#22 How RevOps works in Enterprise

Philipp Stelzer: Hello, and welcome to another edition of the RevOps Lab podcast. Our guest today is Ian Matthews. Ian, very warm welcome.

Ian Matthews: Thank you very much.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Ian, maybe you can introduce yourself shortly in two or three sentences.

Ian Matthews: Yeah. Delighted. So my name is Ian Matthews. I'm the VP of worldwide go to market strategy, planning and incentives for Teradata. I probably got one of the longest job titles you can get in a company. I do a lot of things. I've been doing this for the last two and a half years or so. My big focus is really about modernizing how we go to market, how we address tricky challenges like acquiring new logos or shifting our focus between buying centers and as markets develop. I'm also a member of the DEI board at Teradata as something that's very important to me, and I've seen it can have a huge impact to team makeup and how companies succeed by having a lot of different people being represented and voices not normally heard. And then prior to that, I was the RevOps director for EMEA at Teradata. So I came in five years ago to help a really strong sales leader transform and be data driven and bring the common process and ways of working to organization. And so that's what got me into working with Teradata, the thought of transforming a billion dollar company and helping the sales team to really drive some incredible results.

Philipp Stelzer: Okay. Great. And DEI, that stands for diversity, equality, and inclusion, right? Just for business. Equity. Equity. Sorry.

Ian Matthews: Equity is important. It's about making sure everyone has a voice, people are included at the table, and we give everyone the same chances and opportunities.

Janis Zech: Yeah. More important than ever these days.

Ian Matthews: Very much so. And the companies that get it right, it has a big impact in the results. There's some really good studies that show if you actually put the focus, it leads to different points of view that drive innovation in the business as well.

Philipp Stelzer: And how did you end up in RevOps? Right? So like, five years ago starting as director of RevOps at Teradata. But like, looking at your CV, right, like, I think you had various different roles in sales, like, as a sales manager, as a sales engineer, and then moving more into operations roles. So how did that happen? Was that on purpose? Did you kinda like stumble into it? So like, what was your path?

Ian Matthews: This is an interesting topic. It'll lead on to us talking about forecasting later because it's true. I admit it. I'm a recovering salesperson or sales manager. I was quite a good salesperson, actually. I thought I was a very good sales manager, especially when it came to forecasting, and that's how I started getting involved in RevOps because of forecasting. So I started my career at a company called National Instruments. Worked there for eighteen years. National Instruments was actually the same age as me. Just recently last year, but acquired by Emerson. But it was a great starting point in people's careers. A lot of engineers joined it and then went on to become salespeople, marketing, product, and out into the marketplace. And we work a lot with data, the industrial data, things from the factory floors, helping test and simulate products or build control systems. And so in two thousand five, I've been an applications engineer to start my career. I've been a technical salesperson, then a more senior salesperson. I was a first time sales manager. And with my engineering background, I started to think about, well, I need to forecast. That's a big part of a sales manager's job. I have to get deals over the line. I've gotta help my team get deals over the line. But more importantly, I need to be able to call a number. And so I realized I couldn't just do this on gut feeling. I couldn't just put a big number out there and say we can do it and get the team hiked up to try and get there. I wanted to have ninety seven percent success rate on forecasting. That was my personal goal. I was a bit ambitious, but at the time, this was where we were doing a mix of small and big deals. There was some volume that gave you a baseline, some bigger deals that carry out the line. So I started building Excel models. I started to blend art and science to be the best forecasting sales manager in the UK. Now, at first, there were only two sales managers in the UK, so it wasn't exactly a big competition. But I started getting involved in other conversations like data, systems, quality. I was asked to offer opinions on CRM evolution, and at the time, we were on an Oracle platform. We were going to a slightly different Oracle platform, but what things we need to put in to make it more effective for inside sales, for field sales, for sales managers. And then as I developed as a sales leader, I actually ended up working in France for a while, running a French sales team, and then became the industry leader for aerospace and defense for National Instruments for EMEA. And I was really getting involved in things like continuous improvement, how do you define the process, how can you document it in a more formal way, how we were going to start to change the CRM for a future state with SaaS becoming available. And so I was asked by a really smart operations leader if I'd like to take on a new role back in, I think it was twenty fourteen, to lead sales effectiveness globally. They wanted a sales leader who could actually take the company on a transformation to a single sales process and Salesforce. So we had, I think it was four different regions, seven different sales processes or maybe twenty seven different sales processes, and definitely multiple CRMs. So we went in the course of eighteen months, first with the Americas, then with EMEA, then with East Asia, I think we called it at the time, and then the rest of world to Salesforce and a common sales process where everyone worked in the same way. And so I'd helped to impact almost two thousand different people from sellers to managers to support teams to get to that process. And that was the moment I had a job title that was formerly an operations job title. Even though for the prior ten years, I'd been doing operations on the side, it also led me to think, actually, I want to be more involved in the world of data, technology, analytics. I want to shift from the world of manufacturing technology into the world of data, so I tried a startup, did a few years there, but actually found Teradata as a company that had the scale that I like to play at. I like a billion dollar company because when you move the needle, you move a really big needle, but also billion dollars is actually quite small in big companies. So it means you know who the leadership team are. You can have a conversation with key people in the company so you can understand the business. And so that's what took me on the journey to Teradata. So I'm still the salesperson at heart because that helps a lot in the world of RevOps. You need a few different viewpoints in a team, and so I always think you should have at least one ex salesperson, one person who spent their career in operations, another person who's done a bit of finance so that you've got those points around the table and you understand the complexities because our job is to know everything.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's a fascinating take also, particularly around the one billion dollar company size. So like, it's big, but it's not too big to not know most people still at the company and talk to them. Yeah.

Ian Matthews: It's the race car of the enterprise.

Philipp Stelzer: Yes. Totally. And also super interesting, with your sort of, like, that you started sort of going into the operations with forecasting. Because I think, you know, forecasting, it's such a multilayer topic. It's not about like arriving at one final number that is — I mean, obviously hopefully it's super accurate — but it's also all the steps that you take before that. Right? Like, so the data that you collect, the sales process, how you enable the people to do that sales process, how you kind of collect the data, all the meetings that you have around that pipeline inspection. It's huge. Right? Like, essentially, in the end, like, if you wanna arrive at a really solid forecasting number and have high accuracy, then you need to nail basically the whole sales process that happens before that. And then high accuracy is just like the — it's sort of like the outcome of having a really good otherwise structured and aligned sales process.

Ian Matthews: Yeah. And if you can get that, you can get that longer term. That's the other — that's the holy grail as it were, not just short term sales forecast accuracy, but as you can start to call the number further out, especially with some granularity into which parts of your business. If we could get to that, so many big businesses would really be impacted because a lot of it is still — you can call a big company level number relatively easily, but which country is going to deliver at the last minute or which industry or which subsector is often a bit of smoke and mirrors that change to the last minute as everyone scrambles just to make sure they hit the number. Actually, the other part of that that I've seen a lot here since joining Teradata and was coached on by a sales leader called Dennis Olsen was this psychology about teams actually committing to a number and putting a number on the table. There's a great book. Dennis recommended everyone who started Teradata in EMEA read. Let me just think. It was Bob Rotella. It's How Champions Think. And Bob Rotella is this sports coach. And his entire career has been coaching golfers, but also involving basketball and other sports. And there's a certain psychology around not just getting good at what you do, but committing to do something. Committing, I'm gonna take the shot, or I'm going to — I don't play golf, but I'm going to, you know, have a certain score in golf because the instant you write that down, you commit to someone else. Suddenly, it's locked in, and that makes you try a lot harder and pull people together. So certainly one of the top level things I learned in the last five years was by getting people to commit to numbers and have everyone buy in on those things. You suddenly find people will find ways to make sure they get to that point. And we saw great examples where if a big deal was slipping out, teams would just try everything to not just save the deal, but if they couldn't, you know, keep the deal in the commit, to find another deal to swap in so they could still maintain that committed number. Because you don't want to punish teams for things outside of their controls, but you also want to encourage them to find ways to get there. That pre-COVID was one of the things we found worked really well. The teams would really buy in once they made the commitment that if they haven't made the commitment, sometimes you wouldn't get the same result out of it. And it turns out in sports, that's a huge part of it. But in sales, it applies really well. So it's a different bit of science to forecasting than what we'd likely talk about — the psychology rather than the systems and process.

Janis Zech: Yeah. But I love this very much because I think forecasting is how do you improve accountability. And this is exactly right. And so it's an operating cadence. You run with very clear rhythm and processes. And of course, you need to make sure that the process and system and data side is correct. But at the same time, it's also about improving the game. Right? I think it's in our mind, like a lot of people talk about forecasting, but what it actually means is how do you like improve your pipeline management capabilities and accountability to deliver on the number you commit? And I think that's really, like, if you think about most sales, that's what they care about. Right? It's like — it's very easy to sit in a boardroom and have a discussion about next year and to basically come up with, you know, the number you need to hit to be attractive for the investors. But it's really, really hard to build a bottom up model that is reliable and proves the core selling motion and go to market motion. And I think that's often where a huge disconnect is. I also really love that you mentioned the finance side of things in RevOps. I think that plays a big role, right? Like I think the best RevOps teams are not only deeply embedded into the revenue teams, but also deeply embedded into the finance teams to build that bridge.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah. Completely agree. Okay. So maybe very briefly because we have not talked about it yet, but Teradata. Right? So like the episode today, the key focus really is on how RevOps is running at Teradata because I think it is a fascinating company both in size, but also in what they offer. Quick recap. Right? So it's six and a half thousand employees worldwide. Teradata provides enterprise software for data warehousing, analytics, big data, and then also some related services around it. Company was formed forty five years ago as a collaboration — and that's something I find actually fascinating — as a collaboration between researchers at Caltech and Citibank. So Citibank had a data department, and then they worked together with the researchers at Caltech, and that's how Teradata was formed. And then one of the earliest customers, in the early nineties, was then Walmart, I think.

Ian Matthews: Yes. And so some of our customer names — people just kind of go, wow, that's one of your customers. And because we've been around a while, yeah, forty plus years — what's really scary, because you're startup guys, you probably just could get your head around this — we have people on our teams who've been with the company forty years. Yes. Celebrating forty year anniversaries, thirty year anniversaries, adding some incredible — the amount of knowledge, especially the amount of customer knowledge to the people on the customer teams. You know, some of the people who worked in retail have worked with just one or two big names for forty years. It's funny that the title on, you know, on their office door or their business card has changed because Teradata has been part of NCR and other companies along the way, but we're our own company and have been for a while. But yeah, there's the wealth of experience and the innovations. And so often people think of us as those data warehousing guys who've been around for a long time. And it's true. Actually, we formed the core of some of the world's biggest banks, retailers, telcos using our platforms for critical data management, data warehousing, reporting, and insight. But actually, what we're doing in the last five years or so is with the shift to the cloud, and the shift towards platform, we've got a really complete cloud analytics and data platform, which really enables companies trying to put AI into practice, actually do real analytics and AI with their customer data live. So that might be logistics for the customer experience, not just in a lab, but actually, you know, linking through to your phone or your bank transactions or, you know, the supply chain of huge automotive companies. So we do a lot about helping customers take that step of understanding what they have, and then turning that into something they can really use to change their business. I remember when I started being told by — actually, it was the German team telling me about one of their customers, so I can't name — but that customer was spending about two million dollars a year with us. We'd actually built a methodology to understand the business value that was being generated and worked with each customer to say, okay, so the decisions you make here, getting them right — so that two million dollar investment in us was actually generating a billion dollars in ROI for this German organization because of the criticality of the decisions they make with the data. And they also worked out to do that on another platform, they could do small things really cheaply, but to do it at the same scale on another platform, they'd have to spend five times as much. And they wouldn't even know if it would work until a year later, when they put that into place. So in those scenarios, that's what we're really good at — is working with the world's biggest companies to really drive impact and value. So our customers are bigger, complex. Like, small is a billion dollar for us. That means we do work with, yeah, small organizations, but the ones who really drive the most value are the ones who have enough data to scale. So governments, banks, hospitals, telcos, where there's millions of customers or millions of employees or millions of citizens or millions of components. And it also means it's a very sales led go to market model. We're not having a product-led growth where people pick up the product, test it, and buy a few more licenses. When we put something in place, to drive value, you've got to put it in place and make it work directly embedded into the systems and data. But that's what I like and where I've spent a lot of my career even in the manufacturing world. I like working with big organizations who can do standardization, who can make a system level change that really moves the needle.

Philipp Stelzer: And let's stick with that topic for a moment. So there's this framework by Hillary Hadley — I'm not sure if you're aware of the framework, but she presented it recently. So she works at Insight Partners, and the framework essentially is focused on describing the complexity of a RevOps setup. And it's quite simple. So you basically take like the number of products you have, you multiply it by the number of channels times the number of territories, and whatever else sort of you have in your setup, but those are kind of the three things that come to mind the quickest. And then you end up with a number. Right? And the higher the number, the more complicated. So if you have one product, one territory, one strategy, right, your complexity is one. But then you add like one product, right, and it increases quite quickly. So what's your number?

Ian Matthews: Oh. This could be a good question. It comes down to the definition of territory more than anything else because we've got a unique advantage. We joke sometimes, well, how many products do we have? Well, if you look at our component list of everything we could do, hundreds. But actually, we have one product and we call it Vantage. And it comes in different flavors and can live in different places, but it has that same core capability. So we've got Vantage on premise in its core form. That's traditionally how organizations might be using it. Also, being regulated environments, the cloud is tricky. We have a Vantage Cloud Enterprise, which is a seamless transition whether you're on premise or in the cloud. Plus, we have a newer cloud native framework called Vantage Cloud Lake, so built on the concept of data lakes and data lake houses. So you can argue that we either have one product or three products. We do actually have a new product just coming out. It's in private preview. We talked about it at some of the Microsoft and AWS events last year called AI Unlimited that's serverless. It will allow people to get up and running with AI really quick. So, okay, let's call it four products at that point. In terms of channels, well, we separate our business into thinking about our customer base and our prospects. And they're slightly different go to market motions and different resourcing as well. So customer and prospect, two channels. We have a partner channel in certain locations. That's how we do business. For instance, across the Middle East, we work directly with partners or Latin America, as well as with direct teams. And then with the new capability, with AI Unlimited, we'll have self serve. So we've probably got four channels, though one of them we're not spun up yet. And then in this question of territories, that's the bit I'm not too familiar with Hillary's research because I could say, well, we've got three regions or we've got fifteen sales VPs, each of which has a big set of business, or I've got two hundred and fifty sellers and managers as it were. So yeah, the initial thing, it's sixteen times the number of territories, which is yeah, a big number.

Janis Zech: It's already quite high, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. So obviously for the audience, I think everybody's now asking themselves, okay, so how big is the go to market org? I think you already alluded to that a bit. And then how big is the RevOps org that supports that? I mean, and how does it break down? What are the different teams? What are the different roles and responsibilities?

Ian Matthews: Yeah. So our go to market strategy and operations is what we call the RevOps in our organization. So we have a hundred and thirty people in that organization. I'm part of the leadership team of that organization. We've got a great leader who joined us from VMware a couple of years ago and has really redefined how we do things. I certainly someone to try and get on the podcast at some point because he's got some amazing background. But we're supporting about six hundred and fifty go to market team members. That's sellers, field tech, partners, specialist roles, inside sales, and similar, and about another hundred and fifty customer success and services sales that are not within the go to market organization but are closely linked. So when I'm doing compensation planning or resource planning, Salesforce assignments, I'm really talking about eight hundred people that I need to deploy seats for and put the right people in the right seats with help of the leadership.

Janis Zech: And then how does your group, the RevOps group, break down into the different roles and responsibilities?

Ian Matthews: Yes. So if we think about a hundred and thirty people now, I mentioned our customers are complex. Well, it's not just our customers. It's how we deploy Vantage with our customers because it's highly aligned to how they want to work, which means it's complex. There's a lot of different options — in the days of on premise, it's things like how long a power cable do you need to plug your box into, you know, the right point on the wall where it's going to sit in the server room and similar. And so you get a lot of different options there. But actually, in terms of doing high performance data management and analytics, there's a lot of different configurations around the types of disks you use, the storage, the configurations, and the data sets. So actually, our product is highly customizable to find a fit for each customer. So a big part of our team is actually around commercial operations with deal desk and pricing. The other aspect of commercial operations is renewal operations because actually when you've got one and a half billion in ARR, you have a lot of renewals to do. And just, you know, you drop five percent of your renewals — we're not talking tiny numbers there. We're talking really big numbers. So we have a renewal operations team that is focused on nine months ahead of renewal, structuring the elements of the renewals. So the sales teams and our renewal specialists, and their renewal account managers out in the field and customer success are going in really well prepared. So about fifty percent of the hundred and thirty person team is commercial operations around deal desk pricing, proposals, and renewal operations. And they support the different regions — yes, they're very regional execution focused. So they're aligned within our team, within our deal desk structure and commercial operation structure. But where you see where people sit, they sit very close to the sales teams. They're highly aligned. There's leaders who pair with regional leaders. Whenever possible, we have things like deal managers who work with a certain set of sales managers or certain countries. So they know a lot about what's going on. They know the business really, really well. And then our pricing team and our renewal operations team sit in more centralized functions, but even then they pair to certain parts of the world. So that's fifty percent of the operations team is making sure we've got a fairly execution focused approach on our commercial contract structures and proposals. And then we have about ten percent of our team in field operations. So this is the more traditional RevOps manager role that pairs with our regional leadership. The senior sales leader pairs with a senior director or director of field operations or revenue operations. That's the role I was doing in EMEA beforehand, and you're effectively the connection point with that sales leader to everything else in operations and actually everything else in the company. So you don't have a sales leader who's trying to go and track out lots of different things. They've got an operations business partner that understands their business, understands what's going on, is connected to the rest of the business, can find the links to help them effectively run their business, but also run within the rules of the game. And so they get the maximum resources. And these teams I work quite closely with on strategy and planning because that's how we execute and put things out and shifts out in the marketplace into our teams. And within those teams, we generally pair one to two sales VPs with an operations manager who's their business partner. So depending on where you are in the world, if you're in a highly diverse mix area such as EMEA or APJ, you might have one sales ops manager paired with one sales VP. When you're in the US where you've got a lot more scale and a lot of similarities between sales teams, a sales ops manager might look after two sales VPs. But they're the one who's accountable to making sure that we've got a forecasting process, there's cadence, supporting the execution, supporting the teams working well on the sales process, and understanding how the account executives and other roles need to work together, but then also working with the sales leader to make sure they drive it. And they're the core to our forecasting execution on the ground, and then that rolls all the way up to CRO, who's working directly with me and others from the operations leadership team on our longer term strategic forecast as well as our operational forecast. So that's ten percent in field operations. We have ten percent on partner operations. It's something that's newer to Teradata. We've had partners for a long time, but not working in this more disciplined way. We've evolved a lot in the past few years, and we're going to evolve a lot more, building much better channels, much better partnerships, working closely with the cloud providers. We have ten percent on enablement, and this is really sales capability enablement. Technical enablement comes out of product marketing and other teams. So our core enablement team are things like helping our sellers adapt to the shift to selling in the era of AI. So when, you know, when the marketplace has changed, the language has changed, capabilities are changing, you're talking to different buying centers, our enablement team is enabling the teams to go through that shift and make sure the team members understand their different roles in our sales process and how they can work together. And then the remaining twenty percent is strategy, planning, incentives, process, and platforms. So that's my team. It's also our sales technology or global sales operations team who run Salesforce, who run the tools we plug into Salesforce. We run our insights and analytics — we use Teradata's own product, Vantage, to do a lot of our business intelligence and reporting because, well, you should be using your own product if it's one of the best things in the world for analytics. So we actually, as a core, use that a lot. So we can travel through time. I don't just think of pipeline. I can travel back in time and look at the pipeline by our platform at any moment in time. So I can really go deep into what was happening on this day two years ago and how that trend might flow through because all of this is captured. All of our finance systems, our people systems, telemetry is all together in this one data warehouse that will allow us to really pull together some great stuff. And then we're starting to do some really cool things with some of our other capabilities. We do an analytics package called ClearScape that takes a lot of standard analytics functions people have built. And it's actually a marketing analytics team who are doing the coolest stuff at the moment. They've been taking our propensity model work, layering it with intent data, layering it with marketing system data, and then doing lookalike models and saying, right, at this moment in time, this particular prospect is a, interested in talking to you, b, is interested in buying something in this space, c, is showing indications of working with us, and d, looks exactly like this customer in Germany that you could use as a reference and talk them through the journey of how they're doing similar use cases. So they're doing some really advanced work using our own data analytics capabilities that we're going to start doing within the go to market side as well. It pains me to say this. The marketing analytics team got there first, and they've done some really cool things. So I'm gonna steal them and use them, but we're in partnership. It's all the same team at the end of the day.

Janis Zech: I mean, I think that's actually really fascinating. How do you bring basically light into this dark funnel at top of the pyramid? Right? Like, who are the companies that are actually in the market buying, and what are the signals to then use them to increase likelihood of success in closing them. I have one question. So you mentioned field operations, right, that works as the RevOps business partner, and then also the enablement team. Do they work closely aligned?

Ian Matthews: Yes. Well, all of us are really closely aligned because the field ops are the people close to our sales teams. If I want to know exactly what a salesperson is thinking, I've got two options. One is I call up the salespeople I know and get their opinion, or I speak to one of the field sales ops managers because they are day in, day out talking to tens of people who are close to the customer. Our enablement team is a centralized team. They're building collaboration with feedback from the strategy side, which is my side, but also the field ops teams and, you know, the sales team that are going to be consuming. And then when it comes to pushing that out, working closely with the field operations teams as well to push it out. So it's something I've seen that when I joined Teradata, it just clicked. This is the model I like to use in a larger organization, having these business partner approaches because then they create the glue as well with local marketing, local finance, local customer success, and it truly is that RevOps system level thinking of everything that's going on. And our best field operations managers have that insight. You could ask them about any part of the business in that location, and they could tell you whether it's marketing or sales or something else. They'll have a view of how it connects together because they're living and breathing there constantly. And that gives us real insight into what's working or not working.

Philipp Stelzer: With all the different channels, the worldwide setup, and yeah, really like the different sales channels — I'm assuming like ACV is probably similar across the different territories?

Ian Matthews: Yes and no. So we talk a lot about ARR and recurring revenue. The reason is we split things into different sales motions. The reason we split this into sales motions is because the complexities of dealing with large customers is interesting. So we have a new logo sales motion. With that, actually, the deals are faster and smaller because we're working to help organizations solve a key business problem that will expand into a traditional Teradata platform longer term. And that's a new selling motion that we've introduced the last couple of years that we're still refining. But we see deals there being six months, nine months, hundreds of k, not millions in terms of ARR. But then once you've secured a customer like that, the expansion capability is really interesting. So we have a separate expansion motion because whether you just secured a new logo or you're working with an organization that's been on Teradata for twenty years and have a ten million dollar install base, there's always new things you can be doing. There's new workloads and different functions. So IT may have a core platform, but actually, what about the logistics division? What about the marketing team? There's different use cases, workloads that can expand your IT instance or have a complete new workload, especially with cloud going on, because you can very easily spin up a new instance and have multiple workloads or clusters working in parallel so you don't ruin your financial reporting by doing too much workload from the customer experience side at the wrong moment. One of the things I liked about Teradata is a virtual architecture. It comes fairly well with additional things happening at the same time, but core workloads always delivering on time exactly when you need them. So we've got this idea of expansions. And there's also incremental events, and some of the bigger ones are linked to business changes and renewal cycles. Then we have migrations, and this is migrations for us is when you're modernizing an organization. You're taking what's rather a legacy or on premise technology and moving them to cloud. And so we have customers that move from very old platforms into more modern on premise or into cloud or even customers that are moving from the traditional enterprise architecture to a cloud native lake architecture. So these migration events don't happen as often. They're bigger and complex. They involve modernizing what's going on, and so often you're trying to time them around three year cycles. These get really big because if you're having a ten million dollar ARR, you're likely to move to cloud. And what we've seen, when you move to cloud, you want to do more things and so you end up, you know, signing these huge contracts. We've had some amazing deals. It scares me sometimes. The numbers of zeros that you have for the TCV of these deals. However, the impact of it — this can change the numbers completely. Then we have our renewal events, which don't change your ARR, but you've got to get your renewal in on time. If you miss that date, you've now created risk. You actually create an ARR drop until the risk is solved or even worse, a permanent ARR drop, an erosion or a cancel. So the renewals business is another motion that's closely tied because you might shift from renewal to a migration or tie a renewal event to a big expansion. And then we have our services that flow alongside at the same time that may be tied to certain events, may be ongoing. We have managed services to support customers. We do complex things that need shift support. We have consulting. We have partners delivering services as well. So you end up with kind of three core motions — acquiring new logos, expanding our customers, migrating our customers — while you also have renewal events and services flowing at the same time. And so our deal sizes range from ten k services events to thirty million dollar renewal events, easy side migrations with expansions of the world's big banks where the complexity of the deal is stunning, but then the ROI they're expecting to have is as well. So our sales cycles vary a lot.

Janis Zech: So my takeaway here is how do you build a billion dollar in ARR revenue company? You have big land. Right? Like, two hundred, five hundred million, and then you can level up to thirty million. And I think ServiceNow, over like three, four years ago, you know, had a thousand

customer paying them a million dollar per year, right? And here you go, you had a billion, right? Right? That easy, but obviously what goes into that is so hard. So I love this, right? We have the F1 race car or the enterprise we have, you know, land and expand in the enterprise. Right? So that's, I mean, I can absolutely relate why you enjoy those kinds of businesses because these are great businesses and the login effect is obviously massive if you own stored data on-prem for very complicated use cases. I think like a lot of startup folks always think of on-prem like, oh my God, it's old, right? But if you are able to do it, it's actually amazing, right? And of course, you have to transfer to cloud, there's no question about it. But obviously, talking about all this, right? Like this huge range, like, I mean, what does that mean for your forecasting process? I mean, both the new logo, expansion, renewal, emotion, but then also, like, kind of the wide range of ACVs. I mean, how do you do it, right?

Ian Matthews: Yeah. So first thing, cadence, cadence, cadence. You know this, I think everyone knows this. If you don't have a cadence, you're just playing guesswork. So we have top down and bottom up cadences. So we'd like to think of there's the sales cadence is happening almost daily with our AEs, our sales ops, our sales managers as deal flows are moving along. We then have a weekly sales forecasting cadence that starts with the sales managers with support from operations. It brings in renewals, it brings in customer success, it brings in different specialist teams. So during the week, your sales managers will be setting forecasts for the current quarter, maybe the next quarter as well, really understanding what's precisely happening, and that will roll up to their sales VP. And then that's...

Janis Zech: And just a question there, just a quick question. Sorry for interrupting, but like, do the reps actually call a number? Is it the sales managers calling a number for that?

Ian Matthews: Do reps call a deal to start? So they, we use forecast categories. This is a big part of it. And we can do weighted forecast using forecast categories, but it's complex. And we'll talk about big deals in the mix in a sec, because I hate weighted forecast or categories with big deals, because it just breaks up. But we ask the reps, is it pipeline, upside, or commit? So we want them to commit deals. We're not committing them to a number, per se, at the rep level. We are asking them, if you're predicting commit, you've got confidence in order of magnitude. You've got confidence in timing, as well as the fact that you're going to witness. So when it's in commit, you'll say, it's going to be roughly this size. It's going to at least fall within the quarter, you've said it, and you're going to get it over the line of the quarter. And we have tools like Medpik. We use a lot to actually make sure deals are qualified in our sales stages. There's certain things that won't let you progress until you get a certain amount of qualification. You can't get a deal into stage five if you don't have an approved quote. So that means the deal desk has been involved in it. And so we put supports and guardrails in, also police measurers in to make sure that we, as we're advancing deals, we really know where they are and we have a good insight. So the reps generally have very good insight because reps aren't committing big deals every week. Karl, if you imagine you're a rep, you might have one or two big deals a year that you would fight in lots of smaller deals. And so the sales managers are working on a small number of deals where they're really trying to validate the reps and they're putting a second rep for the forecast on top of that. So we have the reps forecast, and then the sales manager puts a forecast again. On top of that, they're putting in a low of commit or a high status or outside of forecast to it. And at that point, they're not necessarily calling a number at the sales manager level, but they're calling a set of deals to their sales. Now, when we get to the sales VP once a week, they're looking at that portfolio of deals that their sales managers are bringing them. There's a certain amount of other deals that are small, you know, standard ready all events, services, all of that, that's just saying this is my baseline, this is, this is going to happen with a, you know, statistical probability that it's all going to work. Really, I'm looking at the set of deals that will move the needle. And depending on which sales manager, which time of year, your sales VP might be looking at 10 deals might be looking at 30 deals, but they're not looking at 1000 deals there, they're looking at the ones that us several hundred K or more, and hopefully several million or more. And that's the point where they're building their forecast. And the forecast is really made up of three numbers. There's the lot. These are the deals that are closed. These are the deals that are signing in blood that these deals will come in no matter what. Then we have the commits. These are the deals where we have every intention of securing these deals. And if a deal's committed, I will find a way or I have the ability to swap in a different deal to replace it if there's some risk. So we often have the scenarios as we're talking at that level there to GVP and I remember when I was the EMEA, I'm RevOps Director, our French team was amazing and they would say right this is our deal, this is our deal, it's a million dollars. These are our two upside deals and I guarantee you if this one slips out of the switch in, one of these other deals to cover it and they always got the million dollar deal. Normally the last day of December they always got that big deal in but you You could never tell which deal it was going to be because it couldn't be one of several.

Janis Zech: Get out the champagne. We need the champagne. Let's get that deal.

