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Kristi Faltorusso:
So, we wish him the best. And, we’re really excited to have our 2 guests today. Yes. That’s right. 2 guests. 2 for the price of 1, doublemint gum style here, from Bluebeam, Andrew, Gare and Sean Andrews. Andrew, first of all, did I get your last name correct?

Andrew Gaer:
You did. That one that one always throws people off. Okay. Yeah. But you you nailed it.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Nailed it. Nailed it. Okay. Now my now my job here is done. Christy, onto you. No. Andrew, Andrew Gaer is the senior director of customer success at Bluebeam. We’re gonna learn more about Bluebeam, and Sean is the VP of global customer success.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So the first question, for those that are maybe not so much in the, in in the construction industry, Tell us Andrew, let’s start with you. Tell us a little bit about Sure. Bluebeam, the history of your company, and and what you guys do.

Andrew Gaer:
Yeah. Thanks for thanks for that, and thanks for the introduction. I’ll be listening intently for that insult, see if I can pick it up, if it’s if it’s subtle or very explicit. But Bluebeam, I I would describe us as sort of the best productivity tool for communication and collaboration on drawings and documents for the design and construction industry. We got here we’ve been around for over 20 years. It’s kind of a cool origin story. I think a lot of companies have these cool origin stories, but ours sort of came from space. The founders were actually working for a spin off of Jet Propulsion Laboratory and they were designing the Mars Rover robotic arms and they needed a way to create PDFs from their CAD tools so that they could look at the drawings, mark them up, and make some changes.

Andrew Gaer:
So they thought there’s no good way to create a PDF for a drawing, a large format drawing at this stage in the world. And so what if we just created our own tool that could do that for us? And so that’s where we were born from. The ability to get CAD files onto a PDF file format. And then from there, we got into construction and design and started having plugins for things like AutoCAD, if you’re familiar with that. And then a few years later started being able to add markups to those PDFs so that people could actually work with the PDFs. And if you’re not familiar with PDF, I mean, I think it’s 2024, probably everybody is by now. Right? But

Kristi Faltorusso:
Just chat you between it and it’ll give you the answer.

Andrew Gaer:
Yeah. It’s sort of it’s, you know, a simple way of thinking about it is digital paper. It’s printable document format. But, but it’s a way for people to sort of add things on top of a document and inside a document. You can almost think of it like a container, so you can add data to that thing that looks like a document. So it’s it’s very versatile, and that’s why it works so well in this industry.

Kristi Faltorusso:
But Okay, Andrew. Any more any more discussion on PDFs, and we are gonna lose all 5 of our listeners. I think we’re already down to 3.

Andrew Gaer:
You you knew what you knew what you were getting into when you asked me join, I think. But okay. Fair enough.

Kristi Faltorusso:
You challenged you challenged me to you challenged me to rag you, and and there you go. That was that was it.

Andrew Gaer:
Alright. That was pretty good. That’s that’s alright.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So, Sean, tell us a little bit more about the intricacies of of PDFs and and, the technical architecture of them.

Josh Schachter:
Or don’t.

Kristi Faltorusso:
I’ll see my I’ll see myself out. I can I can

Andrew Gaer:
yeah? Alright.

Kristi Faltorusso:
No. No. No. It’s cool. It’s cool. I mean, Andrew, on your podcast, you know, what what types of conversations about PDFs do you guys have?

Andrew Gaer:
Oh, that’s mostly we yeah. I have a podcast about, a road trip from way back when, my buddy and I took around the US, but we mostly talk about French fries.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, best French fries in the country.

Andrew Gaer:
Well, Del

Kristi Faltorusso:
Taco. Del really?

Josh Schachter:
Wow. The taco place has the

Sean Andrews:
best French fries?

Andrew Gaer:
Recently named best fast food place by, USA Today. Very controversial.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Wait a second. We’ll get back to CS stuff. Yeah. No way.

Andrew Gaer:
Over Chick Fil A. It dethroned Chick Fil A. That was the headline.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Wow. Yeah. We don’t have time

Andrew Gaer:
for that, do we?

Kristi Faltorusso:
No. No. But I I think we’re actually just gonna pivot this episode. So Del Taco, the number one overall of any type of fast food, Del Taco out of I think it was Del

Andrew Gaer:
Del Taco, which is I think it’s mostly West Coast too.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Yeah. So I

Josh Schachter:
was like, we don’t have any Del Tacos.

Andrew Gaer:
Yeah. You’re missing out.

