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B2B Agility with Greg Kihlström™: MarTech, E-Commerce, & Customer Success
#35: Aligning organizations for success, with Robert Chatwani, President, DocuSign
00:35:02
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- [00:01]
Unknown Speaker
What's the state of your website? If you're looking for a new digital experience platform or DXP to run your digital experiences, I have the book for you. The Agile Brand Guide to Digital Experience Platforms is part of my best selling series of MarTech books. In this book I explore and demystify DXPs and look at the roles a digital experience platform should play, the different types on the market, as well as how to initially evaluate platforms, then how to best implement a DXP once you've selected it. The book also features a forward from Rupali Jain, Chief Product Officer at leading DXP provider Optimizely, as well as several other thought leaders in the industry. Learn more and get a copy in print or digital now by going to the Agile Brand guide website at www.agilebrandguide.com.
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Robert Chadwani
The Agile.
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Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to the B2B Agility Podcast where we look at the factors that drive success in B2B marketing with a focus on the people, processes, data and platforms that make B2B brands stand out and thrive in a competitive marketplace. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on MarTech marketing operations and CX best selling Author and speaker. Now let's get on to the show.
- [01:23]
Unknown Speaker
How aligned is your organization when it comes to driving growth? Are internal silos or misaligned goals or expectations holding you back from reaching your full potential? Today we're joined by Robert Chadwani, President and General Manager of growth at DocuSign. Before joining DocuSign in 2023, Robert was the Chief Marketing Officer at Atlassian, where he helped scale the business to nearly 3 billion in revenue. He also held leadership roles at ebay where his team supported 35 billion in annual trading volume. Welcome to the show, Robert.
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Robert Chadwani
Thank you Greg. Great to be here.
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Unknown Speaker
Yeah, Looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in though, why don't you start by giving us a little more about your background and your role at DocuSign?
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Robert Chadwani
Yeah, you bet. I have a mixed background in consulting. I started my own company is what moved me out to Silicon Valley, but spent most of my time in consumer e commerce at ebay and other e commerce companies where I really fell in love with marketplace business models and the role of using technology to help entrepreneurs be successful, but then soon ported that expertise over to an enterprise software company, Atlassian, where we took a lot of the principles that helped build some of the world's most powerful consumer platforms and applied them to an enterprise software business. And now at DocuSign, really figuring out and finding ways in which to take some of the best of growth principles from B2B and consumer and bring them together to help grow the DocuSign business.
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Unknown Speaker
Great, great, wonderful. Well, yeah, let's, let's dive in here and want to start by talking about expanding a brand. And, you know, so DocuSign is certainly a brand known. I, I know it well. I, I feel like I use it almost every day, you know, Brand, Yeah, a brand known for leadership in E signatures, for instance, what opportunities and challenges arise when expanding a brand and marketing beyond that singular product focus?
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Robert Chadwani
Look, you know, DocuSign is a company that's 20 years established and pioneered what we call the E Signature category and has been wildly successful in sort of doing that, both in terms of market share, the number of signers and senders who've engaged with our platform. Over a billion people globally have signed with DocuSign. But as you know, technology companies really need to think about how their roadmap and technology vision can continue to serve their mission. And so that's exactly what we've embarked on here at DocuSign is defining the next act for the company. And so our mission is really redefining how the world comes together and agrees, you know, making agreements smarter, easier, and more trusted. And so while signature is certainly part of that, the change that we've embarked on is really thinking about agreement management and specifically intelligent Agreement management as a pioneering new SaaS category for DocuSign. Now, the unique challenge we have there is we are known for signature, and it's certainly something that is the core of our business. But with a company that actually has sign in its name, when you embark on something that stands for much broader than just signature, in this case Intelligent Agreement Management, or what we call iam, we really have to think about a combination of taking the existing customers, we have, both those who sign with DocuSign and send with DocuSign, and introducing them to sort of this new frontier of where we're headed, bringing them along and also helping them succeed in what we think is a really exciting new way to look at agreements, which is the way people and companies create agreements, commit to and sign agreements, and then manage agreements. And that's certainly a lot more than signature. And so we have a number of challenges around repositioning the brand, telling a new company narrative, reframing the product strategy, thinking about international expansion at markets at different levels of maturity, and hopefully we'll unpack some of this. But this is the challenge we've embarked on.
- [05:32]
Unknown Speaker
Yeah. And so I Mean, in, in doing that, it sounds like the one, one good way of doing that is the framing it as agreements. You kind of broaden. It doesn't. It doesn't get rid of your core offering, or it doesn't, you know, but. Or it doesn't diminish the core offering, but it kind of expands it. You know, how. How should you know? There's marketers listening out there that might be in similar enough situations where, you know, they need to expand. How should they be thinking about expanding without diluting what, you know, what you just said, what people are really what people know them as?
