Sam Jacobs

So I wanna make sure I hit the bit so that my friend Guy Rubin can speak.

So what do you do differently in this modern world?

And none of this should be rocket science, but I wanna underscore a couple of things that you can do to align your business around profitable, efficient growth.

What we know is that, again, nothing revelatory here, retention drives all valuation for recurring revenue businesses, right?

And that sounds obvious, and yet, if we go into a boardroom, most of the time, historically, we've been talking about

the sales funnel all the way up to the point of sale.

We've been talking about new business acquisition, new logo acquisition as the primary driver of enterprise value.

But when we do the analysis, we understand that actual enterprise value from recurring revenue businesses is not exclusively, but primarily driven through retention.

Again, that's not surprising, but it is surprising that we talk more about the pre-sale funnel in most board meetings and most revenue meetings than we talk about the entirety of the customer journey.

And so one of the things that we need to do is we need to build up a go-to-market organization that is focused on talking about the entirety of the customer journey, that builds algorithmic customer health scores that lead to retention so that we can understand exactly the behaviors that are going to correlate to retention because retention is the thing that ultimately drives value.

So...

We are focused.

We were in a world where we got $25 million.

We spent it in a lot of different directions.

We lacked prioritization at the same time that we hit this tech contraction.

And there's a big compression on learning and development budgets.

And that's why you've seen some flatness in 2023.

But now we're growing again.

And how are we growing?

We're growing slower than we were growing from 2020 through 2023.