Pioneering RevOps with Evan Liang, CEO of LeanData

Dan Balcauski speaks with Evan Liang, co-founder and CEO of LeanData. Evan shares his entrepreneurial journey, highlighting his experiences in venture capital and leadership roles at major tech companies before starting LeanData. He discusses the importance of understanding customer pain points in product development and the role of HR in scaling a SaaS business. Evan also explores the challenges of transitioning to a multi-product company, emphasizing strategic alignment and clear communication. The episode concludes with a discussion on evolving sales models, specifically the buying group motion in B2B sales, offering listeners deep insights into efficient scaling and process optimization.

00:57 Evan Liang's Journey to Entrepreneurship
04:51 The Birth and Mission of LeanData
07:00 Navigating Organizational Challenges
15:33 Customer-Centric Product Management
21:20 Scaling with Multi-Product Strategy
23:53 Deciding to Sunset a Product
24:43 Navigating Sales and Multi-Product Selling
29:30 The Concept of Buying Groups in B2B
33:33 Implementing Buying Groups: Steps and Advice

Guest Links
LeanData website
Evan's LinkedIn
The Buying Group Leaders LinkedIn Group
The Buying Groups Resource Center

Transcript

Dan Balcauski: 0:20

Welcome to SaaS Scaling Ssecrets, the podcast that brings you the inside stories from the trailblazers of B2B SAS growth. I'm your host, Dan Balcauski, founder of Product Tranquility. Today. I'm excited to speak with Evan. And Liang the co-founder and CEO of LeanData. Evan held leadership roles at Microsoft. Microsoft eBay and caring.com before leaping in an entrepreneurship. He's also spent time in the venture capital world with stints at Shasta ventures and battery. Murray ventures. Evan is widely recognized as a pioneer in Reverend operations. and emerging

Evan Liang: 0:47

trends like the"Buying Group motion" in B2B sales. Let's dive in!

Dan Balcauski: 0:52

Welcome, Evan, to SaaS Scaling Secrets.

Evan Liang: 0:55

Glad to be here.

Dan Balcauski: 0:57

Evan, I gave folks a little bit of a taste of your Background in the intro, but for folks who maybe are not aware of you and your journey, could you give us a little sense of your experience in this SaaS world and how you got to this point that you're at right now, leading LeanData?

Evan Liang: 1:12

Yeah, I had kind of a unique background, actually. So I actually started my career, actually, on the other side of the table in venture capital at Battery Ventures. So I started off on the investor side of the house before kind of moving on to the operator side of the house. And I was looking at investing in, back then, SaaS companies that were called ASPs. So it's not the latest thing. I was actually investing in both software companies as well as B to C companies and found my way into entrepreneurship actually through turnaround, doing turnarounds during the dot com bust. So basically was asked to come into and save some extra cash. I've recently salvaged some companies, found I was, I enjoyed that part of it. And that's kind of where I found my initial passion for being on the operating side rather than the investing side of the house. And so the rest of your background, you mentioned was actually building skillsets, learning how to work at a bigger company, tech companies like Microsoft, like eBay, etc. And especially in the product management side of the house and then For me it ultimately came down to finding the customer pain point that I was passionate about. And that led me to starting

Dan Balcauski: 2:22

LeanData. Very fascinating. I'm sure there was plenty of opportunities for turnarounds in the smoking wreckage, that was the The oh one oh two.com bust I remember fondly as I graduated in computer engineering, right into that into that burning wreckage. Hey, worked out. Worked out, but for any of you out in the tech hunting job world right now, I know it could feel tough but you know, this two will pass, if there's

Evan Liang: 2:46

great. I definitely agree with that sentiment.

Dan Balcauski: 2:50

Well, look, we all have those transformational moments. Maybe it was graduating into a moment where you didn't think maybe the market would be exactly where you're at. I think of them as like a superhero transformation moment where, I'm high school student Peter Parker. I get bit by a radioactive spider. I go to sleep the next day. I wake up, I'm Spider Man. What was that for you in your journey?

Evan Liang: 3:12

Yeah, so for me there's kind of, there's the two, there's obviously the more trite one is the aha moment when you decide to start a company and you have the idea, right? But I won't cover that. I think the other one, because of what you were talking about in 0102, it was really realizing that where you wanted to be an operator and you want to take on the hard challenges of being an entrepreneur. Because I do think the entrepreneur journey is very ups and downs. And so for me, the aha moment was, Where I was watching like people, like when we were doing these turnarounds and other people were just freaking out. It was like so much hard work. And the person I was working with was like, I just don't want to deal with this. And I was like, no, this is a, it's hard, right? Ah, we were dealing with tough times. We're talking about people's jobs here and stuff like that. But I felt like I was pretty calm about it. And I was like, look, I just do with one step at a time. We're going to solve one problem. It's kind of like the Martian, and it was like, you don't got to figure out how to get off the planet, It's got a. Figure out the next problem to solve. And as you solve one problem at a time, you start making progress. And I found a lot of joy in doing that. And that also gave me a lot of comfort that I could solve some of these harder problems. And be kind of be crazy enough to start my own company and be okay with the OA crisis, the SBB crisis, whatever you hit me at. People would be like, Hey, it's really hard, Evan. How do you deal with that? I'm just like, I'm fine with it. This is what I signed up for. This was the journey. Right? And this is kind of what I get updated data to try to figure out.

