Dan Zugelder, Chief Revenue Officer at Dynatrace, shares advice for revenue leaders about creating a customer-centric and collaborative culture for scaling growth. Dan also discusses the advantages to data-driven decision-making that can fuel innovation, drive sustainable growth, and manage risk.
This episode features an interview with Dan Zugelder, Chief Revenue Officer at Dynatrace.
With his extensive sales background, Dan offers valuable insights into building a customer-centric culture that fosters collaboration—a crucial element for driving scalable growth. Drawing on his experience, Dan shares advice for revenue leaders on empowering teams to work together seamlessly, including leveraging data and customer feedback, driving innovation, and effectively managing risks.
About Dan:
Dan joined Dynatrace in July 2023 as Chief Revenue Officer. He oversees Dynatrace’s go-to-market strategies and revenue generation activities. He brings over 30 years of leadership and expertise in sales, client relationship development, and business management. Prior to joining Dynatrace, Dan served as Senior Vice President and General Manager, Americas at VMware, Inc. Prior to that, he served as Senior Vice President, Global Accounts at VMware, Inc. He has also held leadership positions at Dell EMC and ADP. Outside of work, Dan enjoys spending time at the beach with his wife Lori, and 3 adult children. He is an avid sports enthusiast and reader.
About Dynatrace:
Dynatrace exists to make software work perfectly. The Dynatrace platform unifies observability, business, and security data at a massive scale (Grail) with continually updated topology and dependency mapping (Smartscape) to capture and retain full-stack data context. It leverages hypermodal AI (Davis), combining predictive AI to anticipate future behaviors, causal AI to deliver precise answers and intelligent automation, and generative AI to automatically provide recommendations, create suggested workflows or dashboards, and let people use natural language to explore, solve, and complete tasks. Dynatrace analytics and automation capabilities enable teams to modernize and optimize cloud operations, deliver software faster and more securely, and ensure flawless digital experiences.
According to Dan:
“A big push of ours is to better understand what's resonating with our customers: where they see the value, feedback they have, what are their needs, how are their needs changing, and how can we be positioned to help them? Remember, product development is not something that you turn on in a matter of days, weeks, or months. It's sometimes years to do product development. You want to make sure you understand where your customers are going and what their needs are in advance.”
“One thing about all the decisions a CRO makes is that it can distract you from your focus. Typically, we start our year with a business plan signed off by the board. We're saying, ‘These are the major things we need to accomplish this year.’ Now, you have a new opportunity come across. Do we lose our focus on the existing things? If we don't look at new things and as things change, are we missing an opportunity? I find that to be one of the hardest things I do.”
“Whether it's Marketing, Product, or Customer Success, you need to be in it with them. That's where you achieve outcomes. I sometimes get focused on my own organization and what we're supposed to deliver, but knowing that, ultimately, the best is when it's highly collaborative. We'll achieve a lot more that way… Everybody has their targets that are put in for good reason, but to get too heads-down and not pick your head up enough could be a mistake.”
Episode Timestamps:
*(00:35) - Dan’s Role at Dynatrace and Background
*(00:50) - Transitioning and Scaling at Dynatrace
*(07:35) - Creating a Collaborative Customer-Centric Culture
*(14:30) - Managing Innovation with Collaborative Decision-Making
*(37:30) - Advice for Transforming Revenue Generation
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About Accenture
Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world’s leading businesses, governments and other organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services—creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent and innovation led company with 738,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world’s leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. We combine our strength in technology with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability. We are uniquely able to deliver tangible outcomes because of our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Accenture Song. These capabilities, together with our culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable us to help our clients succeed and build trusted, lasting relationships. We measure our success by the 360° value we create for our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities. Visit us at www.accenture.com.
About Conga
Conga crushes complexity in an increasingly complex world. With our Revenue Lifecycle Management solution, we transform each company’s unique complexities for order configuration, execution, fulfillment, and contract renewal processes with a unified data model that adapts to ever-changing business requirements and aligns the understanding and efforts of every team. Our approach is grounded in the Conga Way, a framework of entrepreneurial spirit and achieving together to champion our 11,000+ customers. We’re committed to our customers and to removing complexity in an increasingly complex world. Our solutions quickly adapt to changing business models so you can normalize your revenue management processes.
