38: איך הופכים לקוחות לשגרירים (English)

Hi, Liron. Hi, everyone. You reach Startup for Startup, the podcast on which we at monday.com openly share knowledge, experience, and actionable insights among startups. In 2019, and in businesses like ours, it becomes clear that customers are a driving force to the growth of the company. Early adopters have been perceived as potential promoters for further adoption within their organizations, and the conversation shifts from closing deals and sales into consulting, engaging, and delighting prospects and customers. One framework that strongly reflects this shift is the Flywheel model. So today we will be discussing the opportunity that such a framework presents, why we decided to adopt it, and what challenges arise. Our guest today is Lauren Sterr, Enterprise Account Manager at monday.com, that came all the way from the New York office to Tel Aviv. Hi, Lauren. Hi, Lauren. This is when you can start breathing and talking. Nice to be here. Talk a little about the change in your job. I mean, you've been here for a year and something, but it's not the same thing that you've been doing all this time, right? No, in the beginning it was really based on just as many accounts you could talk to and collections, so we were focused more on just collection versus, I would say, more of a consultative approach and more focusing on just the what can you add from an annual recurring revenue perspective. So huge change. You're focusing your brain and energy and all of this power on 55 accounts per month versus now the shift is I focus on I think my best month was seven to nine accounts. So it's totally different. You're putting a lot more energy into specific people that can, you know, you can reap the benefits of, I guess that's not a very good way to put it, but you're focusing more heavily on just a few accounts versus previously we were focusing on as many as you could touch. And why don't you give us the context of what's really the flywheel model and why did we decide to adopt it? Yeah, so you mentioned the word flywheel and it's basically a different approach of how to do sales and how to acquire new customers and how to help them grow within the product. I think kind of the traditional way of doing it in the past was that marketing will acquire leads. We will qualify those leads, meaning that we'll kind of filter out the leads that are not relevant and take only the leads that are relevant from the marketing efforts. And then we'll do SDR, which is a process of qualifying those leads into sales, meaning leads that a salesperson can contact. And then basically we'll do a top to bottom sales process where you talk with one of the VPs or one of the C-level executives in that company, they will make a decision and then purchase the product and use it within their company. And basically the flywheel model presents a very different approach of how to do sales. Basically, it's not a top to bottom decision, it's the concept behind it is that any team can start using the product. And I think this ties to a broader shift in strategy of companies in the world. So I think the previous model that I've described was very relevant a few years ago, but now I think the shift is to give people more autonomy and more power within organizations. So you see team leaders, group managers, directors within the company, first of all, having their own corporate credit card where they can make decisions and buy software or do whatever they want, where in the past they didn't have this authority of doing it. And more than anything, I think companies kind of adopted the fact that there isn't one solution and one software to solve a problem. And we can see many companies having multiple products and using multiple products, even though they might do the same thing. But it all ties down to the fact that they have more autonomy, they understand it's not like a black and white decision. So I think the world is obviously shifting in that direction, it's already happening and we see companies doing that shift. And coming from that perspective, it makes much more sense for even larger enterprises to start with a small team, start with a small deployment and kind of use the product for their own team. But then you as a company selling that product need to think about from that kind of starting point, what's the best way to engage that company? Should we engage that five-person team? Should we kind of help them scale organically within the product? And the flywheel model, the concept behind it is that there isn't like one sales cycle, it's multiple sales cycles.