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Robert Chadwani
Yeah, look at the brand. Equity is extraordinarily difficult for most companies to create, preserve, and then grow. And so this is really the heart of the challenge that we have here. And I think there's a few lessons. One is we decided that it was time to really shape and create a new category of software. And so what does that actually mean? One is it allows organizations, maybe who are existing companies who want to reframe what their market opportunity might be to really think about a new problem or a new challenge to solve. And so for us, it was really trying to identify, looking at our existing customers, what is it that they struggle with, what is the opportunity, the challenges that they have to face, and how can we better articulate and name that, what that is? And so for us, we decided and discovered that our companies do business with DocuSign and have agreements, tens of thousands, often hundreds of thousands of agreements. They have a lot of information trapped in those agreements, a lot of value and a lot of information that's trapped. And there's no organization or company that's really serving that need. And so we started by really naming the villain, like, what is it in this new frontier that we want to identify that our customers are challenged with the most? And so we call that the agreement trap. And so, you know, one step around thinking about reframing the opportunity for companies and organizations is looking at the next frontier of problems, often creating language that doesn't exist in the world, to name that. Secondly, we sized it, which is, how big is that problem? We did some research work that ended up sizing that global economic opportunity of value that's trapped in agreements at nearly $2 trillion. Right. So you could start measuring that as a percentage of global GDP and break that down by industry vertical and function like hr, procurement or sales, and then effectively creating stories around why it's so challenging and why it's so complex to solve that problem. And earlier this year, in April, we decided to have what we call a lightning strike moment, which is the convergence of our research, our new product strategy, those stories of both challenges and opportunities, sizing of that problem, and bring it all to life at an event. Our annual customer event is called DocuSignite Momentum. And it was a convergence of all of those things I just described to unveil and reveal the new journey that we're on to create this new SaaS category. And so this category creation process has been tried and tested at a lot of remarkable companies, companies like Qualtrics, like Cloudflare and elsewhere. And we were fortunate enough to work with a fantastic team called Play Bigger. And they were our partners in this journey. But really, I think it starts with conviction and ambition, the senior leadership team at any organization or company, or even the founder, to say we want to reinvent and challenge ourselves, to dream one size bigger about how we can fulfill our mission and rethink what that future could look like.
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Unknown Speaker
Yeah. And I think, you know, what makes sense to me about it is that it feels organic. It doesn't feel like all of a sudden you had. You had another bright idea and it's all the way over here and wouldn't it be nice if we also did XYZ or whatever? It's. It feels like an organic expansion. Was that, was that part of the thought process as well?
- [10:00]
Robert Chadwani
You know, it was. And I think that is important to have and hold two things equally true, which is to think about reinventing your company or your business unit, even in a way that is authentic, incredible, so that you have the capabilities to deliver on that new promise and simultaneously be audacious enough to think about the opportunities as a bet the company type move, meaning it's all or nothing. And it is really hard to reconcile both of those. Those because one might lend you to incremental thinking and the other might lend you towards an existential crisis of a company not existing. Right. But if you could manage the tension between both of those things simultaneously, say, how do we do this? Credibly such that our customers will not only trust us, but bet on us. And it's not so far field that we don't have that authenticity to the core brand values while still thinking and dreaming big enough to bet the company. And I think that's both the art and the science of how to do this. Yeah.
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Unknown Speaker
Yeah.
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Robert Chadwani
Love it.
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Unknown Speaker
So another thing you touched on was geographic expansion. And you know, certainly in your experience, not only at DocuSign, but in some of your past experience, certainly led teams to doing Campaigns and marketing across the globe. Scaling digital strategies across geographies industries brings both internal as well as external challenges. In your experience, you know, in, in your career, what, what are some of the key hurdles that you've seen in these kinds of, of challenges? And you know, how do you, how do you think about approaching them?
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Robert Chadwani
Well, one is just to acknowledge that it's hard, difficult. Right? Yeah. There isn't a go to market leader that I've met who doesn't tell me that they're in the and business versus the or business.
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Unknown Speaker
Yeah.
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Robert Chadwani
So what I mean by that is hey, we're pursuing large enterprises and mid size and small companies or we have a growth strategy that requires us to accelerate growth in our most mature, mature markets, let's say North America and invest in emerging markets to think about planting seeds for future growth. Or we have a core platform strategy that's designed to scale and help us reach as many customers as possible. And we're targeting industries and verticals and folks listening to this and the analyst can go on the. Yeah, and by the way that's true in enterprise businesses and it's true in consumer. You know back at ebay it was like, you know, we're about fashion, motors, electronics and sporting goods. You know, about every country in the world and building a global marketplace. So one just acknowledge that it is, it is fundamentally hard. I believe that there's nothing more powerful than prioritization when it comes to thinking about how to balance delivering the present and creating the future. And my brain tends to simplify things into categories. And by that what I mean is inevitably you want to build a business that's going to deliver on the commitment that you make to your investors or to your employees, or to your stakeholders or to yourself. If you're a private company or founder led company in the short term, right you have those milestones that are effectively non negotiable whether it's around growth or efficiency. However, it's also your responsibility to ensure sustainable long term growth and create that future. And so I like to think about these two categories and for every company, what's present and what's future might vary. But to think about resource allocation, people and dollars across those two buckets and then within them get down to a point where you are force ranking your prioritization of what's most important and then aligning those prioritization decisions across functions and teams in the company and it won't be considered a success, meaning this exercise won't, shouldn't be considered a success until it's painful where you are making decisions of what falls below the line or what gets under resourced relative to the things that you're going to bet on. And I have yet to find a company or team that is successful without going through the painful exercise of making tough choices. Ultimately it's what separates the companies with the most successful strategy and execution from those that do a lot but can't seem to win.
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Unknown Speaker
Yeah, yeah, totally agree. I mean it's, you know, if everything's a priority, nothing's a priority. Right. So it's definitely important to be able to do that. But, but to your point, it's tough to be able to do that because there always is that and we also want to do this or what about. What about this? Or you know, there's, there's a lot of those kinds of, kinds of things. How do you, I think a lot of this also comes from, from leaders showing by example as well of, of how to do this and how to make, make good decisions. How do you think of it as a leader, you know, to kind of set an example of doing the right things, you know, finding the right priorities and you know, what are, what are your thoughts there?
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Robert Chadwani
Yeah, I, I think, you know, strategy and prioritization is a, is a team sport and so we're going through this at DocuSign. My teams at Atlassian and at ebay typically do it in the annual planning process. I think some of the world's most agile companies do it as an ongoing process and that's what I encourage. But I say it's a team sport because the decisions that emerge from prioritization strategy exercises in most companies, they affect a lot of people. And so some of the principles that we use here is progress over perfection, meaning it's, you know, continuously iterating on the thinking in and really being willing to challenge that and drop assumptions at certain points in time when you get new data. Second is to manage the process radically open, so with extreme openness. So even teams who are not directly involved in some of the decisions have visibility into the journey by which those decisions and trade offs get made. And I think that one fosters a lot of trust once those final decisions are made. And maybe not everything on people's wish list or expectations made it to the biggest bets that a team or a company is going to make. And I think third is clarity around what success looks like. You know, whether that's, you know, using an OKR methodology or measurement so that folks know, okay, if we've decided to pursue something how do, what's the yardstick by which we can measure that? So this is the approach we take at DocuSign. Flexible, agile, open and transparent. And then, you know, measured. And then, you know, one of the risks is when priorities are communicated that there's a clear understanding of what that means. Which is just because something might not be on a go to market leader or companies top priority list doesn't necessarily mean that those things aren't getting done. It simply means that the things that we choose to invest in get a disproportionate amount of investment focus. And when trade offs have to happen, these are the things that we make sure get resourced first. And I think it really gives permission to leaders to ensure that all teams working on important projects and programs in a company still feel connected to what needs to get delivered today and then for the future. And so that clarity around communication and understanding if something's not on that priority list doesn't necessarily mean it's not critical and important. That's separate. That's a stop list. Right. Or a reduction in investment. And so just having parameters around the step is important.
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Unknown Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I love that. So the last topic I want to talk about, it's a big one, but I want to talk about product led growth and team alignment to help lead that growth as well. So you know, first thing there is just breaking down some of those silos. And you know, you've talked about the importance of aligning product engineering data and operating teams to execute this, this product led growth strategy. How do you think about breaking down, you know, some of those traditional silos to achieve this level of cooperation?