Kristi Faltorusso:
But, Sean, you’re, Sean, you’re from Austin. You guys have some some some, some some hot, you know, fast casual restaurants that have come from that area. Right?

Sean Andrews:
Have a multitude of fast food selections everywhere in Texas, for sure.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Sean Andrews:
I’ve seen a Del Taco. I cannot recall where, and I had never gone to one, but now I have a reason.

Andrew Gaer:
Yeah. Crinkle fries. Delicious.

Kristi Faltorusso:
There you go. There you go. And I’m I’m still, missing in and out from my days in Southern California every

Sean Andrews:
once more.

Kristi Faltorusso:
What do you

Josh Schachter:
Josh, that’s sad. That’s disgusting. And I’m so

Kristi Faltorusso:
excited about that. Like, East Coast born and raised true to her roots of Shake Shack person.

Josh Schachter:
Get me started on the fact that this country eats too much processed food and how fast food is killing America. So, like, that’s where I would

Sean Andrews:
take this conversation. Like, take all the fast food

Josh Schachter:
and, like, let’s reduce the fact that 60% of the food that is being consumed right now is all processed garbage, and that is why we’re all sick all the time.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay. Well, you know what, Christy? You and Sean can go to your organic, like, like, whatever restaurant. Andrew and I are gonna go just enjoy our our seasoned fries.

Josh Schachter:
Instead of saying which one of these fast food places the best, I’ll tell you that they’re all the worst. How about that?

Kristi Faltorusso:
K.

Andrew Gaer:
K. But Shake Shack has crinkle fries too, don’t they?

Josh Schachter:
They do. I’m not a fan. I’m not a fan of Shake Shack.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. My kid loves it.

Josh Schachter:
My husband likes it. My daughter really likes Shake Shack. It’s her preference. No nobody in my house loves Chick Fil A. Yeah.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Well, Sean and Andrew, it was great having you on the episode today. So, everybody tune in next week. No. They’re riveting. Riveting. Riveting. Alright.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So, Andrew, you’ve been there for 13 years. You started at Bluebeam when there were 50 people in the company. You started in account services. You know, really kind of you were handling anything customer touching. Right? Not literally, figuratively. And then, Sean, you joined a little over 3 years ago. Right? So I’d love to learn, you know, kinda your history of with the company and, what you brought on to or what brought you into Bluebeam?

Sean Andrews:
Yeah. Absolutely. So three and a half years ago, I came to Bluebeam. We were in the midst of subscription transformation, so I’m sure you learned a little bit about that, Andrew. Met with you guys earlier. So that was, you know, going from desktop application to subscription pricing model, some portion of the product available in the cloud, in a fundamentally new way than to need to interact with customers. And so that’s what pulled me over. I was at SAP at the time, and so came over to to Bluebeam to build out the CSM team that Andrew now runs, and tech support and our university community aspects through our customer enablement team, professional services, training, all of those things, sort of piecing together what were 3 or 4 separate departments inside Bluebeam at the time and and bringing those units together to to sort of bring a cohesive message to the customers, customer life cycle methodology of how we were gonna interact with customers and and all of those types of things.

Sean Andrews:
So that’s the structure that I came into. We’re now nearly complete with our transformation. I think it’s 96% complete, something like that. So we’ve got a handful of customers left to go. That’s from desktop to SaaS

Kristi Faltorusso:
applications.

Sean Andrews:
Desktop to SaaS. Everybody on subscription, I think, Anders probably shared, we still have a desktop application that is the heavy use tool. Many of those services are now syncing to the cloud so that you can do things from your iOS application, your Android application, and sync it back. So we’re getting more and more SaaS enabled, I would say, but the power there’s a huge still desktop, flexibility and functionality that’s that’s gonna be really hard to peel.

Kristi Faltorusso:
And is that just because, like I mean, like, these I’ll I’ll call it legacy. I don’t need that being disparaging. Right? You think about, like, these these applications that have been around for 20 years, like the photoshops of the world and stuff like that. Is that just because they’re just they’re powerful? You’re you’re dealing with construction blueprints and things like that. And, you know, sometimes you can’t wait the the 7 seconds for the page to reload type of

Sean Andrews:
thing. Yeah. There’s a few things Andrew probably knows more from the history than I do. But, yes, I think a lot of it is there’s a multitude of tools that you can utilize. So there’s a ton of functionality that’s been developed over those 20 years. There’s, you know, large scale drawings. There’s, and then there’s legacy architecture. So you’ve got all of those things sort of mixed together at the moment that keeps a healthy portion of our users on the on the desktop app.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So so for either of you guys, what what if that transformation, because I’m sure there’s other folks listening out there that that may be going through this or or well, hopefully not. But there’s probably some. Hopefully not too many more left. Hopefully not. Did it done it. This is

Sean Andrews:
my third one through. I’m like, I’m done with this.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, jeez. Should be good. Okay. So what’s the biggest so so, like so then, Sean, what are what are, like give us your wisdom on on how you do these transformations of going from application desktops over to to SaaS. Like, what are some of the biggest, as they say, tummy rumbles that come across and and and how you do these things right?

