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Making businesses responsive through tech | Ganesh Shankar @ Responsive
168 Plays1 year ago
What began as a quest for efficiency is now a profitable solution trusted by Fortune 500 companies worldwide- Ganesh Shankar's journey from product manager to building Responsive is riveting. Responsive simplifies stakeholder communication, fostering trust, and strengthening brands for lasting success. Gain insights on B2B product development, sales strategies, and agile organizational building in this episode.
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Transcript
Introduction and Founding Story
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, everyone. My name is Ganeshankar, co-founder and CEO of Responsive.
00:00:21
Speaker
The best businesses are started by founders who are facing a personal problem and realize that solving the problem is a large business opportunity. Something similar happened with Ganesh Shankar who was working as a product manager in an American B2B SaaS company in 2015.
00:00:37
Speaker
He realised that he spent a lot of time in responding to RFPs or Request for Proposals, which is the standard way in which large companies procure software. He was tired of all that non-productive effort and when he could not find a solution to automate it, he decided to build a solution and thus RFPIO was born.
00:00:56
Speaker
Back today, RFPIO is now rebranded as Responsive.io and is used by a large number of Fortune 500 companies and is a full-stack solution to manage all your communication with external shareholders. The company is profitable and is on track to hit an ARR of $100 million. Stay tuned for some amazing insights from Ganesh on building, selling and pricing a B2B product and building an agile and responsive organization. And please do subscribe to Founder Thesis on YouTube or any audio streaming platform.
00:01:35
Speaker
So to be honest, we don't have any, you know, like a cool garage story, like typical startup garages or like, you know, Apple or Google, or even like a dorm room story, like a bunch of friends in the same, you know, hostel or dorm room, like Facebook or Snapchat. I think nothing like that sort, you know, it is truly a problem that we encounter day in and day out. Like I said,
00:02:02
Speaker
I was a product manager at Extero. What happened is being a product manager and that company back then, we are about 250 employees back then I moved to the US. So what happened is we didn't have a very dedicated, you know, sales engineering team. So as a product manager, I became a hybrid sales engineer whenever the sales team is
00:02:31
Speaker
working on a deal, they will pull me in, hey, Ganesh, can you help us setting up the demo?
Challenges and Solutions in RFPs
00:02:36
Speaker
And as part of that process, they also asked me to respond to RFPs. And that is the time, and this is on top of the 2011 or 13, 14 time frame, and a lot of adoption towards cloud. So the security becoming more and more. So there are a lot of security questions companies are asking too. So I could respond to security. But like I said, I was there for almost nine years.
00:03:01
Speaker
in the product role, never once in my nine years of career, my manager called me and said, hey, you did a fantastic R3.
00:03:12
Speaker
Little on that, not even a word RFP mentioned in my job description, never. I just want to quickly clarify. RFP means requests for proposal, which is the way a large corporate buys a solution or a service is their first floated document stating these are our needs and these are the things we want to understand from our vendors. And so for a vendor that is an RFP.
00:03:40
Speaker
Correct. That's an RFP. In India, people call it as tender. Sometimes it's very similar to tender. In Europe, people call it as bid. Basically, you as a vendor or a contractor or a solution provider trying to win a project or you're trying to sell your product, you need to, especially when you're working with the large corporations, they will be issuing these tenders so that you can respond. Are you showing these RFPs? You have to respond to those questions. It's like basically a questionnaire.
00:04:10
Speaker
asking for many parts of your organization, from financials, from your product, your roadmap, your technology, your people, everything they will ask. So you have to respond to that. So that's the point. When a text error, when the RFP hits, it typically hits the inbox of a sales rep. Like I say, it touches every part of the organization. The sales rep can only probably handle maximum
00:04:39
Speaker
about the company and licensing and pricing they can handle it when it comes to roadmap or when it comes to technology, when it comes to security, when it comes to legal, they rely on what they call the subject matter expert. Who are the subject matter experts for that? So I was a subject matter expert for responding to product related questions and the roadmap related questions that product manager that I had access to that information and it's all in my KPI.
00:05:06
Speaker
Similarly, two of my other colleagues, Sundar and Shankar, was also subject matter expert. Sundar was a subject matter expert for technology and security. And Shankar was a subject matter expert for implementation and training. So what happened is we all shared this common theme of responding to our team, but it was a painful process. We have to always go through, like I said, it was never called out in my job description.
00:05:36
Speaker
But I estimated a close to about 30 to 35% of my time was spent on sales support activities, like filling out RFP, filling out security questionnaires, getting the demo site ready. That was what happened. So to answer your question, so that's actually what happened is we were looking for a solution to see if we can solve the problem ourselves, not the startup idea or anything, to minimize the 35%. Because most often what happens is
00:06:08
Speaker
One sales rep will come and say, hey, then if we got an RFP from XYZ client, can you please help me? Two days later, another sales rep will come and say, hey, we have a client ABC. They're asking for, you know, because our product is the same. We are trying to sell it to multiple customers. The multiple customers are asking. I can say, hey, this is the same question I answered two days before to Mr. John Doe. Ms. Jay, why are you asking? So they will say, no, no, no, you are the expert. You tell us what, even if it is copy and paste,
00:06:37
Speaker
from that XYZ, RFP to ABCRP, you do it rather than me doing it. So it's a lot of redundant duplicative work and not a lot of high impact. High impact is when you solve a problem and you provide new information, new message that helps you with a deal. That is there.
00:07:00
Speaker
But most often about the product, oh, we always use the same thing, about your technology. So we're not going to change the technology from one customer to another customer. It's this copying phase we have to do. So we figured when I said we, these are all three of us having the same problems, Sundar and Shankar, but in their respective areas. So we looked into the market to see if there is any technology out there to help us streamline this process so that we can basically, what I was looking for is a database
00:07:30
Speaker
put all the content that I'm repeating and give the database access to someone so that the sales reps or others who are interacting with the customer can just leverage that if they feel like it's outdated, they can come in. So, you know, we couldn't find any technology out there. So, you know, that kind of prompted our interest into look into that space a little more deeper. And like I said, that company that we worked for is 250 employees.
00:07:59
Speaker
What we came back is the products that are solutions that were available back in 2015 time frame didn't quite connect the dots for even for a 2015 employee company. So we can only imagine how complex will it be for enterprise companies. It turned out to be true, actually, for eight years. We'll talk about that. So that is when we decided to dig deeper into that space.
Funding and Product Development Journey
00:08:23
Speaker
And our interest became more and more as we come to know about the space
00:08:28
Speaker
So finally we ended up deciding to take the reins on our own hand. The rest is history today. We are eight years past that started in 2015 came to market in 2016. I know.
00:08:44
Speaker
By then, we also partnered with one other key person, Manish Baffna in India. So basically, Manish helped us set up an India team. So me, Shankar, and Sundar formulated this idea and pitched and started the company. And then we brought in Manish as a core team member to work on developing the product. So this is all in late 2015.
00:09:13
Speaker
Did you raise funds before your 2016 launch or did you raise funds after the launch? Oh, great question. Yeah. None of us are serial entrepreneurs. We were living on paycheck to paycheck. I'll be here first. And so because of our, you know, a couple of investors came in forward because they worked with us in the past, you know, they said, hey,
00:09:42
Speaker
If you guys, I actually had a coffee meeting and was, I didn't hide any product. It was just a PowerPoint, you know, idea. So I think we were fortunate enough to give a clear vision back then. So, but the investors were all, investors came, the plural came in,
00:10:08
Speaker
maybe a month or two later, but the one investor who had a strong conviction, okay, this team, especially knowing the team, especially knowing the area, he understood that space and he said, I'll be open to support this. Again, and at that time we didn't know how much he would invest, but what ended up happening is he started with $10,000 check. He said, okay, I'll give you $10,000. He's not a professional, he's a high net worth individual who has made some money.
00:10:37
Speaker
in his career. So he said, okay, I'll give you guys some time, you know, but he's looking back. It's very smart, you know, in his way, because he had a different, different milestones, he kind of, you know, invested more. But also, he was very clear, if you do this milestone,
00:11:00
Speaker
I will be able to invest more. So I think the first check was $10,000. By the end of the second year or two and a half years, we had seen about half a million dollars at different milestones. But at no point we know
00:11:18
Speaker
how much appetite he had. But the good news is we were able to achieve certain milestones, what he was anticipating, be it me quitting the job, be it, you know, we have a product that can be sellable, not prototype. We have a customer who signs up at every different stages, you know, what's happening. So before the launch, we've raised, you know, just after he started investing, there was another investor,
00:11:47
Speaker
who also came in and joined us. So we had raised a couple of hundred thousand dollars initially to launch the product. And of course the three of us without savings we chimed in as well. So that's kind of how it all started.
00:12:06
Speaker
And what did you build? You explained the problem to me of repetitive work and a lot of it was like mind-numbing, non-intellectual work where you were largely copying and pasting stuff and all that. So what did you build to solve this? Great question. So V1, version one of our, you know, back then we used to be called as, you know, the company started with a name called RFPIO.
00:12:30
Speaker
First of all, proposal input and output. So it was so simple and easy. People can immediately connect. So that's one of the advantages we have. But what we did is essentially should take the tender or be it bid or be it RFP. There are two sides of the spectrum. Somebody was trying to buy something. Somebody is trying to sell something. So trying to meet the medium in which is what they're sharing that information is RFP.
00:12:56
Speaker
So, a lot of times the company who's trying to buy something will send out the questionnaire in many different shapes and forms, you know, typically Excel documents, just list of questions or a Word document or a PDF document. So, then it goes to the sales rep on the vendor side who's trying to sell something.
00:13:17
Speaker
The sales rep looks at the Excel document or Word document. He looks at the 300 questions or 500 questions. So he can understand those questions. Is it joining like 300 to 500 questions? Is that a realistic number? Oh, it will be easily, it's an average like that. Even sometimes it can go up to 1000 questions. Wow. Okay. I had no idea. I know it was so demanding. Okay.
00:13:44
Speaker
Because it touches pretty much everything, right? You know, it is not only, you know, about pricing. It will also talk about, you can imagine sometimes it becomes very fancy, you know, each tab is a department. You can ask about functional questions. They will ask about technical questions. They ask about security questions. They ask about implementation.
00:14:02
Speaker
So you can't get a clear view of asking one or two questions, you know, even for what, you know, can you solve? Can you connect? Can you integrate? What is your roadmap? This itself is a four question, right? You know, in product. Imagine if you have five departments, already 20 questions already, right? Just four in each department and five in each question, and five, but with four questions, you can't evaluate a product. Typically, they will ask hundreds of questions, even in the product itself, and technology and service.
00:14:31
Speaker
and support and security,
Unique Features and Market Integration
00:14:33
Speaker
so you can extrapolate. And in fact, it gets even complex when it comes to security questionnaires. There are standard questionnaires, especially if you say yes to a particular question, it opens up five more questions. There are questions with more than 3,000 questions that companies have to respond. Wow, OK. That's incredible.
00:15:00
Speaker
Although it is received by the sales team, it is not a one-person job. It truly requires a village to complete an RFP in a real sense. So what we saw initially, we said we are going to solve this RFPs that are coming in Excel document because that is what we had a lot of experience in. We said, okay, when an RFP comes, questionnaire comes in an Excel format,
00:15:27
Speaker
What typically happens is, I'll give you a simple use case. If you have three in question now, you need to work with five departments, you upload it in Google Doc, and you have to send them separate email, and there is always a deadline for an RFP. If you miss the end of the deadline or RFP deadline, you are disqualified. So there is a deadline. There's a project management element to it. That's a collaboration element to it. That's a content management element to it.
00:15:55
Speaker
That's why people generally get confused, okay, oh, why not be uploaded in the Google Doc and whatnot. It's not that easy. We'll talk about that. But what we essentially said is, okay, when our customers receives an RFP questionnaire in Excel format, all they will do is upload into our system. The system will be intelligent enough to parse it and divide that by different sections. And then each section can have its own deadline
00:16:23
Speaker
And you can say, okay, this section is a finance section. It goes to my finance manager. This is about security. This goes to my security person and I'll give them, you know, internally that's the workflow. So, okay, this is the person who writes the answer and his or her manager approves it. So that's the workflow for it. So it's all built in. So we, our problem or our solution is to solve repetitive work, filling out this question because you are filling out, but that benefit of
00:16:52
Speaker
Assigning this work to, it even gets complex, by the way, when it comes to, even Excel, it's okay. Imagine a Word document, okay? If Word document comes in, and you have to break down by five different departments, and you're sending through one department email, I'm just saying, in an email, if you send it, okay, this is about 50 questions, goes to my product team, this is 25 questions, goes to my security team. Imagine if security uses basic times in your room, and the product team uses, you know, aerial,
00:17:22
Speaker
bullet is one, two, three versus dot here as a response. The sales have now received five different documents and goes a wire and said, what is happening now? The most expensive resource in the company, the sales have to combine that onto one document, normalize it into same font, everything should be in the same font, bullet. Imagine how much of work that that person, because you can't send this hot spot document to the customer, you can't just update
00:17:52
Speaker
you know, append it to the end and they can set it. Somebody has to manually comb through that, make sure the font is correct. So that is a big problem. So when we launched our first version product, we said, okay, when you upload a document, it breaks it down into multiple pieces. Each piece can be assigned to someone, but when that someone receives, they're not receiving an email, they're not receiving a Word document, they're receiving a link. It's like taking a survey.
00:18:19
Speaker
When you click on that link, it takes you to a page where you will see the questions and you provide an answer. Okay. The benefit for them is what happens is if you do it more than once, more than twice, system will learn from your historical. That's, you know, again, today we have a lot of, a lot of, you know, news around AI. Even if you Google, uh, response or, uh, 2017, we, we said we were the first one to
00:18:44
Speaker
launch the AI-powered RFP software back in 2016, 2017 timeframe. Basically, the system learns from how you have historically responded to those questions and makes the recommendation, okay, this could pass when you get a new RFP next time, the system will say this could be possibly a best answer for it. And it has all the metadata to
00:19:08
Speaker
provide why this content is being recommended by the system. So the users can make an important decision and apply that. So even before applying that, we have what we call does an auto-respond. You can let the system to auto-respond for you. The salesperson can now click off a button, can auto-respond everything, and then assign the work to them. And that time, the person who's getting their work assignment is no longer starting it from scratch. They already have content. They are now becoming reviewers instead of authors.
00:19:37
Speaker
So that is the problem that we are solving. We continue to solve. Our vision is much larger and the product that we solve today is much larger, but that's where we're starting. Okay, amazing. It seems to me that
00:19:59
Speaker
It is a product which is copyable, especially today where generative AI is available on tap just through an API. It seems like a product which is fairly easy to copy. You create a work close and project management tool and then put in generative AI on it and you can start selling it to enterprises. So what's your vote here?
00:20:25
Speaker
And do you agree with my assessment here that it seems like today it can be copied
Company Culture and Sales Strategy
00:20:29
Speaker
fairly cheaply, like maybe with half a million dollars or a million dollars someone can create a clone? See, I believe for that reason, anything can be, especially when you are talking about a cloud-based application, a lot of ways you can get insights and intel about a product.
00:20:51
Speaker
But it also depends on a few things that we have done. If you look at it, the way we have import the document and the process document is patented by us. We have an active patent that we have used it. And like you say, it is not just one, oh, you can do this. This is a combination of what we call tests, a content management
00:21:12
Speaker
collaboration, project management, you have to integrate with multiple sources, and then you have to provide business intelligence, you know, on top of it, right? And you have to be providing business. And not only that, you know, again, I'll give you a simple example. Let's assume you are trying to buy something from my company.