Dan Balcauski: 4:34

So proving competence and building that confidence over time as you sort of solve those problems. And we won't delve into all of those crises, lest this turn into a therapy session. Cause we, we both might end up on the couch at one point, if it goes too far in that direction. We definitely have lived in interesting times. Well, I want to talk a little bit about LeanData, but to set the context for your audience, could you give everyone just a kind of 30 second elevator pitch on what LeanData is?

Evan Liang: 5:00

Yeah, absolutely. So LeanData really, our mission was really to try to make sales and marketing teams more efficient by solving data and process challenges. So that was kind of what we set out originally to do. What we're best known for is a process called matching and routing. And so that's really taking the hand off when marketing creates a lead or some sort of tool. Marketing Signal, whatever that may be buyer intent these days. How do you make sure that gets into the right sales person's hands so that you can run the right sales plan? So LeanData orchestrates or manages that handoff process and the workflows in order to make your your go to market process really smooth. Whether that be a speed to lead, whether that be account based marketing or lately whether that be this new motion called buying groups. So that's Where LeanData sits within your tech stack and your process.

Dan Balcauski: 5:46

Interesting. So, Edwin, I'd love to touch on some of those distinctions and different go to market models that you mentioned earlier, like ABM and buying group. Cause it's definitely an area where I have interest in. And I think like many others, some of these things maybe fly over my head sometimes. So I think you're a great person to talk about that. In terms of LeanData then Is it tools? Because it's in the go to market, when you think about that, is it, is your primary user on the sales side or the marketing side, or are they all in there together?

Evan Liang: 6:14

Yeah, we kind of sit in between, actually. So, we, we were kind of helping pioneer the concept of RevOps. So those are the folks who really are our champions and who use us day to day. We do impact both marketing and sales, and oftentimes they'll be the buyer. But when we work well things should just be extremely smooth for both the marketing team can be ensured that all their leads are being followed up with, and the sales team should just be getting the right information, whatever it leads, contacts, and accounts. So, while those are our End users, and that's how we impact them, we try to make their lives as easy as possible. But the people who actually administer and configure us is either Sales Ops, Mark Ops, or Reb Ops.

Dan Balcauski: 6:48

Got it. Well, and I'm sure we'll see if we can get to it, but I think there's probably some interesting lessons you've learned there and needing to be a leader in a business. I think he could bring his own go to market challenges as well. So, besides helping go to market leaders, you've probably had to sell plenty of your own challenges well, look, Evan, I tragically missed out in the introduction, we are both Kellogg MBAs which so very excited to highlight another very seasoned, successful Kellogg leader on this program. Look, if you had two, Let's add a SaaS CEO Scaling 101 course to the Kellogg program. What would be the most important topic you'd include? What was missing in your education that you found to be most critical as you've really taken on this role of scaling a SaaS company?

Evan Liang: 7:32

Yeah, so I would say from the Kellogg perspective I think and it's slowly changed, probably. I mean, I've been out of Kellogg for close to 20 years now. And so I would definitely say originally when I was at Kellogg, it was very much focused on, like, the traditional, like, how do you, like, do a search fund? Find an existing business. And I think that type of business is very different from scaling perspective, like a venture backed company. And so I, I would hope at Kellogg that they have started moving that thing around, understanding what it takes to scale venture companies. And I would say the key challenge I would as a, maybe people focus a lot on the fundraising part and I think Kellogg did have like a venture capital I think that the transitions in organizational behavior, that's just a topic I've always been fascinated about business school is that how it takes to manage a company from zero to 30 people is really different as you scale to hundreds, right? And talking about like, It's not the same model, right? There's this whole, this talk on the Twitter these days about like founder mode versus like, bureaucrat mode. And I think that would be a fascinating topic in my mind and saying, it's not one versus the other. It's just that you have to play at different modes or different organizational structures. Those changes as you scale a company. And so to me, I think that understanding that there isn't one right way all the time and having people understand that the job and the functions and the organizational design changes over time would be kind of interesting in my mind.

