Go To Masters Show

 Adith:
Welcome to Go-To-Masters presented by Everstage, where revenue is not just a number, it's a narrative. This is your front-seat row to the thought leaders having explosive growth in today's most dynamic companies.

Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of God Masters. I'm your host. The Head of Growth and Demand Generation at Everstage, as many of you might know, is committed to revolutionizing the way businesses approach sales compensation.

And here at Go to Masters, we are committed to expanding that mission. We aim to decode the secrets of exponential revenue growth and share them with you every week. Join us today on our very first episode of Go To Master, Semir Jahic a leader who is truly a master of the art of global expansion, a global expansion leader from Clari.

Welcome to the show. Thrilled to have you with us. Could you kick things off better than our listeners? A little about yourself and a journey with Clari.

Semir:
Yes, absolutely. Thank you for having me. I'm hugely delighted to be on the podcast with you today. My name is Semir, as you've mentioned, and I work at Clari, part of the expansion team here in Europe.
Quick background on me. I'm originally from Switzerland and moved to the UK a couple of years back. I started my career in consulting at Accenture doing global transformation projects. Moved on to Salesforce big c r m player that probably all listeners know and have at one point decided to go into startup land.
Which was in January 2020 to launch Clarity in EMEA, and it's been a fun journey since building the foundations here for us to scale globally.

Adith:
That's a great story. Like you joined Clarity right at the dawn of 2020 just before the world was hit by the Covid 19 pandemic. Can you share with us how this affected your experience?

Semir:
Yeah, so in January of course we did not know what it would all mean, and I started at Clarity. We were just the four of us in January and we were thinking, that's great. We don't need an office yet. We're too small. We can do, you know, co-working spaces and just try and find some customers. Who knows, we might not be successful.

We might have all to go back to our other jobs in a couple of months, but actually, we were quite successful in the first few months already. You know, in March as the pandemic really hit in Europe as well, we knew that we probably don't need an office. And we were pretty happy not having signed any office leases that would then cost us thousands of dollars as we, as we build clarity.

So we've been remote first pretty much since the start, and we still are. So like how does it, like, you know, I think you've started yourself as hiring the sales engineering team building in London and slowly taking up like, you know, operations, partnerships and today international growth.

Adith:
How has that journey been so fast?

Semir:
Yeah, so it's, it's very nimble, I would say how, how we started the Clari in Europe because it, it is, it is hard to do global expansion and as a, as a founder in California, so Clari was founded around 10 years ago in California helping sales and revenue leaders get more precision around revenue.
And in Europe, this was pretty new. So we didn't know as we started Nimble, and for the first year, it was just the four. Then, later on, five of us, and just trying to build pipelines, sign some customers. I was the only se doing SE work, doing post-sales work as well. Lots of, lots of hats in a startup.

And then in the second year, we started. Expanding because we signed the first customers. We had plenty of inbounds as well that started coming in and we expanded the teams. We built a marketing function, the post-sale function. I hired the sales engineering team and with that also came questions. Where next, where's the potential?

Where is there more low-hanging fruit for us to go after? And that's when I started taking on different duties around our strategy, working with our US headquarter in rev ops, asking, is it Germany? Is it France? Do we have to open an office there? Do we not have to open an office to serve the market?

And so did, the responsibilities grew gradually over time, and it's been fun. It's been fun, like, like many say, when you are in a startup, you're always growing, and that's been the case for me certainly. So I've appreciated that opportunity, and I have a big interesting strategy question for you.

So most of the companies, at least in the SaaS world when we have seen, usually they try to dip their toe in the Euro markets with something like a partnership agreement or something because they wanna expand with partners because there is a localization risk, there's translation risk. And then once they've proven that model works and they're able to acquire customers, then between them start like, you know, hey, Google the team and like, you know, get people because we can sell this market.

So how is that, like, do you have any like, you know, details about us? That decision be made at Clarity or. How has that changed? Yeah, I think such an interesting way. I think there are as many ways to expand into Europe or any market as there's, you know, companies and their products because there's, there's, you know, a few mistakes that you can make.

