GSD Podcast - Professional Services at a Product Company and agency Reflections with Eric Elia

Jeff is joined by Eric Elia, and they discuss how Brightcove came onto the scene and how the Professional Services team became one of the first SaaS-based custom development shops. Discussions about personality types to hire for, getting sales teams onboard, and how to make sure that the projects you do ensure stickiness inside your customers. Eric discussed how to make sure that your team doesn't get in the way of customer happiness and jeopardize the relationship and ultimately, the software deal. Lots of laughs as well!

Transcript:

Jeff  01:10

All right, well, thanks so much for joining in. This is episode one of the GSD getting services done podcast. And I had the pleasure to have Eric Elia with me, Eric had was my boss for a long time at Bright Cove, hired me from DECA to bring some services expertise into a group that was a foreign product group. And we just really hit it off when we did lots of great things. So we've covered a lot of stuff in this podcast, and I had to cut it short, we have about two other really meaty segments that we're going to touch into on a later call. But we got into personality types of services people versus product, not even versus but just different personality types from from that and products, people. You know, dealing with sales teams and getting people used to the idea of bringing services as a large deal component, or something that makes the software product even more valuable. That was a great chunk of stuff. And you know, we just got into some funny stories and even talked about some, some topical things like Gronk, and the Celtics and Sixers and things like that. So thanks so much for listening. And let's jump in now and listen to what Eric had to say. All right, it looks like we are recording. So Eric, I am here with Eric Elia longtime friend and boss of mine for a long time. You know, Eric brought me on to to help out with services at Bright Cove. And he had been there as part of the founding team and taught me many things including that there were more more than four types of cheese in the world.

Eric Elia  02:59

And there was coffee other than Dunkin Donuts. Yeah,

Jeff  03:02

you were you were way what like patient zero on the single origin coffee. Matter of fact, I remembered when when you brought me to this magical new place in San Francisco called called blue ball. But you kind of you kind of quizzed me on a beforehand like you were sort of like July confident like annually, but but do you like I felt like there was some feeling out like, I don't want you to embarrass me.

Eric Elia  03:27

Which I didn't want you to ask for a regular.

Jeff  03:30

A regular yeah, there's sugar in that right

Eric Elia  03:32

in two cups like they do in Boston with the styrofoam outside the plastic so you don't get moisture on your fingers.

Jeff  03:40

They charge you more for that and now they're having to switch over to no more Styrofoam which is it's I get it but it's just it I died a little inside they also removed the doughnuts from Duncan's which is something else but I the other note on the blue bottle thing is I don't know if you remember this but like you were doing something very nice. And he brought me this very expensive.

Eric Elia  04:01

Never forget it. type of

Jeff  04:03

roast. And you gave it to me. I'm like, Oh, thanks so much. And, and I was just busting stones. This actually never happened. But when Eric came back like a month later, in Euro like how's that coffee? I'm like, Oh my God, it was so good when I mixed it with the hazelnut coffee mate and put it on ice. Like I was the heroine. You're like, I'll never forget it like but it was not let me buy this. If they knew that you were going to do that too.

Eric Elia  04:33

They they would not let you buy more than a half pound of beans at a time. Because if it was more than a half pound of beans, it would go stale. Couldn't consume it in the amount of time. Yeah, and now look, blue bottle is the Dunkin fancy people.

Jeff  04:55

They're in malls, you go to the coffee Plaza here or whatever it's called now. They're over. So over so I'm in as you people are listening and you might hear Eric is a master Were you an English major because they say you're a master of like F Scott Fitzgerald master of description I remembered when I first started a break and I had to go find out about some some training stuff and you're like, Oh, am I gonna say his name you look for this man he's already faced man he doesn't know where glazing

Eric Elia  05:28

looks like life is treated him hard.

Jeff  05:33

Oh, man, you know, we're talking about so anyways, which description will be great? Well, so the topic of today is something we both had a lot of experience on. Because coincidentally, we both run services teams for product companies, and agencies, or whatever you want to call it, but agency, it feels very digital to me, but like, go build some hardship. Oh, there goes the we got the e Tag now. And then in then, we've also had as they would say, in the major leagues, a cup of coffee. single origin, preferably with with product teams. Yes. Yes. So I really wanted to compare and contrast because I could talk about this topic for hours. But quick since since I noted on all of those, why don't you give me the quick the quick sort of synopsis so people can sort of hear the experience when we're starting to talk about these things.

