data. So like, you know, multiply that out and then trying to load that into a service order. So we had to get like really creative with like how we were actually doing that. There's things to consider like, you know, as a customer you don't want, you know, a fifty page service order or a sales order with like every single SKU on it. So it's like, you know, thinking of things like, you know, how do we present our order form? Like, what kind of language we put in there? How do we actually accurately represent, you know, like, hey, there is, you know, online list pricing or embedded pricing in the product that by signing this you do agree to, but if you want to negotiate on a certain point, like talk to sales. Otherwise, just use the list pricing that is actually embedded in the product. And like our product is a platform. The whole kind of like reason we moved to more of this platform model, we used to sell like a virtual bundle. So we had like bundle one through five, which were like different fraud suites. They weren't like obfuscated at all. It wasn't a la carte pricing. Now we're more on a la carte pricing so customers can just go into our platform, create a workflow, select which modules and which order of like they want a waterfall, drag and drop it. They might not actually have like contracted pricing on paper for all those, but they do have discoverable personalized pricing within their product and like that helped us not have to put, you know, several hundred SKUs on a sales order for things that they might not even be using at this time but they may use in the future. So like think about things like that, like give them what they need at this time, allow them to actually have like, you know, online pricing or embedded pricing in the product. If they want a different price point, if they wanna get some volume based discounting, then they talk to sales. But like, you know, we would kinda want that PLG flywheel, as well as the direct motion, which is always a little heavier than a customer just turning something on and using it.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Awesome. I mean, great great examples to illustrate like the the complexity of a CPQ and lots of things to think about. But like I said, like, probably, like, start small and then, like, keep keep adding to it as long as you don't back yourself into into a corner. And since we are, like, a RevOps podcast, I'm curious, like, how you see the role of RevOps, when it comes to CPQ implementation. We talked about like the different stakeholders, but what's the role of RevOps here?

Colin Gerber: Yeah. So, kinda the way I see it or how it's positioned right now outside of just like our kind of core competency which is really, you know, laying the tracks and setting the guardrails for the team to do their job in the most efficient manner possible. I also do own DealDesk and like that is, you know, that is a finite resource. So like kinda going back to the margin calculator, that thing, that Excel never went away. That really is for our reps to do like pre deal modeling, do like multi scenario modeling, actually like play around with like different assumptions, different offerings, different packaging, to kinda get an idea of like what their best foot forward is or what they actually wanna submit through DealDesk and to the subsequent approvers. Because that takes time for a human still to be like, you know, my team, the, you know, commercial, legal, finance leadership to actually review and be like, hey, this is okay to send to a customer. We want a rep to actually, like, think, you know, very intentionally about what they're putting in the system because everything that goes through there will need a human to look at it if it does require approval. So we still have the reps doing a fair amount of modeling outside the system. We are starting to stand up some more NLP or, like, natural language processing type capabilities where, like, the margin calculator, it lives in Excel today. We're working on getting into more of like a, you know, a Claude agent or like a Claude skill where they can actually, you know, create these without just typing in the numbers themselves and like trying to speed it up there. But, one thing, you know, anyone who is a part of a CPQ company out there, one thing is, you know, these tools need to get better about actually like side by side evaluation or evaluation tools within the actual platforms themselves. So we're kind of in the middle ground today like, you know, we were in Excel. We're now moving to more of, you know, hopefully a more like agentic, a little more natural quicker way to do it. But these tools today, they don't really do a really great comparison of different pricing options side by side in a tool without actually having to like submit something in for approval or like you just you're viewing one at a time, it's very disjointed. So that's why we do still do a fair amount of deal modeling outside the system.

Janis Zech: Got it. Got it. I mean, like, just just just on the natural language processing because, like, I love that story from one of our customers, like, so since we do, like, you know, call recordings and, like, also, like, include, like, email content, and stuff like this all, like, feed it into the CRM and then give you, an AI to do fun things with it. And, like, one of our customers is actually using, like, our conversation intelligence to also automatically create order forms after a call has ended. So basically, like, they discuss different like sizes of different products, so it's a packaging company, and they like discuss different sizes of products and like, you know, sort of like what kind of like they wanna ship and what kind of like volume and then out of like the transcript and then automatically create like that calculation. Yeah. Because they have lots of stuff just like built into our system. There's different prompts that understands, okay, like, hey, if the customer wants like this and this type of volume and these and these kinds of package sizes and this is sort of, like, the weight, and then, you know, like, it automatically, like, puts out, like, okay. This is the potential value, you know, of that deal, which I always like — and they've been doing that since, like, day one since we launched that, so I was always impressed with that. And that's like, that's doable nowadays. Right? Like, you can do that. You can build a skill for that. That's like, I mean, it won't be like super easy, but it won't be super hard to do, either.