Cell cycles. Some of them are done organically within the product and some of them are done through… Strategic relationships. Yeah, through using the sales team or consulting team. And you can see a bunch of companies going public with that approach. I think Slack is one of them. Zoom is one of them. Server Monkey. And what's common within all these companies is that all the enterprise accounts that they acquired, all of them started with a small team, with a small deployment, increased that over time. And then the sales team further increased it going forward. Okay, so you described a shift, but what's really the implications of it to the way we do product, we do service, we do sales? Basically there's three components to the Flywheel model. One is attracting new customers using marketing, performance marketing. The other one is to engage them, meaning that for bigger accounts it might be the sales team. For small accounts it might be the product itself that help them scale and engage them. And the other component is delight, is making a delightful experience for our customers through customer success and through creating a great product. And the customers are in the middle of all of it. Yeah, the customers are in the middle, and that's the concept. Which wasn't part of the process before, because if you think about it, if a manager or a C-level executive made a decision about buying a product, then the whole company had to adopt it even though everybody hated it, because they made a decision. You know, it's like top to bottom, the way, you know, like it's top to bottom, meaning, you know, it's top to bottom also in terms of using the product. And the new model, the Flywheel model, forces you to create a product that people actually love and use, because if that initial team of five people or ten people won't use the product, you won't have the ability to do further sales and scale them, and they won't be delighted, they won't be engaged, and won't increase the deployment within the company. So it just puts the customer and the product in the middle, where it's the most important thing for them to actually use the product, enjoy it, and engage with it. Lauren, do you see it in the day-to-day? Yeah, absolutely. It's much different. I don't really see necessarily, well, I think in certain circumstances, you can see that occasionally it will be more of like a top-down approach, but it's rare. I find it happens much more in this Flywheel model, in the sense that, like Aron was saying, you're starting with a smaller group, and ultimately you're rolling it out to different departments as they find the success of it. And I think the rollout happens either from the relationships you've built, from the internal discussions that they are having. I think the word-of-mouth perspective is a lot more powerful than just recommendations based on what they read or what companies say. So it's much different when you're approaching it this way versus from CEO down, you can really engage from the bottom up. How many accounts have you upgraded until today? I'd have to count that. I'd say at least 200 plus. If we're working more off of the model that we were doing previously, more of the collection-based, probably 500 plus. But now since the shift, I'd say about 200 plus maybe. And Aron just described this, again, model that in theory works perfectly. Have you ever had a perfect example of just the way it rolls? Yeah, absolutely. But I've had much more imperfect examples. But let's start with the one that works. Yeah, absolutely. So one that worked, this healthcare company that I work with, it began with their product team. I reached out to them when they were 15 users standard two-yearly. Which they got to? On their own. On their own. Yep. And it was just the product team. But then this woman had been in touch with the team, trying to get in touch with them because I could see there was potential there. And finally, this woman from the business systems department got in touch with me and said, you know, I have so many people asking to use this system. I need to talk to you. We need to do more security vetting. So then I got in touch with her. And that was definitely more of the top-down approach in a sense because, you know, the product team started. So I think it's a little bit of both. But why I say top-down is that she ultimately was the decision maker for if the organization is able to use it as a whole. So as an IT business systems person, you know, we went through sort of this more arduous process of vetting it from a security and legal perspective. But this was based on an experience of someone from their team already. Yeah, absolutely. And the more interest that was happening, people wanted to get on the tool. So ultimately the flywheel happened because, you know, product loves it. Okay, now business systems is on it. They love it. Now they tell somebody in UI. They love it. Now they're telling somebody in, I can't remember the next department off the top of my head, but an engagement group. So they started telling each group by word of mouth. So that's sort of the perfect instance of having it. And the nice thing, I work with this gal on my customer success team, Ruchita, who I…

