Ep # 155: Building a Data-Driven SaaS Estate for CS & GTM ft. Oliver Quittek (CRO, Viio)

Oliver Quittek 00:01 One of the success indicators is, once you are able to show the 360 degree overview of SaaS, and, the usual way this is works is that any customer has an idea of how many SaaS apps and subscriptions and AI tools out there. Then they almost fall off the chair when they see the actual numbers. Taylor Kenerson 00:23 Welcome to the Hyperengage Podcast. We are so happy to have you along our journey. Here, we uncover bits of knowledge from some of the greatest minds in tech. We unearthed the hows, whys, and whats that drive the tech of today. Welcome to the movement. Adil Saleh 00:43 Hey, greetings everybody. This is Adil the Hyperengage podcast, and I know that it's, been amazing some of the few least recent episodes that we have. And, we've covered, platforms from data infrastructure helping these enterprises as well as like data orchestration, helping these GTM marketing sales support teams, with the best data, and visualization and, analysis and, making sure that they get the specialized version of, the, their, AI agents that we explored a lot in the last three months. So today we are gonna be talking, about, this startups. This is the, one of the biggest problems, from the startups to enterprise, is that how they can manage their SaaS spend, given this such a boom and huge noise of, AI native platforms, across all the, or segments, especially for enterprises, like it is so hard for them to, number one- finalize, how to spend, how to optimize the spend, how to evaluate platforms based on spend, how to indicate where they're spending and, having a 360 view of their entire application spend. that has been one of the biggest problem. And this is what we're gonna be talking about with the, with the CRO, at Viio- Oliver. Today, Viio is a platform that works with more than 60,000, application helping SaaS companies from, small to mid-size to large enterprises, with SaaS spend management. Thank you very much, Oliver, for taking the time. Oliver Quittek 02:20 Thanks so much Adil for having us and having me, looking forward to the conversation. Adil Saleh 02:26 Love that. So now thinking about, I know that, this has been the problem and this category is going to evolve even more. I know that spending is the biggest thing. Every startup today thinks about doing more with less, trying to optimize tools and resources, trying to cut out costs for various different reasons, because number one, they're not getting enough funds. They want to intentionally bootstrap it, with this AI and, all of this, if they can do a whole lot more, versus an enterprise that is, that is bombarded with a lot of technologies and a lot of teams are using, like on average, I would say one team is using, eight to 15, External, like third party toolings in their organization. So thinking about an enterprise of, let's say a Midscale enterprise, they're using 35 to 55 different, third party vendors. That doesn't include professional services, that doesn't include consultants that. These are just productized services. So how do you see this, as a CRO, this, this problem from a, of course, from a potential standpoint, as well as, how big, the need of this, in, in, in, this DNA, especially in the Europe? Oliver Quittek 03:44 Yeah, good question. I think what intrigued me right out of the gates coming on board, with Viio, was that. I guess the total addressable market is almost indefinite because every company that works with SaaS and AI at some point will have a scale where the cost saving elements on unused, potentially wasted licenses is going to be a big enough item to really look into. And, I guess you have seen the early movers like in tech and modern innovative startup scale-ups that embrace this way more than I guess the big enterprise companies. Also, these guys already have some sort of Tech and tooling in place to, to get some of those insights. even though I think there's still so much niche and niche left also with the bigger companies where we can contribute value and switch the lights on how their SaaS estate actually looks like. And, Fantastic segue, right? The numbers that you just quoted, I guess is what you, but what you want to believe that you have once you actually see it, it's, it's in the hundreds and for as organizations above 10,000 employees, it's in the thousands of the SaaS apps and subscriptions that just flourish somewhere in the organization without, central IT having any chance or idea. Who these apps are and, and who have bought them. So that's, the problem that we try to solve and help our customers to, to get on top on. Adil Saleh 05:19 Okay, love that. And Oliver, I know that the way that you guys are approaching, I know there are not a lot of platforms, but again, at the end of the day, SaaS spending, analytics, all of this, is, more of also a part of these finance teams and all. So how do you, incompensate In terms of feature sets, UI functionality, I would say user experience, for these, finance teams that are actually going to, help teams, and talk to the teams to justify that spend. could you walk us through a little bit, about, about. Oliver Quittek 06:01 Yeah. I think what we've seen over the last couple of years, and also guess identifying and, fine tuning our ideal customer profile a lot is that with smaller companies, let's say from a hundred to 200 employees, give and take, there's not many buyer personas that actually interested in the problem, right? In compliance from an IT's perspective and all stuff like where's the data being hosted from the different apps and, vendors and who has a license and have you optimized the license cost, but the CFO in these. Segments. The CFO is most likely the one person that spends so broadly that has a real interest, both in terms of cost savings potential, but also the compliance footprint of the organization. The bigger the, organizations gets, I think you can slowly see a transition both in terms of who is budget responsible for the SaaS tooling, which goes over to IT Then also who is managing the SaaS, which also more and more becomes IT So there's a shift in responsibility. Also buyer persona. So I guess for mid-size companies and enterprises, it's becoming the director, IT, the CIO, who is the one that basically acts the mini CFO and has the same agenda as a CFO for SMBs. That's exactly who we try to help. the way it works is basically by discovering a 360 degree overview over all the different AI and SaaS tools that are out there. And, typically a normal IT department, they have. Let's say a hundred percent control over everything central. Everything that they have been part of purchasing, where they did the IT due diligence and the vetting of the vendors. They know it exists. And this is also where they apply their processes and, workflows. So this is, managed absolutely tightly and oftentimes players like your. Microsoft Google of these worlds that underlying build the backbone of any organizations are big ticket item. They're very costly, so everybody knows them, so they're out in the open and being managed. I think that. The challenge really starts when it becomes the decentral part of SaaS or even shadow IT This is when I guess guys like myself and I'm guilty as charged buy some new AI stuff on the credit card, right? I, know exactly. I have a need now. I want to make this available to me on my team, and I know exactly that I'm dodging the official process of getting IT involved to, to vet the vendor. And also getting a potential procurement department involved in, I guess negotiating the better price. Because the value of, I guess most of these decentral, substack in marketing, in sales and engineering and product is in the applications itself, right? It's the people that are buying them. The CROs, the CMOs and so on, they're not concerned so much with the amount of discount that you get. It's more can you afford it? Do we have the budget for it? And once you have it, it helps you to get, ahead, like in terms of revenue, production, degeneration, employer branding, whatever you task with, like product delivery. so nobody really has too much interest essentially to optimize these things. And, what you then typically see is that companies in some, they waste a lot of funds or budget on overlapping tools. I guess project management tools are. Oftentimes, rolled out a one version in marketing, another version in sales, and then there's oftentimes a third version somewhere else where the tools itself do 80% of the same stuff. So you can easily consolidate this if you knew that they all were available. So that's what we help with. So there's also very easy route to, to cost savings. And I guess then there's the compliance part of it, right? Being really able to, to let the vendors list them and then start. Also organizing them with assigning ownership of the different applications and vendors so that you know exactly who within the organization needs to go in a room once the renewal is up, and then have the conversation, what do we do with this application? Do we wanna scale it up down? Do we wanna keep it, do we wanna discard it? what's the play here? And, I guess this you can only do based on a 360 degree overview. And then data and insights on what's happened throughout the license period. If you don't have it, I guess there definitely is a tendency of too many of those contracts going into auto-renewal, because again, guilty as charged the values in the tools from the decentral substack and not in the optimization of the, cost. that's, I guess a very, in a nutshell, what we, trying to do with our customers. Adil Saleh 11:08 Absolutely love the way that you are, approaching, because at the end of the day, there has to be someone that needs to take the responsibility and ownership, just like customer success is. is this more responsible for the revenue retention? Expansion? Sales is more for acquisition. Marketing is more for, lead generation. You got my point. As of, as much as you have, served in the mid-size companies. I know things are different at startups. They don't even have their CFO, they don't even have their, the kind of even revenue teams that they're not like well defined. So now thinking about, the mid-size to, or like small enterprise companies, what kind of key, personas that you think, that, that have a greater impact on the outcome? Oliver Quittek 11:56 again, back to I guess also our USP all comes with the discovery of the apps and you wanna have really precise data so that you can rely on the data that you get and, you can work with this data. So to that end, we we build a multi-source discovery engines where we tap into. large variety of direct API integrations to the most prominent SaaS vendors. And then we tap into the CASBs. I had to learn also what that means, that cloud access security brokers, so they get all the device information on who, where are the login events to the different, applications so we can. Take that out as well and then show it. And then you have endpoint discovery, I guess the typical stuff, what, what you usually would do. Browse, extension, desktop agent, just to index what's happening and based on this view of the world. Then you can start, Kicking off different value streams. in the companies, the smaller ones, you will most likely, as we talked about, I have a financial buyer persona who's interested in the cost savings and, it's not really, there's no IT focus. So what's important there is basically to provide an outcome and, and to deliver it through a managed service component so that the CFO doesn't have to compromise on the big projects on market growth, market, penetration, all the big ticket items that have multiple RI but can keep the house by having an external partner that basically does the heavy lifting. So that's like the value proposition towards the SMBs in mid-market. I think it's, it's depends on the, structure of the organization. As soon as there is a procurement department is a huge value add internally, right? Because if you have a generalist procurement department, there will be bandwidth to negotiate the big SaaS agreements, typically your Microsoft EOP what it can be, right? And then we can take the long tail. And negotiate the space on data for our, customers. And if you go enterprise, obviously they fully flash, right? They have an IT sourcing team, the category managers that do all of that already in-house. And I think the struggle there is that the, view into SaaS is limited to what's centrally known. And, I guess discovering essential Saas or even shadow IT is. is then the same as, identifying additional spend. And, once you have identified additional spend, you can lift it into your standard procurement flows and processes and you can optimize. I guess the cost and the savings based on a larger playing field. So basically it's like a win situation where IT gets the, data and insights. Also in terms of compliance, procurement gets the data and the insights so that can optimize it, and at the end, the finance buyer persona is the beneficiary because both budgets most likely get optimized. Adil Saleh 15:06 So a lot of these, a lot of these, slogans that I see associated with, with, with your platform, is like you say, like 20% of the, SaaS spend every month, 25, 20, 20 25%. you know how. I would say how true that is, and, for, a B B2B SaaS perspective. And, how do you guys give the reporting and everything, reporting dashboard to these, finance teams like CFOs, and, people responsible for the spend? And number one, number two. I know there's, there's so much of SaaS tooling that, goes above and beyond their, usage base, unit tooling. So I know you can integrate with the payment platforms like Stripe and all of these platforms, to get that data, like monetary values and all of that. how's your measuring success, for these customers? I would say for these CFOs. and what are, what is the, key success metrics that you have? You talk about a startup with, Around 200 to 300 employees. Oliver Quittek 16:15 Yeah. So first off, it's not us who came up with the, 20, 25% of all software spend is potentially wasted. This comes straight out of Gartner research. So this is, almost that's how the, world runs. So we basically just tapping into this, research and how Gartner has presented it. I think, the picture that, makes me also understand this is like the children's room. Unless you clean it up every evening, it most likely looks as if a bomb exploded. And the same is with AI and SaaS. You can clean this up today, then it's totally fine. But as you said yourself, there's so many new native SaaS platforms and the AI platforms coming about that. Once you. Lose the grip on those, it just will explode again. So that is, from a methodology's perspective, also, why customers get value over time from this, if you're looking into, the cost reduction side of things, when you start optimizing your actual contracts. There is a diminishing return on this because at some point they will be optimized. This depends on how good you were negotiating your first serve and the first initial agreement, and then how good you are negotiating over time, and obviously once you have data, you do a better job. But you can say the cost reduction piece, most likely has its end after two, three years. When the contracts are optimized from a financial perspective as if you're the CFO, the next best thing is then cost avoidance, right? You don't want the room to explode again and the toys to fly about. You wanna make sure that the effort that you put in stays there. So instead of getting reduction in, in, in cost, you get. You get to avoid cost, and I guess we all know it. Every SaaS vendor comes with the price increases up on renewal between what, 5%, 20%, depending on the category. So if you take that and, you can cut into this and, keep your last year's price. You still pay the same amount, but you just dodge the bullet and, you can do this easier based on data and, I guess finding a common ground and narrative in the data also with your account manager from the vendors, instead if you select a hard muscle approach, which should be fair, obviously also works at times so that's I guess how we. How we provide value. And then we report this. We have a procurement module within the platform where you can track all the different renewal cases and start off by what's the baseline price, which could be your first offer that you received or last year's price. And then you start doing the negotiations with the, the vendors potentially with help from us. Benchmark insights, price point, insights, and then you have an outcome, which most likely is better than the first, the baseline price. And then you track how much money you have saved throughout being able to have a fine grip on your licenses and using this in the renewal conversations. And that's a readily accessible for everybody who has platform access. So the CFOs can obviously just look into what's the, Potential savings pipeline look like. How much have we already completed in savings? What's the outlook for the rest of the fiscal, very straightforward to, to any financial buyer persona to understand where the, cost saving exercises at. Adil Saleh 19:52 Interesting. And when, talk about, your post-sales, I would say, the enablement team that does that work with some sort of professional services, people like that are working in your customer's environments, to figure out those data points. A lot of these, these products for your customers, they're like hardware. A lot of the data that, comes, from that is, is like hardware plus software. So those tools are different, like BI tools and all this. So tell us more about what kind of integrations that you have available, in terms of, for your internal success, network tracking for your, customer value, success and, how you're driving value paths for your customers based on those data points. Oliver Quittek 20:43 So I guess again, back to the, discovery of SaaS applications. One of the success indicators is once you are able to show the 360 degree overview of SaaS, and, the usual way this is works is that any customer has an idea of how many SaaS apps and subscriptions and AI tools out there. Then they almost fall off the chair when they see the actual numbers. So that is already success criteria one, which is fairly easy to achieve by wiring the different discovery mechanisms in place and based on that, right? Then you start. Looking into usage patterns, what applications are being locked into the most, and then you integrate those through APIs currently around 70 to 80. Direct API integrations to the most prominent SaaS vendors out there. So typically Datadog your HubSpot, Salesforce, like these kind of, of, prominent vendors. And then I guess, and this is where, although most of these guys, they have portals, right? Where they show you have the license, how this license is being used. But first off, it's different portals. You need to find your way around. And then the question is, what is usage in a vendor portal? And the, definition of this can differ. So what you wanna do as a company, once you start engaging with license management, you, wanna have the same standard and you wanna have the same overview in, one cockpit instead of having to go multiple places. So that is, also the next success criteria. Then why aren't. As many APIs in there to extract license data and usage data and plug the holes where the vendor APIs have holes in what they report through the API, so that any customer has the full 360 overview on licenses date. And then the platform itself has, Algorithm most likely is, is way too, too advanced to say, but we're tracking all the unused licenses that haven't been used for more than 60 days and label them as potentially wasted or. unused Licenses Adil Saleh 22:55 Sorry. Oliver Quittek 22:56 Yeah, go. Adil Saleh 22:57 Yeah. for, all of these data points that you guys are tracking, are you using any kind of, a wrapper, that, any platform, any external outsource tooling? Third, third party tooling. what is the process Oliver Quittek 23:15 also foundational, I guess the. To explain it in the best possible way, there's different layers of discovery. So foundationally speaking, if you are running your shop on Microsoft, you would integrate with, the standard Microsoft APIs for your intra id, where you get your active directory. Then the audit log from Microsoft and 3 6 5 itself. For the Google customers, you have the equivalent to, exactly that. That's the baseline that gives us access to who are the users, how can we map usage against. Licenses. Then, I mentioned the CASP's beforehand already, so this is a next data layer where these might already be in place so we can tap into their data and repurpose it In terms of application discovery, because the data's already there, the upside is. You don't necessarily have them to roll out a browser extension or desktop agent. On top of that, some of our customers, they say, that's fine. They can work with this data. Some others want it even more granular. That then you go the next layer on, top of that. And I think what's, if you talk to IT departments, I think that is. It is different tendencies in different companies when it comes to culture, right? Some of them are very sensitive to installing agents because it might slow productivity of the device. Some others are very sensitive towards it because. The culture might be a little bit offset in terms of, are some people now spying on me and what I'm, using? So not having to rely on endpoint discovery, but still having sufficient data makes, and also the customer journey easy and the time between setup and actual results rather fast. I think that's a huge plus from Viio that we can balance the approach based on the requirements and also the, possibilities with any of our customers. Adil Saleh 25:21 Interesting. And, thinking about, I know that this, it takes a lot, work with, Microsoft environments and data and security. I'm sure, you guys have I read about you, that you guys are SOC 2 compliant. How is that flowing in Europe? How challenging was it, in Europe compared to the US? That's a big question because a lot of these, these, tech SaaS subscription model companies, when they go into the Europe say there's so much of regulations and, even Europeans, they're like, there's so many good platforms coming out of Europe, but they have their base in, in the US how do you see data security and all of this, what's your viewpoint? Oliver Quittek 26:05 I think you have to tick all those boxes right in, in one way or another. I guess the. The European standard and which might, be even more beneficial is the ISO certification, which I guess from my understanding is basically exactly the same as so SOC two, type two, there's obviously nuances, but it, the outcome is the same and the aim of why you're doing the certifications and live up to them comes from the same place. so I guess difference ISO Europe, SOC two Small is more like US Centric. We've chose even before my time to go the SOC two route and also European companies are happy that there is a certification in place. Very early on in our own journey, since we also still are a startup scale up, right? So that this box is already ticked and we are taking data serious. And then obviously you can add on GDR GDPR compliance and all these things which you have to be able to document alongside a data processing agreement so that you even get access to company's data. And I guess Microsoft and Google is the backbone. So people actually wanna be hundred percent certain that, damage is, being done by, exposing those end points and, obviously we have the documentation in place. Adil Saleh 27:26 Love that. Love that. And, A lot of this goes in, you being a revenue leader yourself and, you have a team. Like what kind of culture that you guys want to instill? I'm so glad to see that your team is pretty lean, but you guys are some experienced folks and when you work with, people wherever in the world, they look up to leaders, they look at the top line and and, they actually look up to you. So what kind of culture you have at, at, your team and, what is that one thing that you guys are known for? Oliver Quittek 28:00 From an, from our internal culture? Adil Saleh 28:04 Yes. Oliver Quittek 28:05 Not sure whether we, not sure whether we known for our culture yet since, I guess we, we, if there, was even more scale, the word would get out more. But I think from my personal values, I think honesty, transparency. And then I guess creating an environment where every individual feels a true sense of belonging. In whatever shape you, you rock up where you don't have to be a version of yourself to actually be able to do your job, but where you welcome as who you are and then you take in the team and you grow with that and, you add I guess skills and abilities and experience on, top. So I think that's what we are driven by. Straightforwardness. I guess this in, terms of business, I think we are very easy to do business with because we wanna obviously get the word out, get as many new logos on as possible. But it also means this honesty and directness also means that we tell our prospects if you're not, if you think we're not the right fit, we, don't have to build a customer base where you typically oversell and then under deliver. I guess we all have seen this so many times in the past. It's just not a model that works. And, Also, I guess from a startup's perspective, you don't have the luxury to, to half-ass things you like this personal touch. And then also being able to transition these relationships into a customer relationships when they, based on, the values that I, quoted, everything becomes very easy and, and straightforward. Adil Saleh 29:49 Yes. Yes. and having the right intentions to do, and honesty, authenticity, and intentions on top makes it real. Like you go, we are meeting like more than 9,000 F founders, across New York and SF next month. And, the only thing that I told my team and, my co-founders is that whatever you do, whatever you speak or whatever you do, just do it with the right intentions. It's as simple as that. And, even if you don't and land well product wise or you wanna sell your product, pitch and all of that, you will. You will see it on your face that you have the right intentions, and that will help people to, understand that authentic part in you. And that way you'll build relationships. And relationships are everything, I'm, definitely, I'm, willing to invite you guys as well, if you have anybody on your team across, New York, Austin, Texas, Florida, and San Francisco. between September 28th to November 2nd, we are doing, events all across the US and, not just, to, do what kind of like the impact that we are making as a product, as a podcast community. But also to understand, our people and stay closer to our people and help them facilitate them with doing these networking sessions, bringing on these, industry leaders to, learn from them and how people have done it for scale and how they can replicate it for their processes. No event has ever $1 ticket, so it's all a no ticket. It's all exclusive for people, that we really admire. And, anybody that, you have on your team, in the US is, welcome to join. Oliver Quittek 31:33 Thanks so much for the invite, Adil, Also, I guess part of being the CRO of a startup, you need to know what you can afford with the resources. So the US hasn't been really on the map as a market because we simply don't have the muscle yet. Definitely on, on my personal list of markets where. There's so much potential. Always its right. Everybody wants to take part in that because you have fantastic people there, but it's too early for us. thank you. But, this, we won't make it this time. Hopefully in a year two from now, I can say Yes. Now we have our first foothold in the States. You open an office and Yes, sure. We gonna pop back. Adil Saleh 32:17 Don't worry, we're gonna do next, summer in, in Berlin as well. So we'll catch you there. You, know that I'll catch you wherever you are. Oliver Quittek 32:25 Good. But Berlin is easy. that's a one hour flight from Copenhagen and not a problem at all. Adil Saleh 32:33 Yes, Berlin is going to be our next stop We have so many people waiting and, and I have been doing this for about four years now, this podcast. And, a lot of people that you know, I've had on my podcast and they say like, why don't you come to Berlin? why don't you look around Berlin and see how tech is going There. perfect. So Oliver it was really very nice, talking to you and I love the energy. I love the way that you've explained this, how you, you know, being a CR leader, it's quite a sensitive place in a startup, to be very honest compared to a very large, enterprise company. I thank you for all the efforts and all the impact that you're making, and thank you for your time today. Oliver Quittek 33:16 Adil, Right back at you. Thanking me. thank you so much for having me. Was a pleasure. And let's, stay in touch. Yeah, Adil Saleh 33:23 sure. Absolutely. Have a good rest of the day. Thank you so very much for staying with us on the episode. Please hear your feedback at adil@hyperengage.io We definitely need it. we will see you next time and another guest on the stage with some concrete tips on how to operate better as a customer success leader and how you can empower. Engagements with some building, some meaningful relationships. We qualify people for the episode just to make sure we bring the value to the listeners. Do reach us out if you want to refer any CS leader. Until next time, goodbye and have a good rest of your day.