Sam Jacobs

So what are the things that underpin this bow tie?

The first thing is a common set of data, a common set of data and governance around who controls the data.

One of the things that the bow tie gives rise to

is the rise of revenue operations as a critical department within the go-to-market organization.

And that's because you don't want the sales team and the marketing team and the CS team to all have different data sets.

There needs to be one set of data, and you need to have that data that aligns customer intervention, customer activity, effectively a customer health score, but that clearly correlates it to renewal and to customer delight.

And that's perhaps obvious, and that's why there's been the rise of platforms like Catalyst and Tatango,

But it still hasn't been done.

It's still true that most of the time we're going to look at new business.

We're going to default back to what's happening on the new business side.

And we're not going to be looking as closely or as rigorously around what's happening on the retention side.

And again, what's the point that I'm making?

The point is, this was OK if we only looked at this half in a world of growth at any cost.

because the only thing that mattered was growth.

So we could throw as much money as we could at growth.

That would drive valuation.

We'd get 40 times ARR or some crazy multiple.

And it wouldn't really matter what retention looked like or what our ongoing customer activity looked like.

It was still true that we talked about best-in-class companies like Snowflake with 180% net revenue retention.

But the fundamental fact was that we weren't instrumenting.