Colin Gerber: Yeah. I think it's about kinda getting like the, you know, you know, eighty or ninety percent rule. And then the last mile, sure, like human in the loop still, maybe in two years, like, there won't be human in the loop. But right now, we are like, you do still need the human in the loop to, like, kinda get it over the line. I think, you know, for us, and this is something I talked about yesterday, just in the pre call, we've been doing a lot of really interesting things with, you know, data capture and natural language processing to, like, populate this kind of companion we have to our opportunity. We call it SRD or solution readiness document. Essentially, like, before we would have, a questionnaire that, like, our solution consultant or platform solution consultants would go in and fill in, like, all the information and context and be like, alright. So here's the use case or use cases. Here's the modules. Here's what they're actually solving. Here's how they're solving it. And then, like, a bunch of other questions to actually, like, help like our implementation or our post sales team actually implement and understand how this should be configured. Really like what we're doing now is we are populating this like SRD object or the solution readiness document object via an agent where we are actually now building out, and this transfers into a Salesforce object as well which is really cool. But basically it's like, you know, use case. Here is the workflows under the use case. If there's, you know, multiple or one, here are the modules. Here's the order of them. Here's how many decisions that, you know, each workflow will be doing monthly. Of those decisions, like what percentage of the decisions hit XYZ modules because it is a waterfall, they're gonna be one or multiple modules in each step. And so that's essentially helping us to, reverse engineer the volumes by product. And that's how we're actually pressure testing essentially like what we're booking because it is a forecast. But it's like, okay, like we can substantiate, you know, the, hundred thousand calls here because we know that this workflow is gonna make, you know, fifty thousand decisions. There's two modules. Each module is hit every time. So fifty thousand a piece that equals a hundred thousand in volume. That's just a really simplified, you know, example, but like, that's some of the stuff we are doing as well to like basically sense check as we get deeper into the contracting life cycle prior to booking that, you know, what we're booking is tied to reality and actually meets the customer's needs as well as gives our team the essentially rich context as of what they're implementing and like why they're implementing it.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think these use cases are, so broad and so powerful and also things where reps really appreciate it, right, like, oh, there's a handover doc, there's an implementation doc, right, and it's very detailed and you know, like, and just helps to, you know, a, take a lot of time away on doing that, but actually I think the biggest impact there is also being more effective, right, like, you know, X percent just wouldn't do it and so it actually happens and the data is actually there. I have a different question for you, like, so you mentioned you have the Excel, right, you have the production database where you have pricing, you have the CPQ tooling, you have the billing system, I assume, right, like, where's the system of truth? Like, how do you think about that? Like, you know, how do you come — like, how do you integrate all these different, you know, components?

Colin Gerber: Yeah. And this is something we, also kinda touched on yesterday. But, right now, we're going through, a fairly transformative, kind of like billing overhaul, so our billing architecture. Previously, we, you know, it was kind of unfortunate. We only had like a one directional sync from, you know, our CPQ and Salesforce into our billing system. Moving over to a new solution, we're still implementing it. But essentially what we're doing is we are building out a custom kind of like entitlements or customer entitlements object, which will actually live closer to Salesforce than I would like, but still much more flexible when relating to our billing system. So actually, we'll be like bidirectional. And where this has come in handy is, you know, when we do any sort of renewal or upsell, coterminous or non coterminous amendment, we will have that bidirectional sync to that source of truth. Whereas we have, like, you know, the opportunity today, that's a transaction point in time. We didn't really have, like, that living or breathing kind of, like, view of what the customer has today, what they're using, how they're using it. That's what kinda like this third piece will be. And if you think of it like a triangle, you've got, you know, CRM, CPQ over here. We have this object over here. We have our billing system over here. They'll all talk to each other. But, essentially the kind of central source of truth for when we are, you know, putting in our order and configuring our billing system or if anything changes, with our product pick to pair billing system, it goes into here. So we have one centralized repository where right now, you know, it's not a hundred percent perfect with how we do it. I'd say we're probably about, you know, ninety percent correct and then like ten percent there needs to be some manual intervention to correct. But we're gonna like remove that and like reduce that percentage down more and more as we, you know, complete this implementation, just really have that full living, breathing three sixty view of our customer.

