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The Enterprise Monetization Podcast

The Enterprise Monetization Podcast

By Sandeep Jain

This podcast shares perspectives from the thought leaders and practitioners in the B2B Enterprise Monetization (CPQ, Billing, and RevOps). The host is Sandeep Jain (CEO MonetizeNow -- https://monetizenow.io).
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Episode 20: Hannah Hanrahan, Director of Revenue Operations, Atrius

The Enterprise Monetization PodcastSep 29, 2023

00:00
32:14
Episode 20: Hannah Hanrahan, Director of Revenue Operations, Atrius

Episode 20: Hannah Hanrahan, Director of Revenue Operations, Atrius

In this episode of the Enterprise Monetization Podcast, Sandeep Jain sits down with Hannah Hanrahan, Director of Revenue Operations at Atrius

Sep 29, 202332:14
Episode 19: Steven Newman, Director of Global Revenue Operations, Trackforce Valiant

Episode 19: Steven Newman, Director of Global Revenue Operations, Trackforce Valiant

In this episode of the Enterprise Monetization Podcast, Sandeep Jain sits down with Steven Newman, Director of Global Revenue Operations at Trackforce Valiant

Aug 11, 202328:49
Episode 18: Ian Block, VP of Sales & Marketing, ACE

Episode 18: Ian Block, VP of Sales & Marketing, ACE

In this episode of the Enterprise Monetization Podcast, Sandeep sits down with Ian Block, VP of Sales and Marketing at ACE.

Jul 25, 202325:56
Episode 17: Prafulla Patil, Head of Enterprise Applications, Mapbox

Episode 17: Prafulla Patil, Head of Enterprise Applications, Mapbox

In this week's episode of the Enterprise Monetization Podcast, Sandeep Jain sits down with Prafulla Patil, Head of Enterprise Applications at Mapbox

Jun 16, 202338:40
Episode 16: Zach Weinstein, Revenue Operations Lead, Middesk

Episode 16: Zach Weinstein, Revenue Operations Lead, Middesk

In this week's episode of the Enterprise Monetization Podcast, Sandeep Jain sits down with Zach Weinstein, Revenue Operations Lead at Middesk

May 24, 202328:13
Episode 15: Taka Yokoyama, Vice President Operations, Safehub

Episode 15: Taka Yokoyama, Vice President Operations, Safehub

In this week's episode of the Enterprise Monetization Podcast, Sandeep Jain sits down with Taka Yokoyama, Vice President, Operations at Safehub to discuss best practices when setting up a Quote to Cash stack at a company and what some of the considerations are for pricing your product as an early stage company

Apr 06, 202335:41
Episode 14: Rudy Wilson-Evans, Director of Revenue Operations, Impact.com

Episode 14: Rudy Wilson-Evans, Director of Revenue Operations, Impact.com

In this week's episode of the Enterprise Monetization Podcast, Sandeep Jain sits down with Rudy Wilson-Evans, Director of Revenue Operations at impact.com to discuss best practices when setting up a Quote to Cash stack at a company and what some of the struggles businesses will face at different stages of growth.

Mar 27, 202328:08
Episode 13: Albert Wong, Director of Revenue Operations, Alloy

Episode 13: Albert Wong, Director of Revenue Operations, Alloy

In this week’s episode of the Enterprise Monetization Podcast, Sandeep Jain sits down with Albert Wong, Director of Revenue Operations at Alloy to discuss some of the struggles revenue operations teams face when trying to select tools to use for their Quote to Cash Lifestyle.

Sep 30, 202245:04
Episode 12: Glenn Hopper, CFO, Sandline Global

Episode 12: Glenn Hopper, CFO, Sandline Global

In this week’s episode of the Enterprise Monetization Podcast, Sandeep Jain sits down with Glenn Hopper, CFO at Sandline Global to discuss the exciting things happening at Sandline Global and his book that came out last year, "Deep Finance, Corporate Finance in the Information Age"

Aug 26, 202250:56
Episode 11: Sudhakar Jukanti, Director of GTM, Confluent

Episode 11: Sudhakar Jukanti, Director of GTM, Confluent

In this week’s episode of the Enterprise Monetization Podcast, Sandeep Jain sits down with Sudhakar Jukanti, Director Go-To-Market at Confluent to discuss how Confluent deals with variations of usage billing across different sales channels.

