[00:00:00] Harini: In this environment, we all need to be able to articulate how we connect back to our P&Ls, to our revenue conversations. If not, you will be a part of the cost conversation, right? And so when we set these metrics, we worked by function, by CS, for technical support, it was NPS, for our CS functions, for our renewals function, to say, how will each team ladder up to meeting their GRR and NRR goals? What is the work back? What are the KPIs we need to measure?

[00:00:33] VO:  You need to invest in it. And you solve these different. You don't just gun for revenue in the door.

[00:00:37] Andrew Michael: This is Churn.fm, the podcast for subscription economy pros. Each week we hear how the world's fastest growing companies are tackling churn and using retention to fuel their growth.

[00:00:50] VO: How do you build a habit-forming product? We crossed over that magic threshold to negative turn. You need to invest in customer success. It always comes down to retention and engagement. Completely boost, strap profitable and growing.

[00:01:04] Andrew Michael: Strategies, tactics and ideas brought together to help your business thrive in the subscription economy. I'm your host, Andrew Michael, and here's today's episode.

[00:01:15] Andrew Michael: Hey, Harini, welcome to the show.

[00:01:17] Harini: Hey, it's good to be here! How are you doing?

[00:01:20] Andrew Michael: I'm doing great! Thanks! And it's great to have you back for the listeners. Harini is the Chief Customer Officer of Entrust, enabling trusted experience for identities, payments and data. Prior to Entrust, Harini led customer success for next-gen enterprises at AWS, and Harini is also an investor and advisor to several startups, and a previous guest of the show. So, my first question for you today, Harini, is what's new since we last had you on the show? You've joined Entrust. What motivated you to make the switch from AWS?

[00:01:48] Harini: Yes. It's a great question and it's always good to be back and have this conversation. I joined Entrust as their first Chief Customer Officer. As you said, Entrust offers best in class security solutions across payment, and identities for a portfolio that includes governments, and key institutions across the world, that are critical to the world economy, as well as enterprises that are pillars of our economies.

[00:02:17] Harini: So, a purpose that helps secure such critical aspects of our world was very important to me. And so, it was primarily purpose driven. Second, it was about the leadership team and the mission at hand. Our CEO, Todd Wilkinson is an innovative, inspiring, and an always learning leader, and that is a culture I wanted to be part of. And Todd was very excited about the prospect of partnering with me to set up a center of gravity for customer experience and engagement.

[00:02:49] Harini: And that was the third reason, to build a business from scratch, to build that muscle for customer experience and success was scratch, was hugely tempting. I've been a builder all my life and I'm very excited to be now well into my journey of building customer experience and success for Entrust.

[00:03:10] Andrew Michael: Very nice, and just for a little bit of context, how big is Entrust?

[00:03:14] Harini: The Entrust is revenues. Entrust is at about 3,000 employees worldwide, globally. We have key footprint in Europe, in America, as well as in Asia, and we support partners and customers across the globe.

[00:03:31] Andrew Michael: All right, interesting. Yeah, so just for context, I want to understand, it looks sort of the scale and size, and then you joined then as the first Chief Customer Officer. Was there sort of any function of customer success previously? Like, what did your role then entail coming in? Was it really sitting up from ground zero or were you sort of taking initial practices that have been set up, and adapting them, and evolving them for the stage and scale of the company?

[00:03:53] Harini: It's a great question. So, you know, Entrust as a company is very much driven by customer success. Doing the right thing by customers is in the DNA of every employee that we call colleagues, every colleague in the business, and that was inspiring for me coming in, knowing that there were so many people committed to the same vision that I was.

[00:04:14] Harini: And what my role was to bring together a collection of teams that had previously been functioning independently, and bring them together to force multiply and force amplify the outcomes we wanted to have. And in parallel, incubate some roles that hadn't existed for Entrust before, such as the customer success.

[00:04:34] Harini: So, we brought together all the post-sales components from onboarding to professional services to technical support, and then introduced the customer success role in addition. And together said, how do we leave a narrative of having one interest to our customers once they are onboard?

[00:04:54] Andrew Michael: And what was the philosophy then, and the idea behind setting this team up? So like this role, you were hired for it, it's like, what was the main goal and aim of it? I think especially like if we think a little bit about the time and the context that we're in at the moment, I think customer success is under a lot of pressure and keen to understand like what was the motivation to actually set this new function up and bring you on board and get everyone together.

[00:05:18] Harini: Right,  there were three priorities for this role and this function, and I loved that, and I partnered with my CEO, and our leadership team to come up with that. The first one was we would establish this as a cultural change and a cultural priority. We knew, all of us knew customer first was important, but how do we make it a priority that we could walk the talk on every day consistently and deliver to our customers? So, we made it a cultural change, and I'm so deeply appreciative of my partnership with my HR leader, our chief people officer to drive.

[00:05:52] Harini: The second thing we said is it's more than one person's job. It's a strategic priority, so, as part of every strategy we drive, whether it's taking identity solutions to market, taking payment to market, how do you start with a customer first perspective? What problem are we solving for the customer? So, it became then infused into the strategic DNA.

[00:06:12] Harini: And the third piece was, as a function, we wanted it to be a growth function. As we move into a subscription economy, a consumption economy, usage is key, consumption is key, adoption is key. And that is where this function would really help drive the outcomes for us, is by partnering with our teams across sales, across product to make sure that we're helping customers realize outcomes in a timely fashion.

[00:06:42] Andrew Michael: I think that's very important, sort of the positioning and framing as well as the growth function, especially like where a lot of teams maybe today are seen as sort of a cost center, and it's really important to get that positioning right, and then the focus then of the team around growth. So, let's dive into it a little bit, so, how does the team operate as a growth function then, and how have you structured and set things up?

[00:07:02] Harini: Yeah, so a growth function comes with accountability and ownership, right? They sort of go hand in hand, so we took on accountability for our recurring software revenue. And then took accountability for renewals, so we made sure that when that happened, our sales teams were free to go hunt, and we partnered with them to expand a footprint on a customer account, on the land and expand motion. So, there were very clear goals taken on revenue, clear goals on net revenue retention, and gross revenue retention, where I came and baseline it and said, this is the baseline, this is the ambition we have, it's a three-year journey, but where do we want to get to in year one? And with my SLT peers, we took on the NRR and the GRP, securing our base, second growing our base.

[00:07:58] Harini: And those we report on it every month, every quarter to our board, and it just became part of the rhythm of business, and the set of optics we brought to the business, to make sure that we were securing and growing our customer base. And that financial way of looking at it, it's a very analytical business then, right? There's data and there's no arguing with data.

[00:08:22] Harini: So, data tells you what you need to know, whether you're doing well, whether you could be doing better. So, we made it, to me it was important to be data driven, to be analytical and for this to be a science. And then there's all the art that goes with it, right? The anecdotes from the customer, the NPS scores that come in that support the conversation, but the core center of gravity is data driven, focused on NRR, GRR.

[00:08:50] Andrew Michael: I love that premise as well and sort of like really being heavily data driven. I think that's also probably where a lot of customer success teams fall into the trap of being seen as a cost center, not really having strong accountability to a revenue metric, to a growth metric, and ultimately then, sort of facing tough challenges when it comes to tough times as well. So, you first decided, okay, accountability, let's get these metrics in place. Let's take ownership of them ourselves. How did you then set the team up for success in this new environment then, and how did you enable them to be able to hit those goals and targets that you set for them?

[00:09:28] Harini: It's a great question, and it comes down to something you said, Andrew. In this environment, we all need to be able to articulate how we connect back to our P&Ls, to our revenue conversations. If not, you will be a part of the cost conversation, right? And so when we set these metrics, we worked by function by CS, for technical support it was NPS, for our CS functions, for our renewals function, to say, how will each team ladder up to meeting their GRR and NMR goals?

[00:10:00] Harini: What is the work back? What are the KPIs we need to measure? So as an example, how many relationships we have with the customer, is an indicator of retention and growth at a customer, right? As an example, the number of projects we do with them, the number of proof of concepts was a leading indicator of how much we would grow when renewal time came.

[00:10:20] Harini: So, we started building out this, I call a network of numbers. We started building out these connections between the activities we did and the outcomes that resulted in, and what that led to was prioritization. We discovered that some activities didn't lead to outcomes and then those got deprioritized. So, it's all about, we have scarce resources, we have constraints in this economic situation, so, it's about prioritizing the activities you focus on, and we arrived at three that we knew would move the needle for us.

[00:10:52] Harini: One of them was co-solutioning with the customer like POCs. One of them was having regular customer peer to peer conversations, which we are doing with the customer advisory board, and the third was regular engagement with the customer to understand their business and what they are being asked to do, and that translated into regular QBRs and mechanisms that included roadmap and other conversations.

[00:11:19] Andrew Michael: I love that. It reminds me as well of something similar we did at Hotjar at some point, was put together KPI trees and essentially like having three main metrics that the company cared about, being acquisition, retention and monetization, but then just showing, and illustrating how each team's influence, and the different actions they took as part of the inputs influenced the final output metric, and almost every single person to an extent could understand how their role and their function had an influence on the final outputs that we're trying to move as a team, and I think it's very empowering then, because then when you get to understand, okay, what are the actual inputs that you can play with as an individual, as a team, you can get very creative then, and it really empowers you as an individual in a company like that to be able to experiment, but then also like for the company itself, you have really good, strong direction and understanding of what the company cares about most and how you can prioritize against it as well.

[00:12:12] Harini: I love that, and I'll add one thing to it, which is it's very motivational for the individual doing the work, because they understand how they directly contribute to outcomes, there's no fuzziness around it, and we cannot afford fuzziness in this economy.

[00:12:26] Andrew Michael: Exactly, and I think even more so than as well, like when you get this specific, it becomes very, very easy to make the case of why customer success is delivering value in your case as well, like it's almost black and white.

[00:12:38] Andrew Michael: You've done the hard work of really understanding the data, and understanding the inputs, what's influencing the outputs, and then, it's basically like, it becomes, if we do X, we're going to get Y, so let's do X, so we get Y, and it sort of simplifies the process a lot because I think, what I found as well previously when it came to churn and retention specifically is like, especially in earlier stage companies, you'll talk about like churn and retention is a problem, it's an issue, and everybody will say it's a problem, it's an issue, but then nobody will know what to do about it.

[00:13:05] Andrew Michael: And nobody really understands what their role does to influence that final output, and when you actually like connect the dots and you show, okay, like basically you do this, and this happens, and this happens, in another part of the company and so forth, it really becomes like a paint by numbers of how to reduce churn, how to increase retention, and that's I think when you have that alignment is when you get like really, really strong results.

[00:13:26] Harini: That's exactly it, and I'll give you a real example, right? We went back and did the work you just talked about, Andrew, to say, where is our churn coming from? Or contractions coming from, or delayed renewals coming from? And a big driver was onboarding, a big driver was customers up and running on our solution, right?

[00:13:44] Harini: And what we discovered was, we were often going later on in the life cycle, and doing rescue missions for them, and impacting our P&L, and customers dissatisfied. And so, the one quick fix we did was just to move that investment upfront to the life cycle. If onboarding is a big problem, let's devote resource to it, get customers up and going, measure them on time to value, the teams on time to value, and that is immediately making a difference in consumption, in usage, in customer engagement with us. And teams love it because they saw a problem, we fixed it, they now see the upside.

[00:14:22] Andrew Michael: Yep, and then it's really clear as well, like how this works, and the next time a problem's identified and inputs as well, then it becomes easy to get everyone motivated behind things as well, and, then you start to get the team actually looking for these, and discovering themselves, and magic.

[00:14:36] Harini: Absolutely, and I'll say as you do more of this, then the challenge becomes how do you do it that scale and efficiently, right? So, now we're doing onboarding with people, but could I, how much more could I make it into product and service? How could I scale with partners, right? Then it allows you to be more creative in how you drive that flight.

[00:14:54] Andrew Michael: Yeah, interesting. So, accountability, having clear metrics and data. How did you set up the teams themselves as functions? You mentioned you had individual teams working in different silos. You wanted to bring them together. What is customer experience made up of today?

[00:15:12] Harini: Yes, the customer experience today is made up of this onboarding team that we've newly introduced, customer success, professional services and technical support and our renewals team. And they, by themselves, they are a collection of big, competent, talented individual teams, and I love that. That's a great foundation to start with, and my role is to say, How could you be one team? How could we force multiply your impact? How do you interlock? And that is the maturity curve, right? How do we evolve to say, one plus one equals five, not just two, or one and one doing separate things? So, next here as an example, we will have joint targets among teams.

[00:15:57] Harini: So, as an example, our customer success team, and our renewals team will be focused on similar sets of customers, and will share NRR, GRR goals. And that means that they will have more incentive to continue to work together, and converge their conversations with customers. Similarly, our PS teams and onboarding teams share the same goals because often your onboarding team hands or PS comes in and we notice that, you know, there is some interlock that needs to be smoothened out.

[00:16:28] Harini: Let's make it less frictionless, more frictionless, less friction-free. And so, they have the same goals and incentives, and to me, touching the stone on goals and incentives, and committing to it, is often the first step for a leadership team, to do better work together.

[00:16:47] Andrew Michael: Yeah, very nice. And I think it's also in the case of churn and retention, there are a lot of these metrics, where they do bleed over into different areas of the company and the product, and it's not really one single function that has a big influence on it. So, being able to pair teams up, and be able to like, have a false multiply then in a single direction, can be very, very powerful from that perspective. And, nice, so, you're setting these teams up then, working together. You mentioned previously it's around 3000 people, like how big is the CE function in context of this then? Roughly what percentage of the company are you making up today?

[00:17:24] Harini: It's approximately 10% of the company.

[00:17:27] Andrew Michael: Okay, so it's a very, very big end. You mentioned as well then, like a lot of it, is human led at the moment, and working with customers. You're starting to look at different areas of automation. What are some of the first areas that you're thinking about where this can be done?

[00:17:42] Harini: That I love this. I've spent a lot of my past year thinking about how we could go faster, smarter with some of the innovation at hand, right? And I think we are just scratching the surface of what, of course, if you were in my role, Andrew, and you have a lot of these conversations, not one conversation goes without gen AI being mentioned, right? And I think, I'm very excited by the possibility and the potential of what we could do with this innovation.

[00:18:12] Harini: Having been at Microsoft in the past, and I'm always thrilled to see the innovation coming from them, as incorporated into enterprise solutions we're already using. They make it easy for teams like ours to consume that innovation. So, and I think we're scratching the surface, when I think about the potential of AI transforming our customer experience, there are multiple levels of maturity.

[00:18:37] Harini: The base use case is just efficiencies internally. So, my support teams, I'll give you an example. My technical support is where I started. My technical support teams run an NPS survey today, right? Like many other teams. When that survey comes back, we had an individual, multiple individuals look through sentiment analysis.

[00:19:00] Harini: Guess how we do it now. We use AI Builder. We use AI Builder, which is a low-code, no-code solution to do sentiment analysis for us, that has multiple advantages. One, it helps our resources do more higher value work and shift left. Second, it reduces the time to get analysis done, it's real time, which means we take action faster for our customers.

[00:19:27] Harini: And that's just the starting point, we're looking at every workflow to see how we could leverage AI, leverage ML, right? AI and ML, to do things differently, and to have better outcomes. The second maturity level is customer facing. When I go work with a customer, EBCs, roadmap reviews, how can I leverage what exists today in terms of productivity technology or coding technology and coding innovation to do demos faster, to reduce solution delivery time for my PS teams, that's a second level of maturity and my PS teams are already on it. The third level of maturity is how do we transform our products, right? When you think about the work, and evolution, and identity around DeepFix, the phishing that happens today, how do we get ahead of it? What are the biometric solutions required as an example to make sure that we are validating identity right?

[00:20:23] Andrew Michael:  I think that's a whole new challenge on its own as well. And I think a big concern, at least I have as well of the way the world's evolving and the trust factor. So I can definitely see it being a big pivotal play for in trust as well as a whole from that front. But yeah, I think like the generative AI definitely hearing like, and speaking to a lot of people as well, it's being brought into CS now in a lot of different and unique ways. I think the probably the most interesting at this stage, and like valid and has high output is the just general, like how do you automate some of the team's functions? And I think a lot of teams now as well, perhaps like somebody's maybe a little bit technical in CS. Now you've all of a sudden almost got an engineer working for you within CS function. You can actually produce things like I myself as well for the first time decided like just to build an app end to end. And I was just blown away by how good and easy it became. I was technical a little bit before, so I had a bit of baseline knowledge, but really at this point, like it's up to the team's imagination then to decide, okay, how can we improve our processes and from that side.

[00:21:25] Andrew Michael: And then as you said, like from the customer facing role, I think there's a lot of opportunity there, but there's just so many low hanging fruits from a team operational perspective that you can improve efficiencies to deliver results. And yeah, I'm excited to see, like over the next few months and hear stories of what's happening in different companies, because I'm pretty sure. There's going to be a lot of interesting things and a lot of like talk around customer success, the old way versus the new way. And I'm keen to see what this new way is that everybody's talking about, because it's one of those functions that things never really been clearly defined. It's the one of the newer functions and it's still evolving. So I think definitely this is going to be a big shift in what's actually possible and how it functions. What are your thoughts on it? Like, where do you see it going?

[00:22:11] Harini: I love where it's going. I'm kicking it, you know, I'm dragging it to the next place, right? And I think that's the mindset you have to bring to a new function, like a new product. Like what are the different stages of evolution and how do you embrace the change? We drive change for our customers. We need to be able to live with the change our roles have. Right. So. I see us evolving and I've been doing this for a while, Andrew, right? When we incubated the role at Microsoft, we were still thinking through. What would good look like when you do this? Right. It was more fuzzy. It was more of a sales support function at that. And over the years, especially with the growth of the consumption economy, we've truly matured into a growth driver. So going from an enablement lever to a growth driver is a big curve. Right. And now that we are there, more is being asked of this function as it should be. More is being asked in terms of outcomes, in terms of how you will drive growth, how you will help customer get to their next sort of their next maturity.

[00:23:14] Harini: How can we be shepherds of a customer's journey in a more proactive, predictive, growth-driven way? So, I'm hugely excited for the change. I think you have to be embracing of the change. You have to say, now that I have these tools, now that I have this foundation built, what could I do more for my top line of my business and my customers? And those who will rise up to the challenge will define CS 3.0.

[00:23:43] Andrew Michael: I definitely feel as well like customer success has always suffered from a naming problem. Like the words customer success generally look, it's everybody's job for our customers to be successful. I think it's the same sort of thing that growth suffers from. So like growth teams and it's always like, where do they fit? What do they do? Like it's never really clearly defined. It means a lot of things from different companies, whereas you have these functions of sales or marketing where they don't really have direct, like, connotations towards the customer's outcome versus customer success or growth. And I think that creates this confusion in companies of sort of what is the function of this team, how should they be operating?

[00:24:21] Andrew Michael: And like, I definitely feel like these two functions are, they operate very similar in a lot of different ways, except the one's taking it more from an automation product perspective. And the other one's taking a lot more from the personalization and a human perspective. And I think at some point, perhaps maybe these two functions will merge to some degree because they both work on onboarding, they both work on activation, they both try to focus on retention. They're just coming at it from different viewpoints. And I wonder if at some point these end up merging as a function and hopefully rebranding into something a little bit more internal facing so it's less confusing for the rest of the team.

[00:24:59] Harini: I love where you're going with that. The old way of defining roles. Take even marketing as an example. The old traditional way of marketing was front of funnel. I generate pipe, I generate leads, I do dimension. Now think about that in the concept of a Twilio, it's concept of an AWS, a concept of a Shopify. Marketing is evolved to become an entire life cycle engine and a role. And my CMO as an example, and I have conversations about how do we have a connected systems model? How do we coordinate marketing activities with customer experience activities to make sure we're getting the biggest bang for the buck for our investment. As an example, do webinars X days before a renewal so you can then connect the webinar and the renewal discussion, right? So I see the traditional roles evolving, Andrew, and I will say they have to evolve.

[00:25:59] Harini: Think about an old sales ops function. It's a revenue ops function because revenue just doesn't come from the first sale anymore. Revenue is ongoing. It comes from marketing. It comes from sales. It comes from renewals. How do you connect the dots through all of them? I do think there are some functions that will continue to evolve at a faster pace than others. Sales and marketing to me are two that need deep inspection. Because, it's the old adage, if it's not broken, don't fix it. I see still a lot traditional sales models in play that I do not think fit with our customer, the way a customer buys anymore.

[00:26:41] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And definitely as well, there are functions to the point around in marketing that have big overlap in CS as well. So like, I think customer life cycle marketing is one of those function that's like it sits in marketing, but sometimes in other companies, it's the role and responsibility of CS because they're working on those high touch, sorry, low touch models and automating CS. And then, and inevitably this customer life cycle comes into it. So yeah, I definitely think it's an interesting time now as well as we try to figure out. And especially we're talking a little bit about earlier where there's a big push now to usage based pricing and really like increasing retention and engagement is going to be the key factor in driving revenue and growing the business. So there needs to be sort of like a restructure to figure this all out. And I'm keen to hear how you're thinking about structuring things going forward.

[00:27:31] Harini: I have an SLT that's very embracing of change, but I will say that in speaking with CCOs out there, our roles are new. As a female leader, I always assume I'm going to be underestimated in whatever I do. It's just status quo and then you sort of use that to your advantage. Sponsorship is very important to get this done right. And my CEO and my board have been incredible sponsors of setting this function up for success because they see the long-term pack revenue here. So I'll say that's one key factor that's important.

[00:28:06] Harini: The second piece is we need more change agents across other functions. Often when things are working well the way they are, there's no incentive or limited incentive to change. But we need to see the newer models of sales, the newer models of marketing, the newer models of IT come into play to make this successful. But I truly believe CCOs are your next CEOs because they come in with the capability for range.

[00:28:39] Harini: At any point of the day, I deal 20 issues from ops to strategy to product and anywhere in between. You need to have range. You need to be able to ask questions and not know everything, right? Your classic sort of, as Satya Nadella would say, your classic moving from know it all to learn it all. I'm always asking, help me understand this better. And that's my superpower, that question, help me understand this better. And third, we are there to secure our customers' value, and that never goes out of date. So I think the CCO role is a powerful one. It needs to be set up for success. It needs to have revenue accountability and a seat at the table.

[00:29:26] Andrew Michael: Help me understand this better.

[00:29:27] Harini: Help me understand this better.

[00:29:30] Andrew Michael: I love it. I'm definitely going to be using that as well going forward. Yeah, absolutely. So I see that as well in terms of like the outlook as well. I think in CS and this is actually something we chatted to Dave Sakamoto previously from GitLab when we're talking a little bit about like the ownership of churn and retention and ownership of like a retention metric, and we're discussing at that point, sort of like, why the CS on us because it's a company's function. And his sort of response was like, uh, he maybe agrees with that point, but in actuality, you need somebody to own it, to be able to pull everybody together within an organization, to get everybody aligned and without having ownership, then you don't really have this alignment.

[00:30:15] Andrew Michael: So it's actually the customer success team at GitLab, like to champion retention and to be working closely with product, to be working closely with marketing, to be working closely across different functions to create this streamlined customer experience. And it became like sort of, it made a lot of sense, his positioning and framing of it as well. And essentially, I think like this is sort of what you're highlighting now in terms of the role itself. It really covers so many different aspects and functions you need to be collaborating in and working across the team to be able to deliver that customer experience that your customers are looking for at the end of the day.

[00:30:48] Harini:  Absolutely. I think it's the fine balance about being connective tissue across teams and having that interlock and having a point of view on where you should go. Because sometimes teams that just orchestrate go nowhere. And so you need a point of view. Like we have an ambition of where we want to go from a numbers perspective. And then we work back and say, to get to these numbers, this is the plan. And this is how we all come together to do it.

[00:31:20] Andrew Michael:  Yeah. What is on the cards for this year then, for you and the team, like anything exciting that you're looking forward to?

[00:31:29] Harini: We've got some exciting conversations going on. I think focusing on expanding our identity leadership, our position in the identity leadership space and portfolio, thinking more deeply about identity verification, validation, combating some of those deep fakes we talked about, leveraging biometrics is all going to be key. It's what our customers need. When you talk to governments, when you talk to key institutions, key banks, that is their need. How do I onboard my customer, say, as a bank? In the fastest time possible with the least fraud possible.

[00:32:06] Harini: Fraud is a huge driver for banks' performance. Similarly, governments want to be secure. They want to make sure their citizens are secure. So I think leveraging AI-driven identity and verification in our portfolio is going to be key. From a CNS perspective, it's about building on foundations. We had a great foundational year, and this is about building on it to go faster. For me personally, it's about starting to think more about how I give back, how do I collaborate as part of a larger CCO community? How do I continue to invest and more importantly, guide on the right conversations?

[00:32:46] Andrew Michael:  Amazing. It's going to be a busy year, I think for you and the interest team then as well from that side. So running up on time, then I like, I always ask the guests, you know, the question like what you wish you knew about churn and retention before you started your career, but I've asked you that question already. What I want to ask you today, I can't remember to be honest with you, but I want to ask you today, what's one thing that you've learned new about churn and retention since joining Entrust coming from AWS?

[00:33:19] Harini: The size of the customer doesn't matter. Value is value. I worked with digital native customers, the coin basis of the world. I work now with maybe government customers. They all care about similar outcomes for themselves, value. It's a human first business, right? There are people at the end of the day who are looking to make their projects successful. So while on the surface, they may look like very different profiles. What drives people and what drives value are similar.

[00:33:53] Andrew Michael:  Yep. Absolutely. And ultimately, like, I think it all comes down to this. It all comes down to, are you delivering value? Ultimately, the customer came to you to solve a problem. They were looking for some specific value. There was an exchange of value. And if that's not being met equally or in advantage of the customer, that's when you end up having chain ultimately, like it's really that simple. But just we overcomplicate things as well in our processes and the way we go about treating customers.

[00:34:21] Harini: And I'll tell you the other personal thing for me is taking more risks and the concept of two-way doors. And in larger organizations I've been in before, decision-making lacked velocity at times because of the number of moving parts you had to sort of align. The nice thing about working in a 3000 person org who are the CEO is decision-making is with velocity and you're more capable of taking risks and not waiting for perfect. Good is fine. Move fast with good.

[00:34:54] Andrew Michael: Yeah. And you're saying this in the context of coming from AWS though, previously where that's a whole nother beast as well. And it was originally, I think, Jeff who coined it, the two way door. So, slow down over time.

[00:35:09] Harini: Yeah. No, no, no, no. This is very much what I learned from AWS. I think AWS did, does as well as it does. To be completely clear, Andrew, this is important. I'm a huge AWS fan, huge Microsoft fan. I learned a lot of things from AWS. One of them was the velocity of decision-making and two-way doors. And I think the reason AWS does as well as it does is because of two-way doors. And I love to be able to implement that at Entrust. And I'm able to do that, one, because of its size, but also because of the leadership attitude.

[00:35:41] Andrew Michael: Amazing. Yeah, I definitely like that's one of the coin like they're reading the book as well and hearing it. I love the concept of it because it seems like the service, it was quite simple to understand as well, everybody can sort of do their own math in their head and calculate, okay, like, can we reverse this if we run with it and then it just gives sort of autonomy, to teams, it's amazing. But I think you also need to have the team in place that you have that trust as well with it. So it's sort of like this side of coin. You need to get to the point where you can have the Amazon and you have the team to be able to do it. But when you do have it, you can move extremely fast and it's very, very powerful.

[00:36:16] Harini: Exactly.

[00:36:18] Andrew Michael: It's been an absolute pleasure having you today again, as always. Is there any final thoughts you want to leave the listeners with before we wrap up today? Anything they should be aware of to keep up speed with your work?

[00:36:28] Harini: Go speak with the customer.

[00:36:31] Andrew Michael: That's it. Go speak to the customer.

[00:36:33] Harini: That’s it. Using simple.

[00:36:35] Andrew Michael: Nice. So for the listeners, we'll make sure to leave everything we discussed today in the show notes so you can pick that up there. Harini, I wish you best of luck now going into the new year and as you shoot to hit your targets for the year.

[00:36:48] Harini: And same for you, Andrew. Congratulations on everything you've done so far and I'm so excited to see what lies ahead.

[00:36:54] Andrew Michael:  Thanks, Harini. Cheers.

[00:37:03] Andrew Michael: And that's a wrap for the show today with me, Andrew Michael. I really hope you enjoyed it and you were able to pull out something valuable for your business. To keep up to date with Churn.fm and be notified about new episodes, blog posts and more, subscribe to our mailing list by visiting Churn.fm. Also don't forget to subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you have any feedback, good or bad, I would love to hear from you. And you can provide your blunt, direct feedback by sending it to Andrew at Churn.fm. Lastly, but most importantly, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it and leave a review as it really helps get the word out and grow the community. Thanks again for listening. See you again next week.

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