00:21:32
Speaker
So I was able to demo my product to you and say Akshay feels really comfortable saying, okay, Ganesh, your product really meets my needs. I'm going to go for your product. But I'm not a decision maker. My manager is a decision maker and I have to check with her to get this project approved or this budget approved. For that I need few information like your product overview, your licensing,
00:22:02
Speaker
in your plans, your implementation plan and three references I need to talk to. Okay. So let's assume Akshay at XYZ sends it to Ganesh at abc.com in an email, nothing more. And I receive Ganesh is in the email. I open that email. There is no attachment. There's no RFP. Okay. You are saying, okay, Ganesh, I'm not issuing an RFP. You are my vendor of choice, but I need this information. I open up that email. There are four bullets. Okay. So product overview, implementation plan, license and reference.
00:22:32
Speaker
No, product overview. I'm a salesperson. I need to route that question to my product manager who can help me draft the content. Implementation goes to my customer success team. Reference goes to my Revolve state. Licensing, I can handle it. So already, even as simple as an email, I need to work with three different teams. If you have response, you don't need to send out an email. All you need is your mouse. Highlight bullet number one. Right click.
00:23:00
Speaker
lookup responsive for product overview. Because the product overview content went out the door as an RFP response last week for a different client, for a different salesperson. How can we democratize that content? We democratize that content so many different ways. That is more important thing. So the last bullet, like I said, content management, collaboration, integration, project management, business intelligence, the most important thing is content accessibility.
00:23:28
Speaker
Yes, you can use generative AI stuff altogether, but all those are public information. Your product is only within your product manager. What is coming up in the roadmap, you will never be able to get it out of the public internet. It is already only in the minds of your product managers or business analysts, you need to work with them to get their information. That is a unique problem that we solve. It can't be solved within
00:23:55
Speaker
Of course, we use generative AI too. We are the first one to launch, if you look at our thing. We use our generative, but we use it in a very complimentary way that sits on top of enterprise content. The enterprise content is there in a curated way. Then how do we finesse it? How do we message it properly? How do we use a proper tone? How can we produce a proper grammar? How can we use a proper sentences? Is it readable? That is where we use
00:24:25
Speaker
on top of the content. So it's been eight years. We have gone through this. From an outside, it may sound
00:24:38
Speaker
a simple idea, but if you look deeper, the amount of collaboration, the amount of content moderation that happened, and the workflows that we have built in, it's pretty significant. It's not an easily replicable thing. That's the reason why we have, you know, if you take the Fortune 100, that is world's top 100 companies, 25 of them uses us.
Pricing Model and Market Expansion
00:25:07
Speaker
25 of Fortune 100 company uses the sponsor. And we have over 2,000 customers worldwide. And these are companies who are in the sales technologies in that space of building technologies. They themselves couldn't build it. Microsoft is one of our customers. So yeah, Microsoft could have built it.
00:25:35
Speaker
But it is not that easy and be not that focused for these companies to build a solution when they have best-in-class solution available in the market. You said that there are integrations. Tell me about the integrations.
00:25:57
Speaker
So when you talk about RFPs, RFPs are typically received by the sales rep. I'm trying to sell something. I'm in the market. And then I came to know this bank is trying to buy a software. So there we shoot an RFP. This RFP, though it comes in, but if you look at it, the first thing I will do as a sales rep is I will create an opportunity in my CRM. So I will provide all the client information.
00:26:27
Speaker
Like I mentioned, it truly requires a village to complete in RFP. So when somebody, when a product manager is trying to respond, they want to know the context. Who's the client? What is it deals like? What product are we pitching? All those things. Those are already in Salesforce or your say CRM. So we integrate with CRM platform so that when you need that information, you can try to implement it.
00:26:49
Speaker
bring it in and you know we integrate you know for example I told you about you know an email so we have to integrate with your Gmail or Outlook we have integration or as simple as if you use Slack or Microsoft Teams or Hangout you know let's assume you and I work for the same company you know you are a sales rep and I'm a product manager and you are you are pinging me on Slack channel then I need a product or use you know a brief if you have
00:27:18
Speaker
responsive. All I can do is we have built a bot there forward slash responsive product over you. Click enter. The content will be on the Slack channel. You don't need to go into RFPI or responsive. I don't need to log into responsive. It's already in the medium that you and I are communicating in such a Slack. We integrated with multiple security systems. We integrated with content management system like SharePoint, Google Doc,
00:27:43
Speaker
box. So there are various, what is the reason to integrate with security systems? Oh, security system, you know, you need to do with your SSO. Okay, single sign on. Okay, so that single sign on or sign on of users. Okay, correct. Okay. And the integration with Google Drive and these content platforms is for like easy import of files and data.
00:28:13
Speaker
Easy import of files or let's assume you have, you know, the customer is asking for, hey, please provide your certificate of insurance. The certificate of insurance is in Google Doc. And you're saying, please find the, please find the attach. Where is the attachment coming from? It could be coming, you know, you can answer that in the sponsor, but the actual file, the supported document like in Google Doc, we can put that into that answer. So when you package it,
00:28:39
Speaker
When you finally prepare a final proposal package or an RFP package with responses on the answers, this becomes a document that can be sent along with the package. So that's what we do.
00:28:49
Speaker
So the non-sales people, the sales people would obviously log in and use responsive quite extensively because it's part of their job to win deals and to win deals they need to send out the RFP. But the non-sales people like product or security or whatever finance HR, do they also typically log in and give answers or do they just get a browser link where they fill out the answers and that's it.
00:29:19
Speaker
Management is expected from the non-sales people. That is the beauty of the system. It benefits the organization if all the non-sales people are using the system more often than you just described. Because I'll tell you why.
00:29:44
Speaker
your the system is not only like I said we have multiple use cases many use cases right so I've met the product manager let me tell you my example what I faced and what we solved it the sales rep comes in I know it's assumed he comes in and ask hey they are asking for this particular feature as a product manager I know the feature does not exist today so my answer will be
00:30:09
Speaker
This is in our roadmap and we will implement that in some time. Okay. Two months long, two months down the line, a different sales rep comes with the same feature request and say, Hey, they are asking, I can't copy and paste the previous answer because now I've implemented that I have to change my answer. Right. But imagine if they are not checking with me, they're just only copy and pasting.
00:30:35
Speaker
they will be copying and pasting the roadmap. Yes, it's a roadmap, roadmap, roadmap, whereas the actual product, you know, it's a big business risk. People are not giving the accurate information, right? But at the same time, the problem with that is even if you are trying to approach me as a product manager, you are coming to me at the 11th hour. I am busy in doing my work. Now you're saying, hey, I have an RFP to be submitted tomorrow. So the problem there with our phone was
00:31:02
Speaker
You know, one is the content is outdated. The second problem is if I need to get the latest content, you know, I'm approaching and pestering these supplement experts at the very last minute and it becomes a bad employee experience, right? So the way we have solved it is in responsive, you don't need to wait until the RFP comes into the door.
00:31:27
Speaker
you can assign product managers, subject matter experts, or your license, or sorry, legal security team, part of the system, so they can have a workflow to maintain certain piece of content, irrespective of whether you have an RP or not. It constantly asks for information. Hey, is this updated? Is this correct? So they have to validate this is the accurate information. So when the, what I call to the frontline teams, the frontline teams, the sales team, your support team, your marketing team, when they consume the content,
00:31:56
Speaker
they're rest assured they're using the latest and greatest information and they're not pestering you or they don't give you a bad employee experience. It's all about keeping the content accurate. So the subject matter experts are more than happy to do it because they're not asking because what you can technically do, what we do is if I'm a product manager, if my release is, you know, on November 30th. So I can have a workflow to ping me on December 3rd.
00:32:23
Speaker
to say this is the content updated. So I don't need to wait for the next RP to comment. Rather, the product manager gets a ping on December 3rd and say, hey, is this accurate? Looks like you had a release now. Or it can ping legal departments. Hey, is this accurate? It looks like you opened a new branch in Germany with a new jurisdiction. Hey, is this accurate? Last month,
00:32:46
Speaker
Last month we said 500 employees or 500 employees or 600 employees or 450 employees. The accurate information need to be given. So periodically that information need to be made. Again, it's not only for RFP, like I'm saying.
