The Remarkable SaaS Podcast

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the ERP space, and my guest is Vinnie Mirchandani Vinnie is the founder of Deal Architect - a Technology strategy and negotiation firm listed as a leading "boutique" by the Black Book of Outsourcing. Vinnie also founded IQ4hire, a projects marketplace and Jetstream Group, a sourcing advisory firm. Earlier in his career he had various technology consulting roles at PwC (now IBM) in the US, Europe and Asia, and worked as an industry analyst at Gartner.  He wrote various books about the evolution and future of the enterprise software, amongst which Silicon Collar, The New Polymath and The New Technology Elite. His latest book is SAP Nation 3.0, and this triggered me to invite Vinnie again to my podcast. We explore the changes in the ERP landscape over the last 5 years, in particular amongst the big 3 – SAP, Oracle and Workday. We explore why after 20 years of ERP in the cloud today there’s still not enough traction.  Here are some of his quotes: “In the last five years, two things have changed. One is SAP has been a product launch machine. I mean, they have launched more products than any other I would say technology vendor. The other thing I saw pleasantly with SAP was how much more open they were this time. One of the disappointing things about cloud has been, you know, it's 20 years old now. NetSuite was born in 98, Salesforce was born in 99. But if you do a breakdown by global world region, by industry, by business process, only about 20% is filled. So, the vendor community hasn’t delivered enough. And on the other hand, the buyer community has been very slow to adopt it. I raised an alarm. I go, this is scary guys. After 20 years, both the buyers and the vendors are just not moving. Something's not right.” During this interview, you will learn four things: Why it’s key for ERP vendors to not just modernize the technology. Modernize the business processes. That a big opportunity is left virtually untouched and that is: leveraging the biggest benefit of the cloud: Data, and utilize that to introduce real value shifts Why it’s key to wake up and realize it’s urgent after 20 years to start moving ‘by-standards’ i.e. ERP legacy customers.  Why systems integrators should start to apply machine learning and automation to their own business. Stop just selling bodies, and leverage the learnings and data from millions of CRM and ERP projects to make these projects faster, cheaper and a lot less risky See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to deliver upon the promise of self-healing-systems. My guest is Mohit Gupta, Co-founder and CEO of Opas AI Mohit has spent the last decade working on wide variety of interesting problems in Infrastructure, Big Data, and ML. He has run and managed infrastructure at massive scale and felt the pain of operating them first hand. This pain combined with his experience in Big Data and ML led to the incubation of Opas AI. Before founding Opas AI, Mohit has held multiple roles at BloomReach, Groupon, Google, and Amazon. He has a Bachelor in CS from IIT Kharagpur and Masters from UCDavis. The vision behind Opas AI me to invite Mohit to my podcast: to create a single solution that can find, diagnose and fix even the most complex performance and availability problems in your applications and infrastructure.  We explore the fact that today’s applications and infrastructure have evolved far faster than the technology used to measure and manage them. We dive into the challenges that this provides to IT teams as they drown under the weight of too many tools, too many dashboards and too many meaningless alerts, and most importantly, how technology such as AI and Machine Learning can help remove these challenges and risks for good. Here are some of his quotes: “We are in this journey of building self-healing systems. It doesn't matter what kind of IT systems you're running. The cost of failure has been growing higher and higher. There was one thing in early 2000 if Amazon site was down for 15 minutes probably wouldn't turn up on New York Times homepage. However, a few minutes outage on your site [today] can become a massive PR issue. And the cost is not only the lost revenue. That's definitely something that you see right away but the bigger cost is in the negative PR. And God save you if you are providing service to other SAAS providers. We can win customers. We can buy contracts. But buying credibility, winning credibility is a long-term process. You may be doing very well for the last five years; a two-hour outage will basically wipe out that credibility.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: What are the key ingredients that are required to build self-healing systems What the art of listening to customers really means – the key is not to hear what they are saying, but to understand what they are meaning That you should be problem focused, not solution focused to become truly successful  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on the power of curiosity in innovation and my guest is Dr. Diane Hamilton, author of ‘Cracking the Curiosity Code’ She has contagious passion for improving interpersonal communication. In addition to being a nationally syndicated radio host, award-winning speaker, author, and educator, Dr. Hamilton is a thought leader in the fields of leadership, sales, marketing, management, engagement, personality, curiosity, and motivation.  