#235 - MG Gurbaxani. CEO Cuvama - on transforming Enterprise Software sales

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help B2B SaaS companies make faster, bigger, better sales- increasing win rate by +19%, deal size by +42%, and increasing the average selling price by +35%. My guest is MG Gurbaxani, Co-founder and CEO of Cuvama. MG has been obsessed with customer value for nearly 2 decades. Over the last 17 years, he's helped over 80 global B2B customers across manufacturing, distribution, high-tech, and software realize their monetization potential. in 2012 MG joined PROS, where he led the team in the development of customer value quantification tools and methodologies in response to the company's shift to a SaaS strategy. MG focused on increasing win rate, deal size, the average selling price of solutions, and maximizing customer retention rate. As the software industry moved to SaaS, he recognized that the shift of power to the customer was inevitable. This inflection point became the founding idea behind Cuvama, which MG co-founded in 2017, and leads as their CEO.  The belief: Successful relationships start with doing discovery right, by focusing on customer success outcomes. But this is easy to say, much harder to do. As such, Cuvama is on a mission to help B2B software companies sell outcomes, not products. And this inspired me, and hence I invited MG to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the way we deal with selling and buying enterprise software. MG digs into the big lessons learned from his years in value engineering on the sales side, and how he found his breakthrough by flipping the focus to the buy side. Lastly, he shares his advice on creating a software business that the world will talk about - and his key takeaways on the do's & don'ts to make fundraising more effective and motivating. Here's one of his quotes Before you think about b2b software sales cycles, it's hard. It's hard to sell, and it's hard to buy. And we want to make it easy. Now if you double-click on that, our belief is that majority of sales reps struggle to ask their prospects about value. When they do, we see that it dramatically reduces sales cycle lengths. By getting the multiple stakeholders aligned on the value we see deal sizes increasing, and win rates increasing, but the bigger impact would be: It's not just about landing that first deal. But how can you grow, expand, and retain that customer? So ultimately, all this would point to an uptick in your NDR or NRR, Net Dollar Retention, and Net revenue retention. During this interview, you will learn four things: How to discover and demonstrate value for your SaaS suite 24/7  That we're often optimizing our product roadmap for the wrong things - and how to go around that That you can create defensible differentiation by not only focusing on your customers but on your customers' customers That a solid way to differentiate yourself is in your ability to commit to the value you deliver, and engineer for that. For more information about the guest from this week: MG Gurbaxani MG’s Musings blog Website Cuvama Subscribe to the Daily Value Inspiration Get my free, 2 min daily reflection on shaping a B2B SaaS business no one can ignore. Subscribe here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices