212: Brian Gil On Spinning Up A Start-Up Within An Established Successful Company

What's poppin' y'all, your man James Say What Sales Buckley, and this is your weekly episode of Make It Happen Mondays with your host, Jon Barrows. Huge thanks to our partners, Sales Loft Gong, Proposify, Vidyard, and Rise. We wouldn't be here without your support. Today, we're bringing in a titan. Senior Vice President of Operations at Articulate, Brian Gill, is going to join Jon to give some insights that may impact everything about your business. First, Brian's going to give you some early instances that dramatically changed growth and trajectory for Articulate when he joined over eight years ago. So listen up, small teams, because this is good info for you. Brian and Jon will then turn to Rise.com and talk about what it is to break ground on a new product, a new process, new vision, and a new value.

Brian's experience has huge value in this conversation with JB, so strap in good and let's talk about the adventure of starting something new. Before we dive in, sales professionals all over the world are quickly seeing a need to be dialed in at a maximum to gain the attention they need to hit goals and drive conversations with new prospects and existing clients. World-class training that companies like LinkedIn, Salesforce, and Google implement in their leading sales team is available for you at ondemand.jbarrows.com. Join us today. Invest in yourself. By gaining access to our online sales training courses, webinar replays, resources, and more, this membership delivers actionable takeaways, techniques, and mindset value that will change the sales game for you forever.

Companies like Slack, DocuSign, and Snowflake didn't become what they are today without great sales training, and it is available for you too at ondemand.jbarrows.com. We're watching sales reps take the time to invest in their own success and find the careers they always wanted, earn the roles that they've been shooting for for years, and even land great sales jobs that they've been applying for, all through the skills and lessons inside JBSales On Demand membership. A growth mentality finds growth reality. We'll be waiting for you at ondemand.jbarrows.com. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrows making up on Monday. Hopefully you had a fantastic weekend. The summer's starting, or the spring's starting to creep out here in Boston, so the weather's at least decent beyond outside.

It's not as good as Aruba like I was for the past couple of months, but we're getting there, and I am extremely excited to have this conversation today because this is actually a gentleman and a company that we are partnered with, that we are in the same space in a lot of ways, and are on a similar type journey. So hopefully I got some learning lessons here. So Brian Gill over at Articulate, SVP of Operations. What's going on, my friend? Hey, John. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to chat with you a bit about Articulate and my unique journey here, and where we're at the company and the evolution we've gone through. So good stuff. Yeah. So let's talk about that. So first of all, give everybody a little bit of perspective, because there's two, there's like a company within a company, whether what you got Articulate and you got Rise.

Talk to me about, because you came from Jive, right? Before Articulate, you were over at Jive. So first of all, why did you join Articulate? Like what attracted you to about that role? And then talk a little bit about what Articulate does. And then we'll get into how, what happened with Rise. But talk me through a little bit of that journey there. Yeah. Prior to Articulate, I bounced around Silicon Valley. I'm in the San Jose area. I grew up here, worked all over, you know, Yahoo, going up to Palo Alto for Jive, different spots. I heard about Articulate, what was going on over here from a colleague I used to work with at Yahoo, and was really excited about the space, e-learning in general. I thought it was growing.

I thought the company was very unique and how it was completely private and in control of its own destiny. And the remote thing, it was a pioneer of remote. And that was really an interesting move for me. I thought that remote work was going to be the next frontier. And, you know, I did not like commuting an hour and only 18 miles to Palo Alto every day. So I thought, hey, you know, that would be something of a unique challenge to get into and say, can I join a 100% remote company with a product-led CEO in a role that didn't exist at the time and never had before and never did this? And thought that's a unique challenge and I was up for it. So that's what brought me into it. So when you say they were, it seems like they were a little bit outside the Silicon Valley bubble.

They were completely private. Were they self-funded? Yeah. Adam bootstrapped it from the beginning and, you know, built it remotely as he added the best talent he could find wherever they were. Never had a building that didn't have his name on anything and, you know, had that level of, I would say, maturity in how to run a business, you know? Profitability matters here. Hey. Shocking. Who'd have thunk? We're not into, you know, make it up in volume is not a thing. It's, you know, you have to have sound economics. We have to be higher almost late, you know, that kind of thing. The company was only about 70 folks or so when I joined and very like product engineering, you know, oriented, dominated, you know, vast majority of the folks from those areas in thin back office and, you know, I was brought in as my background is product management.

And so I was brought in originally to help. Adam had this vision for what became Rise and other, and the move to SaaS and other big things. And he painted that picture and it was about, Hey, come in and let's move multiple things at the same time, you know, versus perpetual software. And, and so that's what really excited me. It was a very big challenge, but yeah. So that was a different type of mentality, you know, really, really focused on a sound, sound, thoughtful business with control and not have to answer to the public markets or a board and all those kinds of things. I see. I'm happy, I'm happy to hear this, man, because, you know, I've always thought like I've done it a little bit of the hard way, but I've never wanted money from anybody else because I never wanted a boss, right?

I never wanted somebody else dictating my path. I want advice. I want, you know, suggestions, but I don't want somebody leaning on me every day to say, where are you grow at all costs? And it's never made sense to me, the, the, the growth before profitability thing. And we'll make it up on the backend with volume there. Like I just, it's always like Salesforce, the fact that it took them that long to become profitable, the fact that Uber is not profitable, the fact that all these companies, I'm looking at, I'm like, I, I mean, I'm not an economics major, but I just don't understand how those businesses stay, keep getting funding. It actually is frustrating to me in so many ways. So it's really, it's really kind of mind boggling how that goes.

I really like a solid business. And when you get to phases, yeah, maybe there's times you want to take investment and grow to the next level and things, but if you have a solid foundation, that's what makes sense to me. That's when you do it to go big, you know, and we've, you know, we're, we're expanding rapidly as a result because we can afford to. And it's been awesome. Hey, right. And, and it sounds like Adam was a little bit ahead of his time too, on a couple of different things with the work from home and also the product led business side of the house. Cause we're seeing a huge trend right now. Like if I, I am talking to VCs and saying, Hey, where is the money going? And most money is going towards a more product led sale where get it in the hands of the users, frictionless sale, get a bunch of people to use it and then move upstream and get the enterprise deal going on there.

So was Adam, how, I mean, this is probably non HR question here, but how old was Adam when, or how old is he now? And basically back out seven years or eight years for you. Is he in his forties, fifties? Like just, I'm just curious. I believe he just turned 50. Okay. And he had a couple of 19 years old. So I was going to say like, what, like what has he ever articulated to you? Like how, like how he looks at things and, and why he took the approaches or how he was able to see that stuff before it really started hitting. Cause right now we're in the remote world. Obviously he couldn't foresee COVID. Um, but with the remote learning, it's the same thing. It's like, there's this, there's this trend that some people see, you know, a year out, two years, other people see five, 10 years out for both you and him.

Are there, is there a lens that you look through to, to kind of see into the future, to develop something right now that, you know, is going to be, have some traction? Yeah, I think he's very visionary and I think it just fit for him saying, I'm going to build a company that would embody the model of how we have enabled learning as well. Remote distance. How can you be a great communicator and conveyor of information and drive understanding both with your products and with how your organization runs? And that's the key to a successful remote company is it's not just, okay, everyone is central home office and it worked the same way. Of course, everyone's been forced into it for, you know, um, this past year, but I think he really thinks about the way our products can be utilized and the way that the company should be structured and how we operate in the same way.

And, and I, we don't feel like it's changing. I think that, you know, last year, uh, those who were doing remote, remote learning are doing more of it. Those who never did it, had to start doing it and they're not going back to the classroom. That's just clear. Right. So, uh, and we're never going to start building, uh, standing up offices. My first joint of kind of thought maybe we should, cause the tech wasn't that great even for communication at the time when you start adding new disciplines, you know, Yammer and Skype meetings that were like Skype, uh, voice only. That was the world I joined and it was very hard. And, um, but learning the clear communication and the way our products, I think enable people to do the same things and how we work.

It's kind of copacetic, right? They're very complimentary things. And yeah, it definitely plays into what we, um, we espouse generally from a product, product philosophy that should be simple and powerful, right? It's not a feature of laundry list that I think that's the hallmark of a product CEO, a sales ad CEO would just be like, let's just win and, you know, do the checklists and see who's got the longer list of features, product CEO really focuses on the problem. And we also focus on the problem when we add different growth stages of the company, there's different pain points you hit and we focus on it the same way. How do we get through those pain points of expanding the growth of the organization?

So what was the problem that rise that drove rise? And so, so, and, and, and maybe just for everybody listening here, you could kind of give an example, like clarify what Articulate is and then what, how, what, what did you see that drove the need for a completely new product within, within the company? Yeah. So Articulate's journey started with perpetual e-learning authoring software applications. Started from extensions from PowerPoint to get the flash development out of the way and make it simple for non-techies to make really engaging interactive experiences. Storyline was in its marquee product, really changed the game and the industry and stepping up the, the capabilities that somebody without coding skills could do to deliver e-learning.

So that's what it was very lumpy, perpetual software release cycles every couple of years, boom, you make a big drop, tons of sales, you know, and then you, you do iterative releases, then another big drop, very much built around that. Um, that then Articulate shifted to software as a service in late 2016, where we develop Articulate 360, which is all of the tools that a professional e-learning, uh, course developer needs, you know, from authoring tools like Storyline, web-based tool called Rise, um, content, training, collaboration tools, review tools. We sell that as one big bundle and not a la carte, keep it simple. You get everything you need. Then he knew that there's a, there's a need to take it even further.

The future is all in one training platform where it's all on the web, all delivered as a service, and it takes a best of breed authoring experience, which we had already built on Rise 360, and then call it rise.com and then round out that, that great authoring experience with content. So we've been sourcing third-party content and images and templates and like that. And, um, then the hosting, the administration and the reporting that one would need. So you can quickly say, Hey, I'm a, you know, marketing manager. I need to create a course on this new feature release, pump it out to the sales team, you know, enable them with the content and then track that they took it and understood it and quiz them and do that, you know, in hours versus engaging your professional learning department and putting it on the LMS and publishing it out and all that.

So that's the, that's what he saw. Like they're very complimentary. You can sell the, to the niche of your, um, uh, professionally learning developers, and you have this all in one system. We can sit up around it, maybe for SMBs, maybe for department levels with enterprises. And those two are complimentary. So we have like our, our, you know, entrenched industry leading, uh, application in our particular 360 and on our upstart startup within the company, which is tackling this new way to think about how to properly train. So how did you, was there an inflection point where you noticed that they were two distinctly different sales? Like, even though they were complimentary, you had this kind of, you know, software perpetual and then you had this SAS and this new model with rise.

Was it, did you separate that out specifically? And, and was there a different sales process? Was there a different motion to that sale than what you were used to? 100%. I mean, different brand. We owned the very valuable rise.com domain. Yeah. I was going to say that's a well done on that. And then Adam's vision, right? Got that early on. Um, and then, uh, so we had that, we built a brand around it. We built a little tiger team of, of folks who were very isolated from articulate. We were very specifically like, let's not bring our baggage, right? Right. It's different. Let's, you know, that's successful. In its own way, let's leave that, but let's think new from the tech stack selection to the sales model, how we employed like the role of Salesforce and the other applications that feed our, our frontline teams.

Um, we picked it all completely isolated. That was the start. And the start was really, if someone comes into rise.com, they almost shouldn't know that it's articulate, like you have to go to the terms of service and figure that out. That's what, that was the beginning. And that's not what we are now. Of course, did you like from a sales standpoint? So the stack and all that other stuff, but how about from a rep standpoint, did you take the tiger team from articulate or did you hire outside from a, without the baggage to your point? Yeah. I mean, we do have folks who span both. Um, and, uh, but we also hired from outside different, different mentality, especially on the sales side, you know, we had more of the sales development representative, uh, discipline feeding more of the hunters who have to go out there, which is less of the approach that articulates sales DNA would be in, which was more about, we had a lot of inbound, we're very well known, but triaging opportunities, facilitating the orders.

And then later, and more recently, pull us, those disparate orders into an enterprise level agreement and a, and, and a relationship at that level. But for rise, we said, Hey, look, if we're going to be a training platform for a company, it's strategic from the get go, right? You have to be having those conversations. Um, we need to be facilitating it all and understand it. Um, so yeah, very different. And, um, but it has evolved. It has evolved. At the beginning was that bifurcation, not, not the baggage and the freedom to craft something, how we operate and what the, and what the tech was, uh, independent. See, and that's why I see a lot of companies make a mistake. They try to do both, right?

They try to introduce a new product or a new thing or whatever it is and have the existing team, even though it is fundamentally maybe a different sale or something because they see an opportunity. So they create something, but then they have their existing sales motion. They try to cram it into that. It ends up being, and I'll use a very tactical example here. It's like the, it's like the inbound outbound motion that you, that you just mentioned, right? You know, articulated was a lot of inbound. Well, there's always that product led companies usually start with inbound quite a bit, but then there's that, that threshold that they hit where they have to go outbound. Right. And what a lot of companies do is they'll take that inbound SDR and they'll try to do a hybrid role with them.

They'll try to have the inbound do. And I always tell them, I go, please don't do that. Like take a tiger team, take a group of your SDRs and turn them into pure outbound because SDRs inbound will chase the shittiest Gmail lead on the planet before they make a cold call. Right. So it's a different, it's just a different muscle. And so trying to do it all at the same time and get a team who's historically used to selling one way to sell a different way and into a different persona is, is a fool's errand. In my opinion, you almost have to start fresh and, and cherry pick some existing who are really good, but want that next step and want that challenge, but then bring some outside talent and who have been, who have are familiar, more familiar with that model.

Yes, a hundred percent agree. That's exactly what we, what we believed as well. And it's what we ended up doing. What we learned over time though, was that there were unique advantages, unfair advantages that Articulate has to leverage for Rise.com and our brand, you know, our integrity with the security stance that we have, different things that boost us up from a Rise perspective that were assets of Articulate and we've evolved since then. So now we have more coordination between the different sides. They can see different things. They can sell cohesively. Our website is now much more geared towards come into the funnel and then look and say like, which direction should you start with? It might be both at the end of the day, but where should you start is really where we're orienting around.

And then the much more coordination in the back office too, between the business or not running separate businesses, really they're running cohesively now. Nice. I guess what were some of those operational challenges that, I mean, I think they, it seems like they might've been less by completely separating and treating it as its own entity and starting from scratch. But what were some of the kind of early learning lessons, if you will, of this cool thing that you're putting over here because of a need and it's different compared to the historic? Was there, I mean, it sounds like Adam's one of those people that's like, hey, let's do this as opposed to, ah, let's see what works here. Right. And has a very thoughtful approach to that.

But what were kind of the lumps that you took on the, on those early stages of developing rise and trying to build that brand? Yeah. I mean, I think, um, the high amount of SMBs coming into the, into the funnel and choosing the month to month plan was a bit of a surprise. You know, we thought that, you know, we almost didn't have a month to month plan. We were like, oh no, we always sell annual articulates, annual minimum rise should be the same, you know, but when it's something new like this and you get someone who's, um, uh, you know, a growing young company, they want to try something out, they know they have this need, they need to get the training out there, but they want to taste it. And before they take a bite, um, that month to month plan came interesting how to speak to SMB and understand, you know, triaging the leads within those and finding, finding the, um, the high growth potential ones within that segment.

That was, that was different. You know, even thinking about how we calculate, um, our forecast, you know, churn in month to month versus annual is a whole different ball of wax. So lots of, lots of different things. And then, and then thinking about when leveraging our 360, articulate 360 relationships makes sense. And when it doesn't, that was an interesting one too. Marketing to them is, is an interesting, is an interesting, uh, challenge, right? Like how do you speak to them about this new thing while they've already invested a lot in articulate 360. And so that's been, um, some of the early challenges and ways we've had to evolve our thinking is how to go about the, what we're, what, what was walking up to the door, basically the price.com.

Well, and that's where I'm kind of curious about, like, what are your thoughts on build and they will come versus build what the audience is asking for. And, and the reason I always come back, I, I always lean towards whatever your audience is asking for, you know, you know, if you can see some trends there, start building that. But then I fall back on like the old Henry Ford quote of if I did what the, if I did what the market wanted me to, I'd build a faster horse or whatever the hell it was. Right. So, so he was like, no, like, you know, I'm not going to build horses. I'm going to build cars and I'm going to do it this way. And you didn't even know you needed this, but I'm going to give it to you.

And it was obviously a raging success. So where are you on that line of where we know the market, we're the experts here. So we're going to create stuff that we know that you might not even know you need, but we, you're going to need it because visionary, all that other stuff versus we're getting a ton of feedback from our clients. We're obviously all of a sudden attracting an SMB market here. So maybe we should go in that direction. Like, where are you on that? I know it's a mix, but where are you on that line? Yeah, it's a very interesting journey. And, uh, we were about a year in to rise.com, right? It was about a year ago. And, um, especially with SAS, it's like a quid pro quo, right? It's like, here's SAS.

I'm paying you all the time. You better be continuing to ship what I think is valuable. Otherwise I'm never going to pay you. And it's a good, it's a good partnership in that sense. But, and when you first shipped it, yeah, we did that for the first year. It's like whatever the big, the loudest drumbeat was from the, from the people we had, the prospects and customers, we were knocking them out. Yes, yes, yes. Feature, feature, feature. Roadmap, roadmap, roadmap. Yes. A line with what we kind of knew. I mean, we knew where the line was to ship a shippable product versus a, you know, it's ever complete, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. After about a year, we're at the point again where it's like, thank you.

We, we hear you. We understand you. We hope you're happy. We're going to keep you happy. But this, but the, the, the meter is definitely shifting over towards, all right, we have a vision. We're going to step up the market, step up to a place where people aren't even knowing where they should be asking to go. Yeah. And that's really where we're at right now. And it's a very interesting shift. And it's like a challenge for some of my departments who are on the front lines who are having to listen and say, yes, we hear you, but I can't commit to a date on that particular thing because we're doing the big thing, you know, I can't tell you about right now. We're feeling it right now. And he has a product guy, you know, that, that I, I, I go through those phases.

I'm used to it. And it's, it's a little rough to be, it's a little rough sometimes, you know, to have to say no or not yet or whatever, not really be able to explain yourself, but in the end it pays off. And I think, uh, that's another thing that articulate brand brings is those who know us from that context. Yeah. They, they know that we will deliver. And that's, that's a, that's a nice legacy that we have. We can leverage on Rise. Yeah. I think that's, it's, it's kind of, well, let me ask you, do you have right now for Rise? And I know now it's kind of, you've incorporated both of them, but do you have a customer advisory board or like, who do you listen to and how do you collect the data of feedback so that you can then take it for what it's worth and then incorporate that into the vision piece?

Like what's the, what's the, the feedback loop here from the users on your end? Yeah, we have a pretty tight process between the frontline, we call them the happiness team. We're using intercom and fielding those, those, uh, requests from prospects largely. And, um, and then sales, we have a workflow, it all goes into our, uh, via Slack. We have a lead customer advocate who coalesces those things and feeds it into the product team. So, um, we have, we have that pretty well dialed, uh, to understand what they're asking for at the moment. Um, the, uh, the other part of that is how much do you use like data of the platform and of the usage metrics to, to make those decisions too? Cause there's the opinions of people of what they think they want and then what's what they actually do and how, and, and how much of that do you put into this?

We're definitely leaning more into that aspect of this product than a thing like a customer advisory board. We don't have a beta program. We do on the 360 side, we don't have a private place where we communicate with the big, the big, uh, fish out there or hot leaders out there. It is more about listening in to those, those little signals that we get like from the front lines and then using, um, you know, some big data, I guess, data mining kind of thing. And that's, um, uh, business intelligence, um, group who works with our product team and they're digging in and they're looking at what are the signals that are, people are telling us, how are they using in surprising ways and really looking at that.

And it helps us craft our strategy towards content acquisition for it, you know, different go to market tactics on segments and, and, uh, you know, from the product marketing side, where we should be, how we should be doing. So we're learning a lot about that now. And I think that's the exciting part. Cause it took us about a year products, the product's much more mature from a feature set perspective. We have a big vision and now we're, there's enough there to do that. Mining is really starting to bear fruit. I was going to say, it's like, you got to get to a point where the data actually, you know, I always be, uh, you know, BI and art of, you know, those types of things. It's like great, but I've always questioned, like if the data isn't really, if there's not enough of the data or if it doesn't make sense, it's hard to then glean any insights that really should shape your next step, your next, right?

So it's almost this art of marrying some data points with stuff, with opinions and vision to figure out where that, that is. Is there a process? Like, do you look at it almost that in that way where it's like, we need this in order to see that, that allows us to then create. So when you decide to add that extra feature, what are the metrics that you look at to say, yes, this is worth it. Enough people or enough data says that this is going to be something big in the future. Are there parameters you look at or, or, or certain things, a certain way you look at that? Yeah, definitely. And we look at it from both the trial conversion signals and say like, these are the activities that then yield a conversion and let's figure those out.

We use statistical models to understand those and we do our scoring and all the leads that come in and go through that kind of modeling or constantly refining it. Then on the people who are buyers and come in, we look at their product usage and that helps us lean into which thing. So we can, you know, it's not a place where we're just looking at the data that drives our roadmap. There is definitely the, you know, the visionary highest paid person's opinion, all that kind of stuff comes in, but it adds that level of confidence and refinement to it, you know, and also like helps us understand what matters. We had some hypotheses about health scoring of a customer and it was completely like, it was 50-50.

You can be the most healthy and you can churn just as much as the most unhealthy. It was completely like, it was, but we made our best guess. Now, now it's not that way. Now we can actually use it. So, um, yeah, it just takes time, but you have to do it with a professional. That's why we build up a real professional, um, group to help us with that. Cause otherwise you can make bad decisions with flawed or incomplete data for sure. Anyone who's ever been on a new venture or is on a new venture right now should understand what Brian and John are throwing down. The decisions that we make when we're small drive the results that we might see as we grow. And it's the things that we pay attention to that decide where we spend that time, but big vision leads to big growth.

And that's a fact. I want to take a moment to tell you about a few things that we have going on here at JB sales that might interest you first and foremost, we need to hear from you. So send me your sales wins at James at jaybarrows.com. Your stories drive our content that helps you succeed. So I want to hear from you personally this week. We're giving a big shout out to Alexandra of Haas alert. She hit 225% of her Q1 quota and 200% of her March quota using the skills that she obtained from her JB sales membership way to go, Alexandra. And finally, the power of customer success is becoming more and more of a focus. Revenue has become an enormous factor in the top customer success teams. Do you need to get more sales coming out of your CS team?

Well, there's nowhere better to deliver new values and new products than to your existing accounts. Our customer success director, Meg Hulsinger, delivers her new customer success course based on how to achieve more revenue and deliver more value to your existing clients. And you can now access it with your JB sales membership. Sign up now and gain access to this very valuable course at ondemand.jaybarrows.com. Let's finish up with Brian and JB. Well, and that's what like, so for me, it's funny because we're not the same path, but a similar path. You know, I mean, I was more professional. So instead of like, you know, software training, I was professional services. And we created this on demand platform now that has, it's a totally separate animal.

And understanding the usage of this on demand platform of where people go, how they get in there and what all those conversion ratios are. We're very quickly getting into some data that is meaningful, right? On the professional services side of the house, I never really had any data that was, I mean, yeah, I could kind of figure out conversion, where leads came from and therefore throw a few bucks at that. But it never really shaped my strategy, if you will, right? Because it was never substantial enough for me to say, ooh, if I do tweak that, it's going to all of a sudden exponentially grow or, you know, we should see this type of conversion ratio. Where now we are really getting into, and I think my net, you know, some of my next hires are going to be data analytics, like marketing data analytics people who can look in there and say, okay, where are these coming from?

What are the churn metrics? Who's, who's staying, who's going, those types of things. And also playing around with different models of month to month versus year. So I'm, I'm very curious on, on what that data is going to tell us and then marrying it up to my, what my gut says and what I'm seeing out there in the marketplace too. Yeah. Well, it's also very important for me. One of my areas of responsibility is international and I make assumptions that, oh, the international opportunity is going to exactly mirror what we saw in Articulate 360. And it may, it's not, I don't think we're statistically significantly there yet with our data to know that that's not true, but it's leaning towards not true.

I was going to say, yeah. What are some of those things that you're learning from? Because that, I mean, again, I, we're doing a webinar next week on called the world is flat. And the whole idea there is what I'm starting to see is because this is now become the norm. I'm starting, and because now companies are looking for much more global, uh, things, right? They don't want a U S version of it. And then a different product or company for a MIA version of it. They want one, but there's so many nuances there. Um, that said, I'm seeing more people involved from different regions in the sales process, right? Where it used to be, I'm meeting with you and you're a few executives in your office right there.

We're having this conversation. Now all of a sudden I'm in a meeting and somebody from AMIA pops in, somebody from APAC pops in and we have to adjust for their needs, but also, and this is where I'm interested in is their style, right? Like, like selling in Germany versus France versus UK versus U S like very, very different approaches there. So what are some of the learning lessons that you're seeing early on with the international expansion, if you will, that you're bringing back that, that is kind of highlights for you. Yeah. I mean, you're very right that it's not just, Oh, let's replicate what we do in the U S around the world. It is very different. And in article 360 aside, we're very much channel partner led.

We have a reseller network of 45 plus 47, I think, uh, partners throughout the world. And they bring that, they, they know the norms, obviously we enable them and then they, they go out there. Um, and we learned a lot with SAS. There's a lot of skepticism internationally. I believe it's more, it's at least a year behind. It doesn't sound like a lot, but I think it is as far as like acceptance of SAS. And we started to pitch it to that reseller channel partner. We were making that transition in 2016. There was a lot of skepticism. They're like, really, you're going to ask everybody to pay every year. But, um, but, uh, boy, they're really enjoying the annuity now and it enables them to build out the other types of discipline.

You need a lot of different types of disciplines and they learn that too, right? It's you'd need that customer success team, you know, and it's, and it's not just about support. It's about expansion and focusing on all of that. Some of the unique things that we're seeing on the right side is, you know, more emerging markets. They haven't spent millions of dollars in these larger companies on their LMS, right? So they're more willing to try new things, a new training platform. So, you know, I'm looking at doing some, uh, you know, leaning more into Latin America and, and, and our, our, our opportunity in India. We do well there in the 360 side, but it would, those two would not be in our top five, right, but, but I very well believe that they could on the, on the rise.com site.

There's other, there's other things that we have, we have to appreciate, like in India, for example, they will let your subscription lapse if you don't give them a discount for, as a loyal customer, just because, right? They negotiate just to negotiate, you know, and they'll come back, but they're in the interim, you know, they're fine with letting their users lose access for a little while and coming back later because it's a thing. So, you know, we want to get ahead of that beat and, and, and have that partnership and relationship with them, but we appreciate that that is a thing. And we make that happen, right? And that, yeah, so you bake it into your strategy as far as even how to, like from a pricing model standpoint, it's almost like you look at it and you're like, all right, if we want them, what's a lifetime value three years.

Okay. Then we have to price it for the three year, knowing that we're going to have to discount, discount, discount on of us every renewal, just because that's part of the culture. That's part of their approach. Yes. And then we're definitely seeing the phenomenon you mentioned of, you know, you bring one party to the table and next thing you know, it's a global conversation. This, and this is happening on both sides of the house and you really have to understand how they're interrelated with each other, how they're, you know, either connected or have different, different goals. Like if you have someone in Germany, you might have more data security concerns being highlighted and worrying about our U.S.-based infrastructure and what's happening with their data and our government and things like that.

You know, it's a, it's a real challenge. Um, but, uh, but we see that as an opportunity as, um, as folks do consolidate, obviously those relationships get stickier and you can expand them and it's worth it. And so we really have a focused team and strategy about that consolidation. Yeah. Cause the, the, the thing I've been, I'm sure you've seen it as well as like U S based companies taking their product and plugging it in because all of those international and taking none of the cultural nuances into consideration. I mean, I look at it from a training standpoint and there's almost this, like when I, whenever I used to fly around the world and train in Amia and all over APAC or whatever, there's almost this before I even walk in the door, it's like, great.

Here comes another American trainer from American company teaching us how to do it in America and not thinking about how it's different here. And I've, you know, I've adapted by like seeking to understand, reading a bunch about the culture and figuring out at least showing, at least I know a little bit about the nuances, but then asking a lot of questions, but I got to, but we don't sell in those countries. We sell here in the U S and then they have an office in Germany. And then we go train that team in Germany, but the sales motion. So most of, do you have offices in, in, in other countries, or do you almost all through the channel with them, with the local support there? That's right. We, we, no offices.

Um, we, uh, have a U S based VP of sales who then manages our channel manager team who enable the partners. And then our sales enablement also enables them as well. You know, it's, uh, we have walk-up business e-commerce and then of course those folks who do come in, we nurture from a customer success perspective, but, um, to date we have not been, um, going direct aggressively with our own U S based folks, uh, to target companies in outside of the U S and we've got to consider U S and Canada domestic, right? Yeah. So that, that's how we've done it. And those relationships are, you know, decades, decade plus, you know, they're great relationships with these, with these partners that we've had, they've really built big businesses on it.

Um, and we found that that, that is a good way to, uh, overcome, you know, as a small company, some of the inabilities to be really in tune with the unique nature of what it takes to sell a lot more in person and lot in France, you know, they're doing constant phone conversation, they survey over the phone versus sending a survey, right? Cause that's, you send a survey is almost offensive, I guess, you know, they call them and they do that. They read the survey, right? It's, it's, you know, that, that kind of thing. We just don't have the, the, the bandwidth for it, but we have a long way to go. I mean, we're not fully localized in the UI and our web experience. And we leverage some of their web experiences for other languages.

We, I see those upside. Yeah. We're doing quite well internationally and without full investment on those areas. So, you know, it's, it's exciting. So with that, what are you looking at next as far, because you've been a year with rise, like rise is, is now baked. You've gotten the feedback. You feel pretty confident that this thing is the right hit. And now you've got a vision to get it going. Is it now, um, controlled, sustained growth? Is it, are you looking for a pop? Like what, what's the next kind of evolution here for you as an organization, or is it just a continued growth with, you know, controlled growth, I guess, if it was instead of the VC world type of thing. Yeah, no, I think, I think we have, um, a really solid growth plan that's measured as we always have, right.

We know where to, where to invest product wise on rise. And that's where we're, we're hiring a lot, um, in the tech and engineering side to execute against the next level of vision. Um, but we do, but I do feel like rise is the one that will have that exponential growth as we just continue to nail that typical product market fit equation. And it will be the one that, um, has that kind of, if it was its own independent startup that was doing the VC thing and stuff, it would be the hockey stick level growth, definitely laying the seeds. International is just a baby pilot. We've not even scratched the surface. We're really focused on that for the U S first get that hockey stick going. And then we're, um, going to lean in there.

So there's tons of upside on that, on that side, the 360 business still growing, very health and healthy rates. Um, we're just lucky that we're able to, um, to have that kind of balance, you know, yin yang between the products and what they bring to business is really exciting. Um, yeah. Do you see, you know how some companies of like, they let's go on-prem versus SaaS, right? And then eventually it becomes pure SaaS and they, they, I don't want to say abandoned, but they make a decision that that's where the world is going. That's where we're going. So we have to kind of 86, this old, do you ever see that, that trend is over the next 10 years, for instance, do you see that, that symbiotic relationship between the two organizations and continuing to grow and maybe rise growing a little bit faster, but articulate, always being there as the foundation, or do you eventually see this as that's the direction that the world is moving in, we're moving in.

And so eventually we're going to have to get away from this pure software play as it sits. You know, I think we're increasingly seeing that they're complimentary, you know, and I don't see that the 360 business is going anywhere anytime soon. I mean, the, the SaaS delivery model, the fact that it does have all the modern aspects of that, the collaboration, the web-based tools. Yes, there's a, there is a desktop application component of it, but that's for the power of the user, you know, which is still, that is the lifeblood of the industry. We are going to feed that and continue to dominate that. There's lots of greenfield there. You know, I think true on-premise environments, those are a dying breed.

You know, we, we, we do still sell standalone cuts of our perpetual software. If you need that, like you're an air-gapped, you know, defense company or something or whatever, but that is few and far between. I think, I think the, the overall embrace of SaaS and cloud, that, that ship has sailed. And I think it's a matter of us, like seeing how these two, these two products evolve together, you know, and I think in an enterprise, you can imagine that you would still have the, a large learning and development department, all standardized on articulate 360 around the world. And you have use cases for rise.com, which serves a different need, could be for external enablement, could be for customers, could be for partners, it could be for field teams.

You're seeing a lot of these different use cases. And that's where, that's where it's starting to see the relationship and connection. And they're not ones, not cannibalizing the other. And that it's because it's always funny because I, I constantly have to remind myself and my team of the bubble that we sit in, right. In the sense of SaaS and San Francisco, mostly, right. All this other stuff. And I'm like, oh man, like, yeah, this is it. But then, you know, I, I take one step out of SaaS into a normal industry, you know, and it's like, you know, in my perspective, it's like sales, 1985, all over again. You know what I mean? It's like the stuff that we're talking about in the SaaS world is vastly different than what the majority of the other, you know, industries in the world talk about, right?

Yes, it's, it's, uh, influenced a lot of ways by SaaS, but are you, are you seeing the most luck with rise specifically with companies that are a little less traditional, if I mean, or industries that are more progressive, or are you seeing success across the board? It's interesting. I mean, we are dominated by the tech side, right? Those who are, you know, tech, tech leaning, tech friendly, that is, um, the, the majority of the conversions and leads and things that we're getting, but we are seeing pockets in, in surprising categories, like manufacturing, why, you know, and it's, it's more about the appeal to them is the, um, the rapid nature of the program. They realize that the need is I have to get this information out ASAP to folks on their phones and then, you know, and, and just the old way doesn't work for that.

So it's just, you know, so it's like, that's a kind of a surprising insight that we're seeing. It's like, oh, okay, that's a need that isn't met. And this is meant for, and maybe, you know, internally it might have some strife to get over the, oh, scary cloud thing or whatever, but the need outweighs those, those concerns and, um, not losing deals because of that. So I think that's a, yeah, it's an interesting phenomenon. Yeah. And I think COVID, I mean, we were talking about this before we got on is, is, you know, it's accelerated so many things, uh, the, in, in a, in a positive way, right? I mean, yes, it's a horrible for countless reasons. Um, but it, it's actually for those companies that are agile enough and, and, and are willing to like the ones that were kind of like not willing to do that are now being forced to do it.

You know, I, the, the, the, when I use the example is like, you know, everybody always said field sales. So I got to have a senior AE, if I ever want to sell a multimillion dollar deal, no, that AE has to go on site. They have to schmooze, they have to walk the halls. They have to know that. And the excuse was, well, we can't sell multimillion dollar deals remotely, but it wasn't, it was an, a, it was an excuse, but it was also a real reality because the perception of the buyer was, I want to meet if I'm going to spend that much money. But then literally overnight, everybody figured out how to sell multimillion dollar deals remotely. You know what I mean? Right. It didn't stop. Nope. Like training for me, you know, I always offered remote training, right?

But nobody wanted it because the perception was that onsite training was more engaging. It was more valuable. And if I was ever going up against a competitor and they were offering an, you know, a remote version, I'm sorry, an onsite version. And I was trying to pitch my remote version client all day would say, no, we want the, but it's funny because of how much perception and how everything historically has been done dictates so many people's decisions. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's really why I'm very bullish on international. I think they were more entrenched in that. You got to show up my office for me to like you type thing. And now they were forced to not, and I feel like that's not changing.

That's going to be a new thing. It's going to tip, it's going to tip their expectations and really the requirements, you know, they don't really, they don't really need it or do they, they don't really want to have to take you out the lunch, you know, anyway, you know, there's tons of data right now that says LinkedIn even came out with a report recently that said the buyer actually enjoys this far more, like regardless of the seller, the buyer's enjoying it. Cause it's no more bullshit. It's no more, Oh, I got to deal with a stupid rep. Who's going to come to my office for an hour and, you know, want to talk to me about all this random stuff and look around my office and see that I'm a fisherman and pretend like he fishes, you know, like those types of things.

Like I don't have to deal with that anymore. Now it's a 30 minute call. I can shut that thing off and we are done here and I'm on my next, so they are actually liking this better. So if we don't figure out a way to adapt to this model and anybody who right now says that, Oh, I can't wait till things go back to normal. Like you've already lost in my opinion. I mean, I do, I do, you know, miss the relationships, but in some sense it makes the decision making more honest. There are less factors. It's really about the facts. It's not about, do I like you? Did you, did you compliment my kids are cute? And I think as articulate, we actually, I find this on the, on the vendor side and like do our vendor agreements and like things like, Hey, we're doing a, we got SOC two certified recently.

That was the thing. The auditors are kind of like, wait a minute, we can't come on site and like look over your shoulder and like making them think, no, no, this is how we work. We'll get you to need work it out. And you don't have a place to come. You're not going to my house. And they figured it out. I mean, I think we up level them, you know, helping them. This is not COVID. This is just how to work with articulate. We're hiring you. This is how we roll. Can you do it? They do it. And we have to find the right partners and vendors that can, that can do that. But you know, it's so more efficient. Well, and that, and that kind of just goes back to that question I had about like leading versus following, right?

Feedback versus leading. Like you have to, if you really, I think want to crack through, you have to be the visionary. You have to be the leader because if you do what everybody else is expect, you know, is, is want you to do, I would do more on-site, you know, I, in the past, I would have done more on-site training. I would have figured out how to make my on-site training more, more interactive than it was, you know, and I went, I would have kept beating that drum because that's what everybody perception wise wanted. And if I tried to come up with this whole, but now it's, you gotta, if you're not leading people because people are looking for, okay, what, what else can I do here? I know the old way is not going to be, even if it works right now, it's not going to work next month.

It's not going to work next year because we're evolving too fast at this point. And like I said, I think COVID accelerated everything about 10 years. So it's, it's a, I think it's a, I think it's a fun space to be in trying to figure this shit out. But I do empathize with those groups that are a little bit stuck in their old ways and don't know how to get out of it. But it seems like you guys have figured it out with not just how articulate originally was founded, but also within the company, within the company and how to do that, which is, which I find fascinating because that story right there. It's been a really interesting journey and I'm excited about the next phase, but yeah, I think it's a, it's, it's a, I don't know, I think we are on the forefront in a lot of ways and it's been pretty exciting.

Yeah. I mean, I, I mean, I, I used to say, oh, you know, I could look out, uh, you know, five years out and I can kind of see that now I'm like, all right, I, I, maybe five months I can look out five months ahead and I'm going to try to, you know, I guess we have a five of your vision as far as where I, where I, me personally, where I want to go and therefore what my business, I want my business to do. Um, but man, you know, like I keep telling everybody right now, agility is the number one competitive advantage that you have as an organization. Cause if you are not agile, it's almost impossible to be successful right now. Yeah. I a hundred percent agree. I've learned a lot of adaptability and I've moved around roles, different things and all that kind of stuff.

And just rolling with it has been a skill. I think probably the biggest skill I've developed over my eight years here. So I definitely think that's right. You have the best laid plans, but like COVID taught us, you know, it can be completely upended. Then you just have to take that new thing and factor it in and adapt. And that's the only way to survive. I mean, I actually told my daughter that when, um, when we, cause COVID and then when she was going back to school, she was like, I don't, I actually thought she wanted to go back to school because you know, she was doing so much remote stuff, but she's, but she was actually, she was afraid cause she didn't, she didn't, she was like, but it's not going to be like it was, it's not, you know, I'm going to have to be sitting six feet away.

I'm going to have to wear a mask all day and all that other stuff. And I said, sweetheart, you're too young to really understand what I'm about to tell you right now. Cause he was nine at the time. And I was like, you need to learn how to adapt period because this world isn't getting any less weird, right? There's not, you know what I mean? Like it's, it's not going to get less fucked up, right? So you have to figure out, I, that's why she's in Montessori right now, which I love because it's experiential learning. It's not like learn to the test. And to me, adaptability and creative thinking and, um, those types of things are critical thinking are, are ways that I'd much rather have that skill than, you know, how to pass a math test, which, you know, I can ask Siri about.

Right. Yeah. Conversation is not an asset, any answer that your fingertips literally. So like, I remember, I don't know if you, when you were a kid, but you know, the teachers would always yell at us. Well, you need to learn this because you're just not like you're going to be walking around in the future with a calculator in your pocket. Matter of fact, teacher. Uh, yeah, we are the world's knowledge in my pocket. So there you go. You know, anyways, awesome, Brian. Well, anything else that you want to share with the team before we wrap things up here? No, I think it's great talking with you and say, you know, I, I, uh, I hope people took some, some, some tidbits from this and our journey and, um, yeah, really enjoyed it, John.

And, uh, thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you. And if people want to learn more, Brian, um, where should they go? Should they, you know, email you? Should they hit you up on LinkedIn? What's, what's the best way to get in touch? Uh, LinkedIn's probably the best, um, biglate.com. Check that out too, of course. Um, but yeah, that'd be awesome. Perfect. And every, for everybody, for everybody listening, it's Brian Gill, G-I-L. So definitely look him up on LinkedIn. Check out Rise. We're, we're partnered with you guys and we couldn't be more excited because I genuinely believe that, you know, what you're doing and what we're doing are just right in line with where things are going. And so I'm excited about what's next for both of us.

Appreciate you coming on, Brian. Thanks, John. All right, everybody. And thank you all very much. And like Brian said, hopefully you got some little nuggets out of this that at least got you to think, right? Do something a little different or, or, or if you have plans of, you know, doing your own thing moving forward, you know, some learning lessons there. Uh, and like I always say at the end of my, all my podcasts here, look, uh, no matter how bad your day went, go out there and make somebody smile today. Cause if you make somebody smile today, you know, you had a good day and the world needs a lot more of that these days. So thank you all for listening. Thanks, Brian, for coming on and I'll see y'all on the flip side.

John and Brian spent the second half of the show talking about what we should be looking at when we're interpreting our data to make decisions on how to refine our approach or redesign our roadmap. They talked about the health of our customers, which should be a huge focus for every sales rep on earth, no matter what. All this growth that Brian and John talked about took time. And we need to know that the data we examine will tell us where we need to go and what changes we need to make in the future. Some closing notes for you here. Daily tips, techniques, sales content, and perspective is available for you on the gram. Follow us at JB sales training, all one word and engage with us there. It's you and our connection to you that drives our ability to deliver what you need the most.

Share this episode with your network. It helps deliver curated value that came from you, which is a big part of building your own brand. It also helps to share the message of growth to those in your network that might need it. Lastly, we've got some amazing value coming to our on-demand members in the near future. So be sure and become a member today so that you can take advantage of everything that we've got in our pipeline for you. Also, be sure and tune in to Morgan J. Ingram's one-up formula on iTunes and Spotify. Find his new website at MorganJIngram.com and learn from the best. We'll see you next week, everyone, when we bring in another sales expert to help you sell better. Sell better.