But there are also many different nuances for every company and how they look at expansion in Europe. Partnerships are definitely a strong anchor for people to kind of get traction in the market, and get more access for us.

But now as we are expanding and growing across, you know, we are in 16 countries at the moment with a few customers all over Europe, and that's been very exciting and I think the next. Level of scale we will achieve with unlocking partners, be it private equity partners that bring clarity into their portfolio companies to run more efficient commercial operations or with technology partners that we're doing two selling with.

That's an exciting path, but we started with people on the ground because that advantage is that you have such close feedback loops with headquarters. You can really listen intently to local needs and test your value proposition. And that's been, I think, a really important thing to do at the start.

With partners, you have a bit of a degree of separation. We first proved the model that there is demand in Europe. This is a global product that works globally for many companies and many industries and, and. Signed our first, you know, over a hundred customers I think, in, in the first couple years.

And we see that, hey, this is working. We have a reputation, we have a brand also in Europe now, so let's work on the partner channels. Let's start exploring those. Let's accelerate our growth. So that's been kind of our plan. I think it depends really on product to product. So what I did with Clarity, what we've done as a team doesn't necessarily apply to everybody, but it's been our strategy and I think it's worked well.

Adith:
Got it. Yeah, I think given a very great point, I think it's important to not have that isolation from your customers, right? Because your partners are gonna be protecting their accounts. They don't want to expose everything fully to you. They want all communications to go through them. And some partners even do the invoicing through them, right?

Hey, the customer will pay me. I'll pay you, kind of a model. So I think at least it has worked out for you folks, I guess. The model of getting down first and then figuring it out. And I'm gonna go back to something you spoke about private equity partners to deliver value. How does that work? I've never heard about private equity partners to like, you know build a business model for a SaaS company.

Semir:
Yeah, absolutely. It's been something that's, I think, naturally evolved within Clarie and it's just something we've also started doing in Europe. I think when you, when you think about private equity, you know, they buy and sell companies, they buy them in a certain shape.

They think they could do better. They think there's more potential, and most of the time it is the potential around better operating, getting more efficiency and processes, changing out some of the management and maybe some of the sales teams to accelerate. It's really that they changed the fundamental product.

So how they do this is, you know, people process technology. So yeah, you swap out some people, that's fine. You look at the processes, you maybe have consultants come in, you reshape how you're operating, but there's also technology that's a huge enabler in getting that change done and increasing the efficiency, increasing how they run revenue.

Across all the go-to-market functions, that's where clarity comes in. So we partner with the likes of Toma Bravo and others in the industry and in Europe with other private equity firms. And it's been extremely interesting to see that they want to bring in technology like us to push it to their chief revenue officers, VPs of sales to say, Hey, look, this will help you accelerate the commercial growth along that plan that we've built when we import you guys, and if we follow that plan.

When they leverage the software, we can accelerate that and we can sell the company in a couple of years' time for the return that we're expecting, or even more. So that's where we partnered with these companies to help them with best practices and, with our software, to achieve revenue precision and improve their revenue across the teams.

Adith:
So that's such a innovative approach that I think, like now you should, we should probably do a separate podcast around that.

Semir:
Yeah, happy to. I mean that's, yeah. One of my favourite topics to talk about. Awesome. And let's, let's go to the core, right? How, how is it building a sales engineering team in Europe, right?

Adith:
Like, I think there is a lot of talent distributed across Europe. So how, how did it feel like, you know, getting hiring, did you hire across all these regions and then figure out the remote way of coaching everyone and getting them trained? Because when it comes to sales engineering, they're only as good as how they understand the product, and how they're trained as well, right? And what kind of enablement that they have as well? So how, how is that experience set?

Semir:
Yeah, I think so. Regardless of where you're hiring, so, so our ses are based, UK based and, you know, remote in the UK. So I have a personal Liverpool, someone in London, and as a remote-first company, I think we are already set up.

In a way that enables people to work from anywhere and also to enable them from anywhere effectively. And I think that really helps, right? Because if you're set up as a company with offices and you hire somebody far away thousand miles, it will be harder to get them on board. And I think it's, the hybrid stuff is the hardest.

When you have some people in the office and some people not, then you really need to be very conscious about how you manage that. But for us, it's, we're fully remote. All stuff happens on Slack, on, you know, Google slides and images on our different tools that we use and, then made it easy to onboard people.

Now what what we've done in Europe is for all the functions is, you know, we, we take from the us, from our headquarter, what's get ready, what's worked, the whole infrastructure, and we just tweak it to our needs. So for the SES and the enablement, for example, I'll leverage the US stuff. I don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Why would I? But I do tailor it to the local needs. When I work with my, my team and I say, guys, there's a gap in our knowledge because privacy is much more important in Europe when we are capturing activities and clarity and we show all the emails going back and forth, and it's really helpful for the sales leaders to know what's happened and you know how a deal is going.

But the question you get from a buyer is, what about GDPR? What about the data, where it's going? Questions you are less likely to get in the US And that's where I train the ses more. So take what's good in the US already, take that as a baseline and then evolve that. And the same happens as well for marketing, customer success for sales.

And that's worked really well for our approach. And being remote first, it became quite easy to enable a team no matter where they are.

Adith:
And yeah, I mean obviously you spoke about the elephant in the room, privacy in the European market. So how like, I think the overall GTM strategy, the outbound, the media motion, everything becomes much, much more difficult when you have all these compliances and policies straight. And obviously there for good reasons or bad isn't, that's debatable. But basically, how do you handle that? Like, you know, with all those policies in place, how do you do your go-to-market initiatives?

Semir:
Yeah, it's more challenging. Of course, it's GDPR and other, other regulations have been introduced and it just takes more patience to build out a rich contact database of people you can reach out to.

What's really helped us is of course you have the outbounding and use the data that you have and you try and build the database up. That's one aspect. What really helped us, especially the early traction as people think about starting in Europe, is. Create lighthouse customers that become true champions and help them be extremely successful.

And what happens then in tech, especially because we sell a lot to tech companies, is there's always movement. People are VP of sales here, they become a C R O somewhere else. And if you build a good relationship with them and they get value from your product, They will buy you again or they will advocate for you in other ways in the industry.

And that's what helped us from the first few customers. I remember in Europe, maybe the first dozen or so, in the first six months, it was amazing that they, what they would say about us going to a conference and speak for us. Join us at a fireside chat, join us at a dinner with prospects, and really say, I've got so much value from clarity.

It's changed the way I work. I don't have to be on spreadsheets on a Sunday night. And that reputation spreads and you create that critical mass that then becomes really strong momentum one year, two years, three years in. So I think yes, the contacts, GDPR, privacy, you have to work within the framework of those regulations and you have to almost find like these, these other ways to unlock the market potential, build your brand.

And it's amazing. I mean, three years ago when I joined, we had. We, we had a hard time even filling a small room. We had a few people that used us at American companies at the kind of the UK location, and that was kind of cool. And then some consultants and other people. And then last week we had our c e O over in town.

And we filled a room with almost a hundred people without much issue. And they were true customers. They've used us, they see the value, they speak at the panel, and that's the momentum you build, not because you've got a better contact database and things like that. It's because we build true advocacy within our lighthouse customers by making them hyper-successful.

So that's been a few things I think to consider maybe for, listeners here as they think about Europe. You know, it's the. Contact database, the marketing automation set up that engine. Yes. But also really think about the relationships you're building with your first customers.

Adith:
Basically, every customer is so valuable in Europe compared to us, where you just have to focus on advocacy for them to build your business.

Semir:
Exactly. Especially as you're starting out. It's so important. Okay. Cloud expansion in the UK is a significant part of its global strategy.

Adith:
Can you provide some insights into how the UK territory planning is set up and segmented at Clari? I'm sure our listeners would be interested to know about the groundwork, the planning that goes into, you know, such a significant overseas operation.

Semir:
Yeah, I mean I think we're probably pretty similar to many tech companies out there selling into different markets and including emm. We, you know, split out by company size where you have a, you know, emerging market segment until a certain threshold of employees. Then you have a commercial mid-market all the way to enterprise.