And it became this process that was really just iron strong in the sense that I would engage this first team. You go through the sales cycle again. What are the pain points? What's your timeline? What are you looking for? Once that was vetted and it was decided they wanted to use the tool, it's almost like Ruchita comes in the back and immediately starts training the team. And it became group after group of we were just—it was a really strong process, I thought. And I wouldn't be able to do it without her because you can't do both roles. So if you have sort of this really great strategy in place, you can go team by team by team by team. How many are they now? They are at 100 enterprise, genuinely. And total potential for them is no more probably than about 600. So technically it's not an account I should be sticking with. But it was one that I saw a lot of potential in, and it was a really successful story. And I wanted to see this through, so we'll continue to work on them. In your previous company, did you do top-to-bottom or sales? I think when I look back at my company before this, which was a tech company, I think one of the problems was is that we were and some of the people I worked with, their belief was, okay, go after the VP of marketing. Go after the CEO. Go after—and I don't know that that was the best approach. Granted, I think it goes back to your point, Aaron, where I don't know that these people had corporate credit cards and could make the decisions on a software like that. So I don't think that was a successful approach in that case. So you told this perfect story, but I do want to go back to it and understand something that you took kind of for granted when you talked about it. So you said that this lady one day called you and she was like more of the top decision maker. Yeah. What did it take for her to call you? I mean, this is a perfect flywheel. You didn't have to reach out to her. She reached out to you, and that's very different than top-down typical sales. So how much time was the product used before she called you? Like tell us a bit more about that. From a perspective of how long they've been using it, I want to say at least a year and a half that the product team had been using it. And the reason she reached out to me is because they weren't doing it the right way. They completely avoided legal, avoided doing security, and so she got in touch with me saying, what the heck? Like we need to go through this process and formalize it. I'm happy for people to use it, but we need to formalize it. So starting at the top, it took more time. So wait a minute. Here she was almost even complaining, and this might have ended up in churn. Yeah, absolutely. So how did you turn it into an opportunity? And that's a really good point because she also, they were putting money towards other systems similar to ours, but clearly not working as well because people were wanting to get on the tool. I turned it into an opportunity because she was still open to using it. We want to make sure we have the budget. I want to do this the right way and go through security and legal. So ultimately the opportunity presented itself, and then I was able to latch on because her team now used it. She saw the benefit. She wanted to get on herself. So her team started to use it and word spread a bit. So I guess that was sort of the perfect example of the word of mouth spreading and going team by team to get everybody onto the tool, but it doesn't always work like that. You just said something else that is very important. You just stretched the importance of making sure that a team that is adopting it for the first time, that they use it right. Yes. How do you do that? I need help to do that. I can't do that myself, so I need somebody like the people on my customer success team to assist because I simply don't have the bandwidth to do the outreach and the engagement of different organizations and even different teams in an organization, and then on top of that train them. So you need somebody on your team who, A, you can communicate with really effectively and that sort of knows your style. You have to figure that out by going through the process with them a number of times, and then you sort of know each other. And it's kind of a ping-pong, right? Completely. It's not like you give them the lead, the customer, and that's it. You never talk to them. It's back and forth. And one of the examples I'd say of this is like when an email comes in. I'm CC'd, and I'll use Ruchita in this example because I work with her all the time. An email will come in, and immediately we'll both read it probably, and she'll know if she has to answer it, and I'll know if I have to answer it. So how? We don't even need to talk to each other anymore. We just identify. Give an example. Sure. So if it's a director asking, you know, I have this group of 25 people that I'd like to add, or, you know, we're not having a good experience, and I would like to speak to you about X, Y, and Z. To me, that's a big flag for me. I need to get on the phone with them. It depends on what it is. I may bring the customer success person, but if a question comes in, hey, we think we found a bug, or, hey, you know, I need help. I'm really not understanding how forms work, then in that case, I want Ruchita to respond. So some of it's a little more communication still, but some of it's just so obvious you know who needs to take that email or answer that question. I think what Lauren described, the fact that that VP that made the decision was—

Post a product is a big part of the flowery oil model. And it also changes the way we think about our product strategy. One of the features that we launched about six months ago was to add free viewers to the product. And the reason behind it was that we thought, our thought process was that we want to expose as much of the company management to the product and what's the most efficient way to do it by reducing the friction that people have. So we think a lot about what kind of features can we add to the product that people will share the information with their managers, with one of their VPs or C-level executives, where our thought process is that one, it will give them more value, two, it will expose those people into the product and the value it can bring and will create additional opportunity to increase the deployment within the company. So I think the model that we do sales kind of also directs us in how we evolve the product and what kind of features we add. And it's very different when you think about it, when it's a top to bottom kind of decision process. You think more about the value it brings to the manager first, where here we think more about the value it brings to the team first and what kind of thing we can add to the product so the manager will be exposed to the value it brings to the company. Without having to pay first and only then be exposed to the value. Yeah, so that's one example of reducing the friction. But just another example that we plan to add is add a button to the board, like share with your manager or send this to your manager. Team lead, yeah. Just, again, to kind of expose them to the product and expose to the fact that the team is using it and getting value. While you're on the topic of products or features of the product itself, I think dashboards has also really lent itself well to managerial views because before dashboards… Explain what it is. So dashboards is essentially, it's a feature that's made up of different widgets that you can pull different data sets in. So for example, if you are working off of 10 boards and they're all different projects and you have a manager who wants to see, okay, what's the overall status on all 10 of these boards without me having to dip into all of them, you can create a dashboard for them where it's different battery widgets of the completion, the progress to completion, or it's a chart view of what's the percentage of things marked as stock or waiting for approval. I think that's made a really big impact too on more of a reporting or a manager view. They don't need to necessarily, like you're saying, they could be a viewer, have access to a dashboard. They don't even need to be necessarily a user in the system and that's dramatically changed, I think, the reporting aspect as well when we're talking more about the higher level. Let's try and understand when things get more complicated for you. So why don't you pick another account in your head and share a story of something that wasn't going so smoothly and let's try and understand why. Yeah, so there's a few different ones. I think, so one example of something that wasn't going smoothly, I still don't, there's not necessarily, we haven't come to the formal conclusion, so it's a work in progress. So this is a large media company and we successfully onboarded two teams that worked very closely together. It was a creative team and I'm going to say broadly another creative team. And we really successfully onboarded these two teams, me and this gal, I'll keep it really vague. We successfully onboarded them. They really loved it. They're using it. I'd say the one area where we saw for improvement was maybe a little bit more engagement, so focusing on bumping communication, keeping people in the platform versus reverting back to old ways. But what the problem we faced was there was somebody new that joined the organization who then became the admin on this account and completely wanted to revamp the entire process. So we are now in the process of deconstructing all of the boards and rebuilding every single one of them. So I think it's a testament to your champions can get you so far, the people in the company that love the product. But if you have somebody like, for example, a manager who comes in and now they don't love the way it's being reported, they think it's confusing, all that work you put in can completely just, you'll have to restart it all over again. So I think that's an example of a pretty drastic way that it didn't go in an ideal scenario. By the way, this is also an evidence to how deeply we touch every process because the fact that a manager is so annoyed by the way that something has been done. I mean, Monday only reflects a real process. It's not like if you shut it down, the process is still there. Yeah, absolutely. It's very interesting just to learn how. The problem is not with the product, it's the process itself, I guess. Yeah. This is like, I think, what Lauren's saying. But it's reflected in the product, so she has to change it in real life and then in the product itself too. Yeah, and I don't think, you know, it's not only a fault of the… It's not even a fault of the customer, and it's not a fault of us as well. I think in this particular scenario, this gal had a lot of experience.

So it's just a natural change. Exactly. She had a ton of experience in project management and it didn't look the way she wanted and it seemed confusing coming in a little bit late in the game and she wanted to revamp it. So in this case, I don't think it was a fault of anybody, more so a change that she identified that needed to be made. I'd say a better or a not so challenging example would be something like I work with a company, it's a product, but it's very tech heavy and I adore them and I've been able to work with their UI creative team, their creative team, marketing, IT, business systems, the list sort of goes on. Wait, you're mentioning like five to six departments. Help me understand how this happened. Yeah. Because really this is the flywheel. Like you didn't just sell to everyone at once. Yeah. Right? And you're saying it now in 10 seconds as if it was just a 10 seconds kind of process, but it wasn't. So I think this would be more of a not perfect example of the flywheel, but you make it work because that's my job to make it work. So in this case, they started with the creative team and they were a 25 pro monthly account. They've been with us since 2016. It's a really long time, relatively speaking. And so they started with the creative team. We have a feature, we have guest users on our platform and guests are intended to be somebody who are a part of a different domain. But so we have a guest user policy and they were putting a lot of their colleagues on this guest user. It's a free basically feature that we have. So instead of using it for people outside, all their people internally were on it. So that was a challenge in itself. I reached out because I love the company and I reached out to them and just adding value, adding value, adding value. Can I train your team? I'd love to see that there's this gal Ashley who's part of another group. I'd love to be introduced to her so I can help them train and make sure everything's going well. Okay, great. She's doing well, moving on. How are you doing main person from the beginning? Do we want to discuss potentially adding a little bit more of your group? I see a lot of the marketing colleagues are guests. So it was a long conversation that spanned over months. But I think what was effective is being open and transparent. Hey, you know, we're thinking of changing our policy. I would highly recommend converting people back to main users, which is what was intended. But look at all the benefits they'll get. They'll be able to create their own boards. They can interact with their colleagues in a much different way. So I think it's, you know, building the value. But in this case, it was moving from group to group with the value. How can I help? You know, can we train your colleagues? It's much different to approach somebody and say, you know, hey, do you mind making an introduction to John because I want to increase your user count on your plan? Like that sounds ridiculous versus going to somebody. Like, you know, genuinely I want to help them. I want them to be successful because like I've heard you say, you know, our biggest metric is engagement. And our biggest metric is making sure that the WAP is up. We don't want people paying. What's WAP for people that don't know? Yeah, weekly active paying people. So we don't want the people to buy the platform and never use it. That would be a huge failure. So in this case, I think the reason it worked is, you know, I started with a group that was using it in a really niche way and realizing the different groups that this person was working with allowed me to make connections, strong connections, and just build more relationships and find more champions. But what does this process require from you on a daily basis? I mean, how do you get to a point that you realize that they're using the platform on a guest basis? You must be looking at many accounts. Like how do you get to that? Like realize that they are… Yeah, I mean, once you finish a sales process, you move on to a next account. How do you get really like actively get to a point that you understand that there's a need and an opportunity to grow? I think it sort of just… You know, and my gut's not always right. I think sometimes it can click, though. You just sort of see, okay, you work with how many other departments on this project? And you work with creative, you work with… But this conversation happens when? Other initial stages? Yeah, maybe while you're vetting it and while you're doing exploratory calls. If I get on a call and I realize, no, we're a team of 25, we'll never work with anybody else, I'm not going to put my time there because you really need to manage your time effectively. But if I get on the phone and I realize that they work with marketing, they work with UI, they work with… You know, the creative team works with other groups, then to me, it's really flagging an opportunity, and I'm going to put more time into that. I'm going to invest more. When? Immediately? Or… Gradually, if that's a good answer. I'd say in the beginning, I will help them. In the beginning, I like to set up… Because I'm still sussing it out. You know, it doesn't always click in one exploratory call. So you kind of get on the next one, and now you're sort of identifying, okay, there's more groups, there's more groups. Also back then, there was an interest in getting people from monthly to yearly. Not so much anymore. It wouldn't necessarily change your performance, if you will. But there was an interest to get them to a different plan, and I kind of identified that there was an opportunity.

There are people open to talk and there are people that had needs, training being a big one of them. Yeah, in addition to that I think the flywheel model also presents a different set of challenges for some companies. So just to give a few examples, some of the more enterprise accounts or corporate companies, we might have a few teams using the product and then we'll contact them and say, oh, we want to increase or see like adding more potential departments and they will say, oh, listen, I mean, we've been using it for like 50 people, but if we cross the 100 people threshold, people are going to ask questions. And listen, we're not allowed to use software that's hosted on Amazon, for example, and we don't want the corporate to find out. So you have this pockets, I call them pockets of resistance within the company that there's this policy of not storing files on cloud software or not using software that's been hosted on Amazon and they're kind of exploiting that freedom they got to use software where they know that if they increase the deployment, people are going to start asking questions and might get, you know, being limited to using software or anything else. I think this trend will go away eventually, but it also, because it's not a top to bottom decision, we can see those cases sometimes happening. I think going off of that, another big hurdle would also be, you know, they're hiding and they can't host things on Amazon web servers or they can't put files on the platform. It is a big flag and I'm working with previously mentioned account to do that media company. It's a problem. I think one of the other things they have to do is going to the top. I think sometimes it can be even daunting from an internal perspective going to IT or going to security and saying, hey, I want this to be approved. You know, it's pretty streamlined on our side for the most part other than involving some wonderful people like Adva and Shiran and Legal to review these arduous, totally long documents. But I think that also can be a barrier to entry, you know, making sure that people internally at the company feel like they can go above and get the approval to be able to do something as simply as storing files. So you're really touching here also on the topic of Flywheel Model calls it promoters and we call it champions, right? Talk a bit more about that. How do you decide that someone can become a champion? Heavy users from easily, I'd say the first thing would be if somebody is a really heavy user and they're actively engaged. Not necessarily the first user? I mean, it could be the first user, but it could also be the 14th user. I don't think that necessarily, I don't think it always plays in. I think it can frequently play in being the first user and being the champion. But I think it comes down to, and your champions can change. I like to have numerous champions because, you know, every group is going to be different. Like that group I was describing where UI, creative, marketing, there's a lead on every team and those team leads can connect to other team leads. And I think it would be a disservice to only have one champion. So I think you find the champions by looking at initially, way initially, engagement. You know, how actively are they engaged in the product? And then from there it's, you know, a champion and a decision maker might not be the same person. In a perfect scenario they are, but you hope that they have some influence. So I work with this other account where they started very small, like 10 user pro, and now they're at 75 user pro, and now we're talking 700. So I think the reason we got there is he is not a decision maker, but he is such a champion. He's amazing. And he's just really influenced his colleagues. So I don't know if I'm answering your question effectively. Okay. For him, it's a lot of presentations internally, presenting to IT, presenting to team leads. It started with him going to his manager, who I now know, who went to his manager, who I don't know. And I think it can… Wait, what do you mean presenting? He just goes, this person just goes and presents Monday internally? Yeah. Why? Because he's obsessed. He loves Monday.com. It's really, he's probably, again, another really nice example of a flywheel where somebody who just absolutely loves us will take the time to go present it. It also makes him look good. You know, if he puts this software into place for the whole company, and he was the reason, that's amazing. How do you get to a point that he wants to spend time presenting to other departments? I think it's a unique, I don't have an answer for that, I don't think. I think it's a unique person that if, you know, you have different levels of engagement. I think some people are like, yeah, yeah, I'll tell my colleagues about this. Or, yeah, I'll go present this to the whole company. I think those are different types of people, and I think it depends on where their priorities are and, you know. But what do you do to support that? As much as I can. I'll get on any demo that they want. If they want to demonstrate this to the London team or to the entire group of VPs, I'm always there offering, I can lead the demo. Okay, you don't want me to lead the demo? I can be on the demo. I can answer questions. Do you want to do a Q&A? Like, I can offer as much support as possible. I think the problem I've identified in some of these instances

is though is that you can lose control, and I think there's a fine line between being reactive on an account and being proactive. So if you're going out there to actively seek new champions, it's a very special person and a really good salesperson. I'd say I'm a balance of both versus a more reactive, hey, I have this group that's interested in using the tool. Can you give them a demo? Yeah. I mean, having champions is also required in some of the more bigger companies. You know, it's funny because I feel like bigger corporates kind of didn't adopt that model yet. So we have some absurd examples of a team of 100 people using Monday and then they want to scale that past that point, so they go to management. And then management says, oh, listen, if you want to use a project management tool or HR process tool or whatever, we have this process where we need to examine three different, you know, project management software tools. Qualify them. Yeah, qualify them, go through a checklist of features, and then, you know, they will go, but we want to use Monday. And we are using it and we want to keep on using it. Yeah, we want to scale that. And the corporate will say, oh, we have this process, though. So, you know, but then, I mean, I would say, correct me if I'm wrong, that, like, almost 100% of those cases we will get the deal because you have people within the company cheering for you, supporting, you know, using Monday. So it might be that they have this process and we might even have a checkbox that we won't check compared to the other products, but the fact that you have people cheering for you and supporting you is a great, you know, benefit. So it's not about, you know, a war of features, where in the past it was, if it was a top-to-bottom decision, people will mostly decide based on, you know, who has the broader feature set, who support X and Y features that we need. Well, now it's more about people actually want to use the product and supporting you within. You did touch a bit on the importance of team alignment before between sales and success and, I don't know, maybe product as well. Yeah. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, I would say from a CS perspective, it's extremely important to align because I think you can work, I think you can work with people that you just vibe really well with, and I found I work with a handful of people on the customer success team very frequently. I think it's important to align from the customer's perspective because you need to be there to support them on both ends. Like, I need to be there to be able to help expand teams and train new ones or, you know, introduce new ones versus I need the support from somebody else to actually do the training itself. It would be too much time spent. And I'd say if going into something like something I've learned, I didn't do that always. In the beginning, I think when I was on mid-market account management, which was a really micro team, population one person in New York, me. So I was on that team and I did that for a few months and then I transitioned into the current role. Similar, just different sized companies. But when I transitioned, I think I was so, you know, obsessed or I really wanted to make sure I could help the accounts I was working with and that I could be successful. So I was trying to do everything. I would introduce the team to it. I'd demo them. I'd convince them that they loved it or they would love it. But I'd, you know, do all the beginning, which is the sales part or the consulting part. But then it would come to training and I'd be like, oh, I can do that too. And it was just such a, it was a time suck because, you know, I didn't know, I couldn't divide that. I couldn't make the distinction of where I start and begin or start and end, I should say. But one thing that Aaron, my manager, and I have been working on is that I've really become, I'd say personally, much better at is letting go. You need to let go. You need to put your trust in the customer success team and know that that's their exact job to make sure that that team is successful. So I'd say that that is something I'm still actively working on because I really genuinely care about the champions I work with and the people. I want them to be successful, but I need to let go and know that the customer success team, they've completely got it. How do you know when it's the right time? To? Let go. That's still something I'm working on. I'd say from the start of more when you introduce the customer success manager, when you introduce them, then they have another point person. They don't need you all the time. You know, they don't need to come to me. And I think it's also in the beginning, they'll keep coming to you. Lauren, can you help me with this? Whatever. But I think the important thing is looping in help when it's not early and setting the standard up front because there's another account I work with who I love, but it's a product company. They have a product. But it was a very big learning lesson because I've been stuck at the same user count for five months. And not that that's a bad thing. They adore Monday.com and so many departments are using it, but I became sales. I became consulting. I became customer success. I became connection to product. I'm now…

reporting their product requests, reporting their bugs. And it's just, I learned my lesson very quickly. One thing that also I found out is that sometimes we need to help people with, I call it like office politics. So you might have a few teams using it and then you try to scale them past that point and they will go, oh, we have an issue with that person. We are afraid to kind of approach that person. We're afraid that this person will present resistance to change or whatever. And I think a big part of the consultant team is also kind of help them navigate within the organization and holding their hands. People don't like to put themselves, yeah, their neck or how do I say it? Like restrain themselves. Yeah, like, because I get it. Like, I love the software but I don't want to risk my position within the company or even take responsibility on introducing new software because people can come to me and complain about something. And I found ourselves being like a, I wouldn't call it like a therapist, but helping those people navigate within the organization and help them in those points where they don't want to take the risk. Yeah, and I think if that also means then taking the responsibility off of them and putting it on yourself, that's something we do frequently. If they don't want to go out on a limb for you and for the product, then okay, do you mind making the introduction? I'm happy to give them a demo. Let's expose it to them rather than them having to take that risk. Yeah, and then it's on you. It's on Lauren. It's not their kind of decision. What challenges are you encountering now and you think that are going to be just increasing in the future as we're scaling? I think a challenge from a larger company perspective would be one where you have a group set up and they are successful, but then it's like, where do you go from there? Because they're so siloed. I have this group, it's a team of, it's a huge company. It's a company you see commercials for all the time, but I have this group of 100 enterprise where they're thrilled. They're based in the UK and they're a marketing department and they will never, there's five teams within the marketing department and there's no benefit for them to not necessarily introduce me. I don't think it's that. They don't connect with anybody else in the company. So where do you go when you hit that wall and there's- Ceiling. Yeah, that's it. They