Sangeeta Chakraborty on this episode
Sangeeta Chakraborty is the former Chief Revenue Officer of Miro and current Chief Revenue Officer of Amagi, with extensive experience rebuilding go-to-market motions at scale. She joined Miro in late 2021 as Chief Customer Officer and was promoted to CRO within a year to overhaul the company's entire revenue strategy.
Miro had 60 to 70 million users and world-class product design, yet renewals were at risk because the company was monetizing usage rather than selling business outcomes. The core insight: usage metrics and strong inbound pipelines masked a fundamental problem—customers lacked business cases tied to measurable ROI, making renewals vulnerable to competitive pressure and budget cuts. When Sangeeta walked into the first QBR, reps had overachieved on their numbers, but she quickly realized pipeline quality masked poor renewal retention and declining deal sustainability. The problem wasn't that customers didn't love Miro; it was that the sales team had never anchored the product to a strategic outcome a CFO would defend.
Sangeeta rebuilt Miro's GTM motion from the ground up by redesigning the ICP, architecting use-case-driven sales plays (anchored on PI Planning and speed-to-market), and establishing a value engineering function to help buyers build business cases. She introduced entry and exit gates at every sales stage to enforce discipline around use case attachment and economic buyer alignment. The episode walks through how she unified sales, customer success, and product around retention-first metrics, how competitive threats validated the new strategy, and why the biggest deals flow from attaching to bigger business problems rather than individual features.
What we cover in this episode
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1:39
The renewal crisis hidden by pipeline Despite overachieving reps and strong inbound, renewals were failing because deals lacked business cases tied to outcomes.
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6:41
Finding the preponderance of use case Conducted customer interviews and data analysis to identify product managers and product development teams as the core ICP across 70M users.
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18:03
Command of the Message and use-case sales plays Trained sales teams using command of the message methodology to identify pain points and anchor deals to specific use cases like PI Planning.
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19:06
Pepsi case study: 3 years to 10 months Built business case around speed-to-market for Pepsi's new potato chip launch, showing measurable ROI through faster go-to-market timeline.
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26:04
Value engineering helps buyers build business cases Established specialized value engineering function to help customers quantify ROI and develop TCO models at scale, not through heroics.
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34:11
Entry and exit gates enforce discipline Implemented stage gates requiring use case and buyer identification before advancing through sales process to ensure deal quality.
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42:04
Competitive pressure validated the strategy When competitors attacked with lower-cost diagramming solutions, the stronger use-case motion protected Miro and enabled competitive wins.
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46:17
Don't get fooled by vanity metrics Final advice: understand the real business problem being solved and size the ROI rather than chasing usage, bookings, or LTV metrics alone.
The lines worth sharing
The problem wasn't that people didn't love Miro. The problem was that nobody had ever tied Miro to anything strategic enough to survive a renewal conversation.
Sangeeta Chakraborty · 0:47
At the end of the day, a software purchase is a business decision with a business case attached to it. And I couldn't see what that business case was.
Sangeeta Chakraborty · 3:10
The more I talk about features, I'm relegated to the junior people. I actually have to think about the bigger problem to get attached to a bigger entity in the organization.
Sangeeta Chakraborty · 45:17
Don't get fooled by vanity metrics. Really try to understand what problem you're solving and why. Is it the right long term problem for you to solve?
Sangeeta Chakraborty · 46:43
Common questions from this episode
Why did Miro's strong pipeline and user growth mask a renewal problem?
Miro was monetizing usage and converting existing users to paid licenses without tying the product to measurable business outcomes. This created superficial pipeline that lacked the economic buyer buy-in needed to survive renewal conversations when CFOs asked for ROI justification.
Who did Miro ultimately target as its core ICP?
Product managers and product development teams in software and high-tech companies. They needed faster speed-to-market across distributed teams—the strongest use case that drove measurable ROI and adoption at enterprise scale.
How did Miro use value engineering to close bigger deals?
Sangeeta built a specialized value engineering function to help buyers quantify ROI and build TCO models upfront. This removed the burden from sales reps and made business case development repeatable, enabling customers to justify multi-million dollar commitments.
What were the entry and exit gates Sangeeta implemented in the sales process?
Stage 1 (awareness) required ICP and use case attachment. Stage 2 (validation) required proof of business case and identified buyer. Stage 3 (technical evaluation) required value engineering deliverable. Stage 4 (negotiation) required deal closure or loss. Gates enforced discipline around use case qualification.
How did competitive pressure from lower-cost alternatives validate Miro's new strategy?
When diagramming-focused competitors attacked, Miro's stronger use-case positioning around speed-to-market and product development protected the business. Sangeeta's team won deals by attaching to bigger business problems, not just features, proving the strategy worked.
What's the biggest mistake revenue leaders make when chasing growth?
Focusing on vanity metrics like usage, bookings, or LTV calculations without understanding the underlying business problem being solved. This creates fragile revenue that collapses when competition arrives or budgets tighten.
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Sangeeta Chakraborty, former CRO of Miro, explains how she rebuilt GTM around renewals, ICP, and value selling to turn usage metrics into sustainable revenue.
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Read the full transcript · 53 KB · Sangeeta Chakraborty
EDDIE0:04Welcome to Go to Market. In this podcast, we share tangible, actionable playbooks from the trenches working as go to market strategy and rev ops consultants for our clients here at Union Square. Consulting and candid conversations with revenue leaders in the market that have been there. Now let's get into it.