To help improve relationships in the workplace — and performance as a result — Dr. Hamilton draws on her decades of work experience in software, computers, corporate training, pharmaceuticals, real estate, mortgage lending, social media, education, and publishing. She’s a sought-after expert in emotional intelligence, and her research has been published widely in peer-reviewed journals. She is the creator of the Curiosity Code Index® and the author of four books sold worldwide: Cracking the Curiosity Code, The Online Student’s User Manual, How to Reinvent Your Career, and It’s Not You, It’s Your Personality. Her book regarding personalities was required reading at an Arizona-based university, where she was also nominated for an honorary doctorate in addition to her traditionally-obtained Ph.D. in Business Management. The release of her latest book ‘Cracking the Curiosity Code’ triggered me to invite Diane to my podcast. We explore why curiosity is such a key trait to develop in relation to innovation and dealing with top business issues. We do a deep dive on the four factors that impact curiosity, and what to do to start growing the curiosity level inside your organization. Here are some of her quotes: “I first started writing the book because I was very interested in what kept people from being curious. I really found four factors impacted curiosity which were Fear, Assumption, Technology and Environment. My hope was to help individuals and organizations to develop what I think is a such a key trait. It's the spark that leads to motivation and to drive and for you to get anywhere with communication, critical thinking, leadership, creativity, teamwork, engagement, you name all the top issues that leadership struggles with. Once you're able to get all those factors in line and then once your innovative you're productive and you know everybody's engaged, it kind of solves all the problems and so that's what I thought was so fascinating. What I was trying to do was just kind of figure out what's the spark behind it all that's that we could fix and, and that's what I kept coming back to was improving curiosity.” During this interview, you will learn three things: That what made you successful in the past, isn’t likely going to help you survive in the future – And growing your curiosity index is the key to your success Why you have to watch out to avoid aimless curiosity in your organization, and what to do about it That, a critical way to grow a culture of curiosity starts when top management shows they way – they need to walk the talk. Get related ideas from a few blogs  Why your product roadmap fails to deliver remarkable value  How to stay relevant in your category?  Are you in the comfort zone, or where the magic happens? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform the impact Marketers can make by generating more leads, of higher quality, with less effort. My guest is Yonatan Snir, Co-founder and CEO of CliClap, an AI Powered autonomous lead generation and qualification solution He is an expert in data driven marketing with over 16 years of experience, helping organizations utilize technologies to improve business performance. In 2016, he founded CliClap together with Arie Zaks, who now acts as their CTO. Prior to CliClap he opened a marketing agency, focused on helping brands transform their marketing operations into a data driven organization. And before that, he served as the Director of Global Marketing Operations at NICE Systems. It was this big idea behind CliClap’s product that triggered me to invite Yonatan to my podcast.  We explore why so after so many years of marketing automation the tools we use still suggest visitors to our website the wrong topics of conversation (which is awkward) or ask people for their commitment way before the time is right (which is annoying and pushy). We then address how technology such as AI is offering us a completely different approach to the challenge, one that delivers results almost too good to be true. Here are some of his quotes: “We have a lot of traffic on the website that's not converting today, and many tools and many new tactics are being used to try and fix that. But eventually, we see that only friction converts. The numbers the benchmarks that are stated today by Forrester, Marketing Sherpa and other research, is that we looked at talking about 2 to 4% converting to leads, and only half percent is converted to opportunities. The reason for that, at least from what we found, is that on B2B you give the same experience to everyone. The fact is, it's not a one size fits all. A lot of people are being missed out, because they're not used to getting this kind of experience in today's world, where everything is becoming much more simple in our consumer head. So, the idea is to try and understand for each visitor when, and what's the next best thing. And when it's ready, ready to stick and move to the next level of engagement.  Not too soon, not too late.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: How, by staying curious and challenging the established and accepted ways of doing, it is possible to deliver remarkable impact How in a crowded, red-ocean market, it is very possible to get customers to shift from a competitive solution to yours by having clear differentiation. Why the traditional cloud solutions for marketing have been focused on the wrong metrics of delivering scale and quantity (i.e. output), where the real impact is created when you focus your product strategy on quality (i.e. outcomes). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform how the enterprise does business. My guest is Heidi Messer, Chairman and Co-founder of Collective[i]  Heidi has been an active entrepreneur and investor in the digital economy since the commercialization of the Internet. She is the Co-founder and CEO of World Evolved, a platform for global investment and expansion. She is one of the founding members of the Zokei Network, a global network devoted to encourage innovation across art, science, business and technology. In addition, she is an active angel investor in and advises numerous startups. Prior to Collective, Heidi and her brother, Stephen Messer, co-founded LinkShare Corporation, which is host to one of the world’s largest online affiliate networks representing some of the largest and fast-growing publishers and merchants on the web. The company is widely considered to be a pioneer in the world of digital advertising. Heidi is a frequent speaker at conferences around the world and universities on entrepreneurship, digital marketing and advertising, business intelligence and the Future of Internet services. She has been cited in various publications including, The New York Times, Inc. Magazine, and The Nikkei. She has received several honors including being selected as one of 2012’s 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs by Goldman Sachs.  The mission behind Collective[i] is to remove uncertainty and inefficiency around how B2B companies generate revenue through their sales organizations. They do so by using AI to remove tasks, identify important social connections and guide sales professionals to the activities that will yield the highest ROI. This approach often gets them referred to as the “Waze for sales” – And this triggered me to invite Heidi to my podcast We explore why today’s salesforce is wasting 70% of their time on non-revenue generating activities, and why, in order to solve that challenge, you need to go beyond automation. As such we explore how the combination of network-based technology, community-sourced and proprietary data in combination with AI/ML enables to predict buying patterns and provide levels of visibility and actionability previously unattainable for sales teams Here are some of her quotes: “My co-founder and I got together and said: “What is the next big opportunity?” after watching the marketing world transform, and we saw on the enterprise side and the revenue management side, specifically sales, as being the next big thing. That’s what led us to found a Collective[i], which is short for collective intelligence.” “The entire enterprise will be transformed using a combination of data networks and artificial intelligence. And when I say transformation, what I mean is not automation. I think that's a common misconception. Instead, what we looked at is; Where areas where humans are underutilized? Where are areas where their jobs have become something other than what they were originally intended? And for us, we looked at revenue and in particular sales organizations as a ripe place for this, where this technology could completely reorganize and allow human beings to shine and show their true talents.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: Why taking a network approach to creating insights has the power to solve some of our most valuable challenges How, by using AI as a guide, we can raise the potential to increase both the value humans produce as well as the way they value their work. Why being a fast-follower doesn’t work with AI, because the advantages are so far superior. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the Procure-to-Pay space. My guest is David Griffiths, CEO of FISCAL Technologies, a leading provider of forensic solutions that empower procure-to-pay (P2P) teams across the globe to protect organizational spend. David has 20 years’ experience in growing technology organizations and has spent the last 15 years working with hundreds of Accounts Payable teams to help protect their corporate spend by preventing fraud and reducing risk. Prior to becoming the CEO of Fiscal Technologies, David was Head of  Marketing for Bottomline Technologies, and Commercial Director for European Internet Technologies, a supplier of e-business solutions. David holds an MBA and Honours Degree in Business & Accounting. What triggered me to invite David to my podcast was his vision to enable the finance function to prevent high risk transactions from creating reputational damage and become more proactive at the same time in optimizing performance. We explore the fact we are living in a world where Risk & Fraud are increasing rather than reducing. We discuss why current solutions on the market appear to be so inadequate. How that results in reputational damage, leakage of working capital and underperforming financial performance. And finally, how technology such as AI can be used to deliver remarkable impact. Here are some of his quotes:   The whole Procure-to-Pay space is dominated by hundreds of different technology vendors and really sit in two core areas.   Firstly, around procurement and automating the whole procurement process and driving purchase order compliance and POS and three-way matching, and then the other side is about managing invoices and paying those invoices. There's a lot of technologies around automation.   The more feedback we received, and the more research we did, we realized there was nothing to oversee all these different technologies to look at fraud and risk. We found that three-way matching doesn’t work. It hasn't evolved over the last 40 years. So our big idea was to provide oversight to this process, as a lot of organizations now are really exposed to unprecedented levels of risk and fraud.   By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: As the velocity of our world increases and our options to get work done enriches as technology evolves, we are creating new foundation for fraud and risk to grow exponentially. That the value of AI is not only to give insights to identify fraud and risk, but possibly more important to also reveal totally new patterns that allow us to prevent these challenges all together. That a lot of value is destroyed due to inertia in the market – the self-believe that ‘everything is under control’ – and that’s not only in the Procure-to-Pay scene. It’s universal.   