Eric Elia  06:34

The quick synopsis of services and

Jeff  06:38

you know started here you know, I think I know you

Eric Elia  06:41

my quick my quick synopsis Yeah. I don't

Jeff  06:45

even know what happened pre Comcast but you were sort of one of the innovators there for forgetting video online and some others.

Eric Elia  06:51

Yeah, yeah, I was I started my career in the in Silicon Valley at a real high flying early.com startup at home, which was the first broadband ISP, I was on a burgeoning content team. And I had this idea of doing we started to play around with videos postage stamp size video, and we had in house talent and I was on a few different videos we did. And then I had the idea of aggregating video from other companies and started do something on our service that brought some of the best video from different places online. And that really started me on a track for the next now, almost 20 years have focused on what has become the streaming and online video category. And then along the way, getting involved with professional services and consulting in helping people with their online video businesses so at home led to Comcast are kind of bet my career on on flash video at the time, which was a crazy idea. Not not not much anymore. But yeah. And then that led me into the orbit of Macromedia, which was selling flash at the time, and Jeremy Allaire, who was driving the flash video practice at at Macromedia as the CTO. And then he had a crazy idea that the TV and movie business would look in the future, like the rest of the web. Nothing would interlink with each other people would self publish, people would sell and distribute and be distributed advertising models, circa 2005, a little bit of a crazy idea. So we started bright Cove, and I left Comcast to help help get that off the ground was part of the first 10 there to help create a hybrid kind of consumer b2b business because we thought that there'd be no way to raise the amount of money required to license content to build an online video business. So we're going to provide tools to the media companies and an exchange, their video would flow through our systems. We could monetize it, we could help distribute it. Along the way, a little company called YouTube got started that completely disregarded copyright, almost gotten sued out of existence. Google saved them at the 11th hour. rest is history and breakover became a pure b2b company. I must left at that time and the need to create a professional services business came came up at the time and to serve. We then had a pretty large stable of major media customers, Viacom ad networks, show time, New York Times to build their experiences and that's where we got to know each other and and that was an amazing time helping these well known companies build us both strategize and build their products. After I left brain Cove I wanted to get small again and I surprisingly really enjoyed the consulting side of things when, when small work in a consultancy for a while in our shop got acquired By SoulCycle last year, and in house doing more kind of strategic business development and partnerships there with an emphasis on on some video stuff. So that's the long winded summary.

Jeff  10:14

Oh, that's, that's fantastic. So, you know, it's great. I remember, you know, from the outside looking in when when Ryko had started, it was almost like sort of the nobody knew what to do. So it was like a shotgun approach. Like, let's try a bunch of different things here. And sort of let's see what, what the what the net result is going to be.

Eric Elia  10:31

Yeah, I mean, it actually started with a very, very clear, I would say it was it was a shotgun approach. It's not called shotgun. It was it was strategic and being broad, broad. There we go. And that we didn't know what the businesses would look like in the future around video. But what it looked like was we were we were trying to create a whole industry in one company, and thought that this could all sit in one place. Yeah. And so it's, it's premium distribution, its advertising sales, and the network, it's, it's premium payment and subscriptions. And it's the delivery, the uploading the content management. So one that being like a combination of what breakover has today, a little YouTube, a little Hulu, Netflix audit to to mogul, like the ad businesses. You know, it was it was getting those in the mix, we had this amazing team of add people we brought in and they were going to build the ad business. It was a consumer business. That's what I was brought on to run which was the consumer facing side of things, which became infamous as one of the first places you could see the first Kim Kardashian video when amongst which we have a lot of interesting discussions behind closed doors about

Jeff  11:57

what was acceptable or not. Yes, yeah. Versus what makes money or not, right?

Eric Elia  12:03

Well, my argument and we're getting off track, which is what we should do on a podcast is my mum was we had people pushing back that there was some nudity in a video. And victim one obviously had more than that. But there were there were not not that I and I had I had to watch it for work. And but we recording HBO and Showtime as well as Playboy at the time. HBO had some, some very graphic programming at the time, and they still do today. And my argument was that we could not, we cannot choose our partners or accept content based on the size of the client. And we had to have an even policy that we enforced equally, and that if we were going to take HBO on as a customer show time that we we had to treat other smaller customers equally. And so we had to develop a policy and how are we going to react to things and we're going to do what takedowns you know, when we got some bad stuff, as Andy, our Chief Counsel at the time would say, that was beyond the pale. And we we removed certain things, certain things promptly. I remember something that's some some violence in it. And we didn't know whether it was faked or real. And so you know, pulled that down immediately. But yeah, anyway,