RACHAEL0:22There is strong community world class UX. Then the pandemic slowed down and Miller became an easy target to replace with free alternatives. The problem wasn't that people didn't love the product. The problem was that nobody had ever tied Miro to anything strategic enough to survive a renewal conversation. Singida trucker Bardi was brought in as chief customer officer and promoted CRO within the year to rebuild the entire go to market motion from the ground up.
RACHAEL0:47Today on go to market Science, she's walking us through exactly how she did it the sales plays, the redesign, and the operating rhythm that took Miro from inbound to enterprise value selling.
RACHAEL1:00So when you walked into Miro as chief customer officer in late 2021, the pandemic was starting to wind down this point. What were you seeing in the business that told you that the existing motion wasn't going to hold?
SANGEETA1:15Yeah, it was actually a very exciting time to be at Merrill because people had embraced a new way of working that would have taken so much longer to accelerate if it wasn't for that, for the pandemic, basically giving us a tailwind. So it was a very exciting time raising to see globally gigantic corporations deciding that we are going to collaborate on a virtual space.
SANGEETA1:39So obviously, being the leading product in that market, we saw a ton of interest and constant inbound coming at us. So when I joined, it was a very exciting time. But one of my first memories, Rachel was walking into our first QBR at in Los Angeles and just looking at the amazing achievements and was very impressed. Everybody had not everybody, but a very large proportion of the reps had over achieved.
SANGEETA2:09And you know, they absolutely deserved those achievements. They were posting some significant events on the board with many, many multi-million dollar accounts. What got me thinking was it was curious about the the closure of the renewal cycle. Right. So I always want to know what are we selling that I can go back and say, look, we delivered this for you.
SANGEETA2:33And I was looking for what was the pain we solved and what's really a tangible use case that I can put my arms around. And that is what got me worried because I didn't care enough answers. It was simply we were monetizing usage. And that's a great place to be at. And there's a lot of AI companies right now that are doing exactly that.
SANGEETA2:54But what do you have to think about is at the end of the day, a software purchase is a business decision with a business case attached to it. And I couldn't see what that business case was ahead when they were buying it. And so now we needed to go and discover the business case after they've already bought it.
SANGEETA3:10That made me feel that we have to sell differently. We need to actually go figure out how do we anchor ourselves to a use case that we can then stand behind. We can say, we delivered that for you. Now you go find the next use case and the next uses versus simply monetizing daily active usage or whatever usage metrics that you want to go after.
RACHAEL3:32So what did that actually look like in the numbers? Were you watching specific metrics that just weren't doing well, or was it more of a qualitative sense that something was off?
SANGEETA3:43It showed up in the retention numbers pretty quickly. So while the pandemic was rising, there was just a lot of increased. People had no really other better options. So they were using this this software. But to your point, as it started to abate and people then back to meeting in person, if there was no compelling business use case where they were driving using this, that user started to slip.
SANGEETA4:06And there were some, I would say, false metrics, but looked like they were using the software, but not really for deep usage. And we were not inexpensive. So and ultimately they look at the dollars to outcomes. We started seeing the conversations around renewals becoming harder. The other thing we noticed was competition coming in more aggressively with a lower price offering and saying, we can give you this, you don't have to pay as much.
SANGEETA4:30So that showed up in the competitive win rates. So we really had to rally around and look at the business differently and how we go after the business.
RACHAEL4:38We are seeing that in the pipeline numbers as well.
SANGEETA4:40No pipeline actually looked really good because the way we drove pipeline was in any business. Essentially what you're looking at is are people in the software. And then can I go find a way to monetize a group of people in sort of whether it's a team function or a department function, or eventually a company wide motion where I can go and close the conversion of that usage.
SANGEETA5:03That's how we looked at pipelines. So it was a superficial sort of a variety metric in that sort in that sense. Right. You could look at that and say, we have sufficient business to go close. What I really wanted to understand is this is sustainable revenue or not? Am I going to keep that revenue for the first able feature, or is it going to be one cycle?
SANGEETA5:22So DRR is where the problem started showing up first.
RACHAEL5:26Okay. And so what was your first step once you started noticing these issues?
SANGEETA5:30The first step was actually interviewing a lot of customers to understand what is valuable. Why would you use it if the pandemic is over and going into the office? What's a good reason for you to still feel the need to use this product and somewhat tough conversations? We truly couldn't get any answers that we felt good about, and some were actually surprisingly amazing conference conversations.
SANGEETA5:54For example, the CIO global CIO of a large manufacturing company in Japan said, I'm trying to change my company culture to go from a sort of a stayed in office, very formal. He had 200 local CIOs that he managed to team off. This is a very massive business. And he said everybody is sort of living in their own silos, and they're working in their own corners.
SANGEETA6:19And when we do connect, we connect in this very long, formal way. So it's blocking innovation. It's blocking our speed to go to market. It's blocking our interaction within the company. Our culture isn't changing. So I want people to come and interact on this product. And I'm actually going to go measure and see how does that interactive work now translate into faster outcomes for us.
SANGEETA6:41So interesting business cases that we have not thought about. But the crux of it was we had something like 60 to 70 million users on the platform at that time, now over 100 million. We had to go and understand out of that, what is the preponderance of use case? Where do people mostly use Miro and for what purpose?
SANGEETA7:01And we very quickly narrowed it down. It was mostly product developers like product managers, product thinkers who were thinking ideas on products, who were working with cross-functional teams, like the designers, the engineers who are doing early levels of prototyping. They were then taking their product development workflow, mostly agile product development workflows, by planning rituals that in the olden days, they would have to go fly a whole team into a city and then sit and walk around the room and try and get everybody's input.
SANGEETA7:34This could be done much more better on a virtual whiteboard. So we understood that these were the sort of the key use cases. They were the ones that you would expect to see the most. And then we found more and more around this collaboration and culture change and innovation use cases that started to form up. So the fourth thing was go and talk to customers and ask some hard questions for you.
SANGEETA7:55Maybe don't want to hear the answers to it, because if it is going to be, you know, not what you want to hear, but that's the legwork. So that coupled with a ton of data analytics to give us some scale answers.
RACHAEL8:07And when you were still trying to like, diagnose the issues and see what's going on, I know you had like multiple teams across multiple geographies all running their or potentially all running their own version of the motion. What that do to your ability to actually inspect what was really going on here?
SANGEETA8:25It was very difficult to inspect. And every every team had their own approach to understanding how to increase the business. The one commonality on the PLD side was you've got usage that we can convert. So if you have a set of people that are that belong to an enterprise and that they're doing work without being on our enterprise license, it's an easy motion to go and go to the security or the IT team and say, hey, you really should have this under enterprise license because it's going to protect you in many, many ways.
SANGEETA8:56That motion was the first level motion that was fairly consistent across the globe. But when we went to the next level of complexity or to sell to a use case to really understand what is the highest value use case, you could go and do discovery around. We had a lot of people doing different things, trying to understand. The first thing was realizing that they needed to do it.
SANGEETA9:16And then once they realized it, figuring out the discipline of how do I actually go about it? It was inconsistent. Best of efforts. A lot of people trying to solve this similar problem, but it was many flavors around the world.
RACHAEL9:30I like how you approach this because, as you said, it wasn't that the pipeline wasn't doing well. You had like a robust pipeline. It was just that the customers that you were selling to weren't sticking around long enough to have enough lifetime value to probably, you know, have the right LTV ratio. So trying to see like, who is our actual ICP and who can we target and sell to more of so that they actually stick around and they don't leave within a cycle?
RACHAEL10:02I think a lot of cross and revenue leaders, they they focus quite a bit on the front end and the pipeline and seeing, you know, if the pipeline is healthy, then everything's must be healthy, right? So we're just we're we're selling more and that's great. And they don't consider the impact of what happens after the sale. And like if you're selling to the wrong people, like sure you're closing these deals, but they're still the wrong people.
RACHAEL10:28So it's like the.
SANGEETA10:30Wrong case I would say they may be the right people, but they're not sure how to best use their product. Luckily, we didn't see a lot of customers departing, but we saw enough signals early, signals that gave us cause for concern. And so we reacted within two three quarters to say, we're going to have to change how we sell, how we have them adopt, what is our customer success team doing and what's our sales team doing, and then what's the renewals team doing to go and close that next renewal so we can go upsell more?
SANGEETA10:59That whole motion had had to be changed. But it's that early signal was what I think we recognized as risk and then started to change. It was a hard change because to your point, when when it looks like it's easy landing and you're closing the number, why go take the trouble to slow your deal down and go ask all of these questions.
SANGEETA11:21You just want to close the deal and move on. But it wasn't sustainable revenues. That was our take.
RACHAEL11:28I like that too. So yeah, so not necessarily the wrong people, but just the wrong use case. So they're they're approaching the product in a way where they're not going to adopt it in in a manner that's going to like allow them to continue using it. So it's just a mindset shift really.
SANGEETA11:45It's a it's an education. It's a. Shift education of how to really think about getting the most value from the product. It is also doing some deeper business discovery to understand what is the biggest problem you can solve for them, because the thing that was in mirrors favor and continues to be is the product is amazing to use.
SANGEETA12:06The user love is real, but at some point, user love does no longer contribute to keeping your margins and your keeping your your product revenues. So it's about taking the person who is happy to be happily doing a workshop. The workshop is a fleeting use case. I could do a workshop with the racial and never need to look at that again.
SANGEETA12:25Done with the workshop. My days over. I don't need your product after that. But the point was the workshop is just the tip of product building. All through the product building lifecycle. You have to constantly interact with so many cross-functional teams, and you're creating artifacts that you have to keep coming back and referring to. And as long as we built deep integrations, we built workflows into the product workflows that are potent into how you build product.
SANGEETA12:50Now, for example, now you would need to have deep integration with, let's say, cloud code, right? In those days, it was figuring out how to have deep integration with products like Atlassian and figuring out how to go build those things, those hooks where the product team could say, oh, now I understand. I could actually use mirror to do far deeper things I'm doing right now.
SANGEETA13:12That was the that was the difference in motion that we had to. And I just see around the world all of the product development tools that are now AI driven. I see the same trend. I see people using it. They love it. It's so easy. I don't need to be a coder. But really, a year from now, are they going to pay $1 million for that product unless you're really, truly using it for valuable things?
SANGEETA13:37That's the question I think I have to keep asking.
RACHAEL13:39Right. That's that's so smart too. And it really loops in everything from, you know, sales, marketing, product, customer says everyone needs to be working together on these kinds of issues to ensure that you're not just, you know, selling this product, but the product is actually making your customers money so that they can keep paying for it and coming back.
RACHAEL13:59And they have a use case there. There's and there's CEO and they can get budgeting for it and everything. Absolutely.
SANGEETA14:04That's the boring concept of the buyer. Journey has never gone away. We might.
RACHAEL14:10Be fooled.
SANGEETA14:11Into thinking it's getting somehow accelerated past, but at the end of the day, someone's looking for the business case.
RACHAEL14:17that's a huge thing with AI these days to I think it's like everyone's using AI. There's so many different AI tools out there. Everyone feels a pressure to be implementing AI into their businesses because every their competitors are doing it to you. Right. But I find a lot of a lot of companies are struggling to. Well, it depends.
RACHAEL14:33I think it's getting better now, but they used to definitely struggle quite a bit with finding ROI with AI tools. We're definitely people are figuring it out and we're definitely seeing more and more re being found there. But yeah, that was a big issue with with these AI companies for a while because no one's going to keep paying for AI if it's not actually doing anything useful or I think for revenue.
SANGEETA15:01Sorry. Yeah, I do think it's getting better. I still think there's a lot of exuberance that needs to be tempered back into ground realities, because this cycle we've seen many times before. So what happens is you get all of these point solutions, and then there's the 1 or 2 large entities in the space that sort of threaten to start to encroach in yours.
SANGEETA15:21For example, we were all these four inch solutions, right? But we knew Microsoft was always going to have a whiteboard. How can you be different and much more valuable than simply a good enough product? I would say in the world we have to always think about now the large LLM providers, because they're coming in one way or the other into different parts of that space.
SANGEETA15:40So what is your unique niche that you are offering? It's maybe vertical integrations or templates or some kind of a user generated unique to you value prop that you have to deliver to separate yourself from the large bundling that is going to happen. For sure. Consolidation and bundling is going to come into every software cycle. So we're just seeing the beginning of the cycle where it hasn't quite happened, but it's coming.
SANGEETA16:07If we're going to see it. Right.
RACHAEL16:08So you're looking at all this stuff and you realize that you finally need to change how the company sells. And on boards and coaches, customers walk me through how you built that plan to make these changes. Where did you start? Other than talking to customers?
SANGEETA16:24We've started with understanding what use cases that we thought were our core use cases. Then it started with building the playbook. So just saying this is our core case means you have to understand how big is the pain point. How do you scope that out? Who is the ICP that you have to go and do the awareness? The buyer to me is awareness building.
SANGEETA16:46Then they do the evaluation, then they do the negotiation, then they do the adoption. Then they start to become actual advocates and go buy more. So this is the cycle. So along that cycle marketing and product in the beginning had to be very clear. What is the ice we're building for and what is that need. And to continuously experiment and learn.
SANGEETA17:05So from there we we looked at okay if we this is the ICP, this is the problem we're solving.
SANGEETA17:09that means that we needed to understand what is the messaging and for what persona, and how do we understand the biggest problem that we were solving.
SANGEETA17:18that started to design our playbook. And the playbook said we are going to go after this part of the market.
SANGEETA17:25One thing that I truly believe we have to think about and go to market is when you're creating a go to market motion, you have to think like a product organization in the sense that you are constantly building the leanest version of what you're testing, and then you go get data and validate or invalidate your hypothesis and go and do the next level of testing.
SANGEETA17:45So we set up this sort of experimentation basis where we tested the first round, learned a few things, failed in a few ways, and said, okay, that's not the right approach, let's do it this other way. So we did that sort of constant iteration to understand the core use cases. So that was one on the product and marketing side.
SANGEETA18:03And then it was training the sales team on using the command of the message methodology to go look for these pain points and then solving it. And then when we close the deal, it was very important for the CSM to make sure those use cases were actually adopted. So that was the end to end life cycle.
RACHAEL18:22who did you land on being that ICP for you?
SANGEETA18:26So for us, the ICP was the product manager.
RACHAEL18:31Okay. And and what made you like confident that that was the right buyer?
SANGEETA18:36We looked at the data. The majority of our users were actually product managers, and they had a problem that we knew we could solve because their problem was, how do I get quick alignment with everybody that needs to understand what I'm trying to build so we can increase the speed of going to market. So and all of these teams are generally remote teams that distributed teams going to market took a long time.
SANGEETA19:06And we were taking products that were not just software products. It could be building a car for Volkswagen. You could be building a shoe for Nike. You could be even creating a potato chip for Pepsi.
RACHAEL19:20Sorry,
SANGEETA19:20at Lululemon with New Athletic where.
SANGEETA19:23So pharmaceutical companies coming up with new drugs. We had Volkswagen building a car for building a car. And Pepsi actually was coming up with a new flavor of a potato chip, which we created a whole story around. They were releasing a new potato chip for the younger generation in China, and they had to collaborate with the design teams in France, with manufacturing teams in other locations and with the obviously the target market was in China.
SANGEETA19:55So across the globe, this huge distributed team had to go and understand how do you put a product development process for a potato chip together? And they said it used to take them three years. It took them ten months to get this to market.
SANGEETA20:09So we took these.
RACHAEL20:10Three years.
SANGEETA20:11Numbers and build cases around the thing that everybody wants to get done, which is to increase the speed of market.
SANGEETA20:20Right. Speed to market was what we anchored on. So that was the use case, the broad use case. There were use cases underneath it. And depending on the product that you were building, if it's a software product, we went heavily into exile. If it was other kinds of product, we help them understand what is it that they needed to get done differently to make that speed faster.
