 Hi, this is Hosebli Bhartiya and welcome to TFI Newsroom and today we have with us once again Puneet Gupta, CEO and founder of Emberflow. Puneet, it's great to have you on the show. Great to be back, Swapnam. Good to see you again. And today we are going to talk about, you know, your Salesforce app. But before we talk about the news announcement, we have covered this topic before. We have also covered, of course, Emberflow on a regular basis, but it's always a great idea to remind our viewers what is Emberflow all about. So talk about the company. What Emberflow does is we enable businesses to charge, track and build on usage. And this is a pretty wide macro trend that is unfolding where more and more businesses are selling their products and service on a usage-based business model. You know, we can go back, probably we can attribute mostly this back to AWS when they pioneered the concept of consumption usage-based pricing. And so that is taking hold, and, you know, that's a topic in and itself, you know, why that is becoming mainstream now, why more and more companies are going in this in that direction, just to maybe call out a couple of macro vectors that are driving that shift towards usage-based pricing. You know, as more workloads and applications are built in the cloud, cloud-native, folks have to just take a step back and realize that, you know, cloud-by-nature is elastic, right? So cloud, no matter on which cloud you're on, the leading providers, whatever, but cloud-by-definition is elastic. And if you're back-end resource pool is elastic, then you will find sort of in the fullness of time how you then sell your products and services that are layered on that elastic cloud infrastructure also needs to be elastic, aka usage-based. So that is really the underlying current where I think more and more companies are finding that that is the right model, that they can align what they charge their customers and what they pay downstream back to the cloud provider in a better way on a usage-based business model. There are other vectors, too. You know, AI, ML, generative, AI, large learning models, chat GBT, these new phenomenas. Anytime you're going to do anything with these new set of new technologies, inevitably you're going to lean towards a usage-based model. So we provide what we call the cloud metering and usage-based pricing and billing platform for businesses to build modern flexible usage-based pricing models. How does this product-led growth, you know, pricing model that you talked about ties into the rise of customer success because in the end that's what matters for companies. Absolutely. You know, this PLG, product-led growth, I think is also now sort of a mainstream narrative. And I think, again, more and more companies are discovering that they need to have some semblance or some part of a PLG motion, as we call it, product-led growth motion, as part of their go-to-market or product delivery strategy. So let's just put the impact on what it is because it is a little bit of a white surface area. You can kind of land on different stages of the PLG or different parts of the PLG. But bottom line, I don't know what it is. We're saying that customers want to land on the product, not on the salesperson, so to speak, you know. And what that really means is, increasingly, you know, Swapnil, if you look back, just maybe in the five, ten years, everybody has talked about what cloud computing has done. It's kind of democratized the building of software and applications. A couple of guys in a garage can really build the next Facebook because they have, you know, just as much infrastructure at their disposal. There's literally a limitation of ideas and how you sort of build an execution, but the frameworks are available, okay? So what has happened is, we've seen just in the last, you know, five, ten years, a plethora of new companies, any category will have multiple vendors now giving you offering and solutions, right? Just because it's easy now to get started and for folks to put their stuff out there. So now you look at it on the other side, if I'm a consumer, if I'm a buyer, I have a little bit of a challenge to kind of sift through these different options, whereas, you know, five, ten years ago, maybe there was just one or two leading providers in any one category, today there's several, right? So how do I, as the consumer, as the buyer, how do I quickly sift through and arrive at my, at least some semblance of a shortlist, priority list? And that is why the PLG motion is really taking hold because I'm not going to go and connect with ten different salespeople, set up a call, you know, have a four-week, six-week, eight-week engagement cycle, then get provisioned for a POC and then kind of go through all of that. Just don't have the time nor the cycles and other resources. So that's why PLG is taking on because companies are realizing people want to come in and at least try to test things out, either as a free trial or a free tier. They can kind of kick the tires, kind of get in a sandbox and see if this meets basic requirements. So that's why driving the PLG motion, right? And the moment you do that, you know, it does have a ripple effect in how then your sales engages with your customers, right? So that motion is going to get impacted in the world of PLG. And that has a cascading ripple effect, not just to sales, and then how do you come back and service the customers? So that's kind of the overall landscape on how we see things are changing. Excellent. Thank you. And that lets do my next question, which is also the Elephant in the Room, which is the new app that you folks are launching, which is Emberforce Sales Force app. Talk a bit about this app, and then of course we'll talk about the benefit. It brings not only to the sales force customers, but customers in general. This is our Sales Force application, Emberforce Sales Force application. And what it is, is for the motion that we just described. So if you are a company that is either or, either leading with usage-based pricing and have a PLG motion, or have a PLG motion and you're backing that up with usage-based pricing. As we were just discussing, so what tools will your sales team need to be effective in engaging with customers? So first thing, we should just sort of clarify PLG and having a sales team are not mutually exclusive. There's some confusion about this, that PLG motion does not require sales force. That is absolutely incorrect. If anything, I've seen places where PLG motion would require you to double down on sales teams. So, but the engagement model, like I was saying earlier, how do the sales team engage? When do they engage? And what do they engage with? With the prospect and customer, that has fundamentally changed in the PLG model. So what we are providing is Emberflow application for Sales Force. We are giving sales teams those insights and input stream into what the customer or the prospect is actually doing in the product at any given stage, real time, so they can proactively reach out to the customer at the right stage and have a meaningful conversation about their experience in the product and if they wish to continue, or if the sales team can bring in some help. This is different from the non-PLG motion, where you could argue that things are almost sort of reactive. The first part is just a standard template. Hey, what are you interested? What is your budget? You know, when are you ready? We have this process. We'll bring you in. We'll provision you manually. We'll do a four week six week POC. Then we'll cut it off. That's the old model. This model, the customer lands, they already started using your product. You as the sales team in the background need to have that real time visibility as we like to call it, what is being used by whom? When, what, where, how much? So our app for Salesforce gives sales teams that visibility in real time. We call it metering usage metrics. And through this application, we are able to bring this knowledge, bring these insights directly to sales team because they live in Salesforce. That is their tool. That is the investment that they've made. That is their ecosystem. So our app brings that information to the sales folks within that tool. And now they can have a meaningful conversation at any time when they decide to engage with the prospect. They will need to ask the prospect, hey, how was your experience? Our app tells the sales people what the experience is and they can pick up the conversation from there. The way I look at it is that it's kind of empowering and giving more resources to both, not only sales teams, but also customers. So it's like win-win for both teams as well. 100%. Yeah. I mean, that's, you know, so the customers get their own visibility through metering. They will know how much they have consumed if they're still in the free tier when the limits of the free tier are arriving. So the customers have that visibility through usage metering. And then on the back end, the sales team have that visibility on what has been used. And then when they meet and talk, it's a meaningful conversation. And, you know, sales teams can then drive it forward based on the value that their product is providing. And who is the target audience for this specific app? So primarily two-folds. First is the sales team. So within the sales organization. So if you look at it, let's actually unpack, as I said earlier, the motion is changing, right? In the PLG world contrast that with the older model or the earlier model of traditional sales as we talked about, you know, engagement and then, you know, POC and all of that. You know, there was this distinct handoff between sales to support, right? So the deal was that, you know, pre-sales and post-sales is a common narrative. Everybody understands that, right? Pre-sales is like we just said, sales engages, gets the customer to sign on the dotted line. The moment that signature is done, then the customer is handed over to support. In the PLG world, the concept of customer success is overlapping. So if you think about it, you know, in a PLG world, the user, the customer has discretion on how and how much they consume your product over the course of the interaction, right? So sales team cannot really ever detach. It's in their interest to never sort of detach and hand it over to somebody. So in the PLG world, you are always nurturing that account because you never know where another use case may pop up at your customer and they start driving up the usage. And that's a good conversation for sales team to come back and say, hey, I see that you're starting to increase the usage. Is there anything else that we could do? Can we learn a little bit more about this use case? Maybe there's some other things that we can help you out with. So it helps the sales team, our tool, our application, and it also overlaps into the support side. And this is where, you know, different companies have different structures, how they may have set it up. Maybe there's a single leader that owns, you know, sales engineering and customer support. Maybe it's split up. But either ways, the tool is primarily for sales teams and anybody who's part of the customer success organization was ultimately there to make sure that the customer's having a good experience and for them to ensure that they will need to know what the customer is using, how much they're using, when they're using, when it is going up, when it is going down. So it provides value to both of those audience. Can you also talk about the availability and pricing of this app? The application is available right now. It is through invite only. If you have an interest in this application, please reach out to us and we would be happy to set you a demo. But when we GA it, it will, of course, be available through a PLG motion where customers can come in and download the app through an app exchange and be charged based on how much event stream, how much usage is being flown through our application to give this visibility to the sales teams. Puneet, thank you so much for taking time out today and not only, of course, share your insights on product-led growth, product-led motion and, of course, the announcement of this new application. Thanks for all those and I would love to talk to you again soon. Thank you.