Ian Matthews: And so that was the thing. They would commit to a number and they always, yeah, 99% of the time, would bring that one of the big deals in because then you can't be successful in our game if you're just putting all your money on one bet. You've got to have a couple of, yeah, other things going that maybe are going to be your commits for next quarter that will allow you to secure. If something goes wrong, you've got the ability to put some incentives, do something different, to try and move it up and speed it up. We've got some really good reps as well. You always initially forecast a deal in December or January, and you know they're going to, as we get towards July, they're going to start saying, there's a chance I could maybe do it in September. I'm going to need some help. One of our Swedish reps is amazing. Several years in a row, we all joked we're waiting for him to finally commit the January deal into September because he was making a habit of just bringing it in at that precise moment. Because he knew his customer well, but he didn't want to to over-commit until he was sure. But yes, so we have this idea of what you're going to put a low number down, you're going to put a commit number and the deals that make a commit number plus all the small things that's the baseline, and then you'll have an upside number. And we always forecast around two numbers, the total ARR growth and the kind of a reason for that. Cloud ARR is a subset of our total ARR, but it's super important for us, for the markets, because we've got a goal to become a billion dollar power company by the end of 2025. We're on track with that goal. We've got some challenges, some big numbers, and that means you can get there a couple of ways. You can get there by selling lots of new things in power, but you can also convert things from on-premise to cloud. And that converting doesn't change your total ARR, but it increases your cloud ARR. So we always look at at the tune, because if we could do it all from brand new big power systems, of course, but lots of cloud ARR, but in practice, it's a, it's a mix of different motions. So we forecast numbers, and that rolls up. And then on a every Monday, our CRO will speak with each of the region leaders, and have that same conversation about the command tells like commit changing, what's the reasons for things where the deals are even similar. And then on a monthly basis, that rolls into what we call the finance outlook process. And that's the formal company forecast, where we build out the revenue flows of all of those, we can pout the coming to next quarter or even full year revenue as well as ARR plan, and that becomes the company forecast for decision making and similar. So we've got this ability for sales to always be moving up and down a little. And then There's a monthly point where everyone comes together and locks, say, a month's forecast and that forms the, right, this is where we are. We're three months into the year, well, at the moment, we're two months into the year. We've got 10 more months to go, so here's the confirmed two months. Here's the projection, 10 months. And then sales camisone forecasting and tweaking in month until we do the next four-hour album. And then that rolls up into our quarterly process decisions. start planning for 2025, that will start in June as we're starting to build the long-range plan, as a company, how we to expect the top-down view of these things and then what are we going to build out underneath that long-range plan to support and understand what the expansion needs to look like, the industry's growing like this, what can we do differently to shift the needle, and that's a big part of where we've grown and succeeded as a business, as a RevOps team, is build a misview of productivity and so we build productivity with this concept of selling effort where we look at each of the sales motions and say not just how much additional total error I've done but what's on new name productivity, what's on migration productivity, what's on expansion productivity and then what's the selling effort and how does that improve per REE or per dollar spent to go to market. In the last few years I'm really proud we've been driving productivity numbers are. We have a 15 plus percent CAGR on our selling productivity, which means we're doing more with less and we're shifting responsibilities. We're shifting our ways of working in a consistent fashion to really drive that kind of productivity. So it's not just about selling more, but it's actually selling more with the right resources and selling more of the ways the company needs because then we can be profitable. And at the moment in the marketplace, So if you're a billion dollar company, you want to be profitable and a grower and there's a careful balance there. You can easily be growing massively and blow away farms, but we try to grow in a sustainable fashion and be around for the next 40 years, the next 40 years after that.

Janis Zech: So I would actually love to dive into the sales productivity and how you shift that, but we actually had 50 minutes and I mean, time flew by really, really fast. It sounds almost like we have to do a part two of this. But yeah, I mean, really, thank you so much for sharing all this. I think we could dive into many different directions. But before you go, right, I'd love to ask you our closing question. I mean, if you think back, do you experience in sales engineering and being a salesperson and then a sales manager, what would you tell your younger one knowing what you know now on how to progress your career? And yeah, what should you keep doing now?

Ian Matthews: Yeah, I know this for me is something I tell my team a lot. Try it. Don't think it's too hard. I'll step up and work out to solve something. Take on a new role. Do an impossible thing. Because it's going to be challenging. It's going to be scary. But you learn so much. And if you set a big goal, and you don't quite get to the big goal, but you get a long way there, you've probably moved the needle more than anyone else. I've had that attitude for a long time. It's been past my success. An old boss once said to me that these are words of wisdom followed almost every year. Ian, do one thing every year that will get you fired. But make it so important, so valuable, and do it so well that you're wildly successful and no one's going to fire you with that. And then he said, by the way, just remember, don't do two things.

Philipp Stelzer: That's amazing. That's amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

Ian Matthews: Absolute pleasure. Thank you for giving me the time.

Philipp Stelzer: Yeah, see you in round two. Thank you. Bye.