Conga has global operations across North America, Europe, and Asia. Learn more at conga.com or follow Conga on Twitter: @congahq.
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Phil: [00:00:00] Welcome to Revenue Reinvention, the podcast where we get real about transforming business for predictable success. Joining us today is Dan Zugelder, Chief Revenue Officer at Dynatrace, a leading software company with over 30 years of executive and sales leadership experience at multi-billion dollar companies. Dan offers a unique lens into the evolution of the Chief Revenue Officer role. We'll unpack how his sales experience has molded the culture at Dynatrace. Let's jump right in. Well, hi, Dan. Welcome. Thanks so much for making the time to talk with me today. How's it going?
Dan: Going great, Phil. How are you?
Phil: I'm doing pretty great, thanks. It's a beautiful day. I'm really excited to dig into this and learn a little bit from your experience. So, as I understand it, you've been in the role for about a year now. Can you tell us a little bit about your role and some of the biggest challenges that you see right now?
Dan: Okay. Well, my role is I'm CRO at [00:01:00] Dynatrace. I've been at Dynatrace for, as you said, almost a year. And for me, it was a transition as my first CRO role. I've been, previously, at Dynatrace, I was at VMware and I ran the Americas at VMware. And prior to that, I was at Dell and EMC before that. So it's my first year into a new role. So it's been exciting.
Phil: I can only imagine. What would you say are the differences between those two companies in terms of how they operate and what the culture is like for you?
Dan: Well, actually quite different. One is just scale. So Dynatrace has approximately one and a half billion dollar ARR business, whereas VMware was closer to a 12 billion dollar business. So you had a substantially different scale company. Now, Dynatrace has been around for quite a while, but really, has been on what I'll call a significant growth trajectory over the last three or four years. We went public just over [00:02:00] four years ago, whereas VMware went public nearly 20 years ago. So you just have different maturity curves and different scales, I'd say would be the biggest difference.
Phil: And with companies that are so different in their maturity levels as public companies, what sort of skills do you find for you to look good? You transferred over from the last role to this one that really positioned you for success.
Dan: Well, it allows you to see what a business at scale looks like. I've been fortunate to be a part of Dell, previous to that, which acquired EMC. All were, you know, significantly larger in Dynatrace. What I got to experience is what, you know, businesses, how do they run at scale? How do they operationalize their business? How do they do things that allow them to grow in a more automated fashion versus, you know, every single thing to be a heavy lift?
Phil: Yeah, sure. I've heard something similar from some former Google execs. I heard they went from when Google was small, they grew to when Google was [00:03:00] big, and then they popped out into smaller companies. And they said, they learned how to scale, and how a big company scales so they could do it faster at a smaller company. And it sounds like something that's similar. Do you feel like that's something that's common in a transition to this role? And do you talk with other CROs and compare notes about how people step from one place to another?
Dan: Well, I certainly compare notes with a number of CROs that have taken over businesses. I'll call, I'll use the word a little less mature, and all the things that need to be considered to get them to maturity. And, you know, some of the things that you took for granted that were in place, maybe it was your hiring, how you profile your hiring, how you did your compensation, how you did some things that you took for granted, they were just in place for you.
So you were just leading, worrying about CSAT and driving the business. You didn't have to worry about that. Whereas, I have to look at all aspects right now. [00:04:00] Some of these things are in place, but many of them are not. So, you, you kind of have to look at it kind of from the ground up, if you want to call it.
Phil: Well, that sounds like something that could be a bit of a challenge, an additional challenge, but obviously an incredible opportunity at the same time, and it seems like you explained earlier that you are going through a bit of a transition at the company. So can you describe a little bit about the transition of the company and how collaborating maybe with different departments that are in different stages of where you've come from has actually set you on this path to guiding this transformation that you're seeking?
Dan: Yeah, we're, we're transitioning as a business because you know, when you're, even if you look at a percentage, you know, if you're growing 20% a year and you are a $500 million business, that's adding a hundred million dollars a year. So, it's a lot, 20 percent is a lot, but it's 100 million. When you're 1.5 billion and you're adding 20%, now it's 300 million you're growing. [00:05:00] So, you kind of look at everything you did and say, I can't do this without the team all in it together. And I think that sometimes when you're smaller, everybody's kind of off doing their own thing. As you start to grow and scale the business, you need every part of the organization to be aligned and in lockstep to allow for those bigger dollar growth that you need to achieve every year.
Phil: So for you as a leader, you got to lean on skills you developed, and your background is very heavy in sales. So could you share with us a little bit about how your extensive background, through the different experiences you had, leads you to a leadership style that kind of facilitates that team growth scaling leadership that you need?
Dan: Yeah, I think, you know, we feel we've talked about this briefly before. I was fortunate to be a part of some very different roles, although all sales [00:06:00] roles are very different. I started ADP as my first job out of school, and I spent nine years in what they consider a small business segment of business.
So a very high transactional business. So you didn't spend a lot of time with customers. There weren't a lot of relationships if you want to call it that. So a transactional business and that gives you knowledge and an experience that's very valuable and a high velocity business. Then I actually went to the opposite and I spent close to 15 years running global accounts and global accounts were the top 100 120 of the largest accounts, which were all very relationship-based when I was at EMC and Dell, and those were very intimate relationships with the customer. Some of our teams would have one customer and, you know, they would wake up and all they would do is think about how do I make this one customer successful?
So I went from a very high volume, high-velocity transactional business, and they went on the [00:07:00] opposite end to a global, very intimate, you know, business and global accounts. And then fortunately, I was able to go into the Americas role, where I had the Americas all the way from our transactional business all the way to our global accounts from America's lens.
So coming into Dynatrace, I was able to leverage some experience I had in a transactional business. Some experience I had in a global business and some experience I had in an America's business. And it was good to have all those different experiences as I'm kind of handling all those different aspects of my current role.
Phil: Sure. And without giving up too much about your strategy for operating Dynatrace, can you talk a little bit about the strengths of your background that make it easy to lead in the environment that you're in right now, and maybe some of the gaps or challenges that you had to supplement with bringing new people to your team or changing the way the existing teams operated so that you could use the [00:08:00] best of your strengths with the team that you have that you're developing?
Dan: I think the biggest past experience I've had that has helped me came from a culture that was at EMC, and that was such a customer-centric culture, and that you basically operated as a culture, everybody, that if we make our customers successful, we will be successful. And that seems intuitively very easy to get, but many companies sometimes start with themselves, and they think of their own products and their own success, and, oh, by the way, we're going to bring our customers in. We hope they're successful, but we care more about ourselves than we care about them. So, I think that understanding how to have a mindset and a culture is built on customers being successful, and in turn, if they're successful, you will then be successful. So, I think as I came into Dynatrace, I had that experience.
It had such a positive impact in my career that [00:09:00] I tried to share some of that at Dynatrace, saying, hey, if we just fixate all of our attention on our customers and what they're doing and their success and their outcomes. Ultimately, they'll see us as a trusted partner and they'll want to do more business with us. So I think that past experience has led me to some of the ways I lead today at Dynatrace.
Phil: So this is a transition for the company. I'm curious how much of it is cultural and how much of the go-to-market strategy and operation and operational execution is kind of driven by culture. Did they have that culture coming in or is it something you have to build something new?
Dan: They did. I think, you know, they had a strong culture. I was able to join a company that has a strong culture and in fact, that was one of the reasons why I joined, I saw this strong culture there. I don't have to completely, you know, change or rip up what was [00:10:00] in place before, but it just evolves it. So that is a much better place to be than having to, you know, start from scratch. So, I think it's evolving an existing culture that existed. I think that's more how I would frame it.
Phil: Okay. And in this podcast, we often talk about the theme of elevate, and what I'm hearing you say is there's a little elevation of the existing culture, there's a little innovation around processes and collaboration, but there's not a ton of reinvention because there's a decent amount of culture that's already in place. Can you share with us a little bit about something you've taken from a past role, say, and how you've applied it to some things that you've done here at Dynatrace? Maybe it's allocating resources when faced with limited resources or something else that works like that.
Dan: Yeah, I think one that jumps off to me [00:11:00] is spending years in running global accounts is how we did account planning. And it was a process in which we got the whole team together to really look at the company, you know, take the company, your customers goals at the highest level, how that trickled down through their IT organization, how their goals aligned to their company goals, and then how you aligned your solutions to their challenges and their goals.