Dan Balcauski: 8:52

Well, it is such a pressing point. And I mean, it's kind of the, we were talking before that we started hitting record, but this is kind of the reason for this podcast. Cause I feel like this is these, those insights aren't really covered in any curriculum. But I think, when you look at an MBA curriculum in general, it's most of them imply some steady state. Of a business, right? It's like, we've got the marketing function, the accounting function, the finance function, the marketing function. And, I remember, and I had the best experience, but I also remember you'd have a lot of folks who were, had worked as brand managers at CPG companies and they, we were taking marketing strategy and they were talking about, oh yeah, every year we do our annual planning for what our marketing is going to be. And look, it's not to say that. B to B SaaS CEOs don't have a annual planning cycle, but I think the amount of rigor that they put in, because look, if you're managing Cheerios at General Mills, like how much change do you really expect in the cereal market next? I mean, maybe you're going to introduce a new SKU, maybe you have some slightly different, distribution or, whatever new campaign, but it's going to be relatively steady state versus as you mentioned, as a SaaS CEO scaling a company. It almost feels, it could feel like you're running an entirely different business. Year to year, if not quarter to quarter, sometimes. What, if you think back at that scaling journey for you has, was there really like a particular challenge that sticks out to you as you're, that was difficult to overcome, maybe a crucible moment that sort of sticks out in your mind that really has forged you into the company you've come today?

Evan Liang: 10:30

Yeah, absolutely. I definitely think like as you get to like 100 employees or more, maybe 150, I think at that point in time you start, it becomes a little bit more of a systems thing than it is an individual. People aren't going to, I think my leadership style is a little bit, show, showing leading by example, right? If you will, and that doesn't quite work as well at a certain point in time and scale. And I think understanding things like HR and how important that function is to be like, oh, that's a, that's the back office thing to being, no, that could be one of the most strategic things that you do. And so fortunately for me finding that right HR partner someone I turned in actually from a chief of staff into my HR partner was really critical. And I'd say the key point in time for us was during COVID and trying to figure out how to navigate that and how to come back from that in person collaboration has been really big for us and what were the policies we need to put in place. So I think we do hybrid pretty well, and we've never had back to office mandates and those types of, and all of that only happened because I had a true partner, someone I could collaborate with, and we can make great decisions around. And to me I didn't think of HR when we were smaller that way. I was like, ah, they just take care of like onboarding stuff. And afterwards I was like, no, HR. And the most important thing for me was the most important quality wasn't their experience prior. What wasn't what they'd done prior. It's trust. Does that make sense? I need to have an HR partner that absolutely sympathetically trusts me. And that was the most important quality that that I found in in this our director of people operations she hadn't done it beforehand, but we just see eye to eye on things so that we could react faster, we could bounce ideas off of it, and then we could develop policies before the big companies did. Everyone's like, well, why don't you wait until Amazon, Google, or Facebook figure out their their back to office. I was like, whoa, that's going to take too long. I And I think they're doing a horrible job about it, so we actually came up with things earlier while it advances them, and that's done us well, so I think that allowed us to navigate it and have that kind of like lead the way a little bit on the hybrid culture that we have today that has served us well.

Dan Balcauski: 12:30

Yeah, well, I know navigating, no one expected that massive psychological experiment we're all subject to, and I can imagine leading a scaling, leading and trying to scale a company during that time was particularly challenging. I think what's interesting about that example is, What it ties directly into what we were just talking about, which is you were having to realize the need for an entirely other new department which I think is, or a new, senior leadership, like that didn't even exist in the company. I guess kind of looking at that experience, like, What signals did you look for where it was like, cause it sounded like this person was, you think you'd mentioned they were chief of staff and so you're kind of putting them in a new role, but like, what was sort of telling you like, Hey, there's a, there's an HR shaped hole in my organization that I need to fill ASAP. Cause I imagine, right? Like. You're a smart guy, right? Like be like, Oh there's a billion other problems. How do you, how did you know, like that became a pressing sort of issue? And is there any advice you would sort of be able to relay at folks? Is there, as a sort of looking of like, Hey, like, am I big enough to bring in a chief customer officer or chief operating officer at sort of my scale? Right. I think the scaling SaaS CEOs solve this, you see this kind of challenge all the time. So like, what did you sort of learn during that experience?

Evan Liang: 13:43

Yeah, I mean, obviously, I think being a CEO of a scaling SaaS company is always about, like, putting out fires. And one of the things I noticed is, so we did have HR beforehand but they were very, like, legalese. You know what I'm saying? They tell you legally what you're supposed to do but not the business, and that created a lot of friction points with my other executives, where, if you are making a re org, something big strategically, The legal part of it is like 10%. 90 percent is how do you communicate it? How do you plan it? How do you do like all the other things to make sure it goes out smoothly, right? Who needs to know when? How do you because it's sensitive information, but at the same time, they need to be able to do their functions because of the impacts though. And so what I started noticing was that like we were managing HR from a legal perspective, like legally was, but we weren't making it strategic, right? Because people are so key in and also the aspects of technology. Culture and that type of thing. And interesting, like, as kind of we scale the company, my job as CEO and co founder has shifted. It went from like, hey, trying to like talk to customers, try to figure out product market fit to very much managing the team and culture. And so like. That's the reason I started noticing our Chief of Staff, she wasn't originally looking to be to be HR, but I was like, you're actually really good at this, and guess what, as my Chief of Staff, we spent 80 percent of our time talking about the people internally, how do we motivate them, how do we work with them, and doing all the hard things that are around it, and I was like, I actually think you have a good empathy and you have a good sense of this. And so, I actually approached her and was like, Hey, do you want this role? And so that, that was kind of the transition. And like I said, it's one of the things that made my life a lot easier and it became a street function where we could try to drive towards how to help the culture. How do we drive things? And I'm always thinking about things from a perspective of like, Hey not what legally we're supposed to just do, right? But how does this drive like business outcome, business benefits, and all that other stuff?

