 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit in downtown San Francisco, actually out on the war if it's called Pier 27. Never been here before. Pretty cool venue between Pier 39 and the Bay Bridge. We're excited to have a very seasoned Silicon Valley veteran. Nick Metta, he's the CEO of Gainesight, but look at his LinkedIn profile. He's been on startups, he's been at venture capital companies and now we hear you're maybe growing a little unicorn thing out of that. That's the last round. I don't know about it. You an unicorn, but a gray hair for sure. Season ethic just means gray hair, so that's growing in my head for sure. So for people that aren't familiar with Gainesight, give them the basic overview. Sure, Jeff. Gainesight, we really believe that almost every business model is shifting to ones where customers have more power. And so therefore you can't afford to just sell a customer and move on. And for a long time, businesses, the vendors had all the power. You sell a software product or hardware, you sell a device, and once that customer has it, it's up to them whether they get value. Gainesight, we're trying to help enable a shift to this concept we call customer success where companies have to own whether or not their customers are getting value, whether they're getting the outcomes they want, whether they're using the stuff they bought, and we build a software product, a SaaS application, that helps companies make sure everyone in your company is orienting your customers towards getting more value. And in the process, get them to stay with you longer, spend more money with you, and become bigger fans of your company. Right, so I imagine a lot of people might confuse it with CRN, right? Yeah, that's it. Customer relationship management, there's a big 60 story building going up a few blocks away. I've seen the building, and we love those guys. So we're kind of a, think of us as a adjacent product to what you might do with a Salesforce automation product like Salesforce.com. We actually integrate very tightly with Salesforce as an example, they're an investor in Gainesight, and but as you're managing sales with your Salesforce, you're managing your support team, you're managing other systems, how do you manage your customers and make sure they're getting value, make sure they're going to stay with you and grow over time, that's what Gainesight does. And it's really interesting, as people have been talking about a 360 degree review of the customer forever. Right. But that's the challenge you guys went directly after, right? Yeah, it's funny. That's right. And I think for a long time, people were trying to solve 360 view of the customer, but what they're really solving was 360 view of the deal, because it was all about the sale and the sale is important and still very important, right? And it was about marketing leads and who I'm selling to and who has power and those are all really important things. But now if you think about a world where the customer has power, you got to look at 360 view of the customer, are they getting the outcomes they're looking for? Are they adopting and using what they bought? Are they having a good experience? So it's a totally different pivot on the world. It's about the customer, not the deal. Yeah, and it's interesting too to parallel that with just SaaS and cloud. Yes. Because when you have a SaaS relationship with a client and an ongoing subscription revenue model, right, you have to keep delivering value. You have to make sure they're going to pay you next month and the month after and the month after. It's not just to sell it and walk away. That's exactly right, Jeff, as you know, like first of all, it's way cheaper to keep and grow an existing customer than to go get a new one. And because of that, the SaaS business model depends on actual high retention rates. People talk about gross retention rate, basically, are you keeping the customers you got? And then also your net retention rate, are they spending more money with you over time? And the most successful SaaS companies, the highest valued ones, are keeping their customers and getting them to spend more money. And so that's like one of the most important value drivers in SaaS. So I'm curious when you guys deploy into a new company, new customer, what are some of the early ahas that you just see over and over and over again that they just missed before they had kind of this view? Totally. So number one is almost every company feels today like they're reactive. Like they find out about things but very late. A customer leaving them, somebody unhappy, a missed sales opportunity. So number one is just getting your organization to be more proactive. Number two is how do you get everyone in the company aligned around the customer? You might have somebody that cares about that one customer, but that customer is talking to support, they're working with your services team, they're going through training. How do you get everyone aligned around the customer and really have a good view across your whole organization? So they're all marching to that. Number three, the third aha is how do you scale that? You might have a hundred customers, you might have a thousand, you might have a million. And how do you scale the right approach with the right customer? Whether it's a human outreach or whether it's a fully digital experience which we can do both of those. Right. And then what about the, there's customers that are in your sales book as a company, but then there's individuals that you're interacting with. That's right. And then a big company to big company relationship, it's not just two companies, it's thousands or hundreds if not thousands of people that are interacting at a bunch of different levels. I'm so glad you said that. How do you integrate that in? Yeah, totally. Because when you're, if you have a big customer and somebody says is your big customer happy or not, there's no one answer to that question because there might be one part that loves you and another part doesn't like you, one part that's rolling out, one part that's using some new stuff, one part that's not using anything. And so you have to be able to break up that company in a lot of little pieces, we call those relationships and then measure each of those differently and be able to drive each of those forward. So you're totally right. It's not about one company. It's about a lot of little customers within that big customer. Right. Now you bought into cloud early on, I think you're actually a VC firm looking at cloud and obviously your gain side SaaS application. As you look forward, you just got off a panel, kind of what's next? Where do you see kind of the next big evolution or revolution, if you will, in the way IT services and software are delivered? Totally. I think the biggest thing that's happening right now is that, you know, cloud is just a delivery vehicle. I think everyone knows that. SaaS is kind of table stakes. Mainstream companies are saying, how do I reinvent my core business by shifting to these business models that are digitally enabled? People call that digital transformation. That's what this panel we just did was all about. And that's happening not just in Silicon Valley. That's happening in manufacturers and retailers and financial services companies. When they do that, they're rethinking everything about what they do. How do they manage product development? How do they actually sell? And also the customer experiences, which is where we come in. So we think the biggest thing is kind of obvious. It's digital transformation. Now, underneath that, you can leverage all kinds of new technologies, whether it's artificial intelligence, machine learning, bots. But the transformation of mainstream businesses is happening at a rapid speed right now. So I want to get one last point before we let you go. Is the impact of social, direct social back to these big companies? My favorite one is Comcast Cares, right? Every time my internet goes down, I jump on my tree. Oh my God. I feel for those Comcast Cares social people. They deal with a lot of mean work. But it's, yes, no, it's not Xfinity Cares, it's Comcast Cares. But it's a really interesting paradox for companies because people can reach out directly in kind of a semi-public form. Which it wasn't just calling the 1-800 number anymore. So how are they integrating that into kind of this customer relationship management? Oh my God. I think the biggest thing, we talk about the fact that customers have more power and they have bigger voices. One customer has a much bigger voice than they ever did. And so you have this amazing opportunity to either create a great advocate who could bring you new customers and new sales or create all these detractors, right? And I think that that public voicing of customer experience has made CEOs much more aware of why it matters, right? Before, a customer has a bad experience. They want to type up a letter and mail it to some office that nobody ever reads. And now the CEO is seeing on her or his Facebook or Twitter feed or LinkedIn the customer upset. And I think that's making them much more aware of customer experience being really important. Right, right. And are you seeing, it's interesting to me that there's some senior executives, Michael Dell, Beth Thomstock, just picked you out of that, that are super active on social and direct engaging with their community. There's other big companies which I won't name where people don't even have a LinkedIn account, much less a Twitter account. Is there a direct correlation that you're seeing between kind of embracing a direct engagement with your community versus, eh, I don't want to say anything bad, which I think is the end of it or the other. I empathize with the fear because I think people worry about saying something bad. So I get it. I think it's definitely misguided and kind of backwards. You can't stick your head in the sand anymore. Take somebody like Mark Benioff who's so great at this and he's on Twitter, he's advocating for causes. He's taking maybe controversial stands in some cases, right? But he's putting himself out there and he cares about his customers. Same thing with Michael Dell. Same thing with Beth Thomstock. There's so many great CEOs out there. So honestly, at this point, if you're not out there, you look like you have something to hide, right? Which is not good. Which is not good. All right, Nick. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes and congratulations. I saw you were the top 50 SaaS CEO of 2017 and continued success against time. I don't know how I made that list, but I felt honored. So thank you so much. Absolutely. We'll see you next time. Thanks Nick, man. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching The Cube from PagerDuty Summit 2017. Thanks for watching.