Jul 18, 202239:35
Episode 10: Brian Flood, VP of IT, Business Systems, & Data, Fastly

Episode 10: Brian Flood, VP of IT, Business Systems, & Data, Fastly

In this week’s episode of the Enterprise Monetization Podcast, Sandeep Jain sits down with Brian Flood, VP IT Business Systems and Data at Fastly to discuss the complex nature of their Quoting and Billing process and talk about “William”.

May 30, 202245:47
Episode 9: Arnon Shimoni, Senior Product Manager in RevOps, Pleo

Episode 9: Arnon Shimoni, Senior Product Manager in RevOps, Pleo

In this week's episode of the Enterprise Monetization Podcast, Sandeep Jain sits down with Arnon Shimoni, Senior Product Manager of RevOps at Pleo to discuss why or why not build your own billing system.

Podcast Notes:

  • Fun fact: Got served by McDonalds for a video game at a young age.
  • Built their own CPQ and Billing system.
  • Team is total of 12 people at Pleo (Engineers and Product Manager). Work closely with the finance and sales team as they are the customers.
  • Reviewed billing systems but didn't find anything suitable.
  • B2C Billing is easy, B2B Billing is hard.
  • Typical challenges - discounts, one-time, proration, billing schedule flexibility.
  • Recommendation of Books: "Inspired" and "Thinking Fast and Slow".
May 13, 202243:31
Episode 8: Navin Persaud, Head of Revenue Operations, 1Password

Episode 8: Navin Persaud, Head of Revenue Operations, 1Password

In this week's episode of the Enterprise Monetization Podcast, Sandeep Jain sits down with Navin Persaud, the Head of Revenue Operations at 1Password to discuss how a companies Monetization tech stack can accelerate and support a Product-Led Growth model.

Podcast Notes:

  • Fun fact: Loves fishing and the analogies it offers in both his personal and work life.
  • Started his career at IBM, where originally thought he was going to be a lawyer. Spent most of his time in operations but in 2015 moved to a SaaS company as sales and hasn't looked back since.
  • Started at 1Password about 6 months ago as the head of sales operations, where they service both BTC and B2B customers. 
  • As a part of revenue operations, one of his biggest roles is to remove friction to the sales team. The Sales team is often where the most friction is shown with revenue operations.
  • Challenges of being a PLG company - He believes there’s a lot of great things about being PLG, one of which is that the customer intake is already figured out. A lot of his role is the “plumbing” and figuring out things like tech stack, and billing. One of the challenges is that having the ability for customers to self serve is paramount
  • One big challenge is that oftentimes at PLG companies, their product will be set up from the get-go to handle B2C transactions. Once they grow though, they add CPQ to handle the B2B transactions, and merging these two processes can cause challenges.
  • A big challenge of selecting a CPQ software is that things like B2C are well handled by companies like stripe, but when selecting a CPQ for B2B, you have to make sure it plays nice with your existing billing system.
  • The best thing you can do early on in a company is figuring out your businesses needs early and implement your tech stack as soon as you can.
Oct 14, 202145:25
Episode 7: Chris De Vylder, Global Head of SMB Sales, Sales Strategy, and Operations at Atlassian

Episode 7: Chris De Vylder, Global Head of SMB Sales, Sales Strategy, and Operations at Atlassian

On this episode of the Enterprise Monetization Podcast, we sat down with Chris De Vylder, the Global Head of SMB Sales, Sales Strategy, and Operations at Atlassian. Chris offered insights into product-led growth and some of the myths around it.

Podcast Notes:

  • Chris has spent most of his career either in traditional enterprise sales, or building software to support sales
  • Over the past 5 years, Atlassian has acquired 4 companies and combined elements of Product Led Growth with the sales support model that enterprise customers desire
  • Atlassian sells through 3 channels: Self-service, through product-led growth motions, and a direct sales team
  • Discussed some of the challenges Atlassian faces with their homegrown quoting infrastructure, particularly around the challenges of integrating new acquisitions into this system
  • They have several thousand SKU's and transact in USD, AUD, and JPY
  • Atlassian's internal systems need to be able to blend the capabilities typically associated with B2C systems, with the capabilities of more traditional B2B sales motions
  • One of the challenges large companies face these days is trying to negotiate across multiple stovepipes within one company which can slow down how fast a company can respond to market changes
Jul 06, 202143:04
Episode 6: Martin Gontovnikas, Co-Founder and GP, Hypergrowth Partners

Episode 6: Martin Gontovnikas, Co-Founder and GP, Hypergrowth Partners

In this episode of the Enterprise Monetization Podcast, our host Sandeep Jain sits down with Martin Gontovnikas to discuss how product lead growth led to the massive growth of auth0. In this episode they discuss how auth0’s monetization systems were able to scale with this growth and some advice for startups looking to follow a similar path.

  • Martin shared that he did standup comedy in Argentina in high school to make himself more comfortable with socializing
  • One of the first challenges for auth0 was around acquisition and awareness. They wanted developers to know about them and achieved this by hosting workshops and building a community
  • auth0 was able to obtain $1million ARR just by inbound sales and building a community around their product
  • Some of the main issues they dealt with were self service with credit cards and those cards expiring
  • Offered tips around developer evangelism, auth0’s strategy was content marketing and how to guides
May 21, 202147:52
Episode 5: Arvind Sathyamoorthy, Sr Director of Product Management, 8x8

Episode 5: Arvind Sathyamoorthy, Sr Director of Product Management, 8x8

8x8 is a leading provider of SaaS solutions around voice, video, chat, and contact center, all in one global cloud communications platform. Sandeep Jain is joined by Arvind Sathyamoorthy who is their Sr Director of product management. In this episode they discuss how 8x8 is able to handle subscription based revenue on such a global scale.

  • Arvind argues that subscription products are not something that came around ~20 years ago, but rather have been around for 4 thousand years.
  • They wanted to make sure that every customer goes through the same Q2C flow
  • Order management is a mix of custom stuff built on top of their CPQ platform, as well as some manual processes
  • One problem with some modern solutions is that in the ecommerce space, you want everything to be extremely fast but this is not necessarily the case with some of these solutions.
  • When you’re looking at quote to cash, you’re really looking at an entire monetization ecosystem
May 11, 202149:21
Episode 4: Ruchi Kasliwal, Head of Revenue, Telenav

Episode 4: Ruchi Kasliwal, Head of Revenue, Telenav

Telenav are experts at navigation platforms, helping people get from point A to point B everyday. But how do they get from point A to point B within their quote to cash systems?

Join our host Sandeep Jain as he sits down with Ruchi Kasliwal, the Head of Revenue at Telenav, as they discuss their unique revenue model and how a company like Telenav leverages monetization systems.

Podcast talking points:

  • Talking about one of Ruchi's favorite things to do which is go out at night or during holidays and look at all the lights.
  • Discussing Ruchi’s previous work experience at MongoDB, Confluent, and Klarity.
  • Revenue and monetization platforms go hand in hand so Sandeep and Ruchi discussed how different platforms can be leveraged to make revenue operations easier.
  • What Telenav's product does and how it supports car navigation systems worldwide.
  • How Telenav has a unique revenue model where almost all of the revenue comes from royalties and they handle those royalties similar to usage in their monetization systems.
  • What Telenav’s quote to cash stack looks like and what processes they do manually vs automated.
Apr 30, 202137:28
Episode 3: Parag Kulkarni, SVP - SaaS Engineering, Nutanix

Episode 3: Parag Kulkarni, SVP - SaaS Engineering, Nutanix

Have you ever wondered what it takes for a company with over $1 Billion in yearly revenue to build their own CPQ system? Join us as our host Sandeep Jain meets with Parag Kulkarni, the SVP of SaaS Engineering at Nutanix to discuss everything from Cricket to the challenges companies with large SKU’s face when implementing and maintaining CPQ platforms.

