 From the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube, covering Koopa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Koopa. Welcome to the Cube, Lisa Martin on the ground at Koopa Inspire 19 from the Vegas. I'm very pleased to welcome not Bono, not Sting, it's Chandar. The CMO of Koopa Chandar, welcome to the Cube. Lisa, thank you, it's great to be here today. This is a really cool event, it's, procurement is sexy. It can be so incredibly transformative to any organization. I loved how the last two days, what you guys have done is a great job of articulating Koopa's value in procurement, invoicing, payments, expense through the voices of your customers. And I think there's no better brand value that you can get. Absolutely. Tell us a little bit about your role as the CMO of Koopa and marketing in a fast growing company with a product that people might go, I haven't heard about. What is that again? Yeah, it's a good question. I think, you know, if I look at it, my role is at Koopa, especially for Koopa, what's interesting about it, as you said, is that every company makes money, every company spends money. So invariably, Koopa can be used across a set of different companies, one from the Golden State Warriors to, you know, Procter & Gambo, to the Lukumi and Lymphoma Society, across the board. And then from our perspective, you know, the holistically, we're looking at business spend management, different aspects of spend. You said procurement, invoicing, expenses. So my role is to build that marketing engine to get the flywheel effect, the first you drive awareness, all marketing starts with awareness and you said people haven't heard of it. And it's the first to drive awareness in a very thoughtful way to the right contextual community we want to go after. And to drive acquisition, we drive close synergies between sales and marketing to ultimately drive pipeline and win rates and ultimately deals. And then very importantly in today's world is to drive the advocacy. Yes. And get your most passionate customers to evangelize about the brand so that you create the flywheel effect of awareness, acquisition and advocacy. And that's really what my role today is. And I love how I read an article where you call that the stairway to marketing heaven. So I thought, I wonder if you're a guitar guy. But you're right, it's have to drive awareness. But in a meaningful, thoughtful way, especially today with all the technology, we wake up with it, right? It's our phone is our alarm clock. Sure. We are bombarded by ads if we're on Instagram, you know, following our favorite celebrities or whatnot. We and it's scary when they have kind of the right context, but it has to be thoughtful. We need to know our audience. Totally. So you describe this stairway to marketing heaven as you just mentioned, it's awareness, it's acquisition, which is key. But I feel like a lot of companies, don't forget the advocacy part, but they don't invest enough in it. That's a great point. Because that's the best sales person for your technology is the people that are using it successfully, right? Totally. Totally. Yes. So in fact, you know, there's a study about a couple of years ago which looked at how balanced the vote is in terms of spend in pre-sale versus post-sale. And it's interesting that 87% of B2B marketing spend was pre-sale. In other words, only 13% of people was investing in retention marketing, adoption marketing, you know, customer marketing, and you know, this whole advocacy marketing, right? And in today's world, that doesn't work because you've got to balance the vote because to your point, you're getting in a pure bond work where your existing customers are your best sellers and the more, and prospects who have all the buying power today are looking to your existing customers to guide them in their purchasing decisions. So as an organization, if you balance the vote, then you're going to get the flywheel effect going for you in terms of driving the right advocacy across all channels, just not your own channels, your own channels to ultimately drive that acquisition going. Do you think that's actually more valuable? Because it's one thing to have on your .com site, your social media sites, all these great things about your technologies, et cetera, coming from customers or from product experts, from influencers. Talk about the value as technology advances so much and we are influenced by so many other channels. The value of the earned channel and that peer-to-peer relationship. Yeah, I think, as I say, that every mom says her baby is good looking. But in software, not every baby is really good looking. Which means, if you take that analogy and extend it, if you're coming to your own channel, invariably you're going to see some great customer videos about your product. You're going to see some great endorsements and testimonies. You're going to see some great quotes about your product. In reality, there's no bad news about your product on your own website, on your own channel. But the reality is, there are some people who might have different opinions. If you go to Glassdoor, no company gets a 5.0 on Glassdoor. If you take the same thing and extend it to earned channels for advocacy, folks like G2 Crowd, Trustradius and B2B, for example, are becoming more relevant today than before. Because two things. One is 87% or 85% of a customer's journey is self-directed. That much. That much and a forester has anywhere from 60 to 80. But reality is, whether you're buying a car or if you're buying Cooper, today a customer is self-discovering more journeys. And in that process, they're looking to move these earned channels as validation of which ones to go after than just your own channels. So that's why we've got to balance the boat and distribute our advocacy spend dollars across both your own channels and your earned channels. And that's really important for you. And the flyby will pay off for you over time from that perspective. It will. And that sort of seems like a lot of the things that Suzy Irwin was talking about to the audience earlier, that's common sense is, why is it that you see these marketing budgets that are so heavily weighted towards just getting awareness, getting them customers acquired and then not thinking about retention marketing and account-based marketing? I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. I think any smart CMO will conceptually agree with you. Nobody is going to say, of course it's not important for me to get advocacy. The challenge comes in terms of how that marketing department is measured. What gets measured gets funded at the end of the day. That's a good point. And reality is, a lot of these B2B companies are still measuring marketing based on what's the pipeline you're driving and what's the top of the funnel metrics that you're driving. In reality, that's a little bit of a skewed thing because then if that's what you're being measured at the board level, at the executive level, then guess what? All your funding is going to go towards that. But really the true measurement of marketing is about one is about, yes, you have to get pipeline. You have to influence win rates in the bottom of the funnel and that's where product marketing comes in. But as importantly, you have to look at the number of brand advocates you create and lifetime value of a customer. Yes, CLB. CLB. And it's really, really, customer lifetime value is so important because in a SaaS business, ultimately, the Mufasa metric, you know, I'm a Lion King fan, the Mufasa metric is really lifetime value because if a customer stays longer with you, pays you more and is shouting from the rooftop, then invariably that SaaS business is doing well. And that's why you have to balance the board in terms of post-advocacies, post-acquisition spending to advocacy as much as you've done in pre-acquisites. When you came into Koopa a couple of years ago, have you been able to shift those budgets because you're able to demonstrate the value that that advocacy piece generates? Absolutely, absolutely. And I have a progressive, very progressive thinking CEO who partners with me on this too. So we've been absolutely able to do that. In fact, what we're trying to do at the end of the day and most software companies, you know, the real goal should be creating a tribe, right? In technology, you know, you have to create a tribe to be a Titan and it's just not about the capability, it's about the community. And that's really what we're trying to do at Koopa is to create the tribal community feeling. So this community is bigger than the brand. It is about the community itself, learning, sharing, and growing with each other and being successful and we're just fostering that. So from that perspective, if you look at this conference and the investment we're making here, some of the programs we're doing in terms of advocacy, what we call spend setters, et cetera, is all about that community tribal feeling and go establish that, right? So I, you know, to use some, you know, inspiration from our consumer brands, right? If you really think about it, people don't buy what they want. People buy what they want to be. So let me give you what I mean by that, right? What I want could be a bike, could be any motorbike, but what I want to be could be part of a very special community and that's why Harley Davidson is successful, right? What I want could be any, you know, stationary bike today, but what I want to be is part of some cool community, modern community like Peloton. That's why Peloton is successful. So similarly for us, what I want could be some spend management software, but what I want to be is part of this community, this cool club, and that's the feeling you're trying to create in the post-acquisition cycle. You know, I love that you said that because you talked about that this morning and I loved how you, you had the word community on the slide and then broke that out into communication unity. Yeah. And one of the senses that I got yesterday when Rob was talking about it. Yeah, when Rob kicked off everything is, this is a very collaborative community. We think about that in terms of, you know, like a developer community or something like that, but where Koopa is now managing $1.2 trillion to spend through the platform that every other business that's using Koopa gets to benefit from its customer-centric, its supplier-centric, but it's about applying the right technologies, AI, machine learning to all this data so everybody benefits. That's right. And one of the, you know, the interesting aspects of community building is one aspect of community building is, you know, the Mark Pennyhoff at a great, you know, evangelistic marketing was a way of community building. He would come and, you know, really evangelize and this is where we're going and you all need to come with us. When I was at Marquero, it was interesting community building was through more educational marketing and doing it through this kind of, you know, I'm going to educate you to thought leaders share. Another good way of community building is through product intelligence, which is community intelligence. So collectively, the sum of all parts are smarter than the parts themselves. Yes. Right? And Rob has a great line which says none of us is as smart as all of us. And the fundamental community intelligence offering is based on this first principle. So example that if I'm in the community of Cooper customers, the next customer is smarter than the previous customer because the collective intelligence grew, which means I can then go benchmark it myself like I give an example this morning of USO, the company that provides services to the United States troops. And when Rick Quaintan's at the USO benchmark himself using community intelligence, which is the rest of the community, he realizes that his invoice cycle times are seven times lower. So that kind of intelligence is extremely beneficial and invaluable to companies. So that's the value of the community is providing the collective intelligence. Like Waze is a great consumer example, right? Like those of us who use Waze for traffic know that it's all community driven and each one of us is smarter because we're collectively using it. It's the same concept in applying that to B2B software. So as we see you mentioned the over 80% of the buying decision is self-directed, whether we're buying a car or Coupa software. Did Coupa kind of foresee that in the last decade to see we're going to have to go to a more community driven collaboration because the consumer of anything, any product or service is going to be so empowered, we need to, because that's part of the Coupa foundation, which we don't see a lot. It's companies that are 10 plus years old. Yeah, it's right and I credit to Rob for his vision for this is because I think early part of the company he wrote it in the contracts that the company can benefit. Collectively every company can benefit by being part of this community. And the fact is that it is aggregated, abstracted, there's no information that is sensitive, etc. But the fact is we all can collectively benefit because there's a great vision of Rob and the early people and that's benefited us because the benefit is really over scale and time. Now we have $1.2 trillion. That's significant in each different industry to get that intelligence. And that is one of the other reasons we launched our business spend index. It's called spendindex.com where we can use the billions of dollars spent in the community to provide a leading indicator of economic growth based on current business spend center. You kind of think of ADP as this payroll, it's called ADP payroll thing that comes out and GDP on the gross domestic product report comes out. Those tend to be rear view mirror lagging indicators of intelligence to provide a windshield, a leading indicator of where the economy is going. So there's so many different use cases benefiting based on spend you're doing as well as where the economy is going and all this is based on the intelligence. It's so powerful because to your point it's not, you're not looking behind, you're actually exactly able to be looking forward. So with all the announcements and the great things that have come out with the AWS expansion, what you guys are doing with KUPA Pay, what are the advantages of businesses that are still writing paper checks or the fact that a lot of companies have 10 plus banks that they're working with. There's still so much manual processes. You must just be, the future is so bright, going to work shades with KUPA but what excites you about what you guys have announced the last couple of days and the feedback that you're hearing from your tribe? I think there's two kinds of things, right? One is continue to set the innovation agenda for the industry because really you have to look at every customer on their unique journey of maturity and maturation so we have a very thoughtful what we call maturity index, the business management index, whereas you're saying some of these customers, for example, you mentioned maybe in the first stage of this maturity where for them it's just getting automation going from paperless to going from paper to paperless could be the first step but as some of the customers might say that I've gotten there but I want to get to the next level of sophistication to orchestrate these businessman processes. What's exciting for us in the feedback is we're creating product capability across this maturation journey for our customers to make them successful at each of those places and KUPA is one example of that and whereas some of the other pieces we talked about, we announced about some of the community offerings that we did also is on that so that's one exciting piece the other exciting piece that customers tell us at this conference is foster platforms for us to engage with each other, learn from each other, share from each other and grow with each other so even stuff that Rob talked about which is sourced together this concept of customers coming together to drive a sourcing process and again the collective intelligence of the community that we're getting very very positive feedback from our perspective and ultimately Rob is really good saying that it is not about customer satisfaction it is about customer success it's a delineation there a customer could be very satisfied with you but it may not be necessarily success and we say it's not about satisfaction it's about success and by creating this innovation cycle and then having a post implementation process that's driving true value that's really how we drive customer success and something that I've heard over and over as I've talked to a number of your customers yesterday and today is how much they're feeling KUPA is listening their feedback is being incorporated they're actually influencing the development of the technology that was loud and clear the last two days yeah I think there is Rob talked about the number of features that have been influenced by the community 300 plus in the last 12 months 300 plus in the last 12 months this is concept of two years one mouth and listen, learn and innovate and that's kind of the philosophy here but it's a right mix of listening to customers learning from them and getting the right input from them for driving innovation as well as having strategic vision as the market is going and having the right mix of those to provide the capability to customers wow you're on a rocket ship Chendar it was great to have you on the cube you'll have to come back? yes Lisa absolutely I'll come back awesome thank you so much for Chendar I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube from KUPA Inspire 19 thanks for watching