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Josh Schachter:
Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Unchurn. I’m your host, Josh Schachter. I have with me a very special guest, and I really I always say that, but I really mean that this time. He’s laughing at me right now. He’s he’s in his mind, he’s thinking this is so fucking cheesy, Josh. You’re such a fucking cheeseball. But my friend of 10 years, I think, mister Rohan Shah.

Josh Schachter:
Rohan is the I’m blanking for a second, Rohan, because I I know you’re the chief revenue officer, at extend. And, Rohan and I, yeah, we go way back. Rohan, welcome to this program.

Rohan Shah:
Thank you. Appreciate you having me on.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. So And I was tell us your TCS. I know. I know. I know. I know. This is either gonna be, like, the best episode that I’ve recorded or the worst. I don’t know which way it’s gonna go.

Josh Schachter:
It’s either gonna be, like, the most, like, just authentic and, like, get raw and, like, real good lessons come out of it, or it’s just gonna be knuckleheads or it’s just gonna be awkward because we’re trying to be keep a straight face. We’ll see what happens here. So but but but to get things on the right track, tell everybody listening, a little bit about extend.

Rohan Shah:
Yeah. For sure. So thank you for having me on. It’s fun full circle being able to do a podcast with you 10 years after working together at BCG. But

Rohan Shah:
you’d

Josh Schachter:
rather you’d rather you’d rather have the half hour back. Let’s not lie. There’s no reason to do the cordial stuff. Right? That’s okay. You can go.

Rohan Shah:
I like you though. So Xtend. So, yeah, I’m one of the founders of Xtend, our chief revenue officer. We started the company about 6 years ago. And our real focus, you know, I don’t come from a retail background nor do I come from an insurance background, but I’m a consumer. And so we were really looking at the retail market as consumers and trying to understand, a, what was going on. Retail has gone through 4 or 5 different lives in the past sort of 6 to 10 years. So, a, what’s going on? And b, what are the litany of solutions or providers or companies or startups that are out there that are trying to solve problems at retail? And so, you know, I lived in San Francisco at the time, and I had friends that worked at companies like Stripe who made accessing the payment gateways easy.

Rohan Shah:
I had companies who worked at friends who worked at companies like Affirm and Klarna and Afterpay who took, you know, what you and I call

Josh Schachter:
layaway Bro. Bro. What do you do? What do you do? You’re going straight you’re going straight into the narcissistic. Let me tell you my whole fucking story. Give me the one liner. What does Xixxin do? And then we can reverse and do the genesis of it.

Rohan Shah:
We we build software for retailers to help them make more money and reduce cost in the post purchase experience.

Josh Schachter:
Perfect. Perfect. You sat on my couch like 7 years ago, 6 and a half years ago in Santa Monica, and you were telling me about this thing that you were like like you were like 90% in or maybe you had just given your commitment to it. And I remember I actually don’t even remember what it was that you were describing, but just like your energy and like the narrative that you told was really compelling. Again, I don’t remember what that narrative was, but like it’s like, fuck. Like, Ron’s really into this and like he’s telling a really compelling story about the problems that that people are facing. So retell that story. Like, what did you guys really start to capture and create value out of?

Rohan Shah:
Oh, that was the story I was trying to tell you before you come.

Josh Schachter:
I know, but it was taking too long. Go straight to it.

Rohan Shah:
Yeah. I mean, long story short, retail is a hard business. And what we found is that the most successful retailers, take the top 1% of retailers, Walmart, Costco, Amazon, Wayfair, Best Buy, you name it. The way they made a lion’s share of their profits was through services. Right? So you sort of sit back and ask yourself, like, what are services? When you go on Amazon and you check out for the electronic product, you get offered an extended warranty. When you go to Best Buy, some of those annoying guys in blue shirts compound you and try to sell you an extended warranty. Now, I didn’t love the way that that industry worked previously. But when I took a step back and thought about why don’t I love it? It’s because the customer experience was shit.