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Robert Chadwani
Well, maybe what I'll, I'll focus on is, you know, agnostic of the go to market motion. Whether it's sales led, partner led or marketing led or product led, every organization and company will have sort of a unique go to market formula that works for them. Yeah, and what I've typically seen is that changes over time. Now you know, in the consumer world, back in my ebay days, it was very much traditional marketing levers that would drive a lot of growth. Plus organic traffic at Atlassian intensely centered on product LED growth. And product is the vehicle by which to make that, make that top line and customer acquisition number grow. For a DocuSign, it's a real hybrid. We're very sales driven. That has incredible advantages. We're introducing product LED motions and product LED sales now, which is sort of the convergence of both of those, but agnostic of the go to market motion. I think a Few things hold true. Which is one, this question of how do you create, retain and grow a customer? And in most complex organizations, that's going to require teams across an organization and company rowing in the same direction. And that is incredibly hard. And in fact, the larger an organization is, the harder it is to get that alignment. So to your question, how do you break down those silos? Is it feeling things that I think are really powerful? One is, whenever possible, have a North Star metric or a set of metrics that can be shared between teams ultimately meaning, you know, aligning those goals. The second thing I love to think about is we use a DRI model here at DocuSign, which is an individual is effectively the direct, directly responsible initiative owner. And effectively what that means is the point person that gets to play the role of orchestration and choreography of all the people and resources needed to achieve that shared outcome. And typically it means it's a person who might sit somewhere in a product team or in a growth team or in a sales team, and frankly, often doesn't matter where they sit. They influence more than they control, but they're effectively the leader who is responsible for bringing together all the resources needed to support the outcome. And then, you know, the last thing I would say is really powerful. This is something I learned from teams over at Airbnb, which is looking at the handoff between teams and whenever possible, having a shared metric at the intersection where, let's say a marketing team and a product team intersect or a sales team and a growth team, and finding ways to look at that end to end customer journey with a shared metric and that handoff metric so everyone understands how their work contributes to the overall growth and to delivering a unified customer experience. And this is, I think, the real magic happens when you can share metrics across team teams, share the journey across teams, and you can build a lot of empathy when teams across that journey really understand what does it take in the step prior, the step after, whatever they're responsible for?
- [22:34]
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I see, I think a lot of what creates silos, or at least perpetuates them, is different goals and incentives and things between teams. Right. For those listening and you know, listening to this and they're like, wow, this sounds great, but I got like super entrenched silos and you know, I, I'd love to do this. Like, what would your advice be? Like, what's maybe a practical step or two to like, get there, you know, because I, I, I would imagine, you know, it's not going to happen overnight. For, for organizations that are really kind of stuck in their ways, but there are some steps they could take. What, what might you recommend there?
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Robert Chadwani
Yeah, look, it is, it is hard. But what I, you know, what I've learned and appreciated is most of the challenges and problems across teams and companies tend to be very similar across industries, across company size. And they often come down to things like team health. In my prior life, we did some research and some of the data showed that if you ask leaders and people on teams a very basic question, which is on a spectrum of health, is your team healthy? And only 13% of teams go back and say, we're, we're feel like we're optimized and we're really healthy. And if you deconstruct that and sort of what's the root cause? Then it's the basics. It is. Do you have a foundational model like a DACI or a RACI model of who is a driver of a particular project, who's the approver, who should be consulted, who should be informed? Right. Oftentimes those things don't exist. And so it's messy middles where you might have multiple people who think that they're the owner, initiative driver a particular project, and you don't have that uncomfortable conversation of clarifying that that amplifies as the team gets larger. Or there's a missing project poster which is, somebody new joins the team, what's the one pager where they can look at and say, what's this project about? What are the metrics? What are the measures? How long is it going to last? Or there is a lack of adequate accountability through retros, which is, we're going to deliver a project and then take time after that project to do a look back and to assess how well did we do, what could have been done better, what could we improve next time? And it's not about fault finding, but really elevating the team's capabilities. One of the things we've tried here at DocuSign is Pretty Mortems, which is before you kick a project off, get all the key stakeholders in a room, spend 15 minutes going through all the things that can go wrong. And, you know, sometimes those end in feeling like this incredible disaster because you've just identified how everything is going to fail, right? And then you remind yourself, oh, wait, we haven't even started the project yet. Right? But effectively what you have is a diagnostic of things that you think are improved. So we spend a docuSign a lot of time on not just what we do, but ways of working and how we do it and to point to some assets that are available for free for those who are listening. And I'm very open about this. And Atlassian, my prior company shared something called an Atlassian team Playbook. And all of these templates and resources are available for anybody who wants to discover them. And these are great ways to just spend five minutes finding some team rituals and practices that I think can make a big difference between a team chugging along and delivering on what's expected of them versus a team that's thriving and really has that force multiplier effect of achieving great outcomes that many people may have thought weren't even possible. Oftentimes it just comes down to ways of working.
- [26:13]
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So the last thing I want to touch on here is the role of data and all of this. And just, you know, there's a lot of emphasis on data driven decision making and, and relying on this. A lot of what we've talked about just now is team collaboration and a lot, a lot of that happens, you know, whether it's virtually, but it's, it's still, you know, people communicating with other people. But data, you know, is playing a bigger and bigger role for, for lots of reasons. How should leaders be thinking about maximizing their human team members contributions as AI capabilities, you know, machine learning, predictive analytics, like all of these other things are also making a bigger and meaningful impact. Like how, how should a leader think about balancing these, these, these two things?
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Robert Chadwani
Greg, I think it's a great question if you know, anybody listening, if this isn't at the forefront of something they have to think about, you know, monthly, weekly or sometimes even daily, then they need to just pause and reflect. Because across every type of company, including B2B companies and SaaS companies, this is probably the most foundational shift, seismic shift around how to generate revenue, create growth that is, that is important, you know, especially right now. One of the most important relationships I think that exists within.
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Unknown Speaker
Hi, I'm Greg Kilstrom and thank you for listening to this podcast which is part of the Agile Brand Podcast network. As some of you may know, I'm the host of another successful podcast, the Agile Brand with Greg Kilstrom, Apple's top ranked enterprise marketing podcast. Three times a week I talk with C Suite leaders from world leading brands and platforms about the latest trends, issues and challenges in marketing, technology, AI and customer experience. Be sure to subscribe so you too can join the thousands who have already followed to hear us discuss the top issues and challenges you need to know about and get real world insights and advice which you can quickly apply to your biggest marketing challenges. Check out the Agile Brand with Greg Kilstrom podcast wherever you listen and make sure to follow or subscribe so you can catch the very latest.
- [28:32]
Robert Chadwani
Any organization is between the go to market or sales or marketing leader and both the CFO and either the CTO or the cio where data responsibilities often set. And what I would say is we think a lot about this at DocuSign and you know, there's a maturity model of companies and it depends on what type of company you are and where you are. The maturity model of having data as part of the culture of running the business. So agnostic of that because companies are at different stages of maturity. Let's take an example of a company that's far enough along where high quality data is available to anybody who needs to use it to make decisions. And if you're not there, that should be part of your journey. But assuming that's the case, I would say, you know, what we do here at DocuSign is one, we spend a lot of time thinking about AI specifically and in our go to market and sales teams. How can we identify use cases that we think can benefit from better data or better automation or better use of AI? And the good news is that that exercise tends to be a lot of fun. Lots of different use cases that can be identified. And secondly, stack ranking those use cases and then asking how can we make improvements to use either data or applied AI to actually automate some of these kinks capabilities to improve experience for team members or for customers. And then lastly, how do we translate a lot of those applications into results defined by better growth, which is, you know, revenue growth or customer growth or efficiency productivity instead of really translating the use of applied data and AI into business benefits. And you know, a lot has emerged from that. We're still very early in our journey here, but we've been able to identify a lot of experiments that we use to do inbound and outbound prospecting. We're now embarking on how to use better product behavior data to inform better sales experiences and interactions with customers. Some of the table stakes of consumer platforms. We're using data about product behavior and browsing behavior to drive better targeted personalized experiences both on DocuSign.com and our global properties, but also within the product. And so, you know, there's an infinite number of use cases and applications, but I think this is a whole new exciting frontier where enterprise and software companies are added.
- [31:13]
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, definitely.
- [31:14]
Robert Chadwani
Yeah.
- [31:14]
Unknown Speaker
Lots and lots more to discover here. So definitely. Well, Robert, thank you so much for joining today. I've got one last question for you. I like to ask everybody this question here. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
- [31:34]
Robert Chadwani
That's a great question. I would say be open to a lot of new ideas that emerge that challenge conventional ways of working and conventional ways of operating. And I found that more so than having the answer or believing, you know, myself or anybody on my team knows what to do. Our superpower is the ability to respond to new information that comes our way and translate that into better execution and better teamwork.
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Unknown Speaker
Love it. Love it. Well, again, I'd like to thank Robert Chadwani, President and General Manager of growth at DocuSign. You can learn more about Robert and Docusign by following the links in the show notes.
- [32:19]
Robert Chadwani
Thanks Greg.
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Unknown Speaker
Thank you so much.
- [32:24]
Greg Kilstrom
Thanks again for listening to the B2B Agility podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more, more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.b2b agility.com. that's b2b agility.com. while you're there, check out my series of best selling agile brand guides covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics. Or you can search for Greg Kilstrom on Amazon. Until next time, stay focused and stay agile.
- [32:59]
Robert Chadwani
The agile brand.