Sean Andrews:
I I think one is be very transparent with your customer base so they know what’s coming and give them the time to absorb that, give you feedback. We tried to make it as painless as possible for our customers to move across. So one is flexible contracting, so don’t force them too early. But 2, make it you know, we made it price neutral effectively for them to move across so that, you know, you’re already going to face the, conversations around well that you’re moving to this model so that you can monetize more. And, and so you’re gonna have to dispel those concerns anyway. So by trying to make it price neutral, you effectively can eliminate half of that conversation upfront. I guess if you’re raising the price and putting folks on a subscription, I would say that’s a recipe for a very challenging conversation. So I think that’s one of the things that that we’ve done pretty well is be very upfront with our customers and try to make it as painless for them to move across the line as possible.

Sean Andrews:
Andrew, I don’t know what other wisdom you wanna share from from your experience.

Andrew Gaer:
I don’t think I have much else to add. I think, I think that’s the key, just that that clear communication of what we’re trying to do and what we’re not trying to do. Because there is a lot of skepticism out there. Right? Because and I think that was one of the the benefits that we had is so many companies have made this transition before that they, you know, we’ve been able to see the things that people haven’t reacted well to, and we’ve been able to avoid those things and then also communicate that out saying, we know that these have been problems before. We’re not going to do that, and here’s what we’re going to do instead, so that they feel more comfortable about what we’re trying to

Sean Andrews:
do. Yep.

Josh Schachter:
So I guess, what are what are some of the blind spots? Right? So, I mean, customers don’t always behave the way we’d like them to. And so just because we’re asking them to come on this journey with us, doesn’t mean they’re eager, and jumping at it. So how do you guys manage some of the blind spots? Or how are you navigating customers who are like, nope. That’s cool. Good for you guys. I’m glad you’re going through this migration. Not interested. Wanna stay on legacy product.

Josh Schachter:
Or what are the timelines or how do you manage that? Are you still putting resources against the legacy product for a period of time? Like, walk me through some of the ugly part of it.

Sean Andrews:
Those are mostly Is that ugly?

Kristi Faltorusso:
You wanna talk about it?

Sean Andrews:
No. They’re really it’s not it’s not too bad, but there’s certainly some.

Andrew Gaer:
Yeah. I mean, we I think we’ve been quite generous as far as the amount of time that we’ve allowed people to make the transition and and trying to be upfront and let them know what’s coming, when it’s coming, and then not forcing them to just uproot processes and uproot their IT departments to make these changes all of the sudden. And hopefully, most of them have have had the time to kinda do it on their own time. So I think that’s been helpful. Right? Because when it’s just sort of we’re making this change and you have to the end of this month to do it, and they’re sitting there going, I I already had this month and next month and the next 3 months planned out of what I was supposed to do. And now this company who’s just one of the many vendors in our tech stack is forcing us to do something else that really disrupts things. So we we tried to give lots of time. And we do I mean, Sean mentioned we’ve we’re at something like 96% have have come across.

Andrew Gaer:
This has been, what, 2 years Mhmm. To get there, I think. So so we’ve taken our time, and and there are still some customers who are on more of a legacy, you know, license. And and those are kind of the edge cases now, maybe some government type contracts, things like that. But, yeah, we we’ve tried to mitigate it as best we can and understand what these people in IT have to in administration have to deal with every day. Right? Because it’s not just the people using the software. It’s also the people that administer the software that we have to take care of too.

Kristi Faltorusso:
It sounds like a Chris oh, I’m sorry, Sean.

Sean Andrews:
No. Go go ahead.

Kristi Faltorusso:
No. I was just gonna to have an aside to Christie, like, Christie, doesn’t it sound like your dream job, 2 years of of moving people over from from That’s literally the most nightmare. Yeah. We’re changing some packing stuff right

Josh Schachter:
now, and it’s like it’s it’s the it’s so small, the level of effort of the work that we’re doing right now in this specific project compared to what you all did. And it’s like, it should take us, I don’t know, maybe, like, 60 days to, like, get all of our customers over across the finish line once done in development. And that feels like ugly and heavy and horrible. And so to think about doing this for 2 years, and to still feel like, okay, there’s still 4% of these customers who haven’t

Sean Andrews:
even got I’m like, I’m that’s that’s so much.

Andrew Gaer:
I I think one aspect too just, you know, we do think in customer success, we’re always outwardly focused. Right? We’re thinking about the success of our customers. I if there’s anybody out here who is still in this position or about to be in this position, one thing to note too is it took a toll on our customer success managers, our support teams, a lot of people internally too who you know, we we hired a lot of CSMs at the time, and we hire from the industry. So people who have come from design and construction backgrounds, and they were excited to join Bluebeam so that they could talk about our software. And instead, they were having conversations about licensing transitioning. So Yeah. It it’s important to also keep that in mind and how you can support your team to get through this as well.

Kristi Faltorusso:
But So

Josh Schachter:
how do you get them to come along on this journey for 2 years? Right? To your point, like, they’re not

Kristi Faltorusso:
Money.

Josh Schachter:
To I’m I don’t know that

Kristi Faltorusso:
that was how they sell it to Josh.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. But I don’t like I would feel like I would need more money to spend 2 years doing that.

Sean Andrews:
Much of how we’ve sort of turned the same message that we shared with customers inside a lot. We have a great tenure at Bluebeam. We’re very fortunate to have folks like Andrew who’ve been around a decade or more. And so part of our messaging was around, hey. We have to make this move because we’re locked into this legacy architect. We cannot release some new functionality that takes advantage of new technology in the cloud and all the things that brings until we make this move. Like, one, we need to be able to fund it. We need to be able to be on an architecture that can support it.

Sean Andrews:
We need to have an ecosystem of resources that can help customers understand what the heck we just released and how to take advantage of it. So a part of a lot of the internal conversation was around, like, we’re up against, you know, a very real wall of innovation that we can’t get past. And most of the people there obviously are doing this because they love it. They have a passion for the build and construct industry and the lives that we can impact. And so that story resonates really well, resonates for our customers as well just to know that’s sort of the understanding that, yes, it’s a bump. Yes. It’s gonna be a little bit of a a push, but this it unlocks so much good innovation and readiness for the future that if we don’t make the move, we will. You know, it’s one of those things.

Sean Andrews:
You disrupt yourself or you will get disrupted, and we’re choosing performance.

Josh Schachter:
So now that you have all these customers kind of over, we’ll say everyone’s over effectively, how does that how have you redesigned what your customer success strategy looks like now? Because you obviously have a very different product. You’ve got a different kind of initiative and and probably new priorities for everyone. So what is that now kinda new state of customer success look like?

Andrew Gaer:
Well, it’s interesting. The product itself really isn’t new. We we’ve introduced more. So, you know, previous so really, when we say this transformation, most of the transformation was just how we sell and license our software. Right? It was it was a perpetual license with an annual maintenance fee into a named user subscription. So that’s that’s effectively the big part of what it was. Excuse me. So the product itself, the fundamentals of how people interact with it from the end user standpoint, they’re you know, hopefully, most of them didn’t have any idea anything took place over the last couple

Sean Andrews:
of years.

Andrew Gaer:
Right? So so in that regard, not much has changed. However, we have definitely stepped up how we sort of go after the users and try to elevate their education. So we’ve introduced a couple things under Sean’s team as far as, a new Bluebeam University platform so people can log in and get education included with their subscription on their own time at their own pace. We’ve introduced a new community so people can learn from their peers and interact directly with our product management team. Just the way we interact through our marketing channels, you know, traditional ways, social media, all the ways that that people do that now and just really trying to reach people where they’re at because we know that people like to get information in different ways. And we recently did, so we we we talk to our users a lot. Everybody says they do. Right? And everybody does, I’m sure.

Andrew Gaer:
But we actually put KPIs around it on our team. So we we require our CSMs to have a certain amount of interviews every quarter. And so I was just looking through the the results I

Kristi Faltorusso:
should I just need to step in here and say and, Andrew, that that that is I love that so much. Every CS team across the entire world should have quotas for the number of interviews that they their team does with their customers. I’m saying that completely unbiased from a as a founder of a company that manages, interaction meetings with the customers. Sorry. I just had to interrupt. I got really excited about you said that.