Dan Balcauski: 15:33

Well, this is an interesting segue into kind of next topic, because I believe you have a background in, in product management as well. And so I fall from that that same tree and I have a love for all my product leaders out there much love. But I heard you talk in I believe it was another podcast about hire, bringing on your first chief product officer and giving them an interesting initial assignment when you brought them on board. Could you elaborate a little bit more about that?

Evan Liang: 16:00

Yeah, absolutely. So, brought in a product manager fairly early on. And the first key thing I really had was customer support and customer success reported into him. And he didn't initially want the job. And, but I was like, look, We're trying to figure things out. I need you to be as close to the customers as possible. And for example from the background he came actually from some bigger B to C companies like Zynga and stuff like that. Or and he was like, Oh no, we need to automate this and build for scale. And then quickly, when you deal with the customers, you're like, Oh, wait a second. That's not exactly where my key pain points are. It kind of drove the product roadmap. And so there was that strong alignment and some of our biggest innovations. So, Dan, how did you come up with this? when we first came from him having to work with customer success, he was trying to solve, like, how do I make this a little bit easier for our customers? And that wasn't exactly on the product roadmap, but it ended up becoming some of our best features. So, for example, something like at LeanData we have something called Audit Logs, which allows you to understand why something went where it went in these workflows. And that was developed on the back end to solve people's questions because they're like, why did this happen instead of that? Yeah. That's our second most used feature, at least that because people want to be able to self service and do that. So, so that's an example of like a back end feature that no one really thinks about. But if you have that tight alignment between your customer needs and your product roadmap they will naturally kind of solve those problems. Now, they are separate today. At a point of scale, when we talk about organizational design, there's just not enough hours in the day and they need their specific focus areas. But in early days, I think if you want to be a customer centric company which a lot of product managers believe in, Don't have them too separated away from the customer problems.

Dan Balcauski: 17:33

I love that. Well, that's definitely one of the challenges, you talked about like making sure that the product folks have their, Finger on the pulse of, the customer's, current kind of pain points and what they're trying to achieve. And I absolutely love that idea of sticking them in the weeds of customer support for a while to sort of trial by fire, really learn where all the, or where all the road bumps or roadblocks are. But as. A company scales like that is, unfortunately, right. It's like when you're 10 people in a room, like everyone's talked to a customer that day. Everyone, is like, in your shot of each other can overhear what's going on. But as companies scale, like, it just gets drowned out. Right. For better or worse, people tend to start migrate. Actually, I would say for worse, tend to start migrating to what does the dashboard tell me is actually going on with my customers. Are there ways that you've thought about approaching making sure that kind of customer pain points stay kind of central to the company and don't get sort of lost in just another data point as you've grown?

Evan Liang: 18:32

Yeah. So one area that we've invested a lot in is kind of customer marketing and customer advocacy. So, very early on, we noticed that our best customers were what we call viral so that they actually buy us multiple times. So, so because we deliver a great experience, they'll go to another company, they'll take us with them. And so we've had people use us, I don't know, five, six, seven times these days at various companies. And so this is a great. Great source of leads. It's probably the best source of leads. It's not the most scalable because you're counting on people changing jobs. But at the same time, it's that virality is really important. And so to kind of fan those flames, there are things that we have done, like we have a LeanData Certification Program that's very popular, that we kind of encourage. And what we see when customers do become certified on LeanData they're much more sticky, they're bigger advocates, We drive a lot of customer reviews. We do a lot of dinners. I personally love speaking to customers whenever I can. I'm happy also for the customer support. I also take the hardest calls. The customer is really unhappy about something. I'm happy to jump on that call. And similarly, try to make sure that we're doing right by them. Can't save every customer, but at the same time, knowing that, hey, your opinions and we're listening and we're hearing, we're trying to, And those all matter. So, we also started a big conference called Opstars. That's a dreamforce that brings a lot of customers. So as many customer touch points as you can possibly have. And many of those customers that I had dinner with like six, seven years ago. I'm still in touch with them. They've moved jobs and stuff like that, but you still have that little bit of reference and that little bit of familiarity that's really important. And similarly, we do use them a lot for roadmap and stuff like that. So, I think it's you can design programs to make sure that people don't just become siloed and lose touch of, Who is it that we're really servicing? Like a great example at Opstars, by the way, is we kind of tell our, we have our go to market team go through this and sometimes we ask them to do jobs like co check, hallway greeter, and stuff like that. And they're just that's beneath me. But I'm like, no, you get to have a touch, customer touch point with lots of folks. And they end up, a lot of times they do enjoy it because they end up recognizing names. Oh, yeah, we've chatted a whole bunch. And if they see that love that comes from the customer, that just fires people up so much more. So it's not about what you're specifically doing to them, just get a chance to actually, as much as possible have face to face connections with your with your customers. And if you build your product right and it's delivering value it is really like magic.

Dan Balcauski: 20:54

I think, I think a big thing there was, No one has walled themselves off from customers right, you've welcome being directly at the firing line even at the senior most levels at which I think it's super important, otherwise, it could get too easy to you know get just look at a Wall of dashboards and maybe tell yourself a story you want to hear versus what's actually going on in the customer's mind. Well, and kind of staying on the topic of product, leadership and scaling and company. I know you guys are now a multi product company. Can you talk to me a little bit about, what was behind that decision and as you've gone into multi product, I think this is an area where definitely companies get stuck, right? They see their sort of maybe. tapped out on sort of, what they can achieve revenue growth wise. And so now it's like, okay, we build a second product. Do we go acquire a second product? And I've seen a lot of those, second, third products really sort of gum up the works. How did you really think about that from an organizational perspective to, to make sure that, like, one plus one equaled three and not one plus one equaled like 0. 7.

Evan Liang: 22:04

Yeah, actually it's funny we actually went Multi product fairly early on, but it didn't work and we actually had to end the life of product And then we did it a second time and it is working And so I think like some of the key things there is really around So originally, our technology allowed, had two major use cases. One was the matching routing that we're really known for. And another, it was being able to use because it could put together groups and understand the buyer's journey it was using for marketing attribution. And so that was initially where two products actually came out. What ended up happening, why it didn't work, was it was Different value propositions in different ICPs. One was really sold to like the marketing heads, right? Or the analytics team. The other was more sort of off. So it actually made sales cycles much longer. And I actually, I remember early on I had, I forced us to bundle them. So I was like, no, we got to get our ASP higher. So you have to sell both products into all the accounts. It did get ASP hires, but it also lengthened the deal cycle by two or three times. And so, so that's it. Oh, great. Well, you got to go involve a bunch of other people who aren't in this conversation, right? And that's not necessarily the best thing. Now, over time, what ended up happening with one product was growing clearly leaps and bounds ahead of the other. And the customer love there was so much higher, the virality. The other one, some people really actually liked it. Yeah, I'm still still swear by it, but it just seemed like it didn't have the same characteristics. It didn't have the same LTV, the same level of stickiness, and I actually don't know the product word, but I don't know if we were really trying to solve the end goal, which is really like, which is the holy grail of like, What should marketing spend more money on? I think any marketer will understand why. That's a, that's an elusive goal. The product produces the data, but it's a little bit of the story telling. So in any case, we did end up deciding to end the life of it because it was consuming 50 percent of the resources, it was about 10 percent of the of the overall revenue. And it was growing slower with a higher churn profile. So that would be a case of something not working. The newer product that we've added was in the calendaring space. So we added a product called BookIt that allows scheduling. And the reason that has been such a nice one plus one equals three is as the technologies evolve, moving meetings is just the same as moving leads or contacts or accounts. So it's just, it just naturally fit into our sweet spot of what we were good at. And as people got more sophisticated around their go to market, we were able to. Getting the right meaning onto the right person's calendar was just the same thing we were already doing. And so those kind of spaces merged in some respects. So yeah, we became a multi product company, but in some respects, it's so close that it's almost the exact same space. Now changing the sales reps, having to teach them how to sell multi products has been something that we have been going through. But it's been a nice change to see that they can tell that joint story. They're not just stuck on their other thing. And so most of our deals now land with them. Both. And that's a sign that it's working and it goes faster and people understand that. It's kind of the same ICP versus previously it was end of like some reps knew how to sell one, some reps knew how to sell the other. There were just things that were early signs that it wasn't necessarily working that well.

Dan Balcauski: 25:17

Yeah. And it's such a tempting place for companies to end up because you're like, Oh, well, the marketing, talks to the sales operations team. Right. They're right next to them talking, but you know, then you go to market and you're like, wait, this is, we've now split our, we've got too little wood behind too many arrows and it's just really difficult to make that transition, um, you decided to actually kill the product. And it's an interesting scenario because it's one, like sunsetting a product is one of these things that is not on the bucket list of every product leader, but it's one of these things that you don't get to do very often, so it's one of these things where you're like, you get asked to do it, you're really, your end goal is to make everyone the least mad at you as possible. Walk me through that decision. And I guess, were there any sort of takeaways, if you could like, there's a junior PM here where you're like, if you ever have to send a product, like make sure you do X, Y, Z, like any words of wisdom that you'd be able to share from that experience.

Evan Liang: 26:20

Yeah. So I think the biggest thing about it is opportunity cost. So the resources that we were devoting to that product actually allowed us to develop the new product bookend. So we wouldn't have been able to launch the new Bokeh product if we hadn't done that. So if you take a step back, that's absolutely the right decision from a product management perspective. That being said, what we did do is we tried to be as customer friendly as possible. So we gave them a long heads up, we explained it to them. Now, a lot of the customers did have both products. So, So it was not like if you did this wrong, you could be risking the main business, right? So we had to do it very casually. We gave people plenty of heads up. We gave them our rationale for what we were doing at it. And I'll be honest, for a lot of customers, we're just like, Hey, look, we're not going to We're not going to build new features on here. That makes sense. So there's no new features coming on here, but we'll let you use this for another year, two years, etc. Until this until this deadline. And actually the trick is we actually did let some very few customers continue to use it on the notion that It's just code that's not getting updated. As I said, so, so, so, so we let them slowly migrate off and let them choose how to do it. Internally the one thing we did do is assign a line extensive. So I did take that AR of that business. And I told my board, I was like, that AR is just gone off our books. No, we're not counting it. No thing is so like, if some churn hits on that business, no one gets penalized. We're not trying to retain it. But also if you sell it. Which we don't want anyone to do because that was the biggest cost you don't get any credit for. So there's no incentive for anyone to keep that business. What ended up happening was then the our account manager saw a great opportunity to take that budget and reallocate it to our other if you will so they were like, oh, this is free money I know this company has this budget now that they're not using how do I go get more of that into my other existing business? So a couple of methodologies that I plan and the team worked well together But time frame giving the customers more time allowing that and, but but still getting the majority of your 80 percent of your resources was at the sales, marketing, product, R& D teams shifted over allowed us to make it fairly smooth. I don't think we lost a single customer who was just really mad at us for how we acted and threw us out of the other part of the business.

Dan Balcauski: 28:30

Well, well, congrats. That's a, it's a hell of a tight rope to walk. So I heard a couple of good things there, which is clear communication to the customers with a good amount of time for them to transition effectively good communication to the board and then aligning incentives. I think that's the aligning incentives thing is so huge. And, I spent all my time in the pricing world and, you missed that. Upfront, right? If they're transitioning perpetual to subscription, right? And it's like, well, perpetual they get to, this big, chunk of the lifetime value right up front versus subscription. And the company's trying to sell both, right? Like, Oh, why didn't sales guys sell on our fancy new subscription product? Right. And similarly, if you've got a, you try to go from subscription to a pay as you go model. Right. And it's like, Oh, well, the sales folks are happy because they're getting paid their full bonus on, you go. Expected usage on a pay as you go, but like, but those customers never actually grow. Like, and so, the managing those incentives is huge. Not saying it's the only thing that matters, but it's often forgotten. So, worth double clicking on. As we kind of were talking about earlier, I, one of the interesting areas, like you're playing in this whole world of go to market broadly With LeanData And so, One of the things we mentioned earlier was this evolution of this new concept of a buying group. Why is this becoming increasingly important in B to B? How is this different from maybe what people have thought of as like account based marketing?

Evan Liang: 29:57

yeah, exactly. So I think it's the realization that there's a lot of change going on the go to market and some of the old metrics like MQLs have not been working. Just the companies were not just not delivering the efficiencies that we expected, the metrics aren't working, sales and marketing alignment isn't happening. And so the notion of buying groups is just going from, Hey, marketing is just delivering leads to account based marketing is, Hey, we're doing target accounts. So what actually the sellers and the best sellers have always been doing this is they understand that within a company, there's a select group of people, a buying committee that actually makes the purchase decision. And the buying committee has been getting bigger, especially with the harder economic times. It used to be like, in the boom times, maybe one person can make a business decision for a small level of business. Now it's like 9, 10, 11 people. Your CFO is always involved. You've got procurement. So there's this notion that multiple people are involved, and the best sales reps understand that and naturally do that. So this is not a notion that's changing sales, really. It's the fact that instead of delivering just this random person, or just like, hey, there's someone that the company's looking at you, it's to actually deliver multiple people who are showing interest in your product area. Add a specific company that is a buying committee. Now Salesforce your CRM was originally set up this way. There's something called contact with role. So it's that, that was orig so originally set up this way. But it required the salesperson to do everything. They had to find a lead, convert it to a contact, and add it with the contact role. Guess what? No salesperson's ever doing that. Like, no one, maybe one person. But, no, no one was actually doing that. The changes, the technology has evolved to allow that, and then the need on the go to market teams has evolved to say that you have to have this level of fidelity. And so those combination of the two is leading a lot of, especially larger enterprises, to understand that They have to work at the buying committee level. This is especially true as the biggest companies, because if you think of someone like huge let me think, they're like, I don't know, like the SIEM or stuff like that. They don't, it's not about account base, where they're trying to penetrate into new accounts. They've sold to everyone. Everyone's a customer. It's about how many other SKUs and how many multi products in your share of wallet within there, right? Or even your renewal. So that's a big change where our account base is really great for, like, early stage company, venture backed company, penetrating into new accounts, right? But what if that customer is already one of your customers? What you need is expansion. Selling them multiple products, etc. Those are buying committees. That's not account base. Does that

