Soumya Murthy

Hi, everyone.

My name is Soumya Murthy.

I was the chief customer officer of Seven Lakes Technologies.

It was acquired last year by W Energy Software.

And I'm going to be talking to you about reducing burn rate of human beings.

So it's going to be a completely different conversation than you've been involved in up until now.

And very quickly, as a chief customer officer, I was primarily responsible for numbers.

And over time, basically, I was brought in to do marketing and ended up owning sales as well.

And in a $7 million ARR company, you need someone who's also helping groom the team and the leadership.

So over the next 20 minutes, I'm going to talk to you about three big market pivot points and mark the people pivot points along the way.

The first one, this was a very solid services company when I came on board.

How did we pivot from services to SaaS and get that product market fit?

There are three pieces there around a really big, this was an oil and gas AI-based software company, so we got hit with a market downturn right when we were going to product.

What did we do around focus that really helped reduce that burn rate?

And also, we took that functional lens off and started to put a more psychological and organic talent lens.

I'm going to talk to you a bit about what that did.

And started to identify in-house talent of everyone from office managers to engineers on how we went to market around marketing.

then the next pivot point came around when we started to grow and ran into product implementation challenges and we needed to use again that psychological lens to know what talent gap do we have not necessarily functional solve the problem and then use two other really important piece of grooming internal leaders and also taking folks who are naturally more oriented towards variety

and not try to force them in some hierarchical ladder, right?

So how did we do talent management to do that growth to 7 million?