Rohan Shah:
You spend all this money on a new product, you buy that insurance planner, extended warranty protection plan, hoping that if something goes wrong, you can get taken care of. 2 years down the line, something finally goes wrong. And then they make you wait on hold for 45 minutes. And then they make you jump through hoops. And then they make you share a paper receipt, which I’ve never kept So

Josh Schachter:
They hope that you forgotten about it or can’t can’t find your warranty policy. They basically hope that it’s

Rohan Shah:
Their goal is to avoid you. Right? And and that’s their business model. And so the way we really looked at it was, a, why is it the only only the top one percent? There’s a ton of other brands and ecommerce had proliferated, obviously, especially over the last 5 to 7 years. Why are all of these other companies not taking advantage of this opportunity to make more money? Right? Take a company like Best Buy, when you talk about Geek Squad. Best Buy did $40,000,000,000 in volume, about $1,600,000,000 in profit, and 52% of that came from incentive warranties.

Josh Schachter:
That’s crazy.

Rohan Shah:
52% of that.

Josh Schachter:
That’s like airlines making all their profit on baggage.

Rohan Shah:
Yeah. Or travel insurance. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So it’s highly profitable, but you need to deliver value if there’s a product that someone’s buying. And so that was our whole thing, is make it accessible. That’s a distribution play through tech Well,

Josh Schachter:
it’s it’s value, but also probably, like, operationally, if you’re not a a Best Buy, if you’re not a $1,000,000,000 company or a multibillion dollar, it’s probably hard to just, like, to get off the ground. It’s a big lift. Right? So I assume that journey’s on both sides.

Rohan Shah:
Yes. Yes. It was when legacy insurance companies were the only people supporting these programs in the market. Take, and this is what I was mentioning earlier before you cut me off, but like FIRM and Afterpay, right? Like they took what we called layaway when we were growing up. It wasn’t a new product. It just wasn’t a sexy thing that you and I would talk about leveraging. And they turned it into this easy to access, customer focused, modern healing brand that was really just an API at the end of the day, right, with a lot of credit and underwriting and whatnot on the back end. That’s what we did for extended warranties to start, is make it easy to access and treat customers the way that, you know, you as a brand would wanna treat your own customers.

Rohan Shah:
So we become an extension of these brands and help them make a lot more money in the process.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Now when you started this, you you’re the the you’re the CRO. You were also the SDR when you started this. Right? I still you still and you still are. By the way, this is no lie. Rohan, last night, yesterday, sends me a text message. Hey. Can you help me get in front of so and so? It’s an SMB deal, but I’d really loved it their contact.

Josh Schachter:
And, was super gung ho even though I barely knew the guy from 10 years earlier, but he’s still, like, doing the the heavy lifting. I wanna talk to you about that in a minute. It’s, like, this roll up the sleeves mentality that you’ve always brought. Like, you always bring the force compared to all the rest of your generation. And I can say that being an older brother to you, but we’ll talk more about where that came from. So we’re I got stuck in my rant. Okay. So you go to companies, in your current role or 6 years ago, and you say, here’s the Best Buy thing.

Josh Schachter:
Half their profits came from from services. We’re gonna print you free money. We are gonna help you, operationalize this in a lower lift way than otherwise you would, and we’re gonna give a better customer experience to your customers so that, like, yes, maybe maybe they are, what, taking advantage more of what they purchased as opposed to just kind of but but it’s gonna be a good experience for them too. Okay. So are you a good salesperson, or is that just like a slam dunk value prop?

Rohan Shah:
It’s it’s a good value proposition. Right? I mean, I think, hopefully, most businesses out there wanna make more money. So I think that’s something that we lean on for sure. But I do think the sales pitch that we have, if you throw numbers in front of 1 someone, sure. Like, that’s interesting. Tell me more. There’s concerns. Right? At the end of the day, like, these are their customers, not ours.

Rohan Shah:
We’re not paying a bunch of marketing dollars to get someone to a website. The brand is. And so the way I look at it is it’s actually more important to build trust. Like, how are you building trust? The business case is there. Every other provider in the market will show a similar business case. That’s the reality. Right? It is incremental revenue and high margin revenue. The flip side is is how do you build trust? We build trust in a couple of different ways.

Rohan Shah:
1 is from a relationship perspective. So you ask, am I a good salesperson? I’m not a great technical salesperson. I haven’t been brought up in sales organizations. I never got trained on medic, mempic, you name it.

Josh Schachter:
But you’ve got charisma is where you’re going with this. Yeah.

Rohan Shah:
I’ve learned how to build relationships, and I’ve learned how to empathize with the person on the other side of the table. And that empathy comes from me having a broader breadth of experience and skillsets than most salespeople do. I worked under you in product, right? So I was writing Jira tickets and requirements and working with engineers and stuff that I wasn’t very good at, but I could get by and I could learn. So like having the product background, having a finance background through, you know, my my family and and our investments and and looking at some of the things that we do on that end helped me talk the talk with a CFO. So here I am and I can sit in a room with a CEO, have one conversation, a CFO a CMO, have a different conversation, and a chief product officer.

Rohan Shah:
And tell the same fundamental story, but in 4 different ways that resonates with each of those individuals because I

Rohan Shah:
have a sense for what they care about. That for me is like my superpower from a sales perspective. I don’t follow the frameworks and methodologies the same way. And you know I’m a ball of ABB, so I’m not great at that stuff. But what I’ve found is that you need the relationship side of it and you need to build trust. And like many of these folks who work with us, I consider friends now. And that’s not conniving or malicious. That’s because I love learning about their businesses too, and I like that I can help them grow their business.

Rohan Shah:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. No. I agree. That’s actually one of the really nice things about founding a company is that you become, like, really close and and friends with your customers. Actually, in some of my customers, I don’t even know a thing about their business. I only just really care about them personally.

Rohan Shah:
I mean, totally honest with you.

Rohan Shah:
Our customers last night. Right? And we probably talked about works for 30 seconds over the course of a 2 and a half hour dinner. And I

Josh Schachter:
love Yeah. That’s cool. It’s enough to expense it. That’s it. So, so so, Ro, what were some of the objections that you had to handle earlier on?

Rohan Shah:
Extended warranties are slimy, first and foremost. Right? Like, most people have had a bad experience around extended warranties. There’s a reason why the industry on a whole, we look at attach rates, right, what percentage of customers buy that extended warranty. Attach rates were going down. Customers were losing faith. They were losing trust in the actual services that were being provided. So first and foremost is when you’re selling to an executive, typically, someone who makes more money than most. Look, if you have a lot of money, if my cell phone breaks, guess what? I’m lucky enough I can buy a new one.

Rohan Shah:
I don’t need to buy AppleCare every single time. So you have to change the story for folks in those positions where now I lean more into convenience at times. Guess what? When this breaks, I don’t know where to go. What shop do I go to? Who do I talk to? So I buy AppleCare because I can make one call, and they’re gonna send me a replacement. It’s convenience for me. It has nothing to do with cost. Whereas, when we go to Advanced Auto Parts, who’s one of our customers, and talk to them about their customers, they’re like, a lot of our customers can’t afford a new battery for their home. This is not a decision point that they have that’s an easy one.

Rohan Shah:
This is an investment they’re making. And so that broad set of sort of, like, understanding my customer, who is the brand or the merchant, but also understanding their customer, who is the end consumer, I think is a really cool thing that we have the ability to do because we can actually put ourselves into someone’s shoes as a consumer. Whereas How do

Josh Schachter:
you think you develop that how how did you develop that that sense that sensibility for your customers, their needs, and their customers’ needs? How long do you think that took? Like, what was the process of doing that?

Rohan Shah:
I mean, frankly speaking, it’s like give a shit. And if you give a shit, you’ll actually take the time to go read and learn and digest. And, you know, I follow 8 different retail publications that I get emails from every single day or every single week. I read through all of them. Some of them are about job transitions in retail. That’s my BD mind going to work. Some of them are about trends and and and what retailers are thinking about. I wanna read what the CEO of a large retailer is reading.

Rohan Shah:
Right? Like, I try to be them in terms of what are they gonna care about, and that means I should care about it. So there’s reading and learning and just training and educating yourself to an extent. 2 is your network. Who are you surrounding yourself with? It’s a lot faster to learn from someone who can teach it to you in 20 minutes versus you reading 5 different books on it. Right? So I’m lazy in that sense. I like to find the fastest path to getting something done, and getting it done well enough doesn’t need to be perfect. So I think people is a huge piece of it. The people you surround yourself with, that could be your board, right, from a board of directors perspective.

Rohan Shah:
That could be advisors that you have that you

Josh Schachter:
So who who did you who did you surround yourself with earlier?

Rohan Shah:
Very early on in our in our companies, very early on for extend, I built out an adviser network. Right? And so these were long standing retailers, folks who had spent 20, 25 plus years in retail.

Josh Schachter:
This is this is Rohan’s personal adviser network, or this is this is extends or both? Both.

Rohan Shah:
Both. I

Rohan Shah:
mean, the adviser network was managed by me. It was

Josh Schachter:
You were the company at that point. I get it. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But this wasn’t this wasn’t, hey. Help me learn about the industry. This is, hey.

Josh Schachter:
We have this company. We wanna learn about our customer needs. Let let I wanna create this network for that.

Rohan Shah:
And you understand the pain points of the people that we’re selling to. Yeah. Right? How can I make you be valuable while driving value to those customers and in the process generating some revenue for us too?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. So

Rohan Shah:
people, people, content, and education, and then giving a shit, honestly. Because at the end of the day, if you, you know this, you’re a better product person than I am. Like, if you’re focused on your business case when building a feature and not on value for the end consumer or the end user or whoever they are, probably not gonna reach the business case that you’ve set out for. Right? Like, you gotta focus on the customer.

Josh Schachter:
Hey, everybody. It’s Josh. I’m taking a quick break from the podcast to tell you a bit about UpdateAI. I started UpdateAI to solve 2 major challenges for CS teams. The first is that we save CSMs 4 to 5 hours per week with our productivity through AI. Secondly, we give leaders a window into all the conversations across each account and the entire portfolio. So we help knowledge transfer, we help increase the coverage model of your CS teams, and we help you detect emerging patterns in what your customers are telling your CSMs across all the risks, product feedback, advocacy moments, and expansion opportunities. So come check us out at www.updateai.

Josh Schachter:
It’s completely free to sign up and trial. Let’s talk about giving a shit. You’ve always given a lot of shits. When you worked with me at BCG, you gave a lot of shits. You’ve you’ve always had that drive in you, and clearly, you still have that drive and passion. Some people don’t. It’s it’s tough to, like, build an organization. How big are you guys right now?

Rohan Shah:
240 people ish. 2, 3.

Josh Schachter:
240 people. How many people underneath you in your org?

Rohan Shah:
70, 80.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. Cool. So, like, at some point, it’s hard to just cherry pick people who give the biggest shit. How how do you find that that drive to mimic your own? Because I could almost imagine that it’s it’s virtually impossible probably to find somebody that can keep up with you. And yet from where I sit as a smaller startup, I only wanna work with people like you. So Yeah. How do you how’d you go about doing that?

Rohan Shah:
Look. At your stage, you can only work with people like that. Yeah. That’s the reality. And, like, giving a shit comes both in the form of personality and personal characteristics. It also comes in the form of upside. Like, that’s the reality. Right? And so early days, guess what? You gotta give people really strong upside.

Rohan Shah:
Otherwise, why will they give a shit? Is sort of the reality. So it it comes in both forms and fashions, and I think both are important to consider. But at your stage, they have to be those people. Right? They have to be people who are not only willing but capable of wearing 5 different hats on any given day. And spanning across finance and product and engineering and whatever that may be on a given day. Actually a lot of similar skill sets that I think CSMs need to have, frankly, for the type of role that they have. But we can talk about that later. So I think at your stage, you have to.

Rohan Shah:
At 200 plus people, it’s impossible. You can’t have 200 wolves in a china shop like myself. Like, it actually doesn’t work as well when you do that. And there are more processes. I don’t wanna call them bureaucracy, but you need process. Right? Otherwise, things go completely haywire. You can’t run around like a chicken with its head cuffed, which I have in the past as much. So I think that’s Who

Josh Schachter:
keeps your process? Who keeps your process?

Rohan Shah:
You asked that question because you know it’s not me.

Josh Schachter:
Well, I do know it’s not you. But no. But maybe it is. I don’t know. But it

Rohan Shah:
but No. I mean, we have partners. Right? Like, one of our one of my colleagues, Rob, like, he is very good from a internal operations, internal process perspective, and more. And guess what? He knows I’m really damn good in getting out in the field and getting in front of customers. So, like, you surround yourself with people that are good at the shit that you’re not good at. Right? If you’re hiring people that look exactly like you all the time, you’re probably not gonna be successful in the long run. You need that diversity of skill sets and diversity of perspectives to really build something really unique. So it’s surrounding yourself with those people, but recognizing that, like, an IC on x y z team at the company who’s 2 years into their career, I don’t expect them to give a shit in the same way that I do.

Rohan Shah:
This is my baby. I started it. I have way more upside. I don’t expect them to give a shit the same way I do. But I do expect them to put a bunch of fucking work and effort in. And if they don’t care about their work product, the way that I give a shit about the company at large, it’s not gonna work out. Go go work at Google. Spend 30 hours a week working and go home and have your great work life balance.

Rohan Shah:
There’s nothing wrong with that. This is not the fucking place for that.

Josh Schachter:
How do how do you manage that? Really quickly. How do you monitor and manage that at larger scale?

Rohan Shah:
Leaders. It the onus goes from me, when we were 30 people, to the leaders that I have on my team. And they are not gonna be perfect. It’s really hard to hire. You know this. Right? It’s not an easy exercise, especially when you can’t pay the same thing that larger companies can’t pay. So people aren’t gonna be perfect. I’m definitely not perfect in that regard, but you manage it through your leadership.

Rohan Shah:
Like, this is where management layers below sort of the founding or executive team are crucial and fundamental. And like, that’s the success. That’s the layer that drives the success of the business from growth stage to beyond in

Josh Schachter:
my I guess the question is really so I get it. Leaders. Right? You you grow and so does the function. How are you creating the culture for those leaders to be successful in It’s hard. Measuring it.

Rohan Shah:
Yeah.

Rohan Shah:
It’s hard. I mean, we were a company that grew up during COVID. Right? I mean,

Josh Schachter:
we

Rohan Shah:
started this company a year before the pandemic hit. So we had a what I would call an extremely strong culture prior to the pandemic because we were all in person. We were in the office. We would go get beers after work. We would tap each other on the shoulders. So I think during the pandemic, we had to shift our culture quite a bit, right, to support this new world and new way of thinking. We also grew a ton during that time, so we were hiring mostly remote. So it’s hard.

Rohan Shah:
I do think people were understanding of the fact that it is a different environment, and I’m not gonna get the same sort of cultural elements out of my job that I may be used to.

Rohan Shah:
But then we had

Rohan Shah:
to shift out of that too. Right? Like, as an example, my sales teams were in the office most days. Why? Because they learn a hell of a lot faster. Why? Because the social part of work is more important in those realms. So there’s a number of reasons. So, like, I don’t look at culture as like a static thing. It has to be a living and breathing object that sort of changes based on where you’re at as a business too. Yeah.

Rohan Shah:
I don’t know

Rohan Shah:
if

Rohan Shah:
it’s a great answer for you, but, it’s one of the things where you have to hire people that sort of understand and agree and align on where you wanna go. Right? Like, we’re not a company like Facebook who talks about, like, we’re a family and we all love each other.

Rohan Shah:
Like,

Rohan Shah:
no, you’re a colleague of mine. I love my sister, my mom, and my dad, and other people. Right? Like, we don’t need to love each other. We need to work together. We need to respect each other. And then at the end of the day, go hang out with the people that you like a hell of a lot more than I than than me, and that’s totally fine. Right? So, like, I think we take a more, what I would call an adult and realistic approach towards this is a job. No one woke up thinking, god, I fucking love extended warranties.

Rohan Shah:
That’s all I wanna do for the rest of my life. It’s a product. It’s a service. It delivers value, and it drives revenue. Right? And that’s how companies are built, in my opinion.

Josh Schachter:
Let’s shift over to to sales and post sales. So as you know, a large part of our audience is customer success. This is the revenue segment of our series, Unjourned, but, generally, we speak to customer success leaders. Do you own customer success post sales CRO?

Rohan Shah:
Yes. I do. So we have our business is unique, but we have a couple different teams. We have what we call growth strategy managers. So those are effectively CSMs, AMs, if you will, in a traditional SaaS sense, but they own the relationship with a given merchant after that merchant goes live with our solution or our platform. We have technical account managers that handle sort of onboarding and integration as well. But our GSMs are really the the the spindle, if you will, or air traffic control because we have 5 different cross functional teams on the back end that also support our merchants. But we don’t need those teams interfacing with our clients.

Rohan Shah:
So we have a growth strategy manager team. We also have a field operations team. So why? We work with companies like Mattress Firm that has 25 100 retail locations. I can’t have each of my growth strategy managers having to get out into the field. That’s also not their core competency.

Josh Schachter:
You mean physically going to stores?

Rohan Shah:
Correct. Doing trainings, handling marketing, helping educate trainees and associates, building out learning management systems so that we can do virtual trainings. Like because

Josh Schachter:
they have to know what the heck this extend policy is that they’re trying to sell.

Rohan Shah:
And if they don’t, my number is gonna affect it. Right? So, like, performance is directly impacted by that. So we have a few different teams. Those, like, store operations folks is what we call them, do some of the same things that GSMs do when it comes to reporting. Client needs some reporting. They’ll help with pushing that out to them when it comes to training, stuff like that. But it is really important to have people that reflect the people on the ground for those store operations roles. So those are folks that worked in retail, that have retail backgrounds, that managed stores previously, versus our GSMs are much more technology capable, if you will.

Rohan Shah:
Not that the other folks aren’t, but their skill sets and their backgrounds lend itself more towards, you know, understanding how to put in product requests, submitting bugs to the relevant engineering and technical teams, getting reports driven out by our analytics groups, coming up with ideas on how we can grow revenue strategically for an account, etcetera.

Josh Schachter:
Yep. And what’s the ultimate metric that they’re driving towards in post sales?

Rohan Shah:
Net revenue growth. So on an HR level, we basically look at annualized forecasts on each of our clients. Again, we’re not a SaaS business in the traditional sense. It’s not like sign a contract and pay us $150,000 this year. It’s consumption based. And so they’re looking at each of our clients, modeling out what their performance looks like, looking at their 10 ks’s, their earnings, etcetera, which informs our forecast. And then we create what we call growth initiatives, which are opportunities to drive growth within that account. And it’s their job to then go execute against those initiatives.

Rohan Shah:
And so they’re measured by performance against those initiatives effectively like a quota for a sales team.

Josh Schachter:
When you look at the orchestration of your team between sales and post sales and the different sub functions, what are some of the biggest gaps that you see in those functions?

Rohan Shah:
I mean, for us, and my team knows that I would say this, is communication. Those teams are not collocated across sales and growth strategy managers, or field operations for that matter. Sales is largely co located in San Francisco, the rest are largely remote. So communication is the biggest gap.

Josh Schachter:
Community What does that mean?

Rohan Shah:
Yeah, lack of communication breeds friction, Right? So I’ll make up an example that probably has happened, which is sales team closes a deal. Merchant then goes live. Right? They gotta integrate with our platform, and then it’s handed over to the GSMs. Something goes wrong on the GSM side. It’s easy for a sales rep to say, what the what the fuck? Like, why aren’t they doing this correctly? Do they not understand it? It’s easy for the GSM side to say, why did the sales team never give me any of this, like, knowledge? Like, why was the KT or the knowledge transfer didn’t include context on x y z part of their business? That’s a lack of communication that breeds friction. Right? Salespeople are comped also on those deals growing over time. So there is a responsibility across across both parties and there’s compensation up at play as it relates to that. So, like, communication for me is the biggest one.

Rohan Shah:
I’m hosting an all revenue event in San Francisco in January, specifically to help build stronger relationships so that people are communicating without us having to manufacture those environments for them to be okay. Right? So I think communication is a big one. I’d say the other one is, you know, to to what you guys are doing is is tools. Tools can be great at times. They can also be really negative at times, in my opinion, if they’re not set up really well. I think in 2021, every software company out there was buying tools like it was no one’s fucking business. And I think people started to realize that more tools is not more better, you know? And so I think tools is another really important piece of setting a vision and understanding where you want to get to and then having the tools be supporting mechanisms to help you get there. Versus I think a lot of people evaluate tools in a vacuum and are looking at specific insular point solutions when a team’s workflow spans across multiple tools.

Rohan Shah:
Right? My GSM team, similar to customer success, my GSM team is working in Salesforce. They’re also working in Tableau, doing all the reporting. They’re also working in Jira, submitting in tickets. Right? You’ll need to throw more tools at that problem in all situations unless there’s a real critical reason for why you’re doing that. So I would say tools is the other I don’t know if it’s a gap necessarily, but it’s

Rohan Shah:
not You’re

Josh Schachter:
saying just like just consolidation of tools. Just don’t have so many so many swivel seats of things that you’re working on. One single pane of glass to the extent possible.

Rohan Shah:
Or find the right tools to solve for pain points that you actually have that are gonna deliver value.

Josh Schachter:
So what are the what are the tools that are solving for the most critical pain points for you?

Rohan Shah:
Yeah. I think I mean, there’s a few. I think one solution we had, if I’m being super candid, was actually reducing the amount of tools. Like, what we were finding is people

Rohan Shah:
Well, that’s

Josh Schachter:
what it sounded. That’s what you were saying. Right?

Rohan Shah:
Yeah. Less less than 1. Specific tool that was actually helpful. It was cleaning up the workflow for a lot of our folks who were like, I can’t go to 9 different places to figure out where this information is. So by cleaning up the tools, we were able to consistently have the data that they were looking for, the information that they were looking for in a cleaner set of sort of objects or Salesforce or whatever that may be. I think is, is, is one thing that we’ve done. I think another thing that we’ve done is realizing that when we were all in the office, I could grab someone and tell them, come sit in this room and hear me do this pitch. Just listen, be a fly on the wall.

Rohan Shah:
That’s hard, right? When you’re in a remote world. You can give people homework, whether they listen to it, how much they digest it, all of those are question marks. And so, you know, we use things like call recordings as a really good training tool, as an example, and then we’ll have managers actually jump in and ask questions.

Josh Schachter:
But you don’t use UpdateAI because I tried to sell it to you years ago, Rohan, and you had another one, and then you renewed on me. And now I’m waiting for February 2025 to hit up your boy. Don’t worry. It’s coming. Yep. There you go. Put a put a put a Salesforce task in there. There.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. No. I it’s fine. I’m gonna cut you off on that because I like cutting you off, and and we talked enough about tools, and we’re we’re going over time here. Last last thing I wanna ask you again for the CS folks that are listening to this podcast, what’s like what what do you think is the biggest way that CS or one of the biggest ways CS can be helpful towards sales?

Rohan Shah:
Voice of the customer.

Josh Schachter:
Voice the customer. How so?

Rohan Shah:
Like, you know, our our product is a unique one, and I actually love this about it because I think it makes it more complicated and we can learn more about the other business that you’re supporting. But our product’s complicated. Like, we sell to business decision makers. We sell to folks who are looking at the p and l and wanna drive revenue and looking for opportunities to do so. As soon as that deal signs, it gets handed over to ecommerce teams, to operations teams, to marketing teams who were involved in the sales cycle, but it wasn’t necessarily their call to make, if you will. Right? And so there’s a dynamic process, I think, across sales and CS, which is you understand on the sales side how to get a deal done, and what maybe the executive level business decision makers want to see or want to grow within their business. And then you have the needs of other teams when it gets handed over. Right? Typically, the primary contact or stakeholder for our GSM team is not the person that ran the sales cycle, as an example.

Rohan Shah:
And so for me, you know, voice of the customer beyond the sales cycle is super fundamental. It’s actually what’s informed our roadmap from an extend perspective is hearing about cross customers bitch to us by what we’re not doing. Right? That’s exactly what should be informing your roadmap. I’m not smart enough to come up with every feature myself. I’m not very smart, period, as you know. But, like, the reality is is you need that voice of the customer. I think what many companies don’t do well, and we’re we’re okay, good maybe, but not perfect or great by any stretch.

Rohan Shah:
What What a

Rohan Shah:
lot of companies don’t do well is they only look to sales for the voice of the customer. Because sales teams are louder and sales teams get a lot of attention, which you know. Right? And yet I think a lot of the voice of the customer comes from the people who are like day to day operational within the actual product set itself. And that’s customer success or growth strategy in our situation.

Rohan Shah:
Yep.

Rohan Shah:
And so I think voice of the customer is the most important one, and then how do you actually capture that and document it and sanitize it into a way where it’s digestible?

Josh Schachter:
I could not agree more, Rohan. I didn’t pay you to say that, but you you hit all the talking points for me, so I appreciate it. And stop with the, like, the the fake humility. And, like, I’m not that smart. You know, you were working for me when you were 24, 25. I remember saying to you, and you probably remember this too, within 6 months of of working with us together, said I will be working for you very shortly from now. And I still hope hope that to be true. But keep crushing it, man.

Rohan Shah:
All full of shit, though. You know that.

Josh Schachter:
Well but I wasn’t, and you weren’t, and that’s why we’re no longer consultants. So do me a favor. I’m very proud for you, seriously, to see the path that you’ve been on, see your growth. You’ve grown up, kid. But keep on crushing it. Keep on building the unicorn to even higher heights. Really proud of you, and, thanks for sharing the story for extend. It’s it’s, it was really interesting, and I think a lot of people are gonna get a lot of value from the conversation.

Rohan Shah:
Yep. Happy to help, my man. Thank you for having me on.