Dan Balcauski: 32:23

Interesting. Interesting. Well, well, and I feel like, this is a place where maybe a picture's worth a thousand words. Cause in my head, as you're talking and maybe you could I'll help kind of describe what the picture I'm seeing, and you can tell me where maybe it's wrong is, if we just imagine right, the big circle is it accounts and inside there, maybe I've got a Venn diagram of overlapping other smaller circles that are all these buying committee groups. And so, yeah, like I. Account based marketing only really looks at the big circle. And maybe, I mean, maybe it pays some attention to, okay, yeah there's somebody in there who makes a purchase decision versus is just an influencer. Maybe there's some sort of, role configuration, but understanding that like, okay, there's, for a, if we're trying to sell, whatever, a piece of marketing software versus a piece of sales software, like those are both in the, This is usually structured like the words SEO, Rendering, Marketing, Sales, Appliances, Proch pesticiding and those are what they do a is that they maturity into more and more Look at this. Everything in there is great. So this is an example of what banking and banking services might look like but

Evan Liang: 33:24

yep. I think you're absolutely right. It's like lead is too small, account is too big, buying groups is just the middle, the right side, the Goldilocks.

Dan Balcauski: 33:31

All right. Goldilocks view of that. Got it. And so, so I guess for maybe folks who are, have been in either a traditional lead centric world or an ABM world Like how did, how they measure success when using a buying group model change? Like I, you threw out a bomb there before in the, MQLs are, don't work. And I'm sure we you're sure you get a lot of agreement from listeners on their experience with MQLs. But I guess, as you kind of transition to this model let me take a step back. One thing I've heard about problems of companies trying to implement ABM, maybe going from a traditional lead centric model is like internal KPIs don't even support that transition, right? So as people are starting to think about buying groups, is there another transition they need to go through organizationally or KPIs to make this successful?

Evan Liang: 34:23

Yeah, so I do think it is a digital transformation, just to be clear. It's not something just flip on a switch. So it is a transformation, but I encourage people not to necessarily just cut over on day one, it's to run both sets of metrics keep your traditional lead metrics or account based metrics and add these buy groups ultimately is measured on success of pipeline. So it is one that aligns pretty well with sales but you're not looking for, you may not be looking for, Hey, number of leads. Where I think one of my customers called the second lead syndrome. So if all you are saying is you get a single lead, you may ignore the second lead, right? Because you're not getting paid for it on the same company. And that could be a really important person. And so, so I think buying groups is just taking it more at the opportunity level. And you're going to be measuring pipeline. You're going to be measuring ASP. You're going to have a close rate. These are, These would be the some of the metrics, but they're not like radically new metrics. But it ultimately is about pipeline and increasing your chances to close and not spending time on things that don't make a lot of sense. But most of the companies I know are trying to run both metrics in parallel for a while before making that transition. Yeah,

Dan Balcauski: 35:32

so don't pull the plug on day one and do a hard cut over cause you're there's a pitfall doing that. There's some dragons waiting in late for you. So, so if folks are sort of interested in trying to start. They said, Oh, Evan, that all sounds great. Buying groups sound interesting. Sounds like maybe we're not hitting the mark or the current go to market. Like, besides like not doing a hard code over on day one and folks are just like trying to figure out how to start, like, how do you recommend folks even start sort of figuring out what this thing is and how to sort of bring it into the organization?

Evan Liang: 36:02

so I think the analyst group that's been really pushing this the longest and they've published a whole bunch of articles out there would be Forrester. So I'll give them credit. They've been on this. By the way, they invented the MQL. This is the old serious decisions, folks. So they've realized that the model has shifted. And so they've been publishing a lot of information out there. I would approach this. Our analysts like Terry Flatterty, Amy Hawthorne, and Vicki Brown have really been pushing this initiative. And so there's a lot of materials that they're putting out there. LeanData ourselves are also aggregating a lot of information. We've Put together some some guide books around it. Some authoritative guide to buying books. And we're just trying to publish out the thought leadership. Certainly you can follow me on LinkedIn. I'm just Evan Liang is just the short handle for me on LinkedIn. On LinkedIn and we are publishing, we have like communities around it. So we're trying to gather the thought leaders in and around buying groups to really espouse why it's working. And we do have a case studies about successful companies like Siemens, Palo Alto Networks, et cetera, that have moved to this motion.

Dan Balcauski: 36:57

Awesome. Well, I will definitely put those links in the show notes for listeners so they can make sure to follow up on that. Evan. I could talk to you all day but I do want to be respectful of you and the audience's time. I'd like to wrap it up with a couple of rapid fire questions. You ready?

Evan Liang: 37:10

Sure thing, go for it.

Dan Balcauski: 37:11

Well, I'm going to wave the magic wand. We take your responsibilities all away. You have one year to go study any subject you want in depth. All your other responsibilities are taken care of. Lead data continues on its growth path. Your family's fine, but you could dedicate all your time to just immersing yourself in one area of study. What do you study? Why?

Evan Liang: 37:33

Yeah, so I think the area well, actually, two answers. One academic interest area, I've always loved econ. So, to me, what's happening with, like, economics and all that stuff is something that I'm really fascinated about. So that would be one, so I'll cheat. Secondary, just like if I was to geek out on just free time, it'd probably be like World War II history. So I am a World War II geek. I like to read about history and some of those stuff, the things, so those probably would, maybe I'll double major. So those two.

Dan Balcauski: 38:00

Double major is acceptable. And yeah, the history seems to be a big topic on that question. So, look, when you think about all the spectacular people you've had a chance to work with, learn from, is there anyone who just pops to mind, has had a disproportionate effect on the way you think about building and leading companies now?

Evan Liang: 38:17

Yeah, so I was very fortunate that some of the early folks that I worked with really early in my career at Battery Ventures are still with us and have been backing me and those two people. So, two so Ravi Mohan was my initial boss at Battery Ventures. He ended up backing me through Shasta Ventures in my early venture. So, definitely has been a mentor throughout my career and I owe him a lot. And then there was a second person there who's still on our board, David Hartwig, who's at Sapphire Ventures. And both of them have been instrumental to me throughout my career, but also as friends along the whole entire way.

Dan Balcauski: 38:44

Well, if you think about maybe pick one Roshi or David and like, is anything sort of stick out in terms of the best piece of advice that either one of those has ever given you?

Evan Liang: 38:54

Oh, interesting. I don't know if it's like one specific thing that they've said but I would say that they've one of the things I really value is just really being candid and strong transparency and so I think for for Rovi for sure, he's not afraid to call it as it is and so, but I think the good thing is he'll give me the advice and he'll let me learn my own mistakes, but he'll remind me. And he was like, I told you that five years ago. Like, I was like, okay, I just need to learn my own lessons. But I appreciate you giving me the room to figure that

Dan Balcauski: 39:24

Yeah. Yeah. Well, well, and keeping it real with the the venture capital learning cycles of five years, like, see how I told you I have five years for now? Like, but you know, that's how their investments work. So, yeah. Look being a leader of a scaling SaaS company could be taxing in multiple ways. Are there ways that you keep you yourself on the top of your game intellectually, emotionally, physically?

Evan Liang: 39:45

Yeah, I mean, one of the things I think, this is a marathon, not a sprint. Especially as you look at like exit outcomes for SaaS companies have really really elongated. We all thought, to build something in scale. So I think the main thing is, yeah, you have to, Keep keep yourself healthy and stuff like that. And so for me, it's just sleep. So I make sure I get a solid eight hours and I always have throughout the entire way. And so that, that balance is really important is that you're never trying to burn yourself out because I mean, the hardest thing is if you burn out, then there's no hope really for how do you keep everyone else's spirits up in the company.

Dan Balcauski: 40:18

Was there a point that changed for you where did you used to be a believer and like, Oh, I could just grind it out and, get four hours and just kind of, perpetual or was there a Matt Walker moment where you're like, Oh yeah, this is it.

Evan Liang: 40:30

Not really. I think actually it has been fairly consistent throughout. So I would say, actually, a lot of the work stuff and maybe the family stuff, I mean, there's certainly times when my kids were young, I wasn't quite getting that. But as my kids have gotten older, I think that is something that I have prioritized. It's important from a well functioning perspective. So, never really tried to take too much like caffeine or stuff. So I actually don't drink coffee. So, getting so, getting to sleep in the morning is enough for me. So,

Dan Balcauski: 40:58

Oh man, well, I'll have to learn your secret some other point about the coffee. I've got a too much of an addiction. Well, look, if I gave you a billboard and you could put any advice on there for other B to B SaaS CEOs trying to scale their companies, what would it say?

Evan Liang: 41:12

I think what should I say, it's a marathon, not a sprint. So I think think long and, try not to have there are a lot of ups and downs, but try to smoothen it out in some respects for both yourself and your employees.

Dan Balcauski: 41:23

I'd love that. So marathon, not a sprit you already mentioned a couple of different links. Any other ways that folks want to learn more about LeanData or follow you around the internet, anywhere we should send them?

Evan Liang: 41:33

No, I think primarily that we're we're kind of using LinkedIn a lot more. I mean, obviously, you can go to leandata. com and our website, and we have a lot of great information there as well.

Dan Balcauski: 41:41

Awesome. Well, we'll put those links in the show notes for our listeners. Everyone that wraps up this episode of SaaS Scaling Secrets. Thank you to Evan for sharing his journey insights and valuable tips for our listeners, if you found this conversation as enlightening as I did, remember subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes.