Qualify Better & Don't Discount

In this episode, Mark Robinson, founder of Kimble Applications, shares his journey in the Salesforce ecosystem. He discusses the need for a new system to manage professional services firms and how the Salesforce platform provided a solution. Mark highlights the challenges of adapting Salesforce CRM for the professional services market and the importance of building a brand outside of Salesforce. He emphasizes the need to qualify leads better and avoid excessive discounting. Mark also shares his experience navigating the challenges of COVID-19 and offers advice for entrepreneurs.

During the conversation, James and Mark discuss:

- How Mark got started in the Salesforce ecosystem from a consulting background.

- Strategies for acquiring the first few customers and building relationships.

- Navigating the challenges of transitioning from a services business to a software business.

- Insights on marketing and collaborating with Salesforce as the brand evolved.

- Overcoming unexpected hurdles, including the impact of COVID-19.

- Key advice on qualifying leads and avoiding excessive discounting for long-term success.

Chapters

00:00
Introduction and Background

00:30
Identifying the Need for a New System

03:23
Acquiring the First Customers

05:16
Building on the Salesforce Platform

06:34
Challenges of Adapting Salesforce CRM for Professional Services

08:29
Transitioning from Services to Software

10:41
Acquiring Customers and Overcoming Implementation Challenges

11:27
Marketing and Go-to-Market Strategy

13:08
Selling with Salesforce as the Brand Grows

15:47
Collaboration with the Channel and System Integrators

18:43
Success Turning Customers into Partners

19:41
Unexpected Hurdles and Lessons Learned

20:50
Navigating the Challenges of COVID-19

24:56
Advice: Qualify Better and Avoid Discounting

If you are a Salesforce ISV founder with an interesting story to tell, we'd love to hear from you. Send us an email to podcast@unaric.com and we'll be in touch.

Transcript

James Gasteen (00:03.822)
Hello, hello and welcome to the Scale to Sale podcast. Today I'm joined by Mark Robinson, who was the founder at Kimble. Mark, thanks for coming on the show.

Mark (00:14.418)
Thank you, James. Nice to see you again.

James Gasteen (00:16.302)
Yeah, you too. You too. I always like to ask a question about how did you actually end up in the Salesforce ecosystem? I think everybody, especially coming from the UK has got a slightly different story. So I'd love to hear yours and how you got started.

Mark (00:30.322)
Well, if you go back, I'd sort of been in actually the consulting industry. I'd started up and sold two professional services firms. One of them sort of grew very fast, about 200 people in two years. The second was about 500 people in a slightly longer period, about eight years. So we kind of learned how to run, not run those businesses. But I think most importantly in the context, we had first experience of kind of a lack of the decent systems that are around at the time.

to help people manage firms in that space. And on both occasions when we got acquired, we also then found the bigger companies that acquired this also had the same problem, you know, almost surprisingly. And, you know, in the systems that they did have were kind of disjointed. And you knew you would have seen that from your background, James, that, you know, they were kind of separate systems, resource management, skills management, project management, time, expense, billing, and so on. And we're talking about sort of 2010.

James Gasteen (01:29.228)
Mm -hmm.

Mark (01:29.234)
So if you think back then, a lot of the systems that did exist were on premise, not even the cloud. And so they're difficult to maintain, you know, costly to upgrade that kind of thing. And that just made matters worse. So we kind of seeing that problem firsthand and also thinking, I don't want to do a third consulting business. We decided to kind of go out and design a product that can manage the end to end processing one system of running a professional service, a consulting business, but in the cloud. And that's where sort of Kimball was born.

James Gasteen (01:33.548)
Yep.

James Gasteen (01:53.068)
Mm -hmm.

Mark (01:59.218)
But we were originally planning to build this on the kind of Microsoft, um, Oracle sort of infrastructure, the background we'd had from the past and the skills we had. But strangely enough, one of the investors in my last business was a guy who was by then chairman of Salesforce in Europe. And he kind of threw this curve ball at us and said, look guys, can you have a look at this? What was called force .com? So the platform that Salesforce is built on and we sort of almost reluctantly said, we'll have a look at it. And then we're kind of blown away.