Andrew Gaer:
No. No. I I appreciate that. Yeah. I it it’s so fundamental, isn’t it? And you just really it’s easy to get away from it somehow. But when we we make it such a priority, we hear certain things that we wouldn’t necessarily hear otherwise. And and so where I was going with this was we hear so many people say that they’re self taught. Mhmm.

Andrew Gaer:
Or and what that really means is they open the software, and our software is relatively easy to open it up, understand what it is, get some value immediately, and just you’re off to the races. And then when you get stuck, most people, you know, think about yourself, what you do when you get software. It’s well, Google that, you know, or I’ll ask a friend. That’s maybe changed a little bit since that so many people started working from home. It’s harder to walk by somebody’s desk and say, what’s that on your screen? How did you do that?

Sean Andrews:
That’s true.

Andrew Gaer:
But those are those are still sort of the ways in which people, a lot of people get information is, I will use it until I get stuck and then I’ll I’ll Google it. Right? Or depending on your generation, maybe, you know, some of us, you know, home improvement project. Right? I’ll go to YouTube. Somebody, you know, a niece or nephew of mine who’s in their twenties might go to TikTok. It’s just a little bit different. But each like, we all have these different places where we go. But through those those interviews and understanding that people just are self taught, that’s where we need to think, where are you going to get self taught and where can we show up there for you so that the information that you find is the information that is most helpful to you.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So so what what did what did they come up with? So I think you said before, like, educational portals, and content product. Like, what were the what were the different resources that came up, for you from those conversations?

Andrew Gaer:
All of it. The answer is all of it.

Sean Andrews:
We have a pretty broad scale customer enablement engine that has we built out precisely for that reason. So if you you want university training, you’re that type of user that can sit through a few minutes or a few hours of courses and you wanna be certified, we have that path. If you’re stuck at one thing and you need a quick YouTube video, we build micro trainings for that that are accessible.

Kristi Faltorusso:
On YouTube? We

Sean Andrews:
on YouTube. Yeah. So our our YouTube videos have the 100 of 1,000 impressions every quarter.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Wow.

Sean Andrews:
So really

Josh Schachter:
And that makes sense. And I think it’s a better strategy. Right? You’re putting the content where people wanna go or where they’re naturally going anyway as opposed to saying, like, you have to go to this one channel where we are housing our content. And you’re smart to think about it in long form, short form, written images. I’ve seen all kinds of stuff. And I think that’s really important as you think about your content creation there because everyone learns differently, and they like different formats. Like, I’m very much like, show me a video. If you give me a long document, there’s no way I’m gonna get through even half it before I’m, like, onto the next thing.

Josh Schachter:
So I think you’re you’re approaching this the right way. How have your customers responded to it? Like, what are you seeing in terms of not only their engagement there, but how is it how are you seeing that transition into how they’re using adopting your software?

Sean Andrews:
I think the as far as using the assets go, the the, I guess, more surprising things. So we we have certain KPIs around trains completed and the reach that we get to our customers, and we had certain targets around that. What we see getting engaged is the micro train more and more. So there’s really tiny slivers, 32nd, 1 minute blocks. And so we had KPIs around it, but they were sort of second level. So we’re raising those now to top level KPIs so that we can really continue to drive those, because we’re seeing utilization there. How that translates into product utilization is it is the next piece of the onion that we’re slicing, and part of that is the challenge that we have around data accessibility being a largely desktop product. So we’re getting we’re getting into that.

Sean Andrews:
We’re getting better data, but we’re aiming to do exactly that. Like, watch you take a video and then watch you utilize that feature and see if you come back and do it again. Those are data data desires that we still have to build.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Do so the fact that you’ve gone from from, at least on a, like, a a pricing model or business model from from desktop application to SaaS, I know the product is still largely desktop, but, does that help give you more visibility into who your users are? Because now you actually have assigned c yeah.

Sean Andrews:
Yeah. We used to offer license key. So I knew you as a key number, right, from a computer, and you’d move that from machine to machine. I had no idea if it was Josh or Christy touching the actual system. So today, regardless of whether you’re coming into the desktop application or any cloud service, we know you have to log in. So we know who is logging in. So we get the telemetry that we had never had before.

Andrew Gaer:
Okay.

Sean Andrews:
The access to the community is gated. Right? So you use your same ID to get into the software that automatically lets you get into the community if you sign up for that. If you’re part of our r and d Labs group, same kind of thing. So we can see you across the different life cycle interaction points in a very different way than we’ve ever had before.