SANGEETA20:40And that's what the sales team started to go searching for. These are the use cases. These are the pain points. That's the discovery of to do. And that's how you anchored the business case around.
RACHAEL20:51Quick pause. Everything we talk about on this show. Diagnosing go to market ops. Prioritizing projects for revenue. Impact processes. Metrics. Insights. Building a predictable go to market engine. We've built frameworks for all of it. They're free and undated on our website. Union square consulting frameworks. The link will also be in the show notes, so make sure you check that out.
RACHAEL21:14All right. Back to the episode.
RACHAEL21:16so can you walk me through how you build specific sales plays around specific use cases and what one of those plays actually look like end to end if you could pick one?
SANGEETA21:28Yeah. We picked Pi planning as a very standard use case that we could go after. The reason we picked it is that 65% of our user base was in product and developer groups, and of that, a huge number of them were just building software. So there's always these other industry examples. But truly the core of all of it was suffer building software companies, High-Tech companies.
SANGEETA21:55So we went there and we tried to understand what is it that is the biggest pain point that the absolutely needed to solve other than workshops, because like I said, workshop felt like lightweight. You could see another product easily replace that. So what was unique to us is that we could actually help a complex set of workflows happen on on this, on this one platform and bring distributed teams together to solve that problem across time zones, across groups, across different ways of working.
SANGEETA22:24So to us, the the most the sort of the best example of that was the Pi planning process. And so if people I mean not everybody else, I'll just walk you through it. But essentially what happens is that the beginning of a period, let's say a planning period, could be three months. The teams come together and say, we are going to build product with all of these potential things we could build.
SANGEETA22:46So the first thing is to bring that number down and to bring that number down. It takes so much collaboration and discussion and arguing and arguing and sort of bargaining and even estimating what we, you know, how much one takes versus the other. That usually is done either in person, you would have 60, 70 people all in one location.
SANGEETA23:08And we had these pictures of people coming together for this gigantic workshop. And then you bring all of these people together. There's no actual effective way to get the voices of 80 people out. And so some way or the other, some ideas would get dropped, maybe great ideas would get dropped or real problems would not get surfaced. Place.
SANGEETA23:26It was extremely expensive. So we started going after that use case because it was clearly something we could solve. So the business case was less travel cost. You could hear the voice, you could get the voice out of everybody in the room. And because of the product, you could actually get anonymous voices out. So there's nothing hidden that somebody is afraid to say, because the software would now allow you to be able to put in feedback on the board.
SANGEETA23:51So that was a very core use case. So that was what we anchored on. So then we started looking at how do we go to our target, use our account list and create really specific accounts that we wanted to go after first or p zero accounts in the Pisa accounts. Who's the development team leader under them? How many product teams exist?
SANGEETA24:12And then let's go after those product team leaders. So that was the marketing sort of campaign generation that we did. We also could see the data within our software itself because many of them were existing users. So we just had to go find the person. The biggest influence on this who typically did run by planning. Right. And then we started doing some examples.
SANGEETA24:33So for example Blackrock massive customer, they had this exact same use case, lots of people flying in and we were able to showcase to them how using our templates, they could get this word done much more effectively. And it became a really sticky use case for us, for them to really get the value. They saw a lot of value.
SANGEETA24:52And because of this one use case, which then generated other use cases for us, what it needed was discipline on this campaign, discipline on figuring out the ICP, and then a lot of discipline for the sales team to really hunker down and get this use case content out. It's a much harder, higher friction, seemingly difficult process. But what we really saw was once you got that done, the CSM clearly what is the outcome?
SANGEETA25:19They needed to make sure every landing was done on Miro. So it's a much more measurable outcome. And at the end of the year when he went back and said, you saved X number of dollars on travel costs, you made sure the culture of the company was all inclusive. You got your product to market faster. That's a much better business discussion than you have 5000 users.
SANGEETA25:41And your daily active usage is, you know, X numbers. It doesn't really mean anything to somebody who's trying to figure out. They want to spend $1 million plus on this.
RACHAEL25:51absolutely, that's awesome that you're able to show like a dollar amount that they saved on something directly related to using your product. That's awesome. Not a lot of not a lot of companies are able to show that.
SANGEETA26:04It's a tough problem. And we had we invested a lot on the value engineering function, which was part of our sales engineer team. They did that estimation upfront to make it easier. Because I also feel that as pillars, we need to do a better job of helping our customers by and we assume they know how to buy it.
SANGEETA26:25But many buyers are for the first time putting a business case together and for the first time, going through a paper process. Yeah, for the first time, they're thinking about a buying center and influencers and detractors. So you always have to help them go through that process. And once we started doing that, it was much easier.
RACHAEL26:43And so what we're operationally looking at, like the way that you changed your sales process and how you trained your reps to sell these use cases, what kind of entry and exit criteria did you have to input into the CRM to ensure that they're selling to these these new hyper specific niche down buyers?
SANGEETA27:05Yeah, we had at every step of the sales sales process before we went from one stage to the other, exit gates. So for example, for the first gate, which is awareness building, you needed to have attached yourself to an ICP and a potential use case. The second stage you're trying to validate it is truly a business case to be made at the end of that stage before they enter the technical evaluation, you now know there is a buyer.
SANGEETA27:30They truly have a use case that is dollars attached, and all they are trying to see is if the technology works, they're going to use it. So you we needed them to get to at least the use case identified and the buyer identified by them. Oftentimes we had a champion identified but not the buyer, but that's at least the use case needed to be identified.
SANGEETA27:50Then this third stage was the technical evaluation. And it could be in some use in some simple ones. It's a demo. In some cases it's an actual POC. And and as part of that we worked to figure out that value engineering case to make sure that they figured out what the business case at the end of it. So at the end of stage three is technical evaluation.
SANGEETA28:09Then stage four was entering negotiation and the stage four was negotiation done. And it's either a close one or a close last. Right. So that's those were the broad gates that we put in place.
RACHAEL28:20Okay. Cool. And how did the your the reps react to having much more of that responsibility on their shoulders. Because that's a it's a lot of steps to go through for your team that's been previously converting self-service accounts.
SANGEETA28:33Yeah. So I, I talked with a lot of people other cross who have done this transformation. One very important advisor to us was Luca Laseron from he was a sprinkler zero. And he had done a very big transformation, taking the company from 400 million to over a billion, taking them public. And he went to a very big transformation as part of that.
SANGEETA28:59So I would pick his brain. I was like, look, I'm going to go to this team and say, you have to do things differently. But what they've done in the past has worked. So there's going to be resistance. And this is what he said. And it turned out to be true. He said, what you'll find is that there's going to be 20% of the team that kind of knows what you're saying.
SANGEETA29:19They're doing it anyway. They're the ones that are actually giving, getting you the big deals. They are the successful sellers. So in some ways you're actually looking at what they're doing and trying to scale that out. So that's the 20%. There's going to be 30% of the team that will absolutely disagree with you and feel like what they've done is the right way, and there's just no other way, and you're just making their lives harder.
SANGEETA29:40And then there's the people in the middle that is saying, I want to be like the top 20%. Tell me how. And so your job is to work on that middle and showcase the top. Like don't neglect them. They want they need validation and appreciation and support and they can be your champions. Take the champions, give them more support, take the middle, help them become the champions.
SANGEETA30:01And this 30% that you know, you just have to know they're not a good fit. And so we saw that sort of shift not exactly in percentage terms, but there were some people who never thought they needed to change, and there were some people who were driving the change and were learning from them. And then the middle, once we started creating the playbooks and they enable ment and giving them the support, they started to shift in.
SANGEETA30:25Nothing speaks better than results, right? Once you see that, you're able to actually not just close the account, but you keep the business because they did have great targets to think about. The other thing that we had to do was change incentive plans. So in the beginning, we had sort of CS was worried about Grr, but not sales and sales was worried about bookings and it didn't it wasn't enough.
SANGEETA30:52We needed CSM to think about bookings as well. We needed them to think about growing the business, not just protect existing revenue. And we needed sales to think about selling long term, viable business. So we began to find a way to merge and do sort of an 8020 here and a 2080 there. And we saw the behavior shift where they were all leaning together as a pod to say, how do we both protect and the growth of business.
SANGEETA31:19So we saw the behavioral shift by giving the tooling and also looking at incentives.
RACHAEL31:23And how did you help your managers enforce these new processes and enforce this meshing between departments?
SANGEETA31:33I think enforcing is always a very short term thing. Ultimately, people need to be convinced isn't the right thing to do. So a few things happened. Every change we drove, we drove in an a sort of a cascading manner. So first thing we did was we went to the leaders and said, here's what we are thinking, what do you think?
SANGEETA31:53And got a lot of feedback. But by in and they would say, okay, here's how we do it. Do it this way here but this other way there. So we got alignment at that level. Then we said, okay, let's jointly now go to the next level, the directors, and say, here's what we are thinking. What do you think?
SANGEETA32:08So we got feedback at the director level. And then we went to the most important, which is the first line managers. By the time we went to the first line managers, they were seeing that there. They're sort of their chain up all the way had aligned. So it made more sense to them that people had validated it wasn't coming from some ivory tower, Crow office saying, tomorrow we're going to be different.
SANGEETA32:29It was all coming through their leadership team, understanding and adjusting along the way. And then in terms of getting the two disparate teams like CSN sales to work together, it took some doing. There's there's always a little bit of a, you know, big or small disconnect in incentives and the way they look at the problem. But getting people together in the same room and doing workshops together, we had we did joint workshops for GTM, problem problem solving together, giving people a chance to sort of be human together.
SANGEETA33:04A lot of people don't understand the disconnects, them knowing that they had to solve the same problem at the end of the day, got that behavioral shift going. And this sort of cascading communication constantly helped us get by. And so it took a few quarters, but we got that eventually.
RACHAEL33:23And so you also built a value engineering team and a professional services team essentially from scratch. Why would those necessary for the new motion and what are those teams actually do on a deal.
SANGEETA33:36Yeah. So they were absolutely crucial because the value engineering when you're closing to million dollar deal or even retaining a $2 million account, you have to have somebody who can do the math behind the TCO. And it's not fair to expect that the sales rep will magically figure something out, or they will magically figure something out. You want it to be repeatable, and I very strongly believe in specialization and repeatability.
SANGEETA34:03So we had a few people under our sales engineer leader who put began to put this function together, and it took us a while. Just as we were understanding the use case, we needed to know the levers for putting a business case like this together. But once we are understood it, it became a repeat place. So for Pi planning, we knew he was the package very crucial in this way of selling.
SANGEETA34:28It wasn't important when we were converting users to dollars that didn't really need that function at all. Similarly, on professional services, the reason we needed it is we were going after is large companies that didn't know how transformation worked. They understand software, they understand their business. But if you say to let's say Blackrock, for example, and we say okay, tomorrow.
SANGEETA34:51You're going to be doing your business differently. And we just sort of abandon them with some education courses. That doesn't help them do change management. There's no bumper rails when they get stuck. Who's going to unstick them? Right. So we start we put in this professional services team. Initially we didn't need it because in a PLC motion, onboarding isn't a thing.
SANGEETA35:12You're just you're using the product from day one. So you didn't really need a services onboarding. But when we started getting to these harder use cases, we realized that transformation definitely needed services. And so that was the reason we started put in professional services again. As with everything we tested experimented. We had a very small team, gradually added more people and started to see how we can scale that out.
SANGEETA35:40But it gave us a lot of stickiness and better outcomes once we put the services team in.
RACHAEL35:46And were there deals early on where you personally had to get in the room with the economic
RACHAEL35:50buyer to prove that this could work.
SANGEETA35:53Every day? Ultimately, you have to go to the economic buyer and help them see that this would work. Yes, it's only the early adopters that you know you've got the economic by ready to buy, but for after that, you absolutely have to go and help them understand why this is the right choice.
RACHAEL36:10But at this point you were I believe you were the crow at this point in the transformation.
SANGEETA36:15Yes. A year into it, that was the Sierra.
RACHAEL36:17Yeah. Do you have to, like, personally go into these rooms and talk to these buyers?
SANGEETA36:22Yes, yes. I think the what the buyer wants to know is not necessarily. I need to have the crow in the room explaining it to me. They want somebody who understands how the business works, and they want somebody who can say, here's the benefits, whether is the crow or the product seller, it doesn't matter. But here's the benefit.
SANGEETA36:42Here's how you will think about your business differently six months from now. You're going to see this change. Eight months from now, you're going to see this change. And a year from now you're going to see this change in many of these organizations. They wanted to hear from somebody senior, but that's that's what we had to do across the board, up and down the chain.
RACHAEL36:58Do you have any interesting deal stories from when you had to do that? I know you drove deals with Novartis, Amgen, Red hat, Lululemon, Fujitsu.
SANGEETA37:08Yeah. So I, I don't remember who I'm supposed to name for one story, so I'm going to keep it. But the large it's fine. Right. So very large pharmaceutical company. They used mirror in the pandemic just like everybody else did. Which is you are not in the same room with me. Let's get on a, on a whiteboard. But that whiteboard use case is the one that we would dread because it had the least value.
SANGEETA37:37So what we had to do is to understand how do they do their drug discovery? How do they go about interacting with the different parts of their business? One is doing drug research and discovery. One is taking drug to market. What is internal IT. There's the marketing team. So there's all these different entities, and we have to actually go and sit with them.
SANGEETA37:58This is where professional services came in, understand how they worked and then came back and said, okay, what are you doing right now? You could do differently with Miro. So it literally had to do with before or after use cases with services. That got us a lot of success and laboratories and in our pharmaceutical industry companies, Fujitsu is doing the transformation of their culture and the transformation of their business.
SANGEETA38:22Pepsi, like I said, was trying to build a very quick ways to bring up international product to market with teams across different time zones, so that that is how we went after it. Yeah, I think Fujitsu was an interesting story where the CIO came in and said, I'm just going to change my culture. I have 200 global CIOs.
SANGEETA38:42I want them to look differently at our business and came into our office in San Francisco and said, how do I do it? And so we went through this whole workshop, showed him how we, we how we in our distributed teams work together. And for him, that was eye opener. And he's a very influential CIO in Japan. So once he started becoming a proponent, it really helped us open up the Japan market because we could say, this is this is what he was talking about.
SANGEETA39:11And it was a very common use case for Japanese companies to be wanting to go into this set of transformation.
SANGEETA39:17So yeah.
RACHAEL39:18Yeah, company culture is a big thing in Japan. I lived in Japan for a year when I was in high school. Just a fun fact about me. And so like, I lived with a bunch of different host families and I got to know their lives and their jobs and stuff like that. And yeah, like, company culture is huge over there.
RACHAEL39:36So I can absolutely see something like this being a big use case for them wanting to, not, not enforce. But what's the word.
RACHAEL39:46Encourage like encourage. Yeah, yeah. Encourage collaboration and like more of a like a family dynamic. It's absolutely.
RACHAEL39:54So let's shift gears a little bit and talk about measuring and progress. So how did you actually measure whether this transformation was working.
RACHAEL40:04What were you tracking that told you that the new motion was taking hold?
SANGEETA40:08We were tracking use cases attached to deals because we still had so many deals that were just usage conversion. And frankly, we don't have the luxury of saying, I'm not going to take a deal if it has absolutely nothing but usage conversion. So we still had to take a some of those, right? But we made it a point that the large significant deals, we absolutely pressed for the use cases.
SANGEETA40:34So we started checking to see that the use case get attached or not. The smaller upsells where they say we just need another ten seats, that's fine. But if you have a large account in your patch and you know you have a renewal coming up and it's $2 million of revenue, you need to know how you're going to go defend that revenue that needs these cases.
SANGEETA40:54Attachment. And if you have a 500 K plus deal or even 100 K plus day and you don't have a use case attached, then that's something that we would question hard and sort of, you know, gently encourage or enforce that identification. Go to the workshop, go figure it out. Who's going to say this is the business value. So we started measuring that on the front end.
SANGEETA41:18We then measured on the adoption to see how many use cases were actually put into place. What was the initial business case met was a very big important thing for the CSM to to take care of. And then we started measuring the lagging indicator, which is actually are we now seeing better retention? Are we able to protect our business from competition at some point?
SANGEETA41:41Just around the time I took on a cross, when we saw the the more smaller product companies come after us with lesser offering, but they were able to come after our business saying, you don't really have a complex use case, you can do what you're doing on our software. And they were right. So once we saw those, 1 or 2 really big signals happen.
SANGEETA42:04That's when we got our our our competitive battle card in shape and then very aggressively defending and actually taking business away from those competitors. That was very, very fun and very rewarding.
RACHAEL42:18Yes. Very fun. Are you competitive?
SANGEETA42:20I am competitive, yeah.
RACHAEL42:22Same.
RACHAEL42:23What was what's one of your favorite stories of like competing and being able to win out in one of those battles?
SANGEETA42:29Well, we competed with another product that primarily had a diagraming use case and we didn't know, but kind of as has Diagraming included it. And we kept treading on their business. And so they came after us hard. And I have a lot of respect for them because they truly built their product, made it very, very close to what we were going after.
SANGEETA42:53And if we had not pivoted and truly gone after that product management entity, I think we would have been far more vulnerable. But once we saw that coming, we went very aggressively in saying that you actually want one platform that does everything equally well. And we were already built for collaboration. We already had Diagraming. We're not doubling down on Diagraming, so you just need the one platform.
SANGEETA43:15So we're able to go turn around and actually go get a lot of significant business. And I think we were in much stronger position because of competition. I think that's the main thing. The one thing I've learned about competing, Rachel, is it's not the product features. It is about attaching yourself to the bigger problem. And so we just constantly went and did that.
SANGEETA43:37Like this is the bigger problem. It's not about diagraming. It's not about a workshop. It's not about the one you use case. It's about truly driving your entire product to market much faster and more efficiently. And to do that, you need one product that gives you feature proof. You want to not have to go change your product again in a year.
SANGEETA43:54This is the product that you're going to be betting on. So I'm grateful for that competitive pressure. It made us better and we got a lot of joy out of getting big deals. What we would do is we would convert our existing product, our existing footprint, into enterprise license agreements. So we just went one after the other and took away the rest of that business.
RACHAEL44:18Nice. Just hunters. Headhunters.
RACHAEL44:22That's awesome. I love that though. Like not focusing too much on on the features and just connecting yourself to the business outcome and the actual pain in the actual problem. I think a lot of SaaS companies and and sometimes rightfully so, like focus a lot on their features, but sometimes too much. They get a little bit wrapped around the axle on features, and they lose sight of the human being on the other side of the screen, who's looking to buy something, and the actual pain that they have, and the thing that they're wanting to to do in their job or in their life.
RACHAEL44:55Yeah. If you can tell a better outcome story than.
SANGEETA44:58Yeah, I think it's a better it's a bigger problem story. And I, I got this tip from one of the co-founders at HubSpot who he was talking about, you know, how you compete better. And I thought about it. I said, that's true because the more I talk about features, I'm relegated to the junior people. They're the ones who are thinking for features.
SANGEETA45:17I actually have to think about the bigger problem. So I get attached to a bigger entity in the organization who has more budget and more say so. That's that's how we started pivoting our problem segment. You're solving a bigger problem, which is if you can go to market faster, you get revenue faster, your outcome changes. You're reading your competition.
SANGEETA45:39Can you afford not to be doing that? Or do you want to start talking about diagraming. But what we we pivoted to.
RACHAEL45:46I love that that's like that's relevant advice for me as well. As, you know, at USC we're thinking about like our marketing and positioning and stuff like
RACHAEL45:54We're we're just
RACHAEL45:56the way that our sales process is, we kind of have to talk to people who are higher up. So it's difficult trying to find that positioning to get those people into the room with us.
RACHAEL46:04So I love that. Yeah.
RACHAEL46:06If another CRO came to you and said, you know, I need to take my company through the same kind of transformation, what's the first thing you tell them to get right?
SANGEETA46:17I think the first thing I would tell them to get right is don't get fooled by vanity metrics. Really try to understand what problem you're solving and why. Is it the right long term problem for you to solve? And the biggest problem that you could be solving, and what I mean by vanity metrics is simply usage our dollars or upsell numbers or LTV to calculation.
SANGEETA46:43These are all great initial metrics, but they may be fleeting. So at the end of the day, what is the business problem solving? How do you size that ROI? If you can't answer that question, then I would say there's risk to the business because somebody else is going after that question and saying, I'll give you a better ROI.
SANGEETA47:03So. So now or later.
RACHAEL47:06Awesome.
RACHAEL47:07And where can people follow you if they want to see, you know, if you post online or on LinkedIn?
SANGEETA47:14LinkedIn. Yeah, I'm fairly active on LinkedIn and I encourage conversations there
SANGEETA47:20also.
RACHAEL47:20And we will have links to as LinkedIn as well as Miro in the show notes to. Well, thank you so much for joining me today is Angela. This is amazing. I appreciate it so much.
SANGEETA47:30Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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