So we segment by company size. We look at it by geo as well, because our focus is UK and Ireland at this point. Mm-hmm. And we also sell across Europe. I think that's what's important is how, how and why we've done this. Because we sell, at the start, we saw especially, especially to tech companies, and they are quite similar across the continent.

If you're selling to a SaaS company in Barcelona, in Berlin, in London, they are pretty tech-savvy. They all speak English, they know software tools and they don't expect, you know, localization. You don't have to educate them too much on the tech stack. And they see the value in your solution pretty quickly as well.

So it's been easy to have English-speaking salespeople based in or around London selling to a company in Barcelona or OR or Zurich or Berlin. So that's been quite good. Now as we've expanded, we started selling to others, so the bigger focus has become the UK to sell to non-tech companies, like in publishing and manufacturing, whatever the case might be.

And we'll expand then into others as well. So the primary focus was not necessarily geographic, it was more industry. And then the second, we're now starting to look at more industries, but starting in one geo geography to start with. And, in terms of the employee size differentiators that you spoke about, right?

Like, could you clarify like, you know, what is commercial or what is mid-market for clarity? Yeah, I think so I think enterprise is within a thousand plus. At the moment, commercial is less than a thousand. And then for some of the teams we do emerging, which is under I think 150 if I remember right. I think I, it's been changing a little bit.

We've been experimenting, with the thresholds. But the 1000 mark is kind of a nice one in Europe that we've, that we've picked, it worked quite well to differentiate enterprise and commercial. It's always such a moving metric in every company that it helps to have a ballpark in mind on what the best in the business are doing.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I wanna like, you know, segue a little into one of my topics, right? Like, which is around sales engineers in Central, right? Yeah. So I've usually like, you know, been part of a few communities and also work with them a lot. Like usually sales engineers are one of the most underappreciated roles in the company with sales, getting most of the credits usually.

Adith:
So as a sales engineering leader, like, you know, how do you keep everyone motivated and focused today, and how, how do you plan that happen?

Semir:
Well, I'm, I'm always happy to talk about sales engineering. One of my favourite functions in the business, of course, and you're right in many organizations are underappreciated in terms of the value they bring to the go-to-market teams.

I'm happy to say that clarity that's not the case. I think we have a highly appreciated sales engineering team from all go-to-market teams and including leadership with A C R O. And that's nice and that's creating a great partnership also downstream. Then, you know, our CRO used to be actually a sales engineer at the very start of his career which probably helps a little bit.

But it's, it's fantastic because it creates better, better partnerships for AEs and ses also downstream in, in the go-to-market teams. I think it's important, to appreciate the value and work together because I think you win more, you win better, and you win bigger. If you engage effectively, with your SE or solution consultant, pre-sales engineer, however, you name the title exactly, because they bring so much to the table, especially in a, in a product like CL or something that's, you know, not as hyper-technical, where, you know, you can get interesting inputs from a salesperson.

We sell sales technology, so a salesperson actually will have input into that. But also as ses, we always get exposed to many, many customers and many, many use cases. And we can bring ideas in, and I think there is a huge potential in bringing that collaboration together. It probably varies. If you have a deeply technical cybersecurity product, maybe the salesperson will not be able to contribute as much.

It'll be a different dynamic. But in many products, I think it's. Great to collaborate very closely together and win more together. And I'm, I'm glad at cla we, we have a really good collaboration and I always, always encourage people to, you know, work with their AEs, their sales counterparts, se leaders to work with sales leaders very closely and, and try and do the best work they can together to unlock the most value.

Yeah, it's, it's such a great thing too, to hear that something like that is happening in clarity. I think that's how the industry should evolve forward. I think sales engineering plays a much role when you're selling a product like this straight. You need to have industry context. You need to have all those, like, you know, technology context before selling the product fully.

Adith:
Absolutely. Awesome. So like yeah, before the interview I was going through your profile and saw something very interesting SAS churning more than Benning. Like, do you, do you wanna explain that? Yes, absolutely. I mean, this was a post I think I did a couple of days ago on LinkedIn, and this was just from some conversations I've had with people in the industry.

Semir:
We, again, sell a lot of tech companies. I have lots of people that I work with or friends in tech and everybody's like, wow, SaaS is very tough right now. We see earnings this week. You know, stocks are dropping 20 plus per cent. And it seems like the world is on fire in some companies. And then you have other companies like Salesforce and others, you know, some are really strong earnings and you're thinking, well, what does this mean?

Like, what's happening and, and what's happening in this environment, I think is there's much more scrutiny in deals. There's much more scrutiny in companies on their growth rates, on the margin profile that they have on the cost base and how they're growing or they're growing efficiently. And many of companies are waking up to it.

A nightmare where they see their product is maybe just a nice to have. And it's the first list first on the list that the CFO asks, why do we need this and strikes it. And so I've seen some companies where they're churning more than they're winning and contracting overall.

Today they only have 22 or they had 60 million. Today they are only 40-something, and that's pretty brutal. If every quarter you're maybe signing 2 million and you're lose losing four. Churning for, and it should put things a bit into perspective where those companies that are still growing because you know, startups, they might say, look, we have 10, 20% growth.

It's not the 50, 60, 70 we had or a hundred per cent growth we had before, but you're still growing and some others are actually doing much, much worse. So put that into perspective as well in the wider market and be ready for some toughness. For the next, you know, still, six or 12 months until things recover.

And that's just the nature of the market right now. So I think, I posted on LinkedIn because I was trying to put things a bit in perspective. If people think, oh, it's not the same big party, it was in 2021 and 2022, it's a bit different. This is this time around in 2023. And that's okay. You know, you go up and down in cycles and you should be able to place yourself, on the scale.

Like how bad is it really compared to others right now? Not how is it different from a year or two ago? So that's what the Post was about. Yeah. Yeah. I think there is been a regime change overall from how it was like, you know, two years ago to right now. And I think people have to be more sensitive with that in general, like what you said, I think everyone can't have the same growth for already than who's growing.

Like who, who's buying them. Yep. This is such a nice insight and I want to take that like, you know, into the deeper, like, you know, discussion around if there are challenges like this that companies are like, you know, scrutinizing every purchase to a longer Excel, then basically how does forecasting like, you know, change in such a scenario?

Adith:
Right? Like, how, how do you recognize? Revenue operations and growth leader, you should be forecasting your revenue for the quarter because everyone expects you to like, you know, commit to a number and go hit it. But like, you know, people are tough to negotiate in current terms. So how do you do that?

Semir:
Yeah, it's such a good question. I think it's probably more important than it was ever before. Forecasting right now, It's so hard because there's uncertainty in the market overall. You are still getting used to this new environment and you know where it all starts is at the level of looking at the deals.

The first-line manager has effective, rigorous one-to-ones with their sales reps. Are you following our sales methodology? Whichever it is, you're using my pick and others. Are you locking in the next steps? Do you have a meeting coming up? Are you working with your SE effectively? Have you worked with marketing around your ABM that is much more important than maybe before, where?

There are lots of inbounds. You're not too worried about your pipeline and you're doing pretty well. You're hitting your number right now. It's a different environment and it's just back to the basics that we all know, that we just have to be much more rigorous this time around. And as you build that good foundation of data and understanding of, your deals, and have effective one-to-ones as a manager with your team, you can forecast more confidently and it's okay to forecast also not amazing growth and to maybe forecast below your actual number.

But it's bad to get a surprise negative way at the end of the quarter. CROs right now that we talk to as well, are happy to have a product, like Clari. We just pitch about clarity, but it's, they're really happy to have our solution as well because it gives them visibility early on in the quarter to warn the board, Hey, I might miss my number and I can see that already in week three.

And that means the CRO is in control of their revenue. And that is much more effective in running the company and much better for them than being surprised. Nobody likes surprises if it's if, if something's not going as well, let's work on how we get through this tough economic cycle and not get surprised at the end.

Adith:
And that's where forecasting is much more important than before. And it all starts with the data. That you get from the reps, the effective one-to-ones how you, and then how you run revenue all the way up to the crop. That's a bit of context there because it's Yeah. Much more important, I think, than than it used to be.

And hopefully many will take notes and get more rigorous around their sales processes. Absolutely. I, I think I learned a lot about, like, you know, that over the last two years where it's more about the process because the results aren't gonna be that easy to acquire anymore. It's, it's, it's getting a tough market.

Semir:
So you have to figure out a way to get that going and ensure like, you know, you're tracking everything. Like, you know, when is the next meeting? Mm-hmm. Like, you know, what's the next action item? When are, have we set up the next meeting, like, you know, on a call? Because once people go to emails, a lot of times, like, you know, you're not gonna be able to get them to reply to the next email, right?

So, it's, I think forecasting is gonna be as crucial as it's ever been. Right. Because even if it's gonna be a bad scenario, if you're able to predict it's gonna be a bad scenario, at least it's not gonna be such, a rough landing. Right. That's exactly it. Awesome. And yeah, I think, I learned a lot today, Sammy.

Adith:
So, we have a few closing questions for the podcast. So I'm gonna hit you like, you know, three of them right away. Amazing. Let's do it. So number one, are there any books that you would recommend for someone to scale their career in operations? Growth, expansion. Oh, book recommendations. Always love good.

Semir:
Recommendation. Book. Book recommendations. What have I read that I really enjoyed? I think one is generally in life, which is super useful. Boca Reds with the Atomic Habits. That's one That's great. And it's good for not just personal, you know, you wanna do more exercise or read more or sleep better.

It's also good, in your professional life, I think so. Atomic Habits is one of the big favourites that's really helped me, I think. Yeah, that's such a favourite book for me as well. I think I use that to like, you know, create those non-failures, right? Like, you just ensure you're starting something no matter what, so that you like, you know, keep the process going.

Amazing. What is, yes. What else? I think I, I mean, I like reading kind of these, these business books just because I like to get inspired about, you know, stories from other entrepreneurs. So I've probably read all the, all the ones, the famous ones, like the shoe dog on the Nike story. I've read Mark Benioff's books, I've, I've read the hard things about hard things.

Which is an amazing book as well. So there are a few of these. Of course, it's, it's just interesting in the training stories and there are always a few lessons you can take away from your career and your journey, especially in startups. So that's a few more recommendations there.

Adith:
Second question. If you are not in, like, you know, in operations or in the SaaS field, where else would you be? If I was not in SaaS, where would I be? I com I probably have, that's a hard question. That's a very hard question. I think I, I, I really enjoy, you know, company building, helping entrepreneurs change.

Semir:
I mean, it's from, from the very start in my kind of, even when I studied, It was always a combination of business and technology, how to bring innovation to, to to the world. I'm pretty passionate about, you know, kind of how it, you know, on the economic level, it improves companies, not just kind of balance sheets.

It improves the economy, it creates better jobs. So I'm, I'm a bit of an economic geek as well, so I might be, I know a lecturer somewhere teaching about economics and the growth and then what role innovation plays in that. But I like much more to be an operator than a startup, to be honest. If, if I had to choose at this point.

Adith:
The final one, like, you know, I can an audience connect you and learn more about you.

Semir:
Yeah, absolutely. So everybody can find me on LinkedIn, just Samir jk. There are not too many with my name on LinkedIn, I also have my newsletter on ck. It's more value.ck.com. And if anybody's, of course, interested to learn more about Clarity and what we do, it's just clarity.com.

But you can also just reach out directly to me if you want to learn more. That's how you can reach me. Awesome. thanks a lot for coming again on this podcast, Sam, I had a wonderful time posting you and I learned a lot. Hopefully, our listeners also learned a lot from this session. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Adith:
Well, that brings us to the end of this insightful episode of Goo Masters. A massive thank you to Samuel for sharing this experience and invaluable insights. It is truly enlighting to learn about the strategies Clari used to navigate the global expansion and their approach towards G DM strategy in general.

We can tune in every week to learn more from game changers driving hyper-growth companies across the globe. Go-To-Master is brought to you at Everstage. You trust your partner for transforming the way businesses handle sales compensation. I'm your host Adith from Everstage signing off.
Remember to stay curious, say inspired, and keep growing.