I mean, it was early days, but kind of recognized that we could get rid of a lot of the plumbing that we put into our business plan and our numbers that Salesforce took care of. And there was some compromises to make, but generally it meant that we looked at our business plan and said, hey, we don't need to raise as much money now. We can get to market quicker. And again, that had that knock on impact to not need to raise much money and being totally selfish. It meant we could keep a bigger chunk of the equity that we had on day one.

James Gasteen (02:44.458)
Yep.

Mark (02:55.954)
to intensify our team and obviously ourselves as well. So that's kind of where we got to at that point and the rest is history as it were.

James Gasteen (03:04.334)
And then obviously you kind built out the product, like, how did you go about kind of acquiring your first few customers? Was it almost scratching the itch? You went back to the people who acquired you and said, hey, you know, all those spreadsheets and databases you've got, I've got a new product, or did you kind of find that your first few customers came from different angles?

Mark (03:23.538)
Well, I guess, as I said, if you just look about those two companies, I've been in this space, running consulting firms for about 20 years, and you don't include Oracle and bits that I was doing before then in consulting. And basically, what I did was pretty much every company that I'd ever competed with, I sort rung them up and said, do you remember me? I promise you, I'm not going to another consulting firm. I'm not going to be a pain to you. And I did lots of coffees, really explaining.

And a lot of the times they just want to know how did you exit? What money did you make? All that kind of stuff. And then I'd slip in at the end of the conversation, I'd say, well, you know, they said, what are you doing now? And I'd say, well, actually I'm building out this product with some colleagues and essentially we're going to solve these problems. And of course they'd say to you, well, we've got exactly the same problems. Can you tell me when your product's ready? So I said, well, even more than that, can you come and help us with the roadmap? Can you kind of get engaged in that? So we kind of got lots of people already excited about the product. So.

James Gasteen (04:16.332)
Mm -hmm.

Mark (04:19.602)
you know, kind of anybody else doing this, I would always say, you know, don't need to work with your product, you know, you go out there and start marketing and building the pipeline. And the funny story was that when we, if you go back to when we were doing this at the early stages of the ecosystem, we actually had four or five customers ready to go on day one when we launched the product on the app exchange. But Salesforce weren't geared up then to actually get you a customer live in those days. And we had to pull a few favors actually with the guy they talked about who was an investor to say, please, we need to be getting these customers on because they've

you know, they've written their checks and they've got a contract and we're not fulfilling it. And that was kind of the, you know, the thing that we had to react to. Um, so that was kind of, you know, that was kind of it. But again, I think we were very focused on, you know, a, a business problem we were trying to solve and the app exchange itself, Salesforce itself, wasn't really the driver for us. I think we were quite different in those days. Certainly. I mean, later on evolution, Salesforce definitely was a great driver for us in terms of customer acquisition, particularly in the U S.

James Gasteen (05:03.446)
Yep.

James Gasteen (05:07.458)
Mm.

Mark (05:16.114)
I think it's really important that our product is kind of different and that we were selling to people who had a business problem and it just happened to be on Salesforce. And in fact, sometimes we kind of hide the fact that it was Salesforce because that just complicated the sale. It was all about, this is the problem, we've got a solution. And then they say, well, where's your data center? We say, we haven't, we've just got this company called Salesforce, we've got a data center. And that's it. That was probably as far as we go in the technology.

James Gasteen (05:39.47)
Interesting. And just remind us all, I think you started off, was it kind of you started off kind of OEM ISV, but you had customers that were non Salesforce customers, some that were Salesforce customers. Was that your journey?

Mark (05:48.914)
Yeah, yeah, definitely. It was a good question. I mean, I think in the certainly in the European market, if you think where we were back then, Salesforce wasn't really a brand that anybody had heard of. So most of our customers were selling sort of small managed consultancies in those days, small IT services firms. They hadn't got Salesforce. You know, they maybe had Microsoft, they had their own CRM solution. Maybe they got Siebel even, but it wasn't the product that it's now, you know, recognized as a sort of a household name. It was, it was very much a new thing. So.