Jeff  13:24

no, that's actually a good transition now, because you talked about running that sort of consumer business. And then, you know, the whole YouTube thing happened and everything. And then sort of it was like, the way you described it to me was like, Yeah, we have this team. They're awesome. And, and we charged a customer to do some work, and maybe there's some more to it. Right? And, and then, you know, I want really wanted to get into this whole personality type of the Professional Service, Employee worker, you know, whatever, hustler versus sort of the product people because I know this was, it's always been on my mind. Since I've been in professional services. And I know like, even when you were interviewing me, this was a hot topic for you. You're like, you drive by, you know, Google at night, and the lights are on and there's cars in the parking lot of a parking lot here at breakover is right in the middle of the city. But

Eric Elia  14:25

yeah, it's I mean, I would say that counting principles go almost across the board, whether we're services or not, but but I think as I've matured, I think it's it's less important about having the lights on in the parking lot and being present and about and it's about care and working smart. So so the care is you put everything you have into your work and, and you you you pursue the goals that have been set forth for you against deadlines that you have and try to be as efficient as possible. And, and that you do that in a dedicated fashion and you don't don't waste time on things that you shouldn't waste time on. And I think the difference between a product team and then a services team is you're tracking the success on a services team really down to the hour at that point. And, and people's jobs depend on it at that point, and whether whether you're going to keep the lights on and in a product company or your subsidized to some extent, but you you still have those metrics overall, at a services company, whether it's bootstrapped or larger, you know, you're truly keeping the lights on and your headcount is tied to tied to that margin. And, you know, if you're, you're underwater and guess, guess what, you're you're reducing your size your team next quarter. And if you're above water, you can grow in interesting ways. And whether that's increasing a pipeline or investing in your team or building resellable package products internally as well. But, you know, a characteristic that I found that was different in services, because your your engineers are really at the front line with clients is, is empathy and communication. Absolutely. And in any category. You see, engineers who speak English and communicate do better than others like, but, you know, I remember there were a few people in particular, who, who could be in a room with a CTO at a big company who were young at the time. Yeah. Obviously, I'm thinking Jessie, in particular, who know he was he was in the room with like, the head of product at the New York Times and could go toe to toe with them.

Jeff  16:46

On Matt, who's telling the guy who runs music for you.

Eric Elia  16:52

Yeah, that's a stupid logo. Yeah. We could do an episode on that. But the Be. And so I think that communication becomes ultra important, as well, because because those people are at the front lines. And if you get people who can't communicate with the client, then it's, it's on project management, it's on account management, and it's an extra burden. And it's not efficient, right? Because then then you've got the game of telephone, where the engineers not in the not in the line of communication. But you know, as I've gotten older and experienced, I think the, the efficiency is super important, as well. And so the people who are going to be dedicated, I remember, there was a guy who was like reading the newspaper work in the morning when we came in. And I remember, like, we're so busy at the time as a whole. And it just pissed me off. And we had to have a conversation as it's, it's not, you know, when everyone's running around crazy. And you're depending on everyone, you know, wake up an hour earlier at home and read that

Jeff  18:04

paper, right? It's just doing activities like that, knowing that your coworkers are crazy and trying to do stuff. It's just, it's just yeah, it's not beneficial for the team. And during this time, people don't know like, we're all sitting at one table, basically. Right? I mean, there was like one table. And then on the other side of the table was a product team. That was pretty much like, Oh, I didn't get that checked out. We'll do on the next sprint. But you know, our customers were pretty much like we'd start a project there add teams that would start so we're talking about, like, you know, what's watched 24 on Fox online, because I missed it and didn't send my TiVo at the time, right? Like, let's catch up TV. Yep. And so, okay, this is going to be live great. We're gonna sell ads to it. We already knew the ads are sold to it, you know, because we're working on the ads and ad integrations and everything. So there's no pushing the dates, right? Somebody says Feb. 25. It's Feb. 25. And, and that was also one of those huge things that I noticed on the services versus the product is like there's no pushing a sprint and this and that if, unfortunately, you don't get it done during the week. It gets done on the weekend. And but they don't mind because there is that general feeling as in I build something that's worthwhile. It's going to be used. It's a little bit of a struggle sometimes, but we got it done along the way. And in here we are so yep. And then you look and we talked about angry.

Eric Elia  19:32

Yeah. And I think that the work hard play hard sort of thing carries over in that the other side of services is sometimes you have walls, right? And like I remember, it might have been Showtime. I forget who it was, but we had a big launch. And it was very gratifying. And then we took sort of the Friday off and we went and saw the first Iron Man movie, and went to a really fun launch in downtown Boston. Yeah. And, and it was it was, it was great. And the product team, you know, didn't have time to do that. And, and then at times, but we are in that time because we did what we took to get it there. But I didn't remember there was an engineer, we let go and those early days. I don't know if you were and, and I remember he would leave at like 501. Yep, every day. And there was a Friday, and we had to get out something for a big client. And I think it was only going to take like another hour or two. Yep. Any left. Yep. And we had to tell the client, we missed our deadline. Yeah. And, and that was, that was it for him. But that was the lack of dedication that you're talking about.

Jeff  20:50

Yeah. And you know, sometimes in that just goes into, like, I'm sure you're gonna be fine. In this type of environment. It's just not what we need for a services based thing. And, you know, one thing to tie back into the professional services team for a product's team. Try not to swear too much, but like I always say, Don't eff with the revenue, right? So we are building in this case experiences that gets the customer satisfied. And it's very hard for them to untangle us from their main lines of business for video. So we don't want to mess with that, right? We don't want to mess with them, wanting to continue to be able to use our service and renew it our SaaS based service, which is the central point or a focus of this application. But you know, you could be replaced, so you want to make sure that you don't mess with the revenue, and you have to please the customer a little bit more. Because there are times when it's in a straight services thing where you can just be like, You're wrong, we're not going to do that, we're going to have to push the dates, XY and Z. But you know, I think we touched on a little bit, maybe a little bit later in the agenda, but we can get into it now. We're dealing with sales, and we're dealing with, you know, account revenue and renewals and things like that. Maybe now's a good time to sort of talk about some how that can influence how we have to work as professional services members, versus sort of in the agency world where it's like, I'm terrible. We have to push our dates, you know, and, you know, which can have other effects with like, not getting work renewed. But

Eric Elia  22:32

yeah, I think I think going into it, one of the most important things is knowing what your goals and metrics are as the services organization. And the number one goal in the early days of pro surf at Brightcove was actually customer retention and satisfaction

Jeff  22:50

100% 100% Satisfied, right 100% reference ability. That's

Eric Elia  22:55

right. And, and the and the revenue was an important part, but it came second. And so, you know, we were using services as a hook to to build the satisfaction, and make sure that the build outs were successful from our clients, because a lot of times we would sell the product, they've implemented poorly, and then they would judge the performance based on the product as opposed to the execution and implementation, right. And so we were we were, we're trying to hedge hedge against that. And then and then we had clients asking for it. And also at the time as kind of a SaaS category was maturing the A, it was very common for SaaS business to have a percentage of revenue that came from services. And as breakover was looking at getting its financials in order for an IPO in the future, like having that line of revenue was an important piece to have in the portfolio. So

Jeff  23:51

I was reminded later, but not to be too high, like as soon as we hit 30% Unless it was a bad quarter. And then it was like, oh, maybe you should go out and sell some stuff right now.

Eric Elia  23:59

Yeah, yeah. So that's something that we can call product. It was. I think our cap was trying to be about 10% Yeah, you know, Breitkopf getting to like 125 million in revenue, something like that, you know, we were trying to get to like a 10 million, or something like that. Yeah, but the services dynamic was very interesting. And there were there were a lot of run ins with sales and account management people I remember there was there was this one, no fence but total like Boston guy with a double double Dunkin Donuts. Faded faded Red Sox had the office with a thick accent. You know, not It's not close to home. But, and I remember who's like that, that Eric You Why Are you effing prima donna. He's like getting on the phone and telling the client you know, they gotta have this and they gotta have that and and I was holding our ground to protect services to make sure that we were not signed up for a date or a set of deliverables that was not possible to write. And so that was inherent tension. And then there's one guy, remember who is actually a very close friend now who was running sales in our London office. And so he was using services to sell, sell in a bunch of things. And we had with some really interesting, this could be a whole show. Jeff, you tell me how you want to go here with some really interesting clients out of Germany, that we were getting. And we were hiring some some services people in in the UK and Europe to help service them. And, and so he, he, he kind of he still hear me, by