And that process, account planning, was something that we did every day. Every day. And you saw the value. So when you walked into a customer, you said, I know what you're trying to accomplish. I know what some of your challenges are. And so your whole conversation about your products and solutions were all geared to solving those. It was so well received. So one of the things that I'm trying to bring forward is to bring that account planning process to Dynatrace as well. So we have strong account plans. So we're aligned to our customers' challenges and goals. [00:12:00] So we go in and we're talking about our products only in context of how it helps them. And that, that's one thing that I think, you know, kind of evolving if you want to call it some of the past experiences of Dynatrace.
Phil: Well, that's really cool. I mean, it. And when I'm thinking about this, I'm comparing the high frequency business versus a relationship-driven business. And I'm curious where Dynatrace falls on the spectrum between those two because if you're trying to understand where you're going with the client on a daily basis and there is high frequency, that could put a lot of strain on the organization if you don't have already have the practice of connecting and sharing information. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Dan: Yeah, I think that's a great point. I think one of the things I was fortunate in my background is just that, where you have this kind of high-velocity business being a part of this very intimate, you know, business in your largest accounts. [00:13:00] So I think you have to do it all. You know, one of the things that we've done historically very well is, is the velocity business, what I'll call land and expand business where customers are able to take on your, your solution in a small bit, use it, get it, you know, certainly get the value out of it and then expand that.
And we've done that for many years. In fact, we've grown our business that way and it's been very effective and we'll continue to do that. And that's a bit of a velocity business that we have. So for us, that's why you call it evolution. Some of those parts we'll continue to do, but then we take some of our business at the top end of our customer base and say, Hey, how do we kind of mature that?
So we still will do the velocity business. It's one that's very important to us, but we know we have to segment our customers a bit. So you have your customers that you're going to say, Hey, we just don't have the time to spend that kind of energy on every single customer, right? There's tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of [00:14:00] customers around the world.
You just don't have the manpower to spend, you know, all that time there. But, so you start to segment your business to say, which customers are we going to be, spend that kind of time with? Which customers are we going to spend a little less time with? It's going to be a little, what we'll call, a little less intimate. And then ultimately, you get to the low end of the market commercial. You just, you do the best you can to satisfy that, that market. It's certainly a velocity volume play there.
Phil: So it sounds like with each segment, there's a difference. So how do you go from one cycle or learning loop of how you can iterate with them because of the capacity that you have, because of the closeness that you have with them, how do you roll that up to another level? So when you're thinking about business planning, or you're thinking about new product development, or other things that drive improvement, revenue growth for the company overall, and you're very focused on your customers. You want them to win, but you have to make sure you're driving the revenue growth and you might have to make some adjustments there. How do you roll [00:15:00] that insight up into the organization so that you're doing that at that level?
Dan: Well, I think you brought up a great point, something you referred to earlier about my partners in the business. I have a number of partners at Dynatrace, but two of them I'll mention are my marketing partner, our CMO, our Chief Customer Officer and our Customer Success organization. So those are two parts of the organization I depend on, you know, incredibly important to our success. Because think about that segmentation, how you market to the, what I'll call the commercial market or your velocity market, and how you market to the top end of the market, we'll call your, your strategy, is a very different marketing machine.
How you support those from a customer's success is also very different. So having alignment from your marketing all the way through your customer success within those segments, that alignment is the difference between, I think, success and failure. [00:16:00]
Phil: And are there any particular sources of data or insights that you use? A lot of people talk about data analytics. They talk about all sorts of different tools and strategies and such. What sort of things are top of mind for you in being able to deliver on that, that iterative approach that you're talking about?
Dan: Well, we actually use analytics throughout our business. So, everything from putting territories together, our product propensity to buy, that’s used in each segment of our business. We use slightly different tools and different approaches to that. But it's all used in an effort to make sure that we have the right analytics territory built. We have the right target set on that territory.
So all that is ensuring we have, you know, people being given the right tools to achieve the outcome that we've asked them to do. So I think analytics is a big part of delivering that. We've done that for many years. I actually had, you know, that experience [00:17:00] coming from VMware, where we allowed analytics to help tell us, Hey, what, what is the right target for this set of customers? And what should you put on that? And we're doing that manually. We did it many years ago. It's, it's a rough guess, you know, you're doing a guess. Now you're able to put some good analytics to that to give you a better outcome. So that's on the sales and the defining of the sales territories and approaches and such.
Phil: What about feedback from customers that comes up through those systems? What role does customer feedback or sentiment analysis play in all of this?
Dan: Yeah, it's a great question, Phil, because we're starting, that's been a big push of ours to better understand what's resonating with our customers, where they're seeing the value, what the feedback they have, what are their needs, how are their needs changing, how can we be positioned for the future of what What are the new challenges they're facing so that we can get [00:18:00] ahead of that?
Remember, product development is not something that you turn on in a matter of days or weeks or months. It's sometimes years to do product development. So, you want to make sure you understand where your customers are going, what their needs are in advance, so your innovation machine can be delivering those outcomes to match their needs and challenges.
Phil: I would agree with that, but isn't there pressure to accelerate the pace of change? I mean, there's all sorts of technologies out there now. There's a huge promise from artificial intelligence. There seemed to be a huge level of expectations amongst customers for things to be much more customized to them. And if I'm thinking about this segmentation you've got, it seems like a really tricky thing to navigate. So can you talk a little bit about how you segment, for lack of a better word, how you segment or [00:19:00] cut into sections in response to that?
Dan: How we handle that is to ensure that we have the right products to each of the customer segments.So you, you want to make sure that you're not going in with a scaled product into a small commercial operation, right? So how do you have the right products in your team bringing the right solutions to that customer and the right type of needs? So we know where the customer's generally at, the propensity for what type of needs and challenges they have, and now how do we customize that offering to match that? That has to do with pricing, packaging, and sometimes the solution overall. So there it does become custom, not necessarily to the individual customer all the time, but certainly to the segment of the business. But we do typically have good feedback on what their general needs are.
Phil: Well, this makes sense at a [00:20:00] theoretical level and the structural level. Do you have any great stories or success stories that you like to tell about how this worked with a specific customer or a specific industry that maybe you could share?
Dan: Well, the best stories are always the ones where we customize something for a specific customer. You know, for us, the banking vertical is an area that we had our customers asking for us to have because they're highly regulated. They wanted to make sure that they were able to show our technology to their regulators. So we were able to help them present our product to the regulators so that they could feel comfortable with how they're managing their applications.
Because the regulars care about resilience. Business resilience is a big piece of what they manage. Some of the banking environment too, to ensure they are, and our technology helps give visibility to that business resilience. So I think customizing [00:21:00] to that vertical would be an example where we're able to alter our product for an overall vertical because of the challenge they have with demonstrating to their regulators that they have a solution in place.
Phil: And I'm sure that's pretty helpful for them because meeting regulators and staying ahead of them with as little effort as possible is probably really important, especially in financial services. I've seen that firsthand. I'm curious, when you do something like that, what sort of unintended consequences happen? Where do you find opportunities to cross-pollinate, for example, or share lessons across teams or across industries?
Dan: The hardest thing is to prioritize your product group, right? So you have a product roadmap and now when you bring and say, hey, we need this special, it's like, where does it fit into the priority? So it's always trying to make sure our product development teams always have many different deliverables on them. And, you know, you have a lot of, what I'll call [00:22:00] customer needs out there. And it's how do you deliver and prioritize? One of the hardest things for any software development group is to say, okay, what's most important? We can’t do it all. You just gotta tell me what's most important. I think that's the biggest challenge you always have is saying, how do you prioritize what's most important? Because there's a lot of customer requests out there. So I think that's one of the biggest challenges that we face.
Phil: And is that an area where you're expanding your influence more, or is it where you're, like, expanding the team collaboration more? Because if there's all this information coming up from different segments and different approaches, and there's a demand on a finite product team, and you want to deliver as much as you can through the technology of the product, but be flexible enough to customize, it must put a lot of friction, well, gosh, at different levels of the organization, there's different levels of friction, I guess. So where do you choose to apply most of your expertise, and [00:23:00] how do you come to that decision of where Dan's gonna drive and lead?
Dan: You know, we have a lot of requests that come up and as you said, sometimes from different parts of the business and all different places, you try to have a way to make sure it's not one-offs and all these requests aren't coming to your development groups one off without context and without a business case.
We run our business like everybody does. You have to have a business case. So if you have a request, you have to say, okay, listen, there is a business case. Customer SAT issue, if we don't do this, there is a business opportunity if we do do this. So, we have to put together a business case for each one of these requests, and that's how we help prioritize those. And it's no different than probably what everybody has to do. You can't just do everything, so you have to figure out how you prioritize them, and we prioritize them to a process that we put into a business case.
Phil: In some organizations, the Chief Revenue Officer has to extend his or her reach to be the glue, [00:24:00] right, to be the person who goes out to all these different folks in these different departments and encourages them to share more information or work more closely together and so on and so forth. People who have more of an operational background might go about it one way. People who have more of a sales background might go at it another way. And it's the existing culture and the challenges that you need to integrate and bring, draw people together that requires a lot of leadership. So I'm thinking from the perspective of the listener, who's, let's say I'm a listener who is a Chief Revenue Officer, who has more of an operational background, right? Or has more of a marketing background. And they would expect that Dan comes in and says, well, I have more of a sales background. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about revenue growth and how we keep customers happier coming back. For example, I'm completely making that up, but I'm curious. I'm trying to tie back to your personal background and expertise. Do you bring that to that specific challenge of pulling [00:25:00] all those little pieces together? Because it seems far more art than science.
Dan: The top line growth for a lot of companies is still very important. You look at most companies out there, obviously to drive top-line growth is ranked highly. So then you start weighing in, for example, what's it going to cost us to do this and how much top-line growth that we're going to have? I think we pull in and that is generally one of the levers that moves your CFO. So if you want to talk about where the money comes from, I joke, our CFO is the money man.
And, you know, you have to be able to convince them of where we're going to spend money that may not be in the budget or so forth. Typically, that lens is, does it deliver top-line growth? If it does, we can figure out how to manage it. And sometimes that's not always the case. It doesn't deliver top-line growth and you still have to [00:26:00] do it. It may be a customer SAT issue where you have some business risk that you would take on. But for the most part, I think working with the CFO primarily. It's a, how does this drive our top-line growth and is it worth the additional investment?
Phil: That makes a whole lot of sense. So, you know, while you're talking, two things come to mind. The first was a phrase that says all revenue is not necessarily good revenue. And the second was the concept of the three horizons model, the McKinsey three horizons model, which basically says there are people who, you know, operate the business and drive profit. There are people who operate the growth part of the business, and there are people who disrupt the business. So, going to the CFO to justify the business case, that person might be stuck in the horizon, sort of keeping the trains running on time. Let's make sure we have steady growth of the business where there might be an opportunity out in the market for growth. [00:27:00] The business case is a little more speculative, right? How do you balance between, you know, those three horizons of business, because you're going to have to then deal with your CFO and work with that person to see things your way, to guide the company in the right direction?
Dan: Probably one of the most difficult things that anybody in my seat has to deal with. That is a great framing of what happens every day. There are a lot of opportunities that are brought to me and come across my desk on a daily basis. And those opportunities come in various different forms, but they all fall into different levels of upside and risk. And to be able to quickly put those into a clean segment is not always easy to do, but how much risk are we taking on? How much upside exists? How many of those do you do versus how many of what I'll call sure things? [00:28:00] I find that would be one of the bigger challenges that I face on a daily basis because it is a business case, but it's not because there's so much of that, especially those that have this high return, but high risk. It's hard to gauge, right?
This is art and science, as you said, but I deal with that almost daily where I see that. Do I hitch my wagon to this highly speculative opportunity that could have this huge return? It could have very major impacts to the business, meaning that you would have to transform your business to do that. And now, what if it doesn't pan out? You've now transformed and moved the business, altered, you know, the course you were on, and now, all of a sudden, you didn't have all the information, or you learned new things, and it doesn't pan out. So those decisions could be the hardest decisions. I don't make those alone. Those are made with our CEO, our [00:29:00] CFO, and all my peers. You bring those things forward and you talk those through, but I think it's one of the more challenging parts of all of our jobs to figure out which ones those are.
Phil: And I'm sure you're probably proactive going back to partners and resources, proactive and looking for tools that can help you make those decisions, or with partners who can help you surface up more insights so you can make better decisions. Are there any particular trends or desires that you have in that space that you think if I have these things, I would be better suited to influence the product team or the marketing team or whichever or the success team, whichever team is going to have to change to accommodate something that's a little risky?
Dan: So I got a perfect example from today. Just today. So we had to make a decision on making an investment into one in a country in the Middle East. [00:30:00] And so that required us to set up a legal entity and a country, which included having to set up an office there. So there was a pretty significant investment, not just a one-time investment, but an ongoing investment. And so now you have all the information, the team brings a business case about what it is, but now you need validation. And we had a partner that we worked very closely with, one of our strategic partners, where we went out to them and said, hey, do you see this same situation? Do you see this with your other customers?
Can you validate for us this business case that we have? So it's an example where, do we make this investment, not as a one-time investment, it's an ongoing investment that we could use in a lot of different ways that would not only take time and money, but also focus? But how do you ensure that then you reach out to somebody that can validate that? That was the situation today. When you do that, I'll go into the CEO say, here's what I want to do. Here's the business case. And [00:31:00] by the way, we validated with a very trusted partner that they see the business case the same way we do. And so forth. So that is a perfect example of what happens.
Phil: It's a very timely, timely example. It makes me wonder, you know, how does a corporation go through that decision process now? And it seems like a pretty collaborative and dynamic one. And where do you want it to be? If it's really operating well and you're shifting the culture, is that something that you're taking a significant number of calculated bets on?
Dan: Wow, you're hitting hard, Phil. These are the root of what makes our jobs challenging, because one of the things that make all these decisions, it distracts you sometimes from your focus. Typically, we all start our year with a business plan signed off by the board. And you're going into that year, we're saying, okay, these are the major things that we need to get accomplished this [00:32:00] year. And now you have this new opportunity to come across. Even though you're like, do we do that? Do we lose our focus on the existing things? But if we don't look at new things and as things change, are we missing an opportunity? And I think that's probably for me personally, I find that to be one of the hardest things I do.
Some other people may not find it as difficult, but you want everybody rallied around your goals and your objectives. Right? As a company, you want your entire team knowing what they are, knowing what role they play in that. But now all of a sudden you go, oh, but we're, look, we're talking about this. Instantly everybody’s called to the shiny new toy. People's heads turned to the shiny new toy and they're gone, oh, what's, what's that narrow there now? What happened to your existing focus, a maniacal focus, and on these priorities and these objectives? So I find that scenario you described, one that I have not conquered [00:33:00] answer yet, because you don't want to just ignore this new opportunity that may be presenting itself.
But then again, how do you prevent the whole company from losing focus on the objectives, all of a sudden? By the time you look back, now you've lost time, energy, and focus, and now you're not on track to achieve those that you set out to do for the year.
Phil: One of the benefits of being the smaller firm, the smaller company, than the bigger one that you came from is that you could be nimble enough to do that. One of the things that big corporations are hammered on. And it seems like you're putting in the communications infrastructure and culture such that if the team decides to make a choice, that the team can increase their probability of success by working together towards that choice. Is that fair?
Dan: Yeah, it is. You know, it's funny you bring it up. One of the things that I've enjoyed so much of being at this company — we're not exactly tiny. We have nearly, you know, [00:34:00] 5,000 employees. We have 1.5 billion in revenue, but we are nimble and we are able to pivot, and we have a culture of collaboration. We are able to have a lot of these discussions as a team in a relatively short period of time to quickly assess that. So I have actually found it refreshing. I think that was more difficult at VMware. They had, you know, close to 35,000 employees. At that scale, you know, some of this thing was more difficult to do and even Dell had 130,000 employees or more, so even more difficult to do at that scale.
So, yeah, it is great to be able to have that nimbleness, but I think it does start also with no matter what size company you are, do you have a culture of collaboration? And do you have a culture of people? you know, are quick to work well together, trust each other, enable you to make these decisions quickly, either adopt them, put a plan together, or [00:35:00] move on?
Phil: So last question on this point before we go to the closing two questions, because we're, you know, we could keep going, but we're running a little low on time, and I know you've got other things to do to run this massive company. But it makes me wonder where and how you guys think about innovation and strategy. Some organizations centralize that inside of a tight group and some distribute it. Some people carve it out for an outpost outside of the organization. What do you think about the innovation focus of the ARM capability of the organization? Is it embedded in the process that we talked about before, or is it something that you send folks out so that you can stay focused and then draw it back in when you have better insights?