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation around marketing automation that has the power to transform the way can turn customers into buyers by using the power of content personalization, and my guest is Jon Shalowitz, CEO of LiftIgniter Jon brings a wealth of experience in building innovative, fast-growth companies. He was CEO at XDN where he transitioned the company​ ​into a category leader for application delivery services and led the company to a​ ​successful acquisition by Fortinet. He then co-founded CloudUP Networks and led the company as CEO to capture a critical part of the cloud data management market.​ ​ He then became the CEO of Badgeville, a leader in Enterprise Gamification that got acquired in July 2016 by CallidusCloud, where in turn he created a new division to address the $20B Customer Experience (CX) market. CallidusCloud got acquired by SAP in august 2017, from where Jon moved into an interim CEO role at SnapRoute with the prime objective to re-focus the business. In April 2018 he then became CEO of LiftIgniter – a Series A stage startup that helps B2C and B2B companies optimize their Web-based and app-based customer experiences in real-time. The way LiftIgniter does this intrigued me, hence I invited Jon to my podcast. We explore the challenges marketers have these days in meeting the expectations of their prospects and customers in the digital world we live in, while at the same ensure we are 100% compliant with data privacy regulations like GDPR. It has become impossible to keep up with manual segmentation and tagging as we all expect our suppliers to give us a personalized experience based on our behaviors – in real time.  Here are some of his quotes: “I truly think that the marketing stack is in a position to move from evolutionary change that we had with marketing automation, to now something revolutionary with AI and machine learning. The big idea is that customer interactions, customer experience, digital customer experience need to be number one real time, need to pick up on signals in real time. And, related to that, need to be behavioral based, or need to understand your behavior in the moment, or the users’ behavior in the moment, versus the traditional way of tracking and segmenting and really focusing on who you are. It's what you are, what you're doing what you're interested in, in the moment, not who you are, and what you've clicked on at 10 other sites where you came to me” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: How you can leverage your 1st party data effectively and drive the best possible Customer Experience.  That true breakthroughs in technology can only be achieved by taking a distance from the conventional ways of doing things. Too often we get too engaged with improvement on improvement on improvement, where we should really start with a clean sheet Why as a CEO it’s your duty to gear your company at the most valuable challenge of your ideal customer, not the most interesting challenge. You need to apply a level of adaptability, and with that you’ll turn customers into fans See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the sales execution space that has the power to help companies gain 99% accuracy in their sales cycles, hence achieve big leaps in productivity, and my guest is Dr. Cindy Gordon, Co-founder and CEO of SalesChoice, an AI SaaS Predictive and Prescriptive Guiding Selling Company.  Cincy is an expert in SaaS, AI, business innovation, early-stage software commercialization & sales /marketing practices. She has held senior leadership and partnership roles in global B2B Enterprises, including: Accenture, Xerox, Citicorp and Nortel Networks. In addition, Cindy has also been a founder, VC, and an angel in emerging software companies. She is recognized for her innovation and thought leadership, has written over 13 books, and won numerous awards.  Cindy’s passion is the constant pursuit of sustainable innovation and the creation of  differentiated experiences to make our world an incredible place. That’s what triggered me, hence I invited her to my podcast. We explore the large-scale challenges sales professionals have in making their targets. The fact that 30% of sales professionals suffer from attention deficit disorder, and that attention span has dropped 50% over the past 10 years are likely making this worse than better. AI is coming to the rescue here. It’s interesting how Cindy defines it: AI is not then new energy, it’s the new oxygen – we have to breath it to be able to do things we’ve never held possible. Here are some of her quotes: “What drives me day to day is probably just ensuring that what is possible is real, and giving people the confidence that they could actually mobilize the change. It's all about building the confidence to just simply be, enjoy, and make it happen. Too often, we get paralyzed. And I think with the speed that has accelerated in businesses worldwide, people need to make more choices about where they're spending their time and what they're working on, The roots of the company are very much focused on that specific problem. The problem is that 30 to 60% of sales professionals don't make their sales plan targets or quotas in the b2b market segment. The speed acceleration or the age of distraction dynamics, b2b sales professionals have one of the hardest jobs in the world because of the noise factor.  So that's the backdrop and we thought the thesis was: “Could AI, with predictive analytics and other AI methods, absorb all the historical dynamics of a firm and actually guide them?” During this interview, you will learn four things: Why it’s key to always look for audit trails once you add AI to your solution – Someone needs to be accountable for the predictions. And if you can’t stand in for it, the legal issues will be pretty significant That the new way to deliver your solutions is not to give your users individual insights, but rather universal intelligence of all ‘the moves’. This will enable them to add even more value. That one of your responsibilities and opportunities as a vendor is to ensure the data keeps improving – that bias isn’t there – and that your predictions are transparent Everyone knows that to succeed you have to stay focused. Possibly more important is to stay curious. To be looking around the corner for the market dynamics and the edge plays. Leave yourself and your people time to pause, reflect and time to think. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation in the sales & marketing space that has the power to increase sales productivity by over 80%, and my guest is Ilan Kasan, Co-founder and CEO of Exceed.ai. Ilan has built an 18-year career in general management and product management for leading global technology companies including, Cisco, WebEx, Comeet and others. During this time, he’s proven to be a successful product leader with a track record in product, user experience, sales, marketing and building products users and enterprises love. September 2016 he co-founded Exceed.ai around the believe that sales reps time is precious and shouldn’t be wasted on menial, error-prone tasks. As such they developed an AI Sales Assistant that automatically contacts and engages every lead in a personalized and timely manner in order to qualify and book meetings directly on the reps calendar – allowing the reps to be laser focus on high priority prospects. This triggered me, and hence I invited Ilan to my podcast. We explore the challenges every sales person has in performing in their job and how the bulk of their time is spent on tasks that doesn’t use their competence in the optimal way. We also assess why a combo of Sales + AI delivers better results than simply trying to replace Sales with AI.  Here are some of his quotes: “I was exposed to what I would say, the middle of the funnel, how difficult it is to manage a huge stream of leads. I saw how much time reps are spending in qualifying, getting back and trying to set appointments, talking to the wrong people. How much leads that marketing created, nobody actually does anything with them, or follows up one. So I understood that there is a real problem here that is not necessarily related to the size of the company, but rather the nature of the business. The problem is that when you get all those leads at the top of the funnel, you get a lot of noise. It takes a lot of time to work through all the leads and filter out the noise, it’s a very manual process. And we said, okay, this is repetitive, it repeats itself. So let's find a way to automate it.” By listening to this interview, you will learn three things: That to stand out in your market you have to deliver value beyond what ‘the others’ are delivering. Going the extra mile pays off – and sometimes this means pivoting your business That the value is in the data – and often the data is not there – meaning you have to find clever ways to gather it. This way you are not building a product, but a platform that gets smarter and smarter with every interaction. How your biggest competitor is often ‘doing nothing’ because of inertia or simply being sceptical (or fearful). The ultimate way out is positioning.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to transform how we hire and manage talent going forward, and my guest is Caitlin MacGregor Caitlin is the CEO and Co-founder of Plum. After being President/Director of two startups, Caitlin founded Plum in order to transform talent processes to prepare business owners, like herself, for the future of work. Shortly after that Plum was awarded 2015 Gold Stevie International Business Award for best new product or service of the year. The company was also selected as one of the top 10 businesses led by women by Springboard Enterprises NYC. Plum's mission is to help companies hire, grow, and retain top talent with the power of AI and Industrial/Organizational Psychology. By measuring talents such as leadership, innovation, communication, and more, Plum hosts the single largest database for quantifying human potential at every stage of the employee journey – from predicting successful hires, to informing professional development, strategic workforce planning, and high-potential capability. This inspired me, hence I invited Caitlin to my podcast. We explore the challenges in the talent acquisition and talent management space, and why so many companies are challenged with hiring top-talent. We also discuss how the changes in the marketplace require a different approach to hiring, reskilling and redeploying talent – and why assessing where someone went to school or previously worked are not the things to look for. Here are some of his quotes: “Some of the statistics say that, you know, it's a 5050 chance of hiring the right person. a lot of companies don't have 50% turnover. So a lot of the times what happens is that they're putting up with mediocre people maybe 20% of their organization are top performers. But if you understand what makes a top performer, a top performer and you can quantify that you can actually change that ratio so that you can get more people that that meet that criteria. It's really understanding that every single person has the potential to be a top performer, just not in every role, that that each person has a unique set of talents that makes them a top performer.  So it's really about how do you figure out what makes somebody exceptional, and then figure out the jobs that will allow them to succeed.” During this interview, you will learn three things: How looking for scarcity can you help uncover hidden market gems that you can open by democratizing access That to maximize your success as a software business it’s key to align every aspect – all the way from product strategy, to marketing, to Sales, to Service How new business ideas are born by looking with a fresh eye at what it takes to avoid costly investment decisions. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices