Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to another NachoTuesday. Today, I have Anand here with Zoho, and you guys have probably heard about the company. But without further ado, I'd love to see if he could introduce his company and some of the exciting stuff that they're working on over there lately. Great, Andy. Thanks for the opportunity. Zoho is very keen to partner with many of your customers and see how we can add value to them. To introduce Zoho, you know, Zoho offers software products that help businesses address a wide range of business issues, from customer management to financial management to people management. Through 50 plus products, we have about 90 million users globally. Yeah, it's 90 million with about 600,000 paying customers to address their business with us, right? So, what is interesting about the way Zoho approaches is that there is a fundamental shift in the way that businesses are run today. You know, we don't live in silos anymore, and businesses are tired of systems that don't talk to each other. Executives of today deal with a range of business issues, from managing sales, managing people, and managing profitability. They want a solution that kind of integrates teams seamlessly and gives them a unified view of where their businesses are headed. Now, that's where Zoho stands out. Practically for every business function, be it HR management, whether it be sales management, be it customer support, we have solutions that help them address their business challenges effectively, right? So, all these 50 apps work seamlessly. No more data silos and no more wasted efforts of patching between product A and B, and then there is a breakage of data. So, that's where we are able to bring in tremendous value to our customers across segments, across industries, pretty much every country in the world. And that's where we stand. But the second most important thing that we want our customers to, our prospective customers to know is that Zoho cares a lot for data security and privacy. We have been very vocal about it. This is not today. This has been more than a decade that Sridhar Vembu, our CEO, has been very vocal that we would not use customer data to monetize. We will not monitor our customers. And so, security and privacy is something that we are very, very conscious about, and that's like a North Star metric for each of our products that gets shipped. And that's something that's really valuable, particularly in a world where there are a lot of trackers set in the products, like the businesses know what you're doing and they can monitor your performance, monitor your business processes, and monetize them. But we are very, very focused on giving that security and privacy. I mean, yeah, we are a solution provider that could help enhance the productivity of our customers without compromising on security and privacy, and that I think is something we're very proud of. Yeah, it's a huge trend these days. Um, I just interviewed the CEO of Zapier. They're really focused on privacy as a business. Um, and you know, it's great that you guys are putting that at the forefront as well too for your company. Um, it's funny, yeah, there's a recent AI tool that came out, and somebody was using it and they asked, like, "Hey, do you know where I am?" And the AI tool is trained to say, "No, I don't." And then it says, "Where's the nearest McDonald's?" The guy said, and it said, "Oh, it's just a block away from you." And he said, "Hey, hey I thought you said you didn't know where I was" It's good to have that as a party, yeah, yeah. Um, so tell us more about your role over there at Zoho and where did you get to where you're at today? Um, how did your career path get started? Well, yeah, I focus on revenue growth initiatives across Zoho, and my role here is to find new avenues of growth, whether it is cross-selling, upsell, or rolling out affiliate programs and working with the ISV ecosystem across the world. We work very closely with each and every ISV partner, and so my role primarily is to get more revenue streams added to Zoho and make them scale. But what got me here is an interesting question. Um, I'm a financial professional by training, and in the first job that I took in an aluminum manufacturing plant, you know, the dusty plants, so my CEO would ask me to always tell him behind the numbers what is happening. So he would not allow me to say, "This is the P&L, this is our forecast." He would say, "Did you go to the shop floor? Do you know what is happening there? Do you know how aluminum is produced?" So I used to go, and, you know, that got me really interested in going beyond numbers to see what happens on the ground. So it's always fascinating to see how businesses are run, what drives customers to buy, what drives productivity, what drives cost savings. So that got me really interested in the business and the commercial side of things, and, you know, one led to the other, and here I am at Zoho. That's great. Yeah, it's a good journey there. Um, I totally agree. I really appreciate, especially when executives get to the front lines because sometimes, you know, sometimes you just see a bunch of reports, even data doesn't really make sense unless you get there and actually talk to your customers and actually understand what's going on on the ground or the virtual ground, if you will, too. Right? You know, I think it was the Starbucks CEO recently that actually went to go serve at the drive-throughs just to kind of see what the operations were on the ground, right? Absolutely, yes. Yeah, something way different than getting a report and to actually see it live yourself. Yeah, that's a great path to growth there. So you guys are big on partner-led growth over there, I would imagine, correct? Absolutely, yes. And, yeah, so our approach towards partner-led growth is driven through four or five different kinds of partnerships. I'll focus on the primary ones, which are very interesting. The first and foremost is collaborating with ISVs. You know, some of those ISVs could be our competitors, but the philosophy that I focus on is complete it, collaborate. Okay, with giving customers a choice. Say, for example, we compete with Product A in the CRM space, but our customers are comfortable using our disk, which is a ticketing management tool, with a preferred CRM of their choice. It's our responsibility to give them the freedom to choose what they want. And, you know, so we are very focused on collaborating. We collaborate with about 500 ecosystem partners, from very large ones in the world to the smallest ones operating out of, say, a country in Africa. But there are customers. They need their telephony vendor to be integrated with our CRM, so we go all out to partner with the ISV ecosystem. And that's a two-way street. You know, we promote them, they promote us, and that's one way greatly we acquire customers. The second is influencers and affiliate partners. You know, consider the options that are there in front of them, how to decide on which one is good over the other. So, we work very closely with influencers. We educate the influencers, we help them promote our products in the right way. And therefore, a lot of our focus is on creating those avenues for them to learn about our products, give an authentic review out there, and let the customers choose. So, influencers and affiliate partners are one second really important thing. The third one is the reseller partners, particularly in markets where access is difficult for us due to linguistic challenges or sometimes the socioeconomic fabric is not good enough for us to set up our own offices. We rely a lot on our reseller partners. They are our wheels to the market, and they work with us very closely. They help us nurture the message that we want to give that suits that region. And the last but not the least is customization and implementation partners, and they are the most important ones of all for us because they are the ones who are going to help our customers get the maximum value through our products. So, they do a top-quality implementation, and their customers are able to see the real value. So, the stickiness of the customer comes through how well they use the products. And so, implementation partners are really good, and many times, we know for, for example, for every one dollar we make in the early years of our customer journey with us, our partners make five dollars. And we are very comfortable with it. We want them to do well. We want them to make more. So, the ecosystem should grow along with this, and we will automatically be taken care of if the ecosystem is happy. So, yeah, partner-led growth is something that we're very, very focused on, and that's giving us tremendous results. That's great. Yeah, rising tide lifts all boats, right? So, I love your strategy of making it a win-win for you and your partners. You know, I think that's a key for partner-led growth. What other kind of tips would you offer for a startup that's looking to build a partnership strategy that can scale with them as their business grows? Mapped out, okay. It's you can come up with great content yourself. You can really have a fantastic website. You can have great documentation. But they always want someone else who is an authentic reviewer of your product and someone who can talk about your products with a domain authority, right? So, it's really important for companies to map those influencers, engage with them, educate them, and then they would be helping us talk, promote our products in the right way, as I said. So, that's something that I think is really important. The second thing is what we call the virality coefficient of the apps, right? So, how many of your customers are referring new customers? That's a great metric in my view that tells your customers are happy about what they are getting from you. As a software vendor, right, so how we can engage with customers, how happy they are, how we can help them promote our products. So that's something that's a conscious effort to listen to customers, what ails them, you know, in using a product, and how we can help them get that satisfaction and then kind of be shameless in requesting them to promote us because if they are happy, most of our customers say, "Why not? I get tremendous value." And the third way could be co-marketing with industry peers, as I said, build the top-class integration with the ecosystem, travel along with your ecosystem partners. I think those two or three things would be a great way, you know, instead of paying through the nose to acquire some leads through digital marketing. You can do these things, this would be organic, and this would be sustained growth. That's how Zoho has always grown. That's a great point, yeah, because most software, I mean, now that I work at a B2B SaaS marketplace, I hear about all the great stuff out there, of course, but mostly, you know, I've discovered software in the past through word of mouth, right? So it's happy customers of a product that they're using. So if I say I have a problem, I need a CRM system, you know, they'll recommend Zoho or some other company, right? So it's very important to have a high Net Promoter Score with your audience and really make sure that they're engaged with the product, they love it, and, you know, they recommend it to other people. And I love the point that you make about asking for the referral as well, too, right? A lot of people make the mistake, they don't even ask. You know, yeah, absolutely, it's not that much just to ask them. If they don't want to do it, great. If they do, even better for you. So, yeah, absolutely, very good point. Yeah, yeah, great. So what other growth hack, SaaS growth hack tips do you have for this year that you think are kind of trendy, say if you're an early-stage startup trying to get your initial customers? What would you recommend for them? Well, if I find a way to offer some top-class onboarding experience, right? So you can always get your customers to sign up for your product. That's only one part of the long journey that you have with the customers. So a great onboarding experience is going to be something that they really need to work on. Right? So what is important is how you can find a way to do that. The second thing is, I see that verticalization as a process is becoming more and more important. Gone are the days where horizontal apps, which can do, which is like a plain vanilla, people are moving to say, "Can you help me solve the problem that's very specific to my industry? I don't want to waste time finding a consultant, doing customization, and then implementation." So people want verticalization as a really important solution that we want to offer. So yeah, if we can focus on that, plus a great onboarding experience together, I think that would give them the real acquisition. Because when you focus on micro markets and you can talk the language that resonates with that market, say, for example, you're going after the salon and spa industry to give a specific solution, if you engage with them, talking about their business problems and how they go about solving them, and give them the tool, they're more than happy. And generally, there is this great herd mentality that happens. Therefore, make sure that the onboarding experience is top-notch and they are able to get maximum value in the shortest possible lead tech. We have something called a hypercare window, the first 21 days of a customer moving to a paid subscriber mode. Those 21 days are super critical. In fact, we have people who are assigned to talk to these customers almost twice a week, and their personal email IDs are shared to say, "Write to this person if you want," and they work with a company like Zoho where there are 50 apps. There's still one onboarding person, and that person makes sure that everything that the customers need to make sure that they get a very good start. That's something super critical. Partners and onboarding managers play a very important role. The second thing is what we have learned is if you have a customer who is using a product along with, say, five or six other apps in the ecosystem through an integration. So if you build strong integrations, you can say this as a tree with a lot of roots. Okay, those roots are integrations with the ecosystem partners. Those integrations, if they are already there in your product when the customer is able to use the product in conjunction with those five or six, it's very difficult for them to uproot because they need to find a new product. Those products should have those integrations available. There's going to be a lot of breakage. And so, in fact, Zoho offers our own solutions, that's our USB, but we, as I said, we compete and collaborate with our ecosystem, so we encourage our customers to choose what they want. And so that's the second thing that we see is a great way to retain customers. The third and most important thing is to show the human side of your company. That's very important and the brand connect and the connect with the ethos of the company is super critical. You know, we follow what we call as transnational localism. Through this, what we have done is we have got customer support executives in Africa, in the U.S., in the Middle East. They speak their language. They are present out there. The customers can walk into an office and see a human face. That builds huge trust. They are not talking to an automatic answering machine or chatbots. We are moving away from that to this human side, and that brings in a tremendous connect. You know, our ability to retain customers is primarily driven by the human side of Zoho that we keep exposing. Yeah, that's a great point. You know, when everybody moves right, you go left. So a lot of people are trying to adopt more and more automation strategies these days, which is good in some regards, but a lot of people overdo it. So yeah, a lot of companies now, and you know, salespeople are looking to go back to that human element, right? So a big strategic advantage I've seen for a lot of companies, exactly to your point, is that they bring back the human element. And you know, you bring in some faces there, get people to interact with people live, and it goes a lot further in the sales process for winning customers over and making them feel comfortable with your product. I'm excited to use it. So what other kind of companies do you see that have a great customer retention strategy? What makes them so great? Yeah, well, if you look at it, some top-of-the-mind examples could be Atlassian. It's a great example. You know, it started out with Jira as a software lifecycle management solution. They really understood their developer requirements, the developer community's requirements, and those software product companies' requirements. And they More services they got in a Trello into it then they got the bit bucket into it then they got the Confluence into it. What that led to is they are able to address multiple problems of their customers, you know, through one Consolidated Solution. That's a very powerful value proposition when that happens. The customers are able to get tremendous value from Atlassian, and that makes it that much more difficult for them to move away from Atlassian because it's difficult to find an alternate vendor who can actually help you address, and they have built a beautiful platform. That platform is open for people to build their own customizations and integrations. Right, so what it has led to, I think I could see great growth that they have had in the last five to ten years. It's primarily driven by the ability to understand their customers really well, add product adjacencies, and that kind of helps them hold on to a customer by delivering tremendous value. You know, not by using some contractual terms to bind them down, but truly adding value to the customers. I think they're a good example. I could see ServiceNow is another example. Yeah, yeah. So what, so with companies like that with a lot of value to offer, a lot of customers might come in for one particular problem. What would you recommend for companies that maybe have multiple products or multiple value propositions to better help serve that customer when they're coming in for a specific need? And then eventually, how do you onboard them to all the other solutions afterwards? Oh, but it's a great question. So as I said, our onboarding team, the role of that onboarding team is to talk business. They are not here to demonstrate the product. So how we train those onboarding teams is ask them the right questions. How are the customers using our tool? What is the problem they're trying to solve? How are they doing the marketing automation? How the marketing automation and CRM talks to each other? How CRM and your support tools talk to each other? So once you, it's like peeling the audience. Once you go to the root of the issue, then we know that the customer has these problems also that needs to be addressed, right? Or they, we realize that they are using some other tool. Maybe it's too expensive. They don't have to do. They can, they figure out themselves. And hey, Zoho, I think you have an e-sign solution. So I don't want to use Vendetta. I can use the whole CRM along with Zoho sign. Then they realize we have a ticketing management solution for customer support. So then they add. So automatically, those adjacencies come into play, provided we know what the customer's business is and what they're trying to solve for. So I think that's the real value that we should bring to the customers. Then cross-sell is a cakewalk. That's our experience, actually. That's a great point. Well, it sounds like you guys got to dial in. Um, you know, obviously highlighted by your guys' growth. You know, I've used a lot of your products in the past myself too. Um, so what other kind of growth tips would you recommend for early-stage startups that are looking to grow? Um, you did mention a few earlier, but do you have anything else that you might want to share with our audience? The networks we talked about, we had to be a customer reference. We can talk about influences. We can talk about that's something that's very critical because that gives a sustained way to acquire customers and grow. Okay, and that's something really important. The second thing is to Focus on cross-sell and upsell, and that comes with a deeper customer engagement. How good is your customer community engagement? How do you run your communities? How do you listen to your customers? In fact, I would read most of the support tickets myself just to know what the customer is saying, what has been the pain point, and how are we addressing them? So, listening to the customers, understanding the problems, building that ecosystem of a community that supports each other. I think those are small things which we can do in a sustained way that would have a much longer impact. You know, it's great to quickly raise some capital and put some money on acquiring leads, but it's so difficult to make it sustainable and scalable. And these measures, in my view, and I talked about ecosystem partnerships, we need to engage with our ecosystem partners and travel along with them to solve customer problems. Those mindsets, if we bring in, which are all sustained, they won't give you an impact next quarter, but in three quarters, you will see that it's going to give a sustained impact. That's something that I would say that they should focus on. Yeah, that's a great point. What stood out to me was "sustained," right? It's good to put in more work reading the emails and seeing what your customers are actually saying, and heck, even having conversations with them. I mean, anybody could look at a report and see what the data says, but I feel like the qualitative feedback you get from just listening to your customers and actually having a conversation with them is so powerful. Because you could see the emotions in it too, right? It's not just to see if they're excited about this or if they're confused. I even love going to events and doing pitches to people, right? And so I'll kind of work on pitching the product from different angles and see what people react to. And like, you know, if one of their eyes glaze over or if one of them is really excited to hear more about your product. So stuff like that is very, very powerful, I believe. I noticed that you didn't mention advertising at all. You know, would you like to elaborate on that? You know, we do some advertising, but we are very conscious that if we had to acquire customers by buying ad spaces, then we have a fundamental problem. That could be one of the means to acquire, but if that's the primary means to acquire customers and acquire leads, then we have a fundamental problem because the value proposition is not getting communicated well enough. That's the way we see it. So advertising is important. I wouldn't say no, but can it give a sustained, scalable, profitable model? I would always say no. You need to have a much wider, broad-based approach to acquiring leads, and that's the way. Yeah, yeah. I like your approach. It's more organic, right? And that's, you know, especially for startups, that's always the best way. Obviously, because you even passed that and you still use that methodology. But advertising is okay if you really have everything nailed. It could scale what you do, but nothing beats organic growth, actually, you know, hand-holding those customers through the process, winning them over one by one. That allows you to build a company from there. Um, I guess failure comes with any profession. Have you ever had a moment where you failed, and what did you learn from it? Yeah, uh, it's a good question also. So I think before coming to Zoho, a couple of other assignments I was doing, one of them was a co-founded a business consulting service, where we were doing Consulting Service, where we're doing management consulting for our customers. So we did very well. We got about 40 resources with a good presence. But what led me to rethink was, you know, Services business is not scalable. Scalable Solutions are when you're able to come out with a solution that multiple customers could use parallely, and that gives you the power to scale. So for me, the biggest learning is always look for solutions that can scale. Okay, and that's why I love product companies. You get your product right once, you're automatically taken care of, and your focus is on enhancing the product. But you're going to get your revenues coming in, and particularly SaaS kind of products, that's the biggest advantage. Once you have your customers in, if you're doing a great job of customer experience management, you can have the revenue streams coming in, and you can focus on the 2.0 of the product or getting the adjacent products in place. So you can actually add more value, add more revenue. So the biggest learning for me is, yeah, look to find solutions that can really scale and not something that's like a chicken and egg problem. You have either resources who are saying idle or your projects, but you know resources, you know. So yeah, that was my biggest learning. Yeah, I've been there before too myself. I had an agency back in the day, you know, a lot of great clients, big clients, and all that, but everybody wanted to work with me. And so it's hard to build a team, you know, like a service business when it was mostly strategic consulting. And yeah, I found that really hard. I had to be into more product development because I could take my ideas, put that into the product, and the product can actually scale. Right, absolutely. That model. So what's next for Zoho over the next five years? Well, I think one important thing that we see is there is a significant upmarket momentum. Today, as we speak, there is a PR that went out today. We have had a 65% CAGR in the upmarket globally momentum. And so a lot of our customers are seeing the value of what Integrated Solutions can bring, even at scale. Right, so our largest customer is about 50,000 users plus, and they are using a suite of our apps that includes collaboration tools, customer management tools, and other developer tools. So the biggest momentum that we see coming is we have focused heavily towards upmarket, and we are building our ecosystem partners who can support us with the upmarket momentum. We're building a product-as-a-platform, so they can come and integrate, customize, extend, you know. So we are, from a product side, we are addressing that. From the ecosystem side, we are addressing that. And we are building the complete ecosystem of solutions that we can go and take to our customers and say, "Hey, you know, here is where a solution that can address your customer management needs, your operations needs, and your collaboration requirements under one roof. And so no more data silos, no more concerns around how do I build complex integrations that would keep breaking every month because there's some change in the other product, right?" So yeah, upmarket momentum is something that's really coming. Second thing we see is verticalization. I talked about this some time back as well. We see the next wave of growth is going to come through verticalization, and we are very focused on vertical-specific offerings. And when I say offerings, there would be end-to-end offerings from acquiring customers to managing customers to supporting customers and the entire suite of apps that are needed for them. Verticalization, right? You know, I talked about this some time back as well. We see the next wave of growth is going to come through verticalization, and we are very focused on vertical-specific offerings. And when I say offerings, there would be end-to-end offerings from acquiring customers to managing customers to supporting customers and the entire suite of apps that are needed for them to run businesses. It could be verticals across the spectrum, say, as I said, kind of businesses, you know. So verticals are something that we are going to be focused on. And last but not least, we talked about transnational localism. We are very focused on that, and we want to be as close to our customers as possible. That gives them the trust, that gives them the confidence that here is a company that I can trust my business with because there is someone I can put a face to, you know, and I can engage. Yeah, so exciting times, tremendous opportunities, and you know, the people that have local relationships there are no name out there. They know the local customs and how to integrate properly. Because it's nothing worse than a lot of American companies do this. They try to break into other markets and like, "Hey, we're Americans, you know." And everybody's like, "Well, you don't get our customs. You don't even speak, you can even write this email correctly." Um, glad to see you guys doing that. But yeah, once again, Anon, thanks so much for coming on today. You know, really appreciate it, learned a lot myself, and I'm sure everybody else is watching this and we'll continue to watch this as we share and promote it. We'll continue to learn a lot from this. So once again, thanks. And everybody that's watching this episode today, take a look at Zoho's suite of products. It's a one-stop shop that they're building over there. So check them out today in our B2B SaaS Marketplace. We have great discounts available for them. And go take a look at them today and start with one product that serves your needs. And they have their onboarding team there to help you with anything else that might be able to help you going forward as your company continues to grow. Excellent. Thanks for the opportunity. It was fantastic interacting with you.