00:33:00
Speaker
It is for responding to an email. It is for solving a customer support ticket. So the information is consumed and used for many different cases. For that, the information needs to be kept up to date so that the frontline teams, I'll use this word, right? For the frontline teams, they, even as a CEO, it responds, I don't want my sellers to
00:33:26
Speaker
put any content they think is right, because it becomes a liability, especially in RFP, because it is a legally binding document. Two months down the line, if my sales rep said, okay, we can support this, customer finds out that feature doesn't exist, it becomes a liability for me. So I don't want that to happen. I would rather have a product manager provide accurate information. It could be email, especially coming from eDiscovery, the previous legal side, we are very careful in what
00:33:53
Speaker
electronically we share, it doesn't matter that RPE, it could be email, or it could be a simple chat, it could be a Slack message. So you've got to be compliant. For the frontline teams who are communicating their information to the outside world, it could be, the outside world could be a prospect, your customer, your investor, your regulatory bodies, like SEBI is asking some information, you don't want to throw in some information, so you've got to be okay. So all these external third party, external parties are constantly asking this company and information.
00:34:20
Speaker
So, and we not only sales rep is giving that information, it is could be a marketing team, your investor relationship team, your compliance team, so all of them are communicating. For them to be compliant, okay, to communicating, it can, they can only be compliant when the backend teams like product teams, security team, legal operations team are constantly governing the data. The governance happens behind the scene.
00:34:43
Speaker
the governance they keep keep governing the data so that the frontline teams are rest assured they're communicating the most compliant information. So I can guarantee that is that's our pitch though. Responsive.
00:34:55
Speaker
holds the most compliant information that can be shared with the outside board if you are using responsive. Does it make sense? Yeah, got it. Who sets up the workflows? Like you said, I have a product release on November 30th, on 3rd December, I get a reminder. Is there something which I, as a product manager, set up or the salesperson sets up? How is that workflow set up? Yeah, typically in an organization, there are admins who manage this response.
00:35:21
Speaker
they are like a project manager they will you know sales sales team may not know and they don't have time all these things so there is a content manager typically or a revox manager or you know what they call it as a content owner so they they all that that person distributes the workload or you know what part of the moderation workflow sets up
00:35:43
Speaker
the workflow for moderation. So there are different companies do it differently. But at the end of the day, sometimes proposal managers, proposal bid managers are the ones who are sitting on top of the content. But they are finessing the content, but the raw content needs to come from the product manager. The proposal manager can make it look good. The tone could be better.
00:36:07
Speaker
He or she can make that, but actual content need to come. So that person signs the workload to the different subject matter experts and keeps the workflow on check. Okay, got it. So, you know, the more I understand, the more it seems that a good comparison would be Salesforce.
00:36:27
Speaker
While there are a lot of CRM tools, but typically once a company invests in a CRM, then all its data is in that CRM. I mean, CRM is a very sticky product category. It's hard to replace your CRM because your data is there and you don't want to go through the pain of migrating it and so on.
00:36:45
Speaker
Similarly, once a company adopts the key mode for responsive with the data of the company resides there, then it could be extremely hard for them to switch over to another tool. So really, the speed at which you capture the market will determine how big you grow. Because once you capture a customer, it's unlikely that he will switch over. Correct. Especially that's one of the reasons why, like you said,
00:37:14
Speaker
We hold the enterprise content and most importantly, a lot of our content management stuff, but the difference is we hold the most compliant information. It is coming from the actual person. It is not like somebody is collecting the data and putting it and maintaining the database. It's part of the process. The product manager gets on the release date and the legal team when they open up a new office, the HR team every quarter report or investor relationship team every time they announce the financial results, so they have to maintain it. So everybody are in the system.
00:37:44
Speaker
are you know and then they are constantly governing the data so that it goes to the right folks.
00:37:50
Speaker
So tell me the journey of RFP IO to responsive. Essentially what I understand is that you figured out that it's not just responding to an RFP for which you need this information. You need this information for solving customer queries as part of the customer service or for regulatory compliance or for investor decks. So tell me that journey.
00:38:17
Speaker
You're absolutely right, Akshay. So when we started off, you know, we were pretty laser focused on helping our customers to respond to RFPs period. And then what happened is over a period of time, like I said, when they start collecting that information, right, you know, when they're aware of, and I'm responding, and I like to say, system learns from the responses that you provide.
00:38:44
Speaker
What we noticed is customers started using the content that they curated into security questionnaires and then into due diligence questionnaires, into email. So this is the same content because anyways, the companies are going through the pain of curating the content, making sure it is compliant, making sure the right language is used.
00:39:04
Speaker
Why only use it for an RFP? Why can't we use it for when I communicated an email to a prospect? Why can't the same content be used? Because anyways, it's legally binding. It is customer-facing content. So over a period of time, what we realized, in fact, very recently, last week we had our, a couple of weeks before we had our responses summit, where we invited our users to be part of a virtual conference.
00:39:31
Speaker
During the process, we also surveyed our customers to understand what are they using the product for. It shocking and surprisingly came, it is less than 50% and not even half of our customers are using it for our fees. So there are other questionnaires like security questionnaires, you know, due diligence questionnaires. Recently, we have seen a lot of, you know,
00:39:58
Speaker
ESG questions, you know, environmental, social and governance questionnaire that's coming. And even I'm surprisingly seeing, you know, people are using our technology to respond to grant, to when they apply for a grant, the customers, their grantor is asking some questions. So it's a lot of use cases. So if you look back then, the name RFPIO really resonated well, and it still continued to resonate well. But what it also has limited us to think
00:40:25
Speaker
from an outsider perspective, it's only for RFP system. So the moment that we changed the response, I was telling my CMO Michael Lundgren, I was bummed. There's not a kind of revelation. Whenever I said, oh, it makes sense. People almost, even I'm sure you said the same thing. Oh, yeah, this RFP IO.
00:40:47
Speaker
Now, you know, I understand why this once it became like a natural evolution, not a revolutionary change happened. It became like a natural evolution in a good way. And I was pleasantly happy with that because it, you know, then given you when you drastically change something, you know, you have to spend a lot of energy, time, money to reeducate the market.
00:41:11
Speaker
But the fact that it became almost like an evolution for us, I was very pleased. And I would say, time and again, customers have said this. You guys have selected the right name. And yeah, that's how we transitioned because of our customers using our product for many different uses other than RFPs. And to respond, that's what if you look at this whole new category,
00:41:42
Speaker
is being coined as SRM. What that means stands for is Strategic Response Management. You're basically managing all your strategic responses. It could be RFP response. It could be DDQ response. It could be a grant response. It could be an email. So basically, responsive allows you to manage all your strategic responses in one place. And we are noticing customers are adopting. And in fact, we recently
00:42:13
Speaker
work with a third party to provide what we call as an SRM.
00:42:20
Speaker
maturity report. I'm sure some of my team touched upon that. The maturity report gave us a lot insight. Basically, it gave us an insight into if companies adopt a sort of technologies, whether it is responsive or other products, if they are using their odds of, especially if they fully adopt, their odds of
00:42:45
Speaker
winning deals gets very high. In fact, it's about 16% more than companies who use it, but not as to the extent that it should be used. If you're fully adopting it, it gives you almost 16% more win rate or almost 35% more revenue compared to companies who are not utilizing the ASR platforms like that. So it's a huge event, though it's in 16 and 35%.
00:43:13
Speaker
If you look at real numbers, it is huge, you know, another context, right? As a company, as a product, we calculate all the tenders and RFPs submitted through our platform. When we aggregated the data, left to date, we have processed more than $400 billion worth of RFPs or transaction.
00:43:37
Speaker
400 billion and it's only been a seven and a half years. Successful deals, value of successful deals. I would not say successful deals. 4 billion is value of proposals submitted. Deal that is correct. So deals that have been processed in our platform.
00:43:55
Speaker
Correct. Okay. Amazing. Amazing. So, you know, I understand obviously this is a very large time or a large addressable market, which I guess, you know, it sounds like a mixture of luck and like agility to, I mean, you stumbled upon RFP, which you probably initially would not have realized how large an opportunity it would become.
00:44:25
Speaker
How did you build a culture which allowed you to be agile, to listen to customers and to evolve the product to really take advantage and be in the space where you are today? See, I'm a big believer of organization cultures. Actually, I truly believe
00:44:49
Speaker
Every company in the world has its own culture. Probably someone has defined it in a more documented way, but somebody who is not defined it. But it's like, for me mentally, it is like a fingerprint. Every human being has a unique fingerprint. Similarly, every company has a culture. How soon do you realize that?
00:45:11
Speaker
And how soon if it is good, bad or ugly, you have to, you know, finesse it. Some of the things that we've noticed very early on, you know, in fact, you know, we do have a very defined cultural values, you know, at responsive. I'll spend some minute on that. These are not like, you know,
00:45:32
Speaker
These are not like in a bunch of executives came inside a conference room. We all took our notepad and write some cool ideas and put it on the wall to become a cool idea. It's not like that at all. These are values, you know, we kind of formalized in 2019 timeframe.
00:45:50
Speaker
Looking back, what was this company's all about? 2016 to 19, what did we do for three years? What are the things that we cherished? What are the things that we felt really good about? What are the things that we valued? What are the things that kind of separated us? If you walk into our office, photo office, record office, it's all sorted. We used to have this thing called GT triple D. It stands for get the damn deal done. That's how it started. Initially, we were very
00:46:20
Speaker
focused on getting the deals done. And 2019 when we kind of formalized it, we felt, okay, get the damn deal done sounds little salesy. It's only for sales. So if you go to our website, if you know, one of our values today is G-I-D, get it done. We don't like to slap things. We don't like to sit on things. We are so like to a point, and I'll come to the agility in a minute, but we are so fast in the market to get things done. That's one.
00:46:50
Speaker
The second value, Akshay, we have five values. I walk through a few things that are cheesy for you. The second value is what is called as an S-4. S-4 stands for see something, say something. There are four S's in that. See something, say something. It came out of my original landing when I came to the US for the first time. From Coimbatore, I landed directly at Seattle Airport. And I was waiting for my connecting flight to Portland.
00:47:21
Speaker
I was there for almost three hours waiting for, I was roaming around the airport. It was constantly on the speaker system that where people are saying, if you see an unattended bag, say, because maybe it's after a 911 incident, people, you know, TSA is very, very particular about if you see something, say something. It was, I just kind of caught onto me, my brain said, why aren't there at the airport? It has to be everywhere. We have to harness the power of human intelligence.
00:47:48
Speaker
We have to honor the power of human brain. So it's the value. So if you are part of responsive, you have the liberty to share it. The promise that we give to every employee is we can't solve every problem, like every employee. But as a corporate citizen, their responsibility, if they see something, it is not working or working, they have to say it. The person who receives that information has every liberty to take action.
00:48:18
Speaker
not take action, but you have to say, that's a see something, say something. Third value is what going to your point. B called as BAN, B-A-N. BAN stands for be agile and nimble. This actually came out of our customers. They said, we have never worked with a software provider who's so quick in launching features and being agile and we raise a ticket. They requested, please don't lose that agility.
00:48:46
Speaker
And that became like part of us. We said we are no matter how big we grow. We are today almost 550 employees. This is even this is started when we are less than 100 employees. So we said no matter how big we grow, we got to be agile and nimble. So that became be agile and nimble.
00:49:07
Speaker
But just stating it doesn't make it real. How did you make it real? How did you make the agility happen? I mean, just putting it down as a value doesn't make it real. Absolutely. I think it's not just poster ideas. There's also things. If you look at how we operate in many different ways, a lot of companies do say they listen to customers. Correct. You know, how they implement. You know, as a product manager, I have
00:49:33
Speaker
I also have 8 to 10 hours in my day to work on. And so maybe one, two customers will talk. That's practically not possible to solve with their paper. For that reason, we have built a feature inside the product. You can submit an idea. We have over almost 4,000,000 users in the system. So one user putting an idea, every 4,000,000 user can see that idea and put on it, download on it. They can comment on it. So it became
00:50:01
Speaker
a source of roadmap item for our product team. And they act upon it so quickly. We take that too seriously. We say, even if you're not implementing an idea, we will say it to the customer. So that is essentially what Microsoft, you know, Microsoft, it's ironic, Microsoft when they selected us in 2018, they issued an RFP for an RFP software. It was ironic, but we went through the RFP process. And they finally, when they said one of the reasons kind of separated us from the rest of the crowd,
00:50:31
Speaker
is how quick we were able to gather the requirement and build it and process it. Essentially, the device had crowdsourcing ideas and implementing on it and acting on it. That kind of separated stuff. That is part of our DNA, product DNA. Again, end of the day, this is
00:50:49
Speaker
This is run by a bunch of product managers. This company is now including myself. So we understood that agility and we process, again, typical URL process, we have all those crumbs, but at a tactical level. How quickly we launch? I'm a firm believer of launch fast, fail fast, learn fast. So we all believe that in that process. So we don't like to, you know, take months and months to do certain analysis.
00:51:20
Speaker
Just do it and learn it again with right set the right expectation. Don't don't create unrealistic expectation. Don't say we are the best, you know, when you are eventually trying to improvise your, your idea. So setting the right expectation internally. Also, right. You know, your sales team should believe this is a
00:51:39
Speaker
product that is getting mature. So they are overselling something, setting the expectation of the prospects, setting the expectation of the customer. Hey, this is alpha, beta, beta, you know, that kind of separated us and it still continued to separate us. And I'll talk about the fourth bullet, right? You know, we have this thing called GBT, which stands for give back time.
00:52:00
Speaker
every technology company, this is probably a perfect answer for your question. How are we implementing every, every company today? They're going to say, well, automation creates efficiency. We are living back time. Absolutely. We are doing the same thing. How can I take that to one level more, right? You know, we don't like to mess around people's time. I don't want my time to be wasted by anybody. It's only fair for my employees to think I did not waste my time. It could be your manager. It could be your, your, your, your subordinate.
00:52:29
Speaker
So the fact that I have the authority, I should not take somebody's time for granted. We insist so much. If the meeting gets wrapped up early, they should wrap up early. Don't wait for it. Since the manager is asking just for sake of where I can get together one-on-ones, if you don't need it, don't wait. Give back the time to employees. Give back the time to the prospect. Give back the time to the customers. Give back the time to the investors. Give back the time to your partners. That's how we see things.
00:52:59
Speaker
Last but not the least value, we used to call this as DMC. And when we rebranded, we changed it to DOC, D-O-C. DMC stands for don't mess with your customer. Don't mess with customer. DMC, that was. And when we rebranded, we want to give a positive reinforcement rather than negative. So we changed it to delight our customers, became DOC.
00:53:27
Speaker
Pure, essential reason is to delight our customers. They are the ones who are keeping our lights on. And we already know customers have thousands of problems to deal with. And we should not become the thousand one problem to deal with. So we have to be the most easiest company to work with. We have to build features that our customers truly value, and they get delighted to use it. So that's our core method. These are the five values, GBT, giving back time, see something safe, say something, and get it done.
00:53:57
Speaker
Be agile and nimble, delight our customers. These are five things that kind of inbuilt. I'll be surprised if any of my team members are not even calling it out. I'm very pleased. I've seen profound impact on company, how we have as a company performed with these things. And we still follow that pretty heavily.
00:54:19
Speaker
It gives you so many reasons. Giving back time or I see something say something at even at the intern level, it gives them a reason to escalate something. Hey, I've seen so many times they'll say in the spirit of S4, I'm saying something. Again, I'm not complaining. They use the word called in the spirit of S4, I'm giving. In the spirit of
00:54:41
Speaker
giving back time, I don't need to have a meeting. So it saves so much of time. In the spirit of getting things done, I'll do it. Next time, you do it. I've seen this thing coming all along every part of our company's day-to-day work.
00:55:00
Speaker
Amazing. For the delight of our customer party, you must have invested in like a customer support, customer success team, like to make it real. Because again, you know, like to make those words, you need to back it up with some sort of investments or processes.