can't make introductions. So in my case, what I do is I utilize business development person. So I work with this guy in New York, Adam, who's fantastic. And I work with him to help me reach out to any duplicate accounts that open up. Even if they're a different country, different place, it's a account that I really want to actively try to grow. Meaning if you see somebody from that company signing up, not from the marketing, you will try to engage them. Yeah, absolutely. Proactively you're looking for that kind of person. Yes, and that's another opportunity where you need to have the communication because I don't have the bandwidth to do that because it's a big company. We get a lot of duplicates. So I lean on someone else to do the initial outreach. To explain what duplicates are. Yeah, so when somebody opens up a new trial and it's from the same company, it's set up in such a way internally that that duplicate will go to me. But instead I'm putting that duplicate on my colleague, Adam, to be able to reach out and vet it, see if it's a good opportunity. If it is, he'll pass it back to me. If it's not, then my bandwidth can't go everywhere. So I need the assistance from him to be able to say, is this a good opportunity and should we both pursue it? Yeah, so just to give Fed more light on this. So basically everybody signs up with their email address. So whenever we identify an email address which is not generic, meaning not at Gmail or at Yahoo. So for example, if we have an account of 100 people from Microsoft and then we'll see other people with the domain of Microsoft.com signing up to the platform, we'll engage them if that team is siloed or even if not. And then eventually we might have a few paying accounts for that corporate company and then we'll try to scale that into one big account or even keep them a few separate ones but kind of scale that. So the opportunity is not on a single account but it's on the company level and we treat them the same way. And the way we do it is in BigBrain, our BI system, we identify when we have multiple accounts from the same domain and tag them together as duplicate. That's definitely called part of what duplicate is. Yeah, absolutely. Lauren, if someone is trying to use the Flywheel model for the first time, do you have any tips for them? Using the Flywheel model for the first time or introductory salespeople or both? Any kind of tip you want to give? I'd say, so the first one coming to my mind is confidence. I think it's something that, again, my manager Aaron and I work on as being maybe two things, assertiveness and confidence. I think confidence I have in my day-to-day but I think if you're a new salesperson, it's tough to, if you did it once or twice, how do you know that you can actually do it? Was it luck?

by happenstance. So I think having the confidence in the beginning to just say, okay, I did it. Let's try to replicate it. That's a big one. I'd say from the perspective of assertiveness, knowing when to be assertive. I think, you know, I know some salespeople who are very go-getter mentalities versus very more reactive. Like I said earlier, I think I fall very much in the middle. But knowing when to, you know, present the next steps to them to say, okay, so let's move forward. Let's get training started. Let's go. I think it's important to know when to be assertive. From a flywheel perspective, I think kind of goes back to both of those. Don't be afraid to ask for an introduction. Don't be afraid to, and that's something I had to, you know, learn. Don't be afraid to ask for the introduction. Don't be afraid to offer to train other teams. I think it's a fault if you aren't, you know, asking because the worst thing they can say is no. That's the absolute worst that can happen. So once you get that through your head, which I had to, once you get that through, it's like, what's the big deal? You can totally do it. I know we've sort of talked about it already, but leaning on people. So you can't do everything yourself. Don't try. I've tried it, so don't try it. It's just not going to work. So leaning on customer success, leaning on the product team for help. If you, you know, have a feature request or if you have something that's really going to increase the, you know, the opportunity of an account, go to product, lean on them, ask them for help, see if it can be done and how long it would take. Also lean on management or somebody you trust because I get really tunnel vision once you've been working with an account for a long time and trying to increase the opportunity, you become so blinded by other creative ideas. And I know one thing that we've discussed previously is following up. Don't follow up just to follow up, you know, just, hey, just checking in. You need a more creative idea as to how can I understand or get the pulse as to where we are with this account. So leaning on people, you can get more creative ideas that way. I think another thing is that we mentioned it in a previous episode, but being customer centric is one of our core values as a company. And I think more than anything, the flywheel model aligns that mentality with the sales process. So it's all about the customer. It's all about getting values, all about engagement and usage. And I couldn't think about it any other way. I wouldn't want customers that just pay, don't use the product. And I want customers to enjoy and get a delightful experience. And I think it's the best way to align those two things. Lauren, thank you. We made it. Yeah, thank you. Really? It's been like for one hour. Okay. Yeah. Awesome. Great job. Thank you. Thanks for coming and for giving us of your vacation time. I wouldn't want it any other way. Thanks, Liron. Thanks, Lior. Thanks, everyone, for listening. Thanks, Lauren. Thank you.