Dan: We've been fortunate to be an incredible innovator in our space. So technology innovation is core to what we've done in our success. We're trying to continue to ensure that the innovation is meeting the challenges of our customers, meaning [00:36:00] this, you can innovate and have great innovation, but yet it doesn't solve customer problems. Then it's innovation that's cool, but may not then translate into a business opportunity. So what we're trying to do is maintain this incredible innovation machine that we've had for many years. Match that up with the customer requirements and challenges and ensure that that innovation matches that because that's where the business opportunity comes in. When you can innovate with the biggest problems your customers are facing, typically it's in or around or adjacent to your space of course that you're in where your core are, but when you're able to do that, now innovation has a direct return on investment.
What you don't want to do is have innovation happen that your customers really aren't demanding. You're going out and you're speaking to your customers like, look at this cool new thing we're doing. They're like, [00:37:00] yeah, well, that's great. But I don't really feel the need to buy it because it's not, it's not where my biggest problem is. So I think where you marry that customer needs. That's where the field marketing and even our innovation team, as they get out and interact closer to the customer, you're able to understand, you know, where to focus your innovation. That, to us, if we get that right, because we've been such an incredible engineering and innovation company, I feel like we'll be in a position for many years to come.
Phil: That sounds pretty, pretty solid. And it sounds like a really great place to be. So before we go. I'm just curious if you have any more advice for businesses looking to transform the way they draw revenue into the company where they operate together as a team to move forward in the environment that we're in today.
Dan: Well, I'll start with the team aspect. I think anybody, it's easy to get focused on your own team and your own [00:38:00] part of the organization. Everybody's held very accountable to their different goals and objectives. And sometimes it's happened to me in the past where you lose focus on your partners and your peers within the organization.
And I think my lessons learned is that's never a good outcome. Meaning you can't go it alone. You need your partners, whether it's marketing, product, customer success. You need to be in it with them. And that's where you really achieve the outcome. So I would say I sometimes get focused on my own organization and what we're supposed to deliver, but knowing that ultimately that the best answer is when it's highly collaborative, that we're working together because we'll really achieve a lot more that way. It sounds, you know, very cliche but it's something that's easy to forget sometimes, because, you know, you got sales objectives, you got marketing objectives, everybody has their targets are put on for good reason, but to get too [00:39:00] heads down and not pick your head up enough and collaborate could be a mistake.
Phil: Well, it sounds very consistent with the philosophy you've laid out. It's we, not me. You know, we can't succeed as an individual in this organization because of the way we need to operate. So how does that translate then to the role of the Chief Revenue Officer? How do you see that role continuing to change business as a whole?
Dan: Well, I think it changes customers and how they feel about you. And so think about the three parts of the organization that I described. Marketing... I have all sales and some renewals and then you have your customer success to really have a great customer experience. You first of all, they have to understand what your messages, your value proposition is. A lot of that comes from your marketing organization. [00:40:00] You have to have a sales organization that's consultative, that's trying to understand their customers' challenges and so forth and, and are customizing a solution to meet those.
And ultimately, have a customer success organization. It's ensuring that the sales have been made and we have a premise or a business case around making that sale. But now how do we ensure that we actually implement that? And how do we deliver that? So now it's a year or two down the road and people are like, Wow, we achieved everything you said from the time you marketed us to say, here's our value proposition. You customized our solution, you made the sale, and now you implement and realize the value. That's the end-to-end customer experience. And when you do that over and over and over again, you have customers for life. You have customers that come back and say, I want you to solve other problems for me. And so they're sticky.
They're customers that don't want to leave you and customers that expand [00:41:00] with you. So that's where your partners are doing that. You can't, you can't just have the sales. You can't just have the marketing, just success. When all those functions are working seamlessly, they deliver a customer outcome that, that well, in fact, I would say will take you to success for many years.
Phil: Well, thanks for sharing that, Dan. You know how to go out on a high note because that pulls it all together, right? The holy grail of thinking holistically about a company, a customer, and being positioned to deliver on all those things. So, thanks again.
Dan: Phil, I've enjoyed the time. Thank you for having me.
Phil: Well, yeah, well, it's really great chatting with you. Thanks so much for joining us today. And thank you listeners for tuning in to this episode of Revenue Reinvention. We'll see you next time.
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