00:55:19
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. You know, that is one of the reason if you look at, again, these are not like this for the namesake or a poster idea. Sure, you track companies on, you know, review platforms like G2 crowd, Capita, software advice. If you look at our reviews, we have the most number of reviews and we have the most ratings as well.
00:55:42
Speaker
It doesn't, you know, these are not like, okay, we, you know, these are not like manipulated reviews. These are genuine reviews, sometimes anonymous reviews. Sometimes we do get critical reviews as well. Hey, you guys have to improve the product. Absolutely. We take it to the heart. There is a reason why I think mainly because again, we don't like to call this other. This is pure, what I call it as a customer experience, you know, from end to end. It is not just customer success department. That's what most other people think. It is only that department, support departments respond. I don't think so. It's a case.
00:56:13
Speaker
The day one, the customer goes to your website or the prospect goes to your website and looks up for you. From there to the journey, everything is important. The experience is much more important than just solving support. So I think that is what I've separated. It is not just one department. It is the entire company's focus to provide. That is why it is not a departmental goal, DOC. It is a company goal. It's everybody.
00:56:42
Speaker
legal department talking to customers should be polite. Our collection department who's talking to a customer who kind of forgot to process the payment, every experience matters. It's not just customer success teams role.
00:56:59
Speaker
How do you evaluate how people are doing on these? Do you use some sort of a tool to do that? Or is it culturally ingrained and therefore you don't need a formal evaluation system? We do it as a combination. We don't like to
00:57:22
Speaker
micromanage people in a way, because again, like again, this is going back to the core teams that responsible right in a seven year or eight years before I was on the other side of the table as an employee, I was listening to my company's speech, I was listening, I had certain expectation for my manager, I had certain expectation from the CEO. Now that we are on the other side, it doesn't make us superhuman. It is same Ganesh who was on the other side. Now that I have more visibility, I have more responsibility,
00:57:51
Speaker
But it's only fair for my employees to expect the same thing that I expected out of my manager, out of my company. So we do a combination of, we follow OKR at the department level with objective key results. And then in terms of, we empower the managers to go to evaluate the performance in combination of that. So that's how we do. But we don't go in doodily and micromanage people.
00:58:21
Speaker
That's not us. Okay. Got it. Got it. Tell me about how you learned to do sales. You know, in terms of acquiring, you said that 20% of Fortune 100 companies are your customers. So, you know, what are some of the sales hacks which you've learned, especially when you're selling to such large enterprises? What works? What doesn't work?
00:58:44
Speaker
See, like I said, I had the privilege of being a sales rep myself and I started off my career as a sales rep in a few times. I'm not a technology guy. So I had a little bit of a fair understanding of what a good sales team looked like. So the first and foremost thing is to
00:59:07
Speaker
have an amazing sales team who understand the product and who understands the problem that your company is solving. So in the initial days, you know, I think I was almost close to 20 of the first 20 or 30 customers is probably personally by me. We did not have the sales department. So it gave me exposure, not just sales, how to sell technology, you know, then
00:59:32
Speaker
One thing I would say, actually, in the very early on process, again, going back to our value of get the damn deal done, right? You know, one of the, you know, my mentors was no longer with us. He passed away a couple of years before. He instilled two thoughts in my brain. One is, time kills peace.
01:00:01
Speaker
You got to act fast. That is how get the damn deal done came into play. Time kills deals. The second one is his head is compensation drives behavior. Most often, especially founder-driven sales team gets this a little bit wrong because when you say compensation drives behavior, it is also the opposite. What behavior you wanted
01:00:32
Speaker
you have to compensate for that. Most often the problem that I've seen is it will be contradicting. You want one behavior and your compensation structure will contradict that. It will be on the opposite. So it is kind of create this different ways of thinking. It doesn't create a cohesive system because you want the sales sellers to understand
01:00:58
Speaker
and be happy about doing something. And they have to be incentivized for that behavior. So very early on, we have done that. In 2017, our behavior that we wanted at that time was acquiring logos. As long as they're paying customers, at that time, our compensation for the sales team was purely on as long as they're paying customers
01:01:28
Speaker
we will compensate you. We didn't care about how big the deal size was. We didn't care about any other things. It's not free. They're paying. They're paying monthly. They're paying semi-annually. So bring them in. We'll pay you instead of that. Grow there. So in 2018, I fundamentally saw the shift. In 2018, we changed it to annual contract. We said, no, no, we no longer need because we have enough customers who can speak about us. So we changed the compensation structure
01:01:57
Speaker
to drive that behavior of bringing a yearly contract. So we stopped monthly. We stopped giving a large discount, which is an annual contract. And 2019, we said we're changing the behavior to long-term contracts. Today, more than 50% of our contracts is minimum two or three year contracts. And especially when it comes to enterprise companies, we go for longer contracts. So that was one of
01:02:27
Speaker
I would say one of the early understanding that we were able to implement that properly is having an amazing sales team. And it is also important to, because end of the day, what I realized is early startups, early C startups need to keep a positive momentum all the time, every time, unless if you don't have a positive environment,
01:02:52
Speaker
It spoils the morale, it creates negativity, it brings you down. For that reason, very early on in the stage itself, we celebrated everything, especially on the sale. Because when the sales team is humming, when the sales team is celebrating, it boils down to the entire company. So we found every reason to celebrate the sales success.
01:03:13
Speaker
That kind of helped us to retain even our, still our first sales rep is there. Our VP of sales is our third sales rep who joined us as a sales rep and is now a VP. Although we recently brought in our first chief revenue officer early on this year, but our VP of sales is, you know, we still have people who joined us in the early stages to continue, you know, after 780 sales team. These people have continued to be there. So that's,
01:03:42
Speaker
I would say this is one of the greatest ingredient that we had, and I'm very proud of his retention of the team who understands the problem. If I'm not mistaken, in this whole proposal management phase, I was talking to one of our senior most sales rep, his definition, he is the most tenured rep in this whole industry, not just with our responsive,
01:04:10
Speaker
because he has been in this space for almost 25 years and he's with us for five years now. So imagine the brain power that we are getting. So when we speak to enterprise customer, we speak as subject matter expert. We speak as problem solvers. We speak and customers understand when we speak, we are speaking
01:04:33
Speaker
the right thing, and we know what we are doing like that. So the customers appreciate and respect our view and the problem that we're solving and the solution that we are providing the customers understand and appreciate. A lot of times, customers have said, wow, can I use this product for this? We have educated our customers more than, you know, at this stage, you know, we have, like I said, we have many large enterprises that we have learned a lot. We have continuous learning, but we have also educated back saying, hey, you can use this product, especially in this given
01:05:03
Speaker
you know, economic headwind that we are seeing, people are expected to do more with less. And a product like Responsive helps them to achieve just that. Because, you know, especially when people are switching jobs, when the content in their brain walks out the door with them and their employee leaves if you're not centralizing it, you're risking the business. The information
01:05:28
Speaker
It's gone. So how can we harness that information into one place? And how can we leverage that? How can we democratize? It's not just one thing that we did. The right team, right problem that we're solving, right product that we gave to the market, right agility that we had. So all this combination kind of worked us in our favor. All right.
01:05:52
Speaker
How do you structure your sales team? Because they are different activities, right? You need somebody who would do more cold, outbound prospecting, and then somebody who would talk to the more qualified leads, and then you would probably have a client success team which would handle the onboarding after the contract is done. Just help you understand how you structure the whole customer-facing teams.
01:06:17
Speaker
Yeah, so at the top level, there's what we call the GTM team, and then there is CMO. Then we have COO who manages what we call as professional services and customer success and support.
01:06:38
Speaker
RCRO manages two different or three different teams. One is what called as a business development team, who basically does cold calling outbound. And they work very closely with account executive team, whose primary role is to close deals on the new business side. This is a third team, which is called as an account management team, who goes and crosses and upsets with our existing customer base, who increases the license.