Janis Zech: It's funny. It actually reminds me, don't know if you know, in a previous episode, we had both Chrissy and Charlie on the show and they have actually built a custom object for upper funnel or like top of funnel tracking. So kind of the life cycle stages or the UTM parameters to get better visibility into, you know, attribution, but then also, you know, calculating things like how much a meeting costs and, you know, like going really into granular. It's almost like it reminds me of like this because it's almost like you have another object whether that sits in the CRM or not. Right? That essentially combines the, you know, the the the CPQ and production and billing, like, you know, somewhat into one layer that kind of orchestrates like where where do you stand. Right? And and I mean, I think there's always this challenge between like, okay, you sign a deal. Right? And then it actually needs to be built. It needs to be paid. Right? And there's like a dunning process and, you know, like, all these like states need to be measured and kind of compared and then they, you know, like if they're disconnected, it's actually really hard to have like the truth, right, so like, is that like a fair comparison or?

Colin Gerber: Yeah. I mean, it's just funny you kinda mentioned like top of funnel, like multi touch attribution. There's so many tools out there that actually do it, but a lot of times, like, you know, places I've been, like, they buy the tool and we're only using like fractions of it or pieces of it. And it's like, you know, sometimes it does make sense to build versus buy for the pieces you actually want or you're like, hey, it does it in this way but we wanna do it this way and it's like not super flexible. So like that's kind of where we were thinking about, you know, doing this kind of subscription entitlement object, especially because we were, up until this year, we were really, you know, till we moved over to like more of that platform at, I guess, mid last year. We really were a direct sales motion. But, you know, bringing in, like, PLG now, there's not always gonna be a human on our end doing anything, be it, like, an actual, you know, amendment or an actual person on our end doing the implementation, the customer can turn on and configure anything anytime. So we really needed that like centralized place for us to actually hook our product up into. So they're like, hey, you know, customer A turned on modules X Y Z that they weren't using before on a new workflow. Like, need to memorialize that somewhere with the rest of what they were using. Whereas in the past, it's like they've had to talk to someone on the sales team and then whatever that was sold or decided had to be implemented by someone at Socure. Well, we're not there anymore. We have PLG, so like we needed to have this like, you know, no human process to capture that, basically those actions within the platform.

Janis Zech: It is that like production database, right, when someone basically activates a SKU in the product, like, that pushing into the CPQ tool or is that pushing somewhere else?

Colin Gerber: So that's pushing — so like, basically the CPQ tool and like our CRM is essentially for anything direct. So anything that's like the customer's doing themselves, we want it in like this third piece, which is still related to the billing system, but we're not gonna, you know, really when I think about CRM, like that really is a function of like sales activities or like bookings. We're not like booking anything against like a customer's turning on themselves. So that really is, you know, the difference between a direct motion versus like the PLG motion, but we still wanna marry them in the same place and have it related to our billing system. And like, so we can go, you know, that object is what we will query in our BI, use for analytics and things like that. But really like the CRM is really like, in my mind, the direct motion. As long as there is like a customer record, we do have a self-service functionality as well, which if someone goes and signs up for Socure's self-service, like, yeah, sure. We still shoot in, you know, an account record if one doesn't exist. We have their initial configuration, what products are you using, you know, any like related contact information we need in there. But, you know, as I turn on more stuff, that really is gonna be in the subscription entitlement object, connected using like a cross platform like ID essentially, so we just tie everything together.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Love it. Yeah. I mean, I feel we we're going, really down the rabbit hole here, but I love it.

Colin Gerber: Yeah. No. I mean, look, I think these are all the considerations that everyone working on CPQ will always make, right, and I think it's a very relevant topic on like, okay, how do I handle direct, how do I handle self-service, how do I handle seat based, how do I handle, you know, consumption. These are probably the most relevant conversations that many RevOps teams are having these days because pricing is moving towards consumption more and more. Right? Like, I think AI transformation is pushing that, so these are very, very important, like, things and they are not easy to get right to Philip's earlier point. So, yeah, I really appreciate the the level of detail here.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, if any products built on any sort of like AI model right now, there's not gonna be a way for them to survive long unless they start paying or start charging on consumption because they're they're getting charged on consumption too for all the tokens and, usage on those, different models. So, I mean, I would love to go back to just, seat based