Perry Light @ North America Oracle for Startups, Adam Brown @ BT, and Kevin Frechette @ Fairmarkit, Inc
Main Stage
Ascent Conference 2020
Perry Light [00:00:01] All right, let’s let’s get started. Welcome, everyone, to the Ascent Conference. Our session is the big deal, how startups land enterprise clients. My name is Perry Light. I work in the Oracle for Startups team. And my role is to get startups in our program engaged with our sales teams that are connected to our enterprise clients, hopefully, obviously, to help them land opportunities within those clients. As you might expect, that is probably one of our most requested benefits and most popular benefits in our startup program. So we want to talk about enterprise customers and we’ll be approaching it really from two angles or perspectives. One is from the startup. And we’ve got one startup with us today that’s had success in landing enterprise clients. And the other perspective is that of an enterprise customer that is working with startups and in fact, this particular startup. So with me today is Kevin Frechette, who is the CEO and co-founder of Fair Market, and also Adam Brown, a senior transformation manager from British Telecom or BT Group. So welcome, guys.
Kevin Frechette [00:01:06] Thanks Perry.
Adam Brown [00:01:09] Perry and Kevin, thanks
Perry Light [00:01:10] Yeah, glad to have you. So let’s get started first with Fair Market. Kevin, can you tell us a bit about your background and a bit about fair market work?
Kevin Frechette [00:01:19] Yeah, absolutely. So my background is, I wouldn’t say overly similar to tech founders. I came up in sales programs both at a big company that a mid-sized startup took the leap of faith with one of my co-founders back in twenty seventeen and did the classic just one out. Not really a strong idea, I don’t think right off the bat, not on Bakht out, but the whole philosophy that we had going into the startup was we’re not going to create in a vacuum. We said we want to get out in front of potential customers. We want to understand what challenge they’re going through, if it aligned with the problem we were trying to solve. Turns out there wasn’t a great use case right off the bat for what we were trying to do. So in twenty, seventeen, about five months in, we decided to pivot because we actually uncovered a whole new space, which is the procurement space, and we understood how archaic it was, how manual was and how ripe it was for innovation and data and intelligence to come into it, to really start to transform this this space that was predominantly just pen and paper, just people touching knobs and levers. When the data was there, the intelligence is there. We saw a great opportunity to automate, to drive to a very strong business outcomes for our customers. So we did the the scary pivot about five or six months in and end up being the right call. Since then, we’ve done an 11 million dollar series last year with INCI partners. We got the 20 20 Gartner Cool Vendor Award after a couple of years of trying to fight for that one last year. And then we’re at about 50 enterprise customers. So it’s been a fun journey and still learning a ton. And I was really excited to do this talk because selling to enterprises, especially as a startup, is is not easy. It’s hard. There’s definitely a lot of things along the way that we learned and happy to share them here and answer any questions as well.
Perry Light [00:03:02] That’s great. Thanks. And I think maybe, although you say you’re different from maybe some of the founders, I think your experience is probably not that different from a lot of startups in the idea that you said you guys just sort of took a leap and a little bit in kind of said we need to step back and rethink and pivot a little bit. I think I hear that quite a bit.
Kevin Frechette [00:03:23] Yeah, it’s it’s the idea of even early on, I think some people said when they met with me was like Shark Tank because there’s a pitch. And I had like, we had to completely change our mindset and go in more curious and just understanding, listening and learning. And then we created the solution around what we are hearing as opposed to like getting up in front of Cuban and Kevin O’Leary. So it’s been a fun journey.
Perry Light [00:03:46] Great. So, Adam, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background, especially startups?
Adam Brown [00:03:53] Yeah, well, my my time with startups, I didn’t say I’m going to feel really old now. My I have done a few startups in my time. My first one was back in ninety nine, so I did a tech startup in 99, if anybody remembers it, that was the absolute pinnacle of the dotcom bubble which then burst pretty much in 2001, 2002. But we did 10 million in series A funding out of Softbank just at the tail end of ninety nine. And then I went and did a few with a few other things before, you know, ultimately ended up the British Telecom where I work in transformation. So very specifically I work in procurement, in British Telecom, in transformation. And I also run the digital garage in procurement, which is now exactly as it sounds. We have the mission of digitizing procurement as rapidly as we possibly can and importantly trying to leapfrog that traditional transformation that you do, that traditional iterative approach to to a transformation where you just modify and tweak and adjust, but really try to take a step ahead with that. That’s what it is about. And also mentoring some small early states much earlier than fair market. And Kevin, because we’re a big organization, we’ve got a huge, huge reach. And I’m particularly interested in anything in the procurement sphere, that procurement ecosystem and how I can help those start ups we have for the moment to shape their products and work closely with them, give them my experiences and do the correct thing. It is a big, big organization.
Perry Light [00:05:41] That’s great. So, Kevin, tell us a bit about your experience selling into large enterprises. Sounds like you’ve landed a bunch and congratulations on that. But I imagine starting out in twenty seventeen, that was a bit scary when you’re first getting started and first approaching those first few enterprise clients,.
Kevin Frechette [00:06:01] Yet you don’t meet everyone you meet isn’t like Adam. That’s right. And let’s bring him in. Let’s get him in the garage. It’s a really cool role that has it’s it’s a cool initiative and a mindset that you just don’t get a lot of organizations in terms of when we first started selling and frameline listening out there. Sometimes I hear I talk to other founders. The dilemma of like, does the founder sell or do you bring someone for sales to sell to those initial couple of customers? In my opinion, it’s so important for founders to sell early on for two reasons. One is you’re learning a ton just based off how people are reacting to what you’re saying, the questions you’re asking. But also you have that trust factor, because whether it’s Adam, whether it’s someone else and the customer, they’re taking the leap of faith in you as a founder that you’re going to deliver for what you’re talking about. They’re putting their political and their careers at stake, saying that we’re going to work with this team and going and champion the project internally. So I couldn’t support more the founder sales, especially early on in terms of how we went down the enterprise path. I think there’s two different types of companies, some that decide they want to start with enterprise and go down. Others decide we want to start with SMB and go up. Either way, I think the founders should be talking to the enterprise clients early on for us. We decided to go Enterprise down and we just did what we knew, which we made one hundred calls a day. We just got in front of as many people as possible. And the main thing that we are trying to drive to is what are the outcomes that customers were looking for? It was less about what’s the technology has the machine learning work. It’s more about what’s important to the business. What makes a business successful in our champion successful? Can we create that path to get them there? And can we show that we can actually execute against it and then we can talk about the technology to do it? But as I said earlier, I kind of joke like don’t pitch like we started with the speeds and feeds with the deck presentation. We went through it and then we took a step back and we said, no, let’s talk about what’s important. Let’s ask questions. Let’s do a diagnostic to say where should we be going? And then does it align with what this customer is looking for? I’d say the we realized we were ready to actually sell to the Enterprise when we were able to create a business case with our first couple of customers and say, this is what you’re looking to do. This is what we’re looking to do as a company. Here’s the roadmap of how to get there. I know that we are under promising and we could over deliver on it. That’s when we wanted to sign up a customer. I think there are some companies they’re just charging for that first seven figure deal because it’s exciting. But the challenge there is if you don’t execute on that, the churn is going to get you. It’s going to crush you from a metrics perspective. Also, if a seven figure deal or any type of deal is a majority of your revenue, they’re going to have a lot of sway in the direction of your company. And it might not be taking it where you want to go if you sold the deal incorrectly or you create their own business plan. So I’d say for us, the biggest thing we learned was aligning on expectations and doing our rollouts in a very controlled way. So we said, let’s, OK, here’s the big picture we want to accomplish. Let’s start with this. Let’s prove it out here. And as we prove it out, then we can start expanding the partnership. And that also builds the trust along the way as opposed to trying to do everything at once.
Perry Light [00:09:04] Interesting, so, Adam, it sounds like in your role, you’ve got a dual role, so it almost could be easy to have those conflict a little bit because obviously you’re dealing with early start ups on the digital garage. But on the procurement side, I would think your management, you know, maybe not exactly in the terms Kevin said of risking your career, but I would think your management is encouraging you to go with established solutions, known entities that may not necessarily be startups.
Adam Brown [00:09:37] Well, yeah, exactly. This kind of brings on, I guess, my first kind of you learn, if you like, from the really big corporate organizations. It’s it’s not a big corporate doesn’t want to work with startups or innovators or estimates. You know, we absolutely would desperately. But it’s this bit of recognition that in any organization which gets to a certain size based government and there’s policy and there’s process and what we see as a big company need to be very conscious of is ensuring that any governance or policy or process that we implement doesn’t have the adverse effect of channeling us towards just the really big established ones. And a lot of that comes down to really understanding the risk and understanding how to mitigate that risk. Because now, like Kevin, with fair market, they have you have that company, fantastic product. But it’s a small company, and so it’s you want to make sure that if there’s any risk, which some kind of policy would make you assume that they may be, whether rightly or wrongly, we need to make sure that we understand and accept that and know how to mitigate it. So they need to be so that that kind of appreciation as well. The big companies, it’s like that. And if there’s anything that the small startups can do to be flexible with commercial terms or the way they work, or that proposals to really help enable us to mitigate any foreseen risk, that is really, really super helpful.
Perry Light [00:11:16] How do startups help put an enterprise customers concerns at ease and feel like they’ve gotten the answers they need to mitigate those risks?
Adam Brown [00:11:27] Oh yeah. I love fantastic, fantastic question. And it’s really it depends on the product and it depends where it’s fitting it. So speaking from my experience on that procurement side and digitalizing that it would be an enormous ask for a big company like Bayti to say swap out your ERP system or swap out something absolutely mission critical for a startup. That kind of criticality on just running the business is probably too much of a difficult question to answer. But to Kevin’s point, they the thing that really does work is having an expansion plan, getting in there, being utterly laser focused on just delivering something that really proves out and is really meaningful and then having an expansion plan on how you can bring more and more. So with with the guys that market a product like that is super clear. You so focused on one territory, one country, one regional, one category, something simple like that, which proves and give confidence that it’s working seamlessly, so happy and then expand. So it it depends. But you need to be realistic as well as the criticality.
Kevin Frechette [00:12:43] And I think Perry to jump in there from a startup perspective. The like atom’s mindset right now is, is exactly what we’d be looking for, where it’s understanding what the current forces at play internally at our company, and then how do we start to integrate and start to bring in and not just show that initial value, but how do we and champion it to other teams, other geos, other departments. And that’s the hand in hand kind of working together. And when everyone talks about like ideal customer profile, so what’s the ICP? And it could be at a company level, but a lot of times it’s the role level that’s most important. And I have talked about this. It’s who owns the process because that’s for our business. That’s what we really need to interject ourselves in. And we have to become part of that process. And if we’re talking to the wrong person, they can we can have 50 calls. But if they can influence that process, we’re just spend our tires until we get to that right person. The other part that Adam brought up that thought was a great one is and we did it incorrectly. We still do incorrectly sometimes is just making sure that we ask and understand the internal process before having our expectations set about when the product is actually going to kick off. And I think probably all founders do this, especially ones that are a tight timeframe. Right off the bat. You have a couple of good calls. You get excited. It’s called Happy Years and you’re like, oh, this me a customer tomorrow when in reality, even if everyone wanted it, there’s still a month and a half of data security review, the MSA process, all these different things to sign up. So just to make sure both sides have a positive experience, having those conversations early is, I think, super healthy, because then you can start to work backwards from what do we need to accomplish to get to each of these steps. And that’s something we’re able to do with Adam’s team and most of our customers. But it’s still hard to have that conversation early, almost like the disarming honesty.
Adam Brown [00:14:29] And that’s the bit, Kevin, is that is that honest conversation for the. Yeah, based on the corporate side, but also from of us, the brutal question of who’s the operational budget holder who owns that process. Fundamentally, you’re asking who makes the decision. And this comes to, well, the one bit of advice to anybody who’s who’s listening do not be blinded by job titles just because somebody got a CFO or a CPA or a CEO in a big organization. That might not be enough, you might think, great success, you know, the CFA thinks this is fantastic, but you have that level of diligence and process and governance in that data level to step through. And and ultimately, you know, you’re looking for who owns the budget, who’s making the decision. And I think I saw something which really crystallized this for me years ago. And it was, I think, from Bain, they had a model for who makes the decisions. So you need to find a person who makes the decision but also understand who are the people who need to input into that. They were the people who need to agree to it, who understands how everybody fits in. And then you’re really going to be successful. And if you think you’re talking to the wrong person, but you’ve got to champion, just ask them to introduce it to the right people.
Kevin Frechette [00:15:58] Adam, are you ever offended when someone asks you counterattacking before someone says the decision maker, who’s your boss? But like, how how? Because I think some people are worried to say that sometimes it’s hard to get the answer. What’s the best way using a position to yourself to make it a healthy conversation?
Adam Brown [00:16:16] Yeah. So I’m really, really happy if I’m happy or if people are just blunt and ask the question if I’ve forgotten to say at the beginning, just to make sure it’s clear and sometimes it’s healthy because it reflects nothing in my procurement world that might be a little overlap with something else. And it may be that I sort of think that I might own the process, but in reality I don’t. And if I’m pushed by somebody like Kevin, I’ll realize that straight away, saying that it is doing that in a in a nice, polite way. So having a conversation and off the bat somebody say, I want to talk to them probably isn’t really going to be the most helpful thing. But having a good conversation to understand those moving parts and what’s the process as a great way to start and who owns the process, who owns the budget cut of that phrasing will really help nail down to where you need to be.
Perry Light [00:17:13] Yeah, I think a lot of times. You ultimately have to say, you know, who who ultimately is going to sign this contract, you know, if we get to that point and the other is, as you said, Kevin, I think it’s really important to identify a champion, someone like Adam, and maybe even use those words a little bit, not necessarily asking them, but saying I appreciate you championing this issue for us and then asking the next question, you know, kind of positioning them as champion and then see how they respond. Would you agree?
Kevin Frechette [00:17:46] Yeah. I mean, I think there’s the philosophy I always had is just like super direct and just like that, disarming, disarming honesty of like, hey, Adam. Done a lot of these projects. I know typically we’re going to get to a point a month and a half where someone else is going to get brought in and then someone else is going to get brought in. We’d like to get ahead of that or prepare you for that or have us be prepared for that. Can you just unpack and walk us through what happens for you to get a project approved and just like as plain as possible? And I think if people respect if you’re honest and if you’re like looking at them eye to eye and it’s not. Adam, I think we talked about this in the prep session. It’s not that this is Adam, BTW, coming over and we’re like, you’re a startup and it’s like that’s the relationship. Because if so, there’s going to be less trust and less confidence and less value being delivered. But if you’re looking at us saying this is a project we want to accomplish, we’re both investing time, both of our teams. Let’s make sure we have the expectations set and talk about it. I feel like that’s something that people are a little nervous to do sometimes.
Perry Light [00:18:52] Yet you’ve mentioned when you talk about this negotiation and and making sure you don’t have happy years and expectations a little bit unrealistic. How do you negotiate that, Adam, from your side? I think you’ve mentioned before that sometimes you might want to just add a zero or, you know, times 10 whenever you get an estimate from somebody. How do you negotiate that between a startup who wants to do it as quickly as possible, they need the cash, that kind of thing, whereas the enterprise, they’re going to move at enterprise speed so that.
Adam Brown [00:19:27] Enterprise speed is a great phrase, and I’m sure when do we start speaking, Kevin, January?
Kevin Frechette [00:19:33] January demo in February announces in March more meetings.
Adam Brown [00:19:37] Yeah.
Kevin Frechette [00:19:40] Before we agreed on the rollout.
Adam Brown [00:19:43] So as a startup, do not be dependent. Don’t have that first phone call and say, great, I’ve spoken to Betsie, I can see the scope of what we could do there. It’s millions and millions and then just sit back and wait for something to happen because it would get on the phone relentlessly, contacts people, get the best salesmen, just be the salesperson for your company. Don’t just be the inventor. Don’t be the founder. You’ve got to you got to sell and you’ve got to relentlessly be out there pushing and pushing to. Yeah. More irons in the fire, as many as you possibly can, because it’s going to go slow in the world of the enterprise. It really is because. You’ve got so many large organizations on a site with so many people that you find involved, be that from just from procurement to do the commercials, to get contracts sorted out all the way through to the technology to make sure that the technology integrates correctly or if it’s on the roadmap to the future, the folk in a different department, it might be security. You want to come in and check that you go you’re testing down, that you adhere to whatever standards to so many parts of the organization to hit that it’s going to take a long amount of time. So as a start up, if you want to sell to an expert, you need to be prepared for that. So you need to be talking to a lot of people at once and ensure that you’re realistic about the time frame. It’s it’s not something that’s going to be super, super fast. Because and I guess this is the crucial thing to point out here. I am not buying stuff. Just to test it out, I’m not buying it to play with I have a real critical business need for all of this stuff that we’re looking at and we’re doing. And so really, it doesn’t matter. The fair market is a startup, although they’ve got a product and it works. Then I’ll put it because I’ve got a name. I’m not here doing favors to capital fair market. It’s because they know the companies that we’re using, like them, have a good product that we honestly want to use. The only difference being a startup is coming back to that risk. And how do we how do we korecki mitigate it? Make yourselves comfortable that, you know, should something go astray. But the power that they have a pile of things to do in their office, how do they carry on the delivery is the simple stuff like that.
Kevin Frechette [00:22:06] Luckily, we got out of our office, so we have a P.O. box now. So that’s some cash back in the business now. And I think Adam’s absolutely right. And one thing for anyone listening is usually that risk factor is in the first three to 12 months, it’s getting over that hurdle. They’ve evaluated it. They’ve aligned to the business goals. We know the rollout. They need to make sure in that first year it’s successful or that first month or the first three months. But then after that, it’s off to the races. And we’ve seen it with every one of our customers. And I don’t blame our champions of making sure that this is the right call. This is successful. And I did say earlier, if you put the carriers in line, it might’ve been a little bit of an overstatement. But people are putting their political capital down. People like Adam, people, all of our companies, they’re they’re going to they’re like to the CFO, to the CPA, whoever it is, and they’re champions of why this is going to be successful. If it if it does fail, it’s a big project that is a big black mark. So we understand that at this point, this isn’t like, oh, because it’s cool or because it’s fun. It’s not. This needs to solve a business problem. And then we’re equally accountable as we hold our customers to making sure we hit those goals.
Perry Light [00:23:16] That’s one thing you talked early, Kevin, about speeds and feeds into the tendency to want to go there and of course, Adam’s talking about I need a solution. I wasn’t in search of a cool product or something that does something neat with a tire smell. I think that’s that’s common not only in startup world, but just even in maybe younger salespeople as well, that they want to go in until everything they know about a product or all the the cool features without really talking to the customer or listening first to what are the problems you’re trying to solve and then talking responding to those issues instead of going in and just saying, here’s a library of all the cool things that our product does. And it’s it’s an understandable tendency. I mean, a startup is very proud of what they’ve done and they’ve done something new and innovative. They want to be able to show it off. Right.
Adam Brown [00:24:09] But what you’ve got to remember here as well is being it’s that laser focus on your message. I mean, want your product to solve a whole load of problems. It might solve three, four, like 10 different things. But you need that laser focus on the one key one, the one thing that really matters, because you’re going to get dilution, dilution of the sales message. So, yeah, if Kevin sells something says Adam is the ten amazing things about fair market, he’s going to present a usable equal waiting to me. I’m going to probably remember three of those out of those three, I’ll probably be able to articulate one of them to some half level of decency. And I think I would explain that to my boss. Then he might explain it to somebody else. It’s like Chinese whispers eight toilets. So be laser focused on the beginning of that one thing that really, really matters and sell.
Kevin Frechette [00:25:04] And to take it a step further, it’s not something that happens by accidentally by accident. It’s you need to have a process around how you’re going to run those initial discovery calls. We decide at Fair Market to bring in a sales trainer. Shout out to Steve Cranor and we’re looking for a sales trainer. Let me know after I can give you an intro. But essentially, we flip the mindset of giving a deck and saying, here is everything you like, Adam said, or even two or three things. And instead we have a very, very specific line of questioning around, OK, what is the customer priority? What do they care about? Why do they care about it? Have they tried to solve it in the past? And that helps us uncover a is there a fit? Because it’s really hard sometimes for startups to have a chance to talk to Adam and then say, you know what, this actually isn’t a fit right now. And that’s a lot of times the best thing to do is disqualification. You just saved Adam a ton of time. You just saved a startup with a lot of time and resources are really valuable. So if you can really figure out what’s important to them and if it doesn’t line to what you do, you save everyone time to small. You leave on a great note. Maybe you pick the conversation back up in two year, but if there is one or two things that are exact it, then, you know, these are the two areas that we’re going to line this whole project around. And it’s tough once again, because you want to talk about tech. You’re in the recent meetings and you’re just going you have to change your mindset altogether. And that’s why I go back to back to customer meeting. It’s really hard sometimes.
Perry Light [00:26:27] Hmm. So one last thing, and this is this is probably the eternal question. What about proof of concept versus paid proof of concept? You’ve both talked about how you need to start with something provable, manageable, and then grow it over time to prove yourself and be able to meet the customer’s needs. From a startup perspective, how did you approach that? Did you ever ask for a paid proof of concept?
Kevin Frechette [00:26:52] And so from our perspective, we always did, because we’re an enterprise sales company, we tie in with big legacy solutions and different solutions that are newer, but they have thirty, forty thousand people on it. So they’re already structured very in place. Oracle is half our customers for us. How we position our proposals is saying this is the three to five year roadmap with your team. Let’s start with a shorter period of time, prove it out and then then we can expand it out once we justify it so that that’s how we’ve done our pilots. It’s just a shorter period of time. But acknowledging that both sides are putting in putting skin in the game, knowing that we’re both eager to make this accessible, as Adam said, he’s not testing in our stuff. We don’t test it out. It’s not we want to prove out that this is successful and then we’ll expand it.
Perry Light [00:27:41] So rather than pay, just try to make that proof of concept as short as possible to move on to the next phase, which will start producing revenue.
Kevin Frechette [00:27:48] So we do pay. That’s still paid in a show. It is OK. And then we expand it out after. But it’s a much smaller financial commitment. But the bigger the whole reason that we have a financial commitment is to show that both sides are leaning in, that both sides once again are invested in making it successful.
Adam Brown [00:28:08] And I guess only to build upon that because Kevin and the guys are a lot further down that journey than the some of the other startups that I’m working with. I’m one of them that I met in January straight out of Cambridge University, which is just up the road from me. There was one guy made fun to go stuff. He was one guy literally created the company with that, you know, the small startups that we mentored and never going to be in a position to do. Is Kevin this done and say let’s have a let’s have the initial phase of our contractual to approval that expand. And so I kind of spin on the head and say, OK, so you’ve got a product, you’ve got an idea of what you want to do. What how can we structure that? So there is a real tangible deliverable to us that I can keep that’s meaningful and has value to me that I’m comfortable to pay for because I’m paying you to give me something that really has true meaningful value. And so when it’s the really super tiny startups, just think about how you can shape it to be a meaningful product that you can do and deliver. And it’s there, but it’s done rather than looking for a full ongoing service, which may be a much, much more difficult thing to do.
Kevin Frechette [00:29:27] I think that’s a super important point, Adam. It’s less about the period of time. It’s more about what’s the value driven during that period of time, because if you if in a month or every two weeks, you can prove the value to justify the expansion, that you have to validate it. Great. For some companies that might take six months to do so really depends on your business. And when you have measurable data for your champion to bring back to the team and say, we’re good to go, we validated this.
Perry Light [00:29:57] That’s great. So I want to talk about some key takeaways, but before I do that, any final thoughts and the other tips and tricks that you would hand out?
Adam Brown [00:30:10] I wouldn’t go yes,.
Kevin Frechette [00:30:13] I’d say it’s something it’s the reason we’re on this talk right now, it’s time to partner and to align with other credible third parties. Oracle is a great example. So we start partner with Oracle. And this wasn’t prompted by Perry. I think that was really a question that wasn’t in the notes. But we started partnering with Oracle about two years ago. And since they’ve introduced us to ten plus customers, we’ve been to Oracle Open World. We’ve had Bruce there. We’ve done case studies with Oracle. It just brings a ton of credibility, especially when we were a year and a half in, when we first started working with them to get large enterprises to kind of sit up and say, wait, how come Oracle is spending so much time with this startup? And it can be the same thing with partnering with a beating and not just having BTE as a customer, but saying how do we do case studies together? How do we do reference calls together? How do we do events like this together? Because a hopefully from a Rams perspective, it shows what they’re doing and showing that they’re pushing the limits. And from fair market perspective, it’s a great association to be with B team with Oracle and that we talk about risk and risking it. If you’re another customer looking in, hopefully it gets just a little bit. Derice, every time you see that additional validation point where that’s Gartner or the next thing in line. So every Mikie thing I throw out there Adam I cut you off.
Adam Brown [00:31:30] Yeah, it’s like, well, it’s it’s to me it is just the blindingly obvious stuff to not forget. So don’t sell it. Please don’t oversell. I think this is Kevin said he would rather on the selling the list because is a much, much better position to be in. And you know, we again, the obvious thing. Yep, I have problems that I’m trying to fix. Every other big organization will. And we’re simply looking at how can we do something better, faster and cheaper. That’s it. You know, when I was young and growing up, somebody invented these things called facies. When I was young, my parents thought they were an expensive toys. Right. Clearly, they weren’t. So so I just remember. So everything is going to move forward. Everything has to accelerate. Yeah. At the moment we’re now reaching an machine learning lockshin is how do we automate, how do we accelerate, how do we make it better, faster, cheaper. Thus don’t miss the the obvious. And then yeah I think a lot of companies like Betsie at the moment, I think I’ve got to give kudos to the CPA for having a bit of a vision to say, let’s have a digital camera, let’s let’s create something new, let’s build this this new thing and these new ways of working. And yeah, it is an exciting time, big procurement of the moment, tremendously exciting time with being able to evolve and really get onto the cutting edge of procurement. Technology is absolutely awesome.
Perry Light [00:33:07] OK, great, thanks, guys. So the other things that we talked about that we heard today, one is definitely develop a champion, you know, work with somebody, try to identify someone to be your champion and use them to be your guide to find who those decision makers are. Be realistic in your expectations, I think was another, especially when it comes to time that the enterprise timeline is always different than the startup timeline. And and just remember, I think we talked quite a bit about it’s not just about bells and whistles and cool innovations. Make sure you understand, as Adam was just saying, get to the meat of what is the customer trying to solve and stay there. You know, you’re doing it in a very cool way, but just make sure that they’re getting what they need. And that’s about all I’ve got. One other thing I do want to give a reminder to our audience that there is a session right after this at 130 with JD Weinstein from Oracle talking about something that you mentioned, Kevin, corporate partnerships and how they can help your startup scale. So that would be a way to kind of expand on what you just introduced. And we appreciate that. And no, I didn’t ask him to do that. Thanks a lot, Kevin.
Kevin Frechette [00:34:17] And really appreciate you having us on Perry and Adam. Thank you. Thank you for joining as well.
Perry Light [00:34:22] Thanks, guys.
Adam Brown [00:34:24] Yeah, Kevin, Perry, thanks very much.
Perry Light [00:34:25] All right. Enjoyed it. Thank you.
Kevin Frechette [00:34:27] Have a good one.