01:07:07
Speaker
Business development, we also have an ADR team, account development. So business development has two divisions, sales development and account development. Sales development works tightly with the new business team. Account development works tightly with the account management team. So that's how we structure. And under operations, we have professional services team who also manages our onboarding. And we have a customer success team who's maintaining the ongoing relationship.
01:07:34
Speaker
So once onboarded by the onboarding team, they hand it off to the customer success team. The customer success team, they are not cross-selling and upselling. They are adding value. They are creating value. They are solving problems for the customer. They are helping them to use the system more. They train the customer. All those things are happening in the customer success team. And if there is any support, like bugs, all those things, that goes to our customer support team. So that's how our customer facing teams are structured.
01:08:04
Speaker
It sounds a little... So if I'm the customer success rep for a particular company, they would be most comfortable with me for everything, including upselling. Why have a separate account management team? I mean, it sounds a little chaotic with so many people looking at one account.
01:08:28
Speaker
True. We have a very clear transition thing. So the moment the new business sales happens, so the new business team will hand it off to the onboarding person. So when the expectation is set, so the expectation is set by the onboarding thing, hey, they are only for helping you to onboard, migrate your old content. Once that is done, they get introduced to customer success manager and account manager. Those are the two reps who maintain the relationship throughout their lifetime of the customer.
01:08:57
Speaker
on post sales process. Could you not have this one person doing this? Because we don't want our customer success team to, again, compensation drives behaviour. I want our customer success team to be a subject matter expert there for real success, not trying to sell constantly.
01:09:20
Speaker
We should not sell that. And their compensation is not driven based on anything like that. It is purely based on retention.
01:09:29
Speaker
So again, compensation drive behavior. Right. Interesting. Yeah. So you don't want to compensate customer success team with revenue targets. You want somebody else to change the revenue targets. Got it. Okay. Very interesting. And what does your go-to-market team do? So go-to-market team is like doing the marketing. No, go-to-market team is, we have very clear go-to-market. When we say go-to-market, it is a combination of sales and marketing. We have a CMO and CRO. Combination is what go-to-market team is.
01:09:57
Speaker
So, our go-to market, you know, when we talk about our CMOs organization, we're talking about demand gen, content marketing, events marketing, events. And that is, you know, primarily the focus of product marketing.
01:10:16
Speaker
Customer marketing. So we have different departments under CMO. So basically anything to do with marketing. What is customer marketing? I mean, is it everything? What does that mean? Oh, customer marketing means marketing to existing customers, like about upselling.
01:10:35
Speaker
Correct. So when we launch a new product in feature, they have to take it to the existing install base. So they have to run a campaign that has been driven by customer marketing. Okay. Okay. And how does demand happen? Like through paid ads and in addition to events and content? You know, we have paid, we have organic SEO things, we have, you know, what to call it as an
01:11:03
Speaker
you know, PPC campaigns that we do. So, and then of course, like you said, events, we attend events. And we also conduct, you know, thought leaderships that we do. So all those systems in combination. Okay.
01:11:23
Speaker
What's your learning about how to price a SaaS product? You must have gone through a journey of figuring out what is the right way to price it, just taking through that journey. You know, when you lost, how did you price it, and how is that mature to where you are today? In fact, I would say we got lucky. We did not do a lot of changes. You know, even today, it's the same price, but we are changing.
01:11:53
Speaker
eight years we had the same model. But our model is very unique. In a way, probably you've not heard about it most of the time. But we are not, typically when you talk about SaaS product, they charge you based on the number of seats that you have. But we have not traditionally charged based on seats because we fundamentally believe, I think that thought worked out for us. So for example, on our customer,
01:12:23
Speaker
hires a product manager or hires a security person. That person is probably not directly contributing to their revenue. As part of the growing pain, they're filling those roles. And if I go in between and say, hey, you have a new product manager, you need a new decision. And we never wanted to be part of a growing pain. On the flip side, if you are responding to RFPs, you are winning more deals, you are responding to more RFPs, you're bringing in revenue for your company.
01:12:53
Speaker
We want to be part of the revenue generation process, not part of a growing thing. So we structured our license based on volume of projects that you manage in the platform. Plus integrations, we have other means. But that's how we started. We were very clear in being part of revenue and adding value. And customers did not have any heartburn or hesitation because when they are doing more, when they are asking more license, that means that tells me
01:13:20
Speaker
they're adding more RFP, they're adding more revenue. And if they're making more revenue, they're happy to share that with us. So that's how we structured that. So in the new model that we are implementing, Glam will be a combination of both. We're trying to optimize it in a way, customers don't feel it too burdensome.
01:13:46
Speaker
And we also have an opportunity because the problem with that model is sometimes you are limited if you are managing it, if the customer is managing the license properly, there is no upset option. You are limiting your upset option. So we are trying to balance the opportunity for us to upsell and cross-sell plus providing revenue or value for the customer. So we are optimizing that as we speak.
01:14:12
Speaker
So you told me that 50% of usage is RFPs only. So if you remain stuck with an RFP-based pricing, like how many RFPs you're responding to, so you are the other 50% value you're providing free of cost in a way. So you won't know. No, that's why we don't call this an RFP. We call this project. Each one becomes a project. It doesn't matter what the project could be. It could be RFP. It could be security questionnaire. It could be data questionnaire. It could be a grant.
01:14:42
Speaker
everything and anything that you process to the system for as a response, it becomes a project. So we license it based on the projects, not on all of these. Okay. So if the marketing team needs some information about the product roadmap, that will be counted as a project if they're pulling out that information for putting on the website or whatever.
01:15:04
Speaker
Before that becomes an integration we have we sell what we call we have a product called lookup. So, that is a special product that is what we are talking about accessing the content is different from running through a project like an RFP. So, we have you know project by license plus connection. So, if you want to look up the information on your email or if you want to look up the information on your Slack that is
01:15:24
Speaker
that product is called lookup, you can lookup that information. So that has been licensed separately as an add-on, alongside with your original licensing structure. Yeah, okay, got it, got it, got it. And what, give me some idea of what the pricing would be like.
01:15:40
Speaker
It depends on, like I said, it depends on the number of projects. So, you know, you're at the minimum, you're looking at about $15,000 at the maximum, you can go to a million dollars. So it depends on $10,000 for how many projects? Five projects, you will start with a million, five projects.
01:15:59
Speaker
OK, got it. So what is the way to increase your market further? I'm guessing right now a company which is selling to businesses would only be looking at this software. But let's say a company like, say, Unilever. So Unilever is a pure consumer-facing company. They may not really have a need to respond to an RFP. They may not think about going in for an RFP software.
01:16:28
Speaker
even though they would have other needs, you know, like the ESC and the regulatory need, but they may not think of looking for an RFP tool. So what is the way in which you can capture that market as well? Like, you know, what are your thoughts on growing your addressable market? That's the exact reason why we rebranded our company. Our messaging will be, you know, end of the day, Akshay, what we're trying to do,
01:16:56
Speaker
Even before the market is wide enough, even people who are responding to every company, to an extent, you have to respond to the market.
01:17:08
Speaker
you know, even you talk about Unilever, I'm pretty sure if Unilever is trying to send all their product to government agencies or, you know, they're trying to put it in their city, they have to respond to it. So the problem that they're solving is very unique. It's not like, you know, there are a few companies may say, okay, it's not a good for us. But you know, the problem is very resonating, you know, resonating. But more than that, right, when we rebranded the company, we also take a hard look at the vision of the company.
01:17:37
Speaker
What are we trying to achieve? What is the big vision this company is having? It becomes very evident what we're trying to do is along the lines of companies to share information. Basically, our vision is to empower organizations in and around the world, effectively share and exchange their information.
01:18:05
Speaker
A company is requesting information, a company is responding to information. So our mission is to create the world's most powerful information exchange platform. We want to become the de facto platform to share and exchange information. And our platform will be supporting that. So you talked about RFP. So we do have an opportunity to help people who are requesting information.
01:18:36
Speaker
The buyer knows the questionnaire. Instead of sending you to an Excel document or a Word document, they can, with the product we have in the market, they can issue the questionnaire. And if you're already as a responder on the platform, so basically we are trying to bring both sides of the spectrum onto the same platform. Our vision is to create or empower organizations through information exchange.