Podcast Talking Points:

  • Discussed Parag's previous work experience with Netscreen, Juniper, and now Nutanix
  • Nutanix is in the hybrid cloud infrastructure space and revenue is around 1 Billion yearly
  • Quote 2 Cash stack includes salesforce for CRM, NetSuite for ERP, and an homebuilt platform for CPQ that integrates with Salesforce
  • The reason they built their own CPQ system is they wanted to have more agility as a company and move more quickly as they transition into a heavier subscription based model.
  • Their product catalog contains more than 1000 SKU’s and mainly supports USD but also does transactions in Euro’s and the Korean Won
Apr 16, 202141:03
Episode 2: Justin Wong, Director Enterprise Architecture, Unity Technologies

Episode 2: Justin Wong, Director Enterprise Architecture, Unity Technologies

<ul>
<li>Unity has two separate businesses - Create business: traditional Q2C process, and Operate business: very different i.e., ads-tech, usage-based, and as such their sales process is very different</li>
<li>Customers are across different verticals — automotive, media, gaming, etc.,</li>
<li>Business in multiple currencies — mostly USD and EURO and GBP, Japanese Yen , Chinese RMB, and Korean Won.</li>
<li>The number of SKUs is in thousands (mostly legacy)</li>
<li>Justin's team provides architecture oversight, custom integration, and billing. Team size ~25 (Zuora 3, Salesforce 15, and rest on ERP).</li>
<li>GTM is through both self-serve and direct sales.</li>
<li>Direct-sales: Salesforce CPQ, Zuora Billing, RevPro Revenue Recognition, Workday for ERP, and Mulesoft for custom integration</li>
<li>Self-serve: Legacy e-commerce handles all billing/subscription (TBD on how that will be moved to Zuora)</li>
<li>Challenges: usage-based billing, supporting various payment gateways for the self-serve channel, consumption forecasting</li>
<li>The specific challenge with usage-based billing is the separate data model between Salesforce CPQ and Zuora Billing</li>
<li>Time to set up new products is in the order of weeks — testing the quote creation, checking if billing is correct, etc.,</li>
<li>Metric: average time for payment from a sales order and average order entry time</li>
<li>Professional services: needed both one-time and on-going basis for industry best practices</li>
<li>Recommendation to vendors -- build an agile system</li>
<li>AI/ML: Potentially play a key part both in online self-serve and direct-sales (close a deal faster)</li>
</ul>
Mar 22, 202138:56
Episode 1: Alisa Liebowitz, Director Business Applications, PagerDuty

Episode 1: Alisa Liebowitz, Director Business Applications, PagerDuty

Show Notes

  • Alisa manages a team of roughly 15 people who work on Salesforce CPQ (~ 5), Zuora Billing (~4), and Netsuite ERP (~2)
  • Had a homegrown billing system and migrated off of that during IPO prep
  • GTM is self-serve, direct sales and partners
  • Partners do not quote directly but are sent information by the PagerDuty team
  • Roughly 35 SKUs, selling in USD only
  • No usage-based billing for now
  • The average lines on the quote are 1-5
  • Challenges — change pricing/products rapidly, customize deals for specific enterprise customers, and doing that quickly
  • Changed to Salesforce CPQ in 2020 (from Zuora CPQ)
  • 2021 priorities: 1/ Self-serve — early renewing, tiered pricing, etc. 2/ Having RunDeck (first PagerDuty acquisition) and PagerDuty on the same order. 3/ Auto-book / zero-touch simple deals
  • Explore building internal tool to map product catalog between CPQ and Billing
  • Self-serve to direct sales transition issues -- complexity in sales increases e.g., standard quotes in Salesforce are built for one-time but not for SaaS and resulted in a lot of friction. 
  • Metrics: 1/ Time-to-quote (Automating order entry reduced time to quote from 2 days to under 10 mins). 2/ How long approvals take 
Mar 13, 202134:15