Kristi Faltorusso:
So it’s okay. So it’s made all the difference getting that getting those user licenses just

Sean Andrews:
to be under sign up? Yeah. It sets the foundation for us to do all the things that we need to

Kristi Faltorusso:
do. Now you’re still everybody’s doing that. Yeah. You’re still slightly blind on product usage data. Is that correct? So, yeah, how do you offset that?

Sean Andrews:
I well, Andrew talked about one aspect was at the interview side.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah.

Sean Andrews:
And community engagement has been a huge one for us to sort of push that just pushed out 4 months ago, and we’re already seeing very healthy adoption on that front. We and we ping that community from direct product management interaction. So we’re we’re getting feedback and consuming feedback requests, enhancement requests, and our product managers are responding to inquiries inside that portal. They’re very active, which has been awesome. It’s helped to feed that beast, so to say. We also measure I think Andrew probably alluded. We created a customer delight index this year, which is sort of a multi pillar mechanism by which we survey, grab data that’s accessible, or directly survey certain aspects from multi dimensions so that we can figure out where do we need to reduce friction for customers. So What

Kristi Faltorusso:
tell can you tell us more a lot

Sean Andrews:
of things about that.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. I mean, can you double click into that? Like, what are the dimensions? How how is what’s the composition of that, delight index?

Sean Andrews:
Yeah. Absolutely. So it is built off of 5 primary pillars. So CSAT, traditional CSAT, which is primarily taken from support interactions that are directly surveyed every time a case is closed, which we do, lovability score. So our users are very passionate. And so we wanted to find out, like, what is it about the product that is really driving an emotional benefit for you? What is that emotion? Is it ease of use? Is it, like, you really get excited to use the tool? So we we survey that directly. We take NPS from 4 different dimensions. So traditional NPS, you might have one dimension that you’re taking.

Sean Andrews:
We hit it from, the NPS score inside the the folks that we survey for lovability. We hit it from our professional services and training engagements, and then we hit it from our customer effort scores, so that we get and then we average those out and sort of penalize ourselves to a degree. If one’s really high, the other one might be really low, and and gives us a a bit more targeted way to go after NPS. Customer effort is a big one, so we directly survey that as well. And that is a 100% aimed at figuring out where our customers encounter friction in any interaction, whether that’s purchasing a license distribution, the product itself, and that we do customer lifetime value to CAC ratio to measure sort of our share of wallet. And then bump that up, all against our retention numbers.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. I’m gonna take a really better

Sean Andrews:
tip way to understand where where work can help.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. That’s your lawnmower, Sean, and back up, Christy. That’s not yours, is it?

Josh Schachter:
Oh, it’s not mine. I I had Charlie barking. I didn’t have a lawnmower. I’m sure

Kristi Faltorusso:
that’s it. Somebody that actually has warm weather outside that yeah. Sorry.

Josh Schachter:
I mean, 65, I guess somebody could be cutting my grass. They’re just not. Okay. I got a couple questions here. So as you’re going through that, Sean, I think it’s you definitely have a comprehensive mix of a whole bunch of metrics that you’re pulling in here. But you also mentioned a bunch of metrics that I think as we’ve seen the evolution of customer success, more and more people have said these are not valuable metrics. And so I have a couple questions for you. 1 on CSAT Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Because you mentioned that as a primary one. What is the percentage of your customers that are completing that? Because I think that’s something that a lot of folks struggle with is how are we using data where we don’t have a scientifically relevant sample size because not enough people are using it for that to feel relevant to drive any even even thematically Yeah. Things forward.

Sean Andrews:
Yeah. Well, like I said, CSAT’s pointed in in a pretty specific container for us. It’s in the tech support interactions. I can’t remember the exact percentage that we have, but we get fairly decent. You know, it’s in the it’s in the thousands by the time we’re measuring this every, quarter. So it’s a decent sample size. What it does it it is valuable in the respect that it will tell us very clearly if we find any consistent themes. If you’re having to contact us for support, why? And are you able to get that answered timely? So we we have 4 or 5 questions that are part of that particular survey.

Sean Andrews:
And it does give us the ability to sort of very pointedly go after, like, oh, this is interesting. And we’ve seen that. We’ve had a couple of technical things that happened. We said, alright. Well, this should show up. If we built this index the right way, we should get dinged for this and we should see it. And so we validated that in some of our early assumptions to make sure that we’re not just creating some index that we can’t act on, but that events that we know should show up show up and things that we’re like, oh, that’s interesting that that showed up. We go take a look at it.

Josh Schachter:
That makes a ton of sense. Lovability score. You gotta dig into that one for me because that’s not more that’s not a I don’t think that’s a universally adopted score, but now I’m interested.

Sean Andrews:
It’s definitely not a universal one for sure. It it is totally aimed at figuring out, like, Bluebeam’s a fun one just to give you like, if you walk through an airport with a Bluebeam backpack, we often get stopped to say, like, hey, I use Bluebeam. That’s amazing. That’s awesome.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. So you guys have fans is what you’re saying.

Andrew Gaer:
So we

Sean Andrews:
have People that use your product that

Josh Schachter:
love your product.

Sean Andrews:
Who actually like it. And I’ve been at software companies where that’s not the case. So this is the fun part of being at Bluebeam. So what we really wanted to do is tap into that. Like and we don’t wanna lose it. So I think that’s the other thing. When you when you built that kind of passion across a bunch of users, there’s a tendency to become complacent around, like, oh, they’ll always be here. And so we we wanna know, like, why do you love it? Can we improve it? Can we make sure we’re, you know, continuing to feed, like, if it saves you time and gets you time at home, well, then let’s do the things in the product that save you more time and continue to sort of, encourage that infinite loop of of goodness.

Sean Andrews:
So that’s what we’re asking. We’re basically, like, is this product indispensable to your day? And and so I think the question specifically is, to what degree is booming critical to your day? And it’s basically indispensable, very important, somewhat important, not important. And the amount of indispensability we get is pretty amazing. The other question is, a lot of times, I think Andrew’s team has asked this a lot, which is, if we take Bluebeam away, what happens?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. How does your business impact it?

Sean Andrews:
Mhmm. And so, you know, it’s not necessarily like, oh my god. I love you. I can’t wait to get up and get into Bluebeam every day. Like, that may not be true. But if you have to use 3 software products and you’re excited to get into ours because it makes your life easier

Josh Schachter:
Yeah.

Sean Andrews:
That’s awesome. And we wanna figure out, like, why that is so that we continue to build products that service that need.

Kristi Faltorusso:
You’re at the you’re at the core. You are a core operating platform for these companies, so you can’t take it away. I love that. Yep. I love that stickiness factor. How about, you know, Andrew, maybe you can talk a little bit about, what going from going to the SaaS model, what has what that’s meant for upsell and expansion opportunities that maybe you didn’t have for I don’t know. Maybe you did, but has that changed those opportunities for you?

Andrew Gaer:
Well, I don’t I’m not sure if if anything has has changed in that regard. I think by you know what? Maybe what it’s changed is by moving to a subscription model, it’s opened up the door for us to create a customer success management team. Whereas before so this team kind of evolved from a technical account management team. Right? And so we were a group of subject matter product experts that were more reactive in nature and brought in almost like a post sales engineer, right, to help people understand how they’re using it today, how they might be able to use it better. Now that we are building and growing this CS team, it’s more of a proactive approach to help them, you know, identify and define what their desired outcomes are and help them figure out a path to achieve those. And in so doing, I mean, this is the formula that we all live by. Right? Is once we know what you want to accomplish and we help you accomplish that, you’ll see that there’s value that could be opened up to additional groups that maybe aren’t using it yet or either there’s things that we just aren’t doing that we could do that are, you know, relatively easily accessible. So let’s just start doing those things.

Andrew Gaer:
So I think that’s what this has enabled for us is taking a different posture in how we approach our customers and and push them to achieve success. And I’ll share a very quick story maybe. I I recall this is years ago working with a large client before we were customer success. And, you know, we were having a conversation about how they were using it and what their users were doing with it. And one of the leaders at that organization either asked me or or said to me, well, you’re the expert. What should we be doing? And, like, to me, at that stage in my career, I was like, what? You you wanna know from me what you should be doing? You know? And I was like, oh, yeah. Okay. That’s that’s exactly what I should be doing.

Andrew Gaer:
And so that’s kind of where this model of customer success has has come from, not just for us, but for everybody. It’s like, we get it. We talk to you and all of your competitors. We see what’s good, what’s bad, what works, what doesn’t work. And because we have that experience and that exposure, we’re the best people to tell you how to get the most out of this software. So I think for us, it that’s really been kind of the the transformative part of it, by being able to solidify a group that’s dedicated to that.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Sounds good. Last question for you. How are you both thinking about AI within your organization? I don’t know if Bluebeam has AI applications itself in the product, but as far as internally within your, goals as an org, how are you thinking about it?

Andrew Gaer:
Yeah. Sean, you wanna go first? Or

Sean Andrews:
or Yeah. I can go I’m happy to go first. So I think from a we do have some aspects of AI in embedded into the product that that’s continuing to push forward. So that’s obviously product side things that are being worked on. I think all products are trying to enable that as best they can. We’re trying to be very, sensitive to do it inside the workflow that people are already comfortable with. So it’s not creating some fundamentally new area that they go to or fundamentally new workflow. It’s basically leveraging AI and existing workflows and and trying to maximize that.

Sean Andrews:
For me, specifically, I’m very much looking at operational efficiency. So how can I get all of these assets we talked about earlier, these snippets and videos and content and knowledge articles and all the things that we’ve built over the years? How do you then turn that into accessible answers on the fly via an agent, via any kind of interaction that could be plugged into your community, could be plugged into your support portal, could be plugged into the product directly eventually, right, from, like, I want help on this and and very simple question and answer. We already have those assets built. So I think it’s more like figuring out which technologies to leverage that give us the broadest scope of influence to drive massive efficiency and answers in the moment for customers because I think that nothing’s more delightful than getting your answer answered correctly quickly for people who have very little time.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Totally. Andrew, anything to add on your end?

Andrew Gaer:
Yeah. It it was funny. Sean and I were both at our customer advisory board meeting last week, and we had conversations about this. You know? And people were talking about an AI agent that lives inside of a of the the product. And, you know, at some point, there is probably a little bit of a silence, and then, you know, the collective realization of Clippy was just way ahead of his time. Right? And and so it’s you know, in my mind, I’m just seeing this paper clip with these big eyeballs, but I Sean said it very well. I think that, you know, getting people the answers and the the support that they need in the moment they need it, where they are, I think that’s the the key to AI being successful and doing the things for us that we don’t need to do. In the product, we have a couple of examples that we’re not leading with AI, but we’re leading with this helps you get your job done better, faster, easier.

Andrew Gaer:
And if it’s AI that’s powering that or machine learning that’s powering that, then so be it. So for example, we came out with a tool recently where we’ve always had these tools that allow you to compare revisions or overlay, different plans. Right? So you’ve got a floor plan and then you’ve got your your electrical or your lighting plan, and you need to lay them on top of each other to make sure there’s no clashes or things that could go wrong. And sometimes you get these plans from different parties. Right? The floor plan from the architect, the lighting plan from the the electrical contract or engineer. And they’re different sizes, different scales. They don’t match up exactly. So you we used to have a way where you can manually align those drawings and size them.

Andrew Gaer:
Took about 2 minutes, if you were good at it. So we’ve now been able to introduce some AI machine learning to where it will automatically read the drawings and size them and lay them on top of each other for you, and it takes now about 15 seconds without any manual touch. So that’s just a way that in the product, you’re still able to do that job, but but you don’t have to do the hard part of it or the tedious part that you really don’t need to do. So so that’s the way I think in which in the product, we’re we’re utilizing that.

Kristi Faltorusso:
Yeah. Those lovable moments as you might say. Those little things make a difference.

Andrew Gaer:
Or or yeah. Lovable moments or take away the unlovable moments

Kristi Faltorusso:
Oh, there you go.

Andrew Gaer:
Is another way to say

Kristi Faltorusso:
it. Right? Yeah. There you go. There you go. Okay. Christie, any final thoughts on your end? Christie, your Wi Fi is going caputz.

Josh Schachter:
Is it my Wi Fi or the fact that I was muted because Charlie was acting up? Or a combination of both?

Sean Andrews:
Both. Could be a little

Josh Schachter:
Possibly both. I keep rerunning my Wi Fi. I’ll take it up with Verizon that keeps over

Kristi Faltorusso:
Okay. Well, we’ll we’ll leave it on that. We’ll leave it on that. Yeah. With our our great guest, thank you guys for great conversation. Really cool to hear the story, and the evolution, like, the the massive evolution, it sounds like, within Bluebeam’s post sales team. And, now we all know the best fast food in the country, Del Taco, and they’re wonderful was it crinkle cut fries?

Andrew Gaer:
It is. Yeah. Alright. Get yourself fries, a cheeseburger, and a taco. It’s a weird experience, but a good one according to USA Today.

Kristi Faltorusso:
There you go. On the way. Alright, guys. Thank you so much for stopping by.

Sean Andrews:
Thanks, Josh. Thanks, Chris.

Andrew Gaer:
Thanks for having us.