TRANSCRIPT:

Brian: Welcome everyone to Friday 15 with Master B2B. We’re going to be talking about software buying tips and tricks from an insider – Gireesh “The Silencer” Sahukar. Gireesh has is a living example of someone who’s been on both sides of the fence. He’s a now a Master B2B executive adviser. Welcome to the team there, Gireesh. You were a VP of implementation and customer services at commercetools, a leading e-commerce platform. Prior to that, VP of digital at Dawn Foods. You’re a  ambassador, I guess, emeritus, right? The Mach Alliance. You worked at Keurig and Dr. Pepper. Gireesh, welcome. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey. 

Gireesh: Andy, Brian great great great to be here again. Great to be back with the Master B2B cohort. Looking forward to having a lot of great conversations with the master B2B folks. As you mentioned I’m one of the newly minted Nexus advisors  just starting out on a new journey here. 

Andy: So we wanted to bring you on Gireesh because you’ve had a lot of different experiences. You’ve been on the vendor side, you’ve been on the SI side, you’ve been in the e-commerce space, the search space, been a practitioner in multiple companies, and you have a technical background. So, we thought this is like a really good opportunity, especially since you’re now one of our executive advisers, to pick your brain about what are the mistakes that you see companies make and what are the opportunities that they miss when they’re buying software. And so, we want to go through a couple of slides with you and sort of tell you what we think people do wrong and then get your thoughts on what they should be doing, right? 

Brian: Yeah, there’s so much confusion around this now, Gireesh, because you’ve had all this composable stuff come out. AI is is further confusing and as a business leader in particular and you’ve crossed you cross business and IT so magnificently that I we think that you can really contribute. So let’s go through some of those to Andy’s point let’s go through some of those points. Well here’s the first one Andy you want to set us up and then let’s ask you. 

Andy: Yeah. And I found this to be the case myself that companies when they’re evaluating software vendors, they get stuck on the product and they think the product is the entire company and it really isn’t. So I always say don’t settle for a long list of features and functions. the excuse that management churn is normal in tech. That’s one we hear a lot. Yeah. Why is the CEO no longer here? Well, it’s just management churn. Or how come the entire product team was let go? Oh, it’s management churn. and then of course recently the statement that we are committed to AI. , what exactly does that mean? Right? It’s like when a plane crashes and they say, “Well, safety is the number one priority.” Well, apparently it wasn’t right before the plane went down. So anyway, that’s sort of what we see on our end, but want to talk to a little bit about what you think companies should be doing instead or in addition to those things. 

Gireesh: Andy, you said don’t look at features and functions. I think that’s a day one requirement right when when you’re launching a new platform with a new platform  you need to know what they have but beyond that once what they have what’s next with a lot of almost every software nowadays being a cloud delivered software you need to understand the SLAs. You need to understand what’s their availability is like and when they go down what is their recovery time recovery path what’s that outage mean to you and your own front end  is is your site down? If a third party provider is down, those kind of things that you need to understand and you need to have a contingency plan. You need to have a business continuity plan for those things. And , those are day two activities. Those are week two, month two kind of activities that most practitioners don’t really pay attention to when buying software. You need to have a plan and it’s better to have that plan early than have to endure a AWS outage like last week or an Azure outage. I think that was yesterday. So these are if an AWS goes out what is your what is your plan to be up and running? Those are key questions. 

Andy: It actually also stresses the point that you need to have an assessment of the ecosystem these people operate in because as you pointed out when it was software that you installed behind a firewall that was one thing but now that there’s a dependency on cloud compute providers other companies that are building your online experience your mobile experience your AEO GEO experience you need to know not just who the software company is but also who the partners they have and right what partners do they still need right and these things are not secret right every every SASS business has to tell you through their DPA data processing agreement who are the providers they use and for what purpose so you will know contractually who you’re dealing with and who else they’re they’re using. So another big one that you’ve talked about when we’ve chatted about this is this idea of understanding the financial performance of the company right  it seems like whenever companies report their financial performance to potential co companies customers they say things like oh here’s our total company revenue and here’s how many years we’ve been in business and here are what I call the macro metrics which is  here are here’s how we deal with all of our customers. And you’ve contended that that can hide a lot of things, right? It can hide business business unit performance. You only care about comparable customers, right? If you’re an enterprise company, do you really care that these guys are serving  a mom and pop shop in their basement really well? Yeah. So, what do people need to ask here? 

Gireesh: So, think about a large software company, right? We talked about some of the other providers that released their earnings this week. But when you unpack that  if you’re buying services from only one small business unit inside of their gigantic corporation, you need to understand how that small business unit you’re actually doing business with. What is their track record of performance? what is their trailing 12-month  performance and their next 12-month projected revenues, right? They are more than happy to tell you in any kind of RFI RFP process under NDA. They’re willing to share these things. Public companies generally give those in their annual statements. So they’re public. You can look them up. so do that diligence, do that research, right? If 2 plus two should add up to four, sometimes it doesn’t and that’s when you raise the flag. And then you also want to think about not just the customers that they won also some of the customers that they’ve lost and see if you can talk to them and understand why did they say no to a provider you may be saying yes to  – what were their criteria.  When I was at Dawn, we actually did this and asked a bunch of other B2B companies why they chose the software they chose versus the ones that we were looking at. And many of them gave us really candid and good honest advice about what we should be looking at and thinking about when we were going to pick the software we’re picking and how we should be operating on that. 

Brian:  I was going to say one of the things that I’ve always found valuable is finding references in companies that the software provider didn’t give us right when I was a practitioner. So  who else is using them that they’re not they don’t want to maybe don’t want us to talk to, right? So, there’s a little bit of that.

Gireesh: When you just ask your prospective vendor for references, they’re going to give you their best customers, right? So you have to go find the customers that are  using but they’re not extremely happy with or customers that are unhappy and have left and have churned. so you have to dig through and find out who’s in that sort of average or unhappy or exited buckets and try to figure out if you can and if your if your network is big enough to go find them and you can reach out to a lot of people on LinkedIn nowadays. it. , LinkedIn has made it easy and you can go get that kind of advice. 

Andy: So since we talked about references, which actually I think that’s great. Let’s talk about the last area here for today, which is the road map. This is one of my favorites because whenever I talk to companies and they brief me, you wouldn’t believe some of the crap I hear about road maps. And so  I just sort of throw these in there and I know you and I talked about this like don’t settle for what they tell you is on the road map or what they’re excited about. I don’t care what you’re excited about. What are you actually going to deliver? And then  don’t settle for what customers are asking for. That’s the other thing I often hear. It’s like oh well this is our roadmap. Customers are asking for this. None of this matters right unless they can actually demonstrate that they’ve delivered. So what’s your advice for them on that? 

Gireesh: When you go to these briefings  you get  the road map, the future forward of future looking road map and the past deliveries, the the past year delivery is an inch deep, but the road map for a quarter from now is a mile long, right? So, you you have to ask yourself, okay, you delivered an inch, how are you going to deliver a mile one quarter later? What have you done in that intervening period to be able to make that enormous leap? Sometimes that is true. They’ve added a whole lot of engineering teams and staff and capacity. That is possible. But more often than not that is not true, right? The engineering capacity almost incrementally goes up. It doesn’t go triple quadruple in one quarter. That is rare unless you’re dealing with a startup that went from seed to series A or series B. But in general what they delivered a quarter ago, two quarters ago is going to be the amount of features and capabilities they will deliver in the quarter coming up or in the quarter after. Right. So anything beyond an inch deep is probably not realistic. So you have to evaluate that and be realistic. 

Andy: Yeah. past this prologue, right? I mean, what they’ve delivered in the past. And I often say too, Your road map is not a wish list. It’s a development plan. And so, I’ve seen people just load up on all the things they want to do with no real plan to deliver. And to your point with no track record of actually having delivered any of that stuff. And so, I know I won’t name names, but I’ve talked to companies in the last several years where the road map is almost exactly the same as it was the year before. And honestly pretty much the year before that. Wow. One more thing and I’m like wait a minute this is the same road map. So either you guys do a terrible job of road mapping or you can’t deliver anything. 

Gireesh: Yeah. When I was selecting and implementing software what I would do is I would take screenshots of the road map they shared and I would go back to those as I’m talking a year later and said here’s what you promised a year ago. Here’s the road map that you’re presenting today. Right. and , we’re if we’re buyers, we we have to take some accountability in that, right? And say  this is what I promised. This is what I planned and this is what you’re now promising. So, your promises are matching up or not matching up. You have two pictures side by side and you can do that yourself. Right? This is one time where that  you hear the statement on all of the financial services past performance is not guarantee of future returns. In this case  past performance is a guarantee of future returns.