Although we were on the Salesforce platform, totally natively built, so 100 % of our code was on Salesforce. Actually, we were really just using it as a platform. And that causes some issues because, you know, there's a lot of things that they wanted in Salesforce. So we were bringing customers to Salesforce rather than the other way around.

James Gasteen (06:26.198)
Yep.

James Gasteen (06:34.542)
Yeah, because I can imagine also Salesforce CRM back in those days wasn't really a good fit for a professional services firm that's selling different blends of skills at different prices with different prices and different days, which, you know, they were selling servers and they were selling kind of, you know, units with set prices. So there probably wasn't a fit between the professional services market and Salesforce back in that day, I imagine.

Mark (06:56.626)
Absolutely. I mean, I used to describe it, you know, as you say, I used to describe it as we're kind of making Salesforce work the services, you know, typically I think a product being high volume, low volume, low, high volume, low complex complexity of transaction kind of deals. Whereas the consulting deal is a highly complex, low volume, but high value solution. And not only that, it's a solution that rely on the individuals and the cost of those individuals who may change.

James Gasteen (07:18.252)
Yep.

Mark (07:24.594)
right the way through the sales process to when you win the project and have to resource it might change. It has a fundamental impact on profitability and the revenue from that project. Whereas when you sell a product, you know what the price is, it's on a skew around it and you can ship it and you probably get the money before you even send the product out. Consulting is typically in arrears, all those things, all that complexity. So Sales Source was never really designed for that market because that was kind of the low hanging flute when they built the solution. So...

people like ourselves and I know your previous business James, that they all kind of started to provide that solution to make Salesforce fit better in that world.

James Gasteen (08:00.966)
Definitely. And then I think like me, you came from, you know, services into kind of, you know, software. What were some of those kind of teething issues you found when you're switching from building a software, a services business to building a software business? Because it's very different in terms of, you know, how you think about staffing, resourcing, how you think about planning, how you think about cash profitability, etc. What were some of those kind of early teething pains you had whilst switching gears?

Mark (08:29.33)
Yeah, I mean, another good one. I think if you think about a services firm or a consulting firm, you're generally profit rich and cash poor. You do a project for somebody, unless you're very lucky and they'll pay you upfront on a fixed price, which is very rare. You know, you're eventually doing your work. It takes, you know, you're perhaps doing monthly billing, but you have to pay your staff at the end of the month. If you're very lucky and efficient, you send an invoice out fairly quickly after that month end. If you're lucky, the customer pays it 30 days later.

James Gasteen (08:36.974)
Mm -hmm.

James Gasteen (08:51.66)
Yep.

Mark (08:59.058)
but you're still kind of potentially two months away from when you incurred that cost. And bottom paper, you're incredibly profitable. So it's really just managing cash flow and you can do invoice discounts and all that things to get around it. You can, but on the product side, specifically SaaS, you're the opposite. You're billing people typically and in advance if you've got some level of confidence in your product and you're getting that cash in.

but you haven't necessarily got the profitability because you're having to drive the growth, do the R &D cost of that investment. We've seen that with the way that Salesforce until recently has been running their business, huge revenue growth, but losing lots of money. So it's a different model. And I think when you come from a consulting world, you're used to kind of being cautious about recruiting people into that organization because of that cost burn. In product, you have to really have the confidence to say, look, I'm going to win this business.

James Gasteen (09:36.718)
Mm -hmm.

James Gasteen (09:47.726)
Mm -hmm.

Mark (09:53.202)
And therefore I need to be recruiting ahead of the curve. And we certainly, you know, fell foul of that early doors. I remember winning, you know, a big customer well ahead of perhaps where we should have been doing that and haven't really got the implementation resources to actually deliver that project. And we had to sort of recruit the people into the business and get them up to speed very quickly. And the reality of how we solved that was as the founders in the business, we ended up rolling our sleeves up and getting involved in implementation. I remember doing.

demos to people, even though I'm not the greatest demo person, I'm demoing to people in places like Columbia, believe it or not, at nine o 'clock at night, literally over a glass of wine. But it was, you know, that kind of the all hands to the pump sort of stuff. But we could have avoided that if we'd run the different business in a different way to how we used to do it in certain early days from our big experience in consulting.

James Gasteen (10:41.358)
Yeah. And I think I kind of everyone faced that problem is, you know, you land a big fish, you're not going to say no. And then it's kind of like, you know, how'd you go? I remember I went from, you know, 30 customers being 30 people, uh, agency, and then it was 120. So it was four times as big and it was like, Oh, okay, great. How are we going to take this down? So just like you rolling up my sleeves, I was part of the project management team. And then you start to realize, okay, that's how we kind of absorb those, those slightly kind of bigger customers. And just thinking there about the kind of, you know, going back to the Salesforce angle.

Maybe talk to us about the journey you went on in terms of maybe marketing go to market, given that you may be selling directly to an end customer that didn't really know Salesforce. And then may it sounds like you then transitioned to kind of maybe more selling with Salesforce as the brand became better known within the market.

Mark (11:27.698)
Yeah, I mean, think a lot of times with Salesforce, people assume that they're going to be this great company that's going to help you win deals. You know, they're going to introduce you, even if you've got the best product in the world, that the AEs, the account executives are going to introduce you in. You must have seen this. And the reality is probably in those early days, you know, it was a much stronger relationship in terms of those sales. You know, the guys didn't have much, they were just selling CRM and that's all they had. You know, in the early days of Salesforce, they'd all be flown out to California or Chicago, I think.

on a training course, they have five days and one of the days was dedicated to the app exchange, just the partner apps. Well, that's long since gone. And the amount of, people assume that the AEs will be out there, you know, practicing lyrically about you to their customers. But the reality is that the Kaching, as it's known, the amount of money they get as their kind of kickback for introducing partner apps, it is relatively small. It's insignificant in their scheme of things. So it kind of doesn't happen. So.

I think it's really, really important that you develop your own, your brand outside of Salesforce, that you're not reliant on them as a go -to -market strategy. I too many other ISVs have kind of assumed that they'll just build a product and people will come and Salesforce will help them. And I think it's really important that you look at how you go to market on that. And that's what we did. We went out there, we did a lot of work around building out the brand about really trying to become...

known for being experts in the problem we're trying to solve. And as I said before, I think then people come to you and are not looking at you because you're on Salesforce, they're coming to you because you're solving a problem they have. And that's much better for a longer term relationship. As I say, as things went on, then Salesforce are kind of, you're coming to people because they're on the Salesforce platform. As it becomes more mature, people will start to say, okay, I want to look at either totally or at least some.

James Gasteen (13:08.206)
Yep.

Mark (13:25.554)
other applications that built on Salesforce. So we had a big competitor who we would go up against all the time where we sometimes be just the two people then vying for the work. And then it was down to a better product would win rather than it being are you on the platform or not. And in fact, on the other extreme, you've got situations of somebody maybe is a big Microsoft customer from a serious perspective. We would still sell to them because we're solving a problem. So we have to play this kind of game where...

You want to go with Salesforce, but you have to work out what level of Salesforce you're pushing in an account. But at the end of the day, pretty much, I would say, 95%, if not almost 100 % of the deals we've ever worked on, we were finding the lead, taking the initiative, running the sale, and actually weren't directly linked with the Salesforce sales guy, which sometimes caused problems. I mean, sometimes those people didn't like that because you were too influential in the deal.

But generally, you if you build up a good relationship with somebody, they'd see that actually you're helping them to cement the relationship. And I think you probably know these stats better than I do. There's some great stats Salesforce will quote you about how much stickier their own Salesforce CRM is with partner apps. And the more partner apps you have on there, the more likely, or less likely that Salesforce CRM will churn. So it should be in their interest to create that ecosystem within the customer.

James Gasteen (14:50.39)
Totally agree. And I think one of the things I found with OEM is there's probably a little bit of education piece with Salesforce A's and commercial teams to say, this is how we can work together because some of them seem to think that OEM equals a competitor. Oh, you're going to, you might deny me revenue. And it's like, no, no, no, we're not going to die. We haven't, we haven't built a CRM here guys. We're complimentary. Here's our story, but we also have users that aren't Salesforce or don't have seats. So back when I started 10 odd years ago,

only salespeople would have a Salesforce seat. So if you're trying to create adoption across a services business, like in Kimball's use case, those people wouldn't have a seat and for them to go to Salesforce and buy that seat would then be almost cost prohibitive. And it was just trying to get that message across so that it was kind of, you know, better together as opposed to people would be picking one or the other. And I think I've heard that from quite a few of the other kind of OEM founders past and present that, you know, there was a struggle sometimes on the education piece.

to work with Salesforce ease.

Mark (15:50.482)
I think, I mean, to be fair to them, I think bottom line is, you know, sometimes people forget that at the end of the day, you have to be generating revenue to them. I think quite early on, we became like the biggest revenue generator as an ISV to Salesforce. And on that basis, you could negotiate a lot more easily. And I think sometimes people just assume that, well, I'm going to get all this from Salesforce, but they're not actually bringing Salesforce revenue or as you say, they're not bringing you the opportunity to upsell some of the other products. And you have to realize in any partnership, I think.

what's a win -win for both organisations. Even if the organisation is much bigger than you, I think it's even more important that you actually recognise that and don't just think about what you bring to it, it's also what you bring to them as an organisation.

James Gasteen (16:32.942)
And then, you know, kind of progressing through the journey, like towards the latter stages of your journey with Kimball, did you find that there was more collaboration with the channel, more with Salesforce, maybe SIS, did you develop new channels to drive leads? Because obviously at the early days, everyone's got to drive their own business. Did you find new novel ways or things that work particularly well in terms of lead gen?

Mark (16:55.698)
I think it was what we found is a bit tricky for us because if you think about it, the sort of the traditional company that would introduce you that would probably be a large system integrator. And we were selling to systems integrators. So, you know, kind of, you wouldn't necessarily expect your, you know, your caps to be, or your, know, CGI is to be introducing you into and doing implementations to your product into Accenture. It's kind of meant to compete so it's slightly different.

But certainly you could, you could leverage those relationships. And we certainly dealt with people like PwC who would look at this from not just the product perspective, but also the wider stage of the implementation. As you know, you're putting in the systems that I talked about earlier, the breadth of those systems, you're touching pretty much the whole of an organization, particularly in a consulting firm. And so the opportunity for people to come in and help them with say business transformation is huge. So, you know, one of the areas that we really sold into heavily was in the

services arms and high tech world, which is, you know, pretty much Salesforce own, particularly that most of those are in the US. And so we would be selling it to very, very large, you know, several thousands or more services organizations within an established software organization, hardware organization. And, you know, you would be, they would, they would typically be bringing in the PWCs as well to help them with the transformations of their own organizations in services. So you could then leverage those people as a relationship.

as you got bigger and the product you're able to cope with that kind of large multinational, multi -currency, multi -company organizations that they need a more mature PSA solution than maybe some of the other players around.

James Gasteen (18:34.318)
And did you find that you had like success turning customers into partners or did you try and kind of keep them separate?

Mark (18:43.57)
We had a few but I think they tend to be the smaller ones I think as I say it is it we're probably you know not relatively unique in the sense that our customers are generally you know services customer to Tokyo services companies So they were you know to be a partner you then be trying to sell into another service organization We certainly had a lot of referrals. I mean that was a as the business goes as you know You know you'd find a CEO or CFO one company would go to another company or start up another company and they would immediately ask for your product

which is sometimes embarrassing because you know they've got five people and by this stage in your business a five person business wasn't quite as exciting but they were adamant that they wanted to put your product in day one because they planned to go to a 500 person business and felt that to do that now was obviously a lot easier to do than to do it when they were 100 people or whenever you would normally be dealing with.

James Gasteen (19:30.368)
Yeah, totally. And then when you think about what were some of those kind of like, you know, you think what was the most unexpected hurdles along the way? And what are maybe some of the main lessons you learned?

Mark (19:41.01)
Well, I suppose, um, Kimball was my third company, as I said. Um, so I've pretty much been battle -hardened by then, I suppose. Um, but it was my first product company, as we said. So I've been through, I've been through several recessions actually, you know, during that time. I always have to remember a lot of the sessions. Um, and my experience with that was that kind of good people and, you know, if you had good people and you're good product or a service that genuinely, um, there was a need for then through things like recessions, you'd come out stronger. Um,

James Gasteen (20:06.318)
Hmm.

Mark (20:11.602)
I think we were sort of the weaker players out there. They do well in the good market, we wouldn't survive that. But I think probably in terms of the biggest unexpected hurdle, it's a bit of a clea -

James Gasteen (20:12.558)
Yeah.

Mark (20:26.13)
then I think it's probably doesn't come any bigger than COVID in terms of where we were at. I think most tech companies, to be fair, were able to switch to kind of home working pretty quickly, pretty easily. And arguably the sort of, you know, the financial impact of COVID as it turned out, wasn't really that much different if you're looking back from a recession, a pretty big recession. So we kind of knew how to cope with that.

James Gasteen (20:42.35)
Mm -hmm.

Mark (20:50.898)
but I can remember being in the situation where as a kind of leader, and I'm sure you probably had to say, we were engaged for the first time really in people's personal lives as well as their work lives. And that was probably the same for our employees as well. We were all having to cope with serious concerns about our loved ones as well as juggle, are we going to still be in a job? Is there a job to have? And so you kind of felt a huge responsibility, I think, for...

James Gasteen (21:12.622)
Mm -hmm.

Mark (21:19.09)
not just the welfare of the company, but also for the employees and even your customers to sort of be around to help them. And at a personal level, as a founder, you tend to have all your eggs in one basket financially in the success of your business. You bet your farm on it, that it's going to be a success to reward your family and so on yourself down the line. And if you think about where we were in our evolution, having started in 2010, I think I pretty much felt like we've done that heavy lifting. We pushed the company up the hill proverbially, and now we're on the other side. Life was a bit easier.

You know, we knew we were a great company, we knew we were going. And then suddenly, you know, COVID hits you, boom. And you have to make all sorts of fundamental decisions about your business you never expected to do. You know, with a recession, you know, kind of know, you don't, you know, you don't know when it'll end, but you know it's going to end. You know, the recession will end at some point, things will change around. But, you know, if you think back to COVID, it's easy to say now, but we didn't know when it would end or perhaps even if it would end at all. And I think I mentioned, you know,

James Gasteen (22:11.79)
Yep.

Mark (22:19.026)
I haven't said enough of it, but we really ran our business in a very lean manner. The kind of muscle memory of our team members was to operate in that way. We didn't raise anything like the sorts of money that our well -funded West Coast organizations were. But I think that kind of makes you a bit lazy because you've got so much money, you don't have to be very precise about your decision making. You don't have to think about where every dollar or every pound's going. So I think our teams, we used to...

in the ways that we have to do and react quickly, far more quickly and have less impact on them personally than the sort of competitors we had who had that kind of luxury of the dollars that help them kind of drive growth. They're used to driving top line, but they're not focused on bottom line. And the way of losing money all the way, we talked about it before, it was easy to lose money, that's what you did. And I think that can...

James Gasteen (23:02.654)
Mm -hmm.

Mark (23:16.594)
shifted overnight from kind of investment community as well. So you had to react to that. And from a personal point of view, that change also has a big culture shock if you're not used to doing it. And a lot of people kind of never operate in an environment like that in their working lives. They're a lot younger, they didn't been through maybe an recession even. So although it wasn't kind of without paying for it, I think we were able to make fairly relatively minor changes in our business because of the way we'd run before it.

in just a few months. And so we emerged from COVID as a stronger business. We were now profitable. And the confidence that we created in our largest investor at the time meant that actually when the opportunity came down, relatively soon afterwards to acquire one of our competitors bigger than us, they backed us to do it. So I think from my point of view, my advice would be expect a downturn, even if maybe not one like COVID.

James Gasteen (24:02.286)
Yeah.

Mark (24:12.53)
But I think, you know, never get ahead of yourself. I think, look at the, you know, book, look at the bottom line, look, don't, you know, as well as the top line, even in good times, you know, really think, even if today everything's going wonderfully, just think, well, what would happen tomorrow? You know, plan for it. And I think if you prepare for the worst and nothing happens, then you're in a great place. But if it does happen, you'll be in a better place than your competitors to exploit it when you do come out the other side.

James Gasteen (24:34.154)
Yeah, no, I think that's a great point. I mean, I think if you think about it, we've had a war in Europe in 22, we had COVID in 20, you had global meltdown, and I think, you know, I've had a 20 odd year working career, and I've seen several of these, you know, multiple black swans in a 20 year period. So they actually maybe that they are they aren't so infrequent. So yeah, I think planning for those or being prepared makes a lot of sense. And then just to kind of wrap up what's maybe one bit of advice you wish maybe someone had given you?

Mark (24:56.402)
Yeah.

James Gasteen (25:04.046)
out as a, you know, as Salesforce.

Mark (25:04.074)
Yeah, I mean, think it's probably a general thing really. I think what I've learned is really two things. One is around, I'd say, qualify better. I think that would be my first one. But very close to that is, I'm going to be quite controversial. I think I'd say don't discount. And there's some really interesting statistics. I think it's from the SAS Institute that say,

something like the level of discount you give is proportional to the likelihood of churn. And it's obvious when you think about it, the logic behind that is that if you have to discount, then you've not been able to get your prospect to appreciate the ROI your product gives. And if they don't get that value, then they're less likely to say the project's seriously as they should do. And I guess that's what makes your product less likely to give.

James Gasteen (25:42.414)
Mm

Mark (25:58.61)
they're sticky and you know that leads to churn and churn is the silent killer as it were in any SaaS business and I've spoken to lots of founders and I think it's really easy particularly in the early days to win any deal you know win a deal at all costs you know any deal any shape any size and you've only got a finite amount of cash to burn so it kind of think that any deal you're gonna win just tops up that cash reserve a bit more.

James Gasteen (26:17.17)
Mm -hmm.

Mark (26:27.634)
mean delays when you might have to go back to investors. But my experience and trust me on this is that all deals aren't born equal. So I think you should believe in your product and the value it provides to your prospective customers. And if you haven't convinced that prospective customer to pay the right amount for your product, then they're not going to value your product. You'll have a poor experience and they probably will eventually churn. And so my advice is to either spend more time selling the value,

James Gasteen (26:40.142)
Mm -hmm.

Mark (26:57.842)
And if they're still going to get it, just walk away and qualify out. And even if you do tell to someone that isn't a perfect fit, you're going to end up wasting time in customer success. Um, or perhaps worse, you're going to end up wasting time in R and D, um, while they happen to sort of play around the product and take it away from court, your core roadmap. So, um, you'll end up bending your product out of shape, but also probably get people out of shape. So I'd say qualifying better and holding firm with the price that people will pay for your product. Um,

James Gasteen (27:06.634)
Yep.

James Gasteen (27:26.918)
Yeah, and I think they're great. I mean, I suppose and they're also probably linked like, you know, I've definitely acquired customers my early days where the qualifications a little bit loose and it was like, okay, great. It looks like a nice logo, not a great fit, not a great use case fit, but you know, it was a great, you know, a great logo that was heard of and it's almost probably, you know, qualifications probably linked to sloppy discounting.

Mark (27:27.666)
create far more value for your business in the long run.

Mark (27:45.938)
Yeah.

James Gasteen (27:50.606)
meant that you're acquiring probably not an ideal customer that would probably churn, but that the idea of their logo on a website was far too attractive. So I think they're great points. They're also interlinked. I they can be separate, but also kind of interlinked.

Exactly. Well, Mark, appreciate you coming on the show. It's been great to hear about your experiences. Obviously, you've got a wealth of entrepreneurial experience pre Kimball, but also being very successful here. So yeah, appreciate you coming on the show. It was great to catch up.

Mark (28:14.008)
Pleasure, lovely to chat to you.