01:18:59
Speaker
most easiest way. Streamlining the process is what we are after. I do think that's the big hack that we have.
01:19:06
Speaker
That sounds pretty exciting as an opportunity. Is that a monetizable opportunity? You have to get buyers on the platform because one approach could be to say that you offer it to buyers at a free or very low cost because getting buyers on the platform gives you more sellers. If a buyer sends an RFP through responsive, the seller will wonder, hey, what's this? You have an opportunity to sell to him.
01:19:33
Speaker
So is that what you're looking at it as, or is that like a monetizable opportunity which you're looking at? It's a little early in that thought process right now, but we, you know, it could be that, you know, there are different ways to look at things like that. So it's a little early in this process. But, you know, imagine a world, if you're trying to buy something today, you have to go through the painful procurement team handles the
01:20:03
Speaker
the purchase process. But procurement team probably are not the right people to ask questions. They are depending on what should I even ask vendor. If you're trying to sell a system, you're trying to buy an ERP system. They are depending on the business uses to provide the requirements. How on the responding side, the sellers are coordinating with multiple subject metrics for the product managers and the subject security people to get the answers. Procurement team faces a very similar challenge in getting the questions.
01:20:33
Speaker
So we can facilitate gathering the questions in a more simplistic way between procurement team and the business users. More importantly, how with our artificial intelligence, how we are recommending answers based on your historical. Similarly, with our AI capability, we can let the business users
01:20:53
Speaker
draft initial set of questions that they want to ask the vendors. Otherwise, it feels like you're writing an exam. Okay, now you have your primary job as a business user you're doing. Now you have to sit and draft a requirement. I'm looking for this. It kind of includes it your day-to-day job. So how can we empower them to ask the right question and provide them a set of questions? So that is where our mind is up to them. So that we can help both sides in a very effective way.
01:21:20
Speaker
Okay, that sounds like a sizable opportunity and there could even be an opportunity for you to help buyers to find the right vendors because once you understand what is important for a buyer, what it is they are placing on waste parameter and you also know from your customer base who's the best fit for a buyer, then this could be a matchmaking opportunity.
01:21:42
Speaker
maybe eliminating the need for a natural thing. You are becoming our product manager. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely, you are absolutely right. That's the natural extension. But again, first things first, we are trying to solve the response to this problem really solid. And I think that's a big enough opportunity there. So we're focused on that. We're eventually getting into the requesting side. But again, especially in the SaaS, you
01:22:11
Speaker
You can't have anything two or three years beyond. Things change so rapidly. One year before, nobody even thought about chat CPT. Today, the entire roadmap is kind of took for a ride because of this whole generative AI. So we'll see how that turns out. But at least right now, our focus is to streamline the information exchange process as smooth as possible.
01:22:34
Speaker
Yeah, right. I'm wondering if this is a concern or not. I'm assuming that each customer's content trains your AI, right? Which is then available to other customers, that AI. No. No. We use each customer data to train their own recommendation engine. Each recommendation engine gets trained based on
01:23:02
Speaker
that particular, and we don't cross-pollinate between customers. But say you're going to a buyer, and you're going to recommend questions to him. Where is that recommendation of questions coming from? Oh, we have multiple ways. We are going to allow the vendors to post questions, what they think they should be asking. And we can normalize that and provide that as part of the process instead of
01:23:30
Speaker
intruding into vendors side and gather. A lot of times, even today, when the buyer is trying to buy something, it is a known fact that sometimes they ask the vendors, hey, do you have a sample RFP that you guys have received in the past so that we can use it as a baseline item?
01:23:47
Speaker
It creates an awkward situation for the buyer to go to the vendor. So imagine a situation where the vendors upload in our platform and us as a sponsor normalize that to remove all the brand names and then make it more common.
Future Directions and Business Challenges
01:24:04
Speaker
It removes that embarrassment from the buying side. Now they are saying we got a set of questions from a sponsor, not from a vendor.
01:24:12
Speaker
And when does there any way uploading questions on responsive, right? I mean, any vendor who's a responsive customer is uploading every RFP. We don't do that today, but that's where we are heading towards. Right, correct. So what have been your own learnings in this journey of building up responsive? One is building a company is not easy.
01:24:41
Speaker
You know, a truly a customer funded business is truly sets them apart from a lot of companies who try to raise a ton of money or trying to raise money. You got to put yourself in a position where it is truly a customer funded business, that one. And your personal problem is not universal problem.
01:25:11
Speaker
You have to validate, validate, validate. Though, yes, you have experience, my eye faces challenge doesn't mean that customers are also facing. We should not assume that the problem that we have is the same because even version one of RFPIO is completely different from in the sponsors today's version. So that leverages your network storage.
01:25:34
Speaker
How do you leverage the network? How do you leverage? So don't be shy. You can't be shy. Like the first 20 sales you did yourself, that was through the power of your network. Even the fundraise, the first investor was through your network. Correct. So that you can't be shy, asking for help. You can't run a company if you're shy on mingling with people, asking for help, networking people.
01:26:04
Speaker
So that is a hard shell that I have to broke. Again, I'm not, I did not even had a Facebook account until 2015. Okay, so I know, so once I start, these things you got to develop. And creating an inclusive environment is very important, you know, where people feel they are a part of this process. It is not, okay, one or two persons company.
01:26:31
Speaker
It is part of this process. We are all in this. Creating that supportiveness, creating the culture. Again, understanding this is not charity trust. Understand this is for a profit organization. You need that hunger, but it's also important to be humble.
01:26:54
Speaker
Help me understand when you say that you are a customer-funded company, how much have you raised till date? As of now, are you profitable? No need to raise further funds?
01:27:08
Speaker
Yeah, we are truly accustomed. We are, we are funded by a private equity firm called K1 out of LA. They are a minority holder in our business. But I think your last one was 2018, which is like five more than five years back. Yeah, we didn't get 25 million ratio of 25 million dollars. But we also did a couple of acquisitions in 2021.
01:27:37
Speaker
And so we are not in the market to raise capital. We've been profitable for a long time and we continue to operate profitably. So again, that's also one behavior we have always wanted. We have to create what we call as a sustainable business. It's always important for us to create a sustainable business. So that's what I figured, you know, my partners and we always
01:28:07
Speaker
think about how can we be sustainable and not be dependent. So today, no one customer holds more than one percentage of our revenue. So there's no dependency there. There's no dependency in geolocation. And there is no dependency in industry. What's the average contract value across all the states?
01:28:36
Speaker
It varies. We don't go across all segments. We have different segments, SMB, mid-market and up, right? So from 15,000 to 40,000 to from 150,000 to a million dollars. It's a good number to understand your pricing power, right? If you have one average across all customers. Close to about 50,000 to 75,000, 50,000 dollars is probably I would say.
01:29:02
Speaker
And have you crossed 50 million dollars a year? Like what kind of a year are you at? When do you think you'll hit 100 million? We are on track probably in the next 18 to 24 months. Wow. Amazing. Amazing.
01:29:24
Speaker
So you ideally would be like a unicorn, right? I mean, you've not raised funds in the last five years, but if you were to, $100 million profitable SaaS business would be a unicorn, right? I mean, if you were to raise funds to do. Again, I'm not too much worried about that. That's not our focus. We don't, uh, you know, again, like our focus is creating a sustainable business and our focus is to solve problems of customers. But I mean, only with a speculative, uh, again, uh, again,
01:29:52
Speaker
Even at the peak of 2021, and I'm sure the lot of companies done, we have also gotten attractive off. We kind of were pretty heads down on creating a business like this.
01:30:06
Speaker
And that brings us to the end of this conversation. I want to ask you for a favor now. Did you like listening to the show? I'd love to hear your feedback about it. Do you have your own startup ideas? I'd love to hear them. Do you have questions for any of the guests that you heard about in the show? I'd love to get your questions and pass them on to the guests. Write to me at adatthepodium.in. That's adatthepodium.in.