Jeff  25:55

the way I can Yes, i By the way, I did write down a note about I have a note here. It's called Photoshop. I wonder if it's the same? No, we

Eric Elia  26:02

should. I thought it was PowerPoint, but we should come back, come back to that. So he, so I remember, he sold something without consulting. Yes. And just put the price on it, that he needed to get to get the deal done. And in the big picture was the right thing to get the client in the door. But it put us in a awkward position in services because we were underwater from from the start, dates were unrealistic. And we were just going to make everybody unhappy. And I had one of my first trips to London, we had a lunch. And I was San Francisco based at the time. And I remember they took me to a Mexican restaurant in London, which, which was actually surprisingly good. But nevertheless, and, and we kind of hashed it out over lunch and had a real heart to heart and he understood our position better, I understood his position better. And we just agreed to communicate better. And that that that, that then I wound up going to London for about four months to help grow, grow the business, there be a face of professional services and work on some burgeoning kind of Ott, like TV stuff. And we wound up having a great rapport, and we were very effective together. And that that relationship developed well, and then he wound up moving to San Francisco years later, and we became very good friends. Yeah,

Jeff  27:38

no, no, that's, that's great. And I actually totally forgotten about that whole UK experience. Oh, I so I look back upon like, my sort of experience in action. Sometimes when I was getting ready to talk to you. And I'm like, I feel like I was a teenager that like I was like, I don't know, eight. Yeah, it was a little while back, but just sort of like the stuff I've learned. And we've all learned from there, we were just kind of figuring out so much stuff along the way. Yeah. So on that note, and that that sort of was a great sort of micro example of like, a sort of a sales guy goes out and sell something, you know, service is gonna slow the deal down, probably they know, we're gonna get upset anyway. So they just throw it in there and deal with it later. But then there were these other things. So this happens to a lot of people in the these types of SaaS or product company positions, but the big customer, right, so we were always going for the Grand Slam Umbraco. Right. Like, if we, if we signed on one of these massive companies, it's just a lot of streams, it's a lot of people watching video through our platform, and in my whole Don't f with the revenue thing. This gets into a little bit because we were, you know, being asked to swallow and I can think of like three like, boom, boom, boom, off the top of my head were like, you know, like, that's, that's a million dollars, but the services were, like, great, you're gonna charge 250 for that. I'm like, what, like, in, you know, you're, you're still around, are there when this sort of thing happened. But like, Chris menar, our CFO basically said, like, our profitable professional services company will continue to be profitable, and q2 are our second, you know, quarter of being public. And then suddenly, it's like, you need to eat 750 and margin and like, Well, I suppose. But that's sort of just kept, I sort of thing happening. They're very strategic deals. And we have to do, how to do a lot of those things to win the business. The public company one I don't want to get into too much. That was a very interesting situation. I would rather kind of want to talk about maybe a previous dial up business customer that we had, or one that was very famous for that but then had lots of other businesses. They would prefer, people didn't know that they owned. And yes, and that was a very strategic deal for us at the time, where we just kind of got a lot of stuff done and did a lot of things, but you know, didn't help out our margins at all, you were very instrumental in those discussions. So I wanted to turn it over to you on.

Eric Elia  30:19

Yeah, and I remember, I remember our partnership there as much as anything where, you know, I was instrumental in getting something through the door and moving, and then we could not have framed it and got it set up and, and gotten the workstreams running in any kind of fashion without without your involvement there. I remember a lot of late hours with us trading, ESA W's and requirements, requirements, docs back and forth and trying to get get everything as as detailed as possible. Yes, that's a really important thing to set expectations. But that was that was an interesting one, where you had internal people, they're trying to build their own success on this thing you had pulling out years of internal plumbing that had been built, you had a company in the midst of a transition from one business to the next that that never wound up really being that successful in that transition. And accompany that had been the biggest of big in the industry and, and a real, a real sea change in terms of their their role in the industry. And so you weren't dealing with the A players necessarily anymore, and a lot had a lot had changed. But that

Jeff  31:44

was I do believe they still had a billion dollars in revenue, when they signed up as our customer because they were still relying they still had that legacy thing, which is a quick pause on this conversation. I've said this over and time and switched it to my East Coast elites. But that customer reminded me that what we think is cool in Boston and San Fran in New York, is not necessarily the status for all the distance in between, right?

Eric Elia  32:13

Yes, absolutely. And I would say it's another reminder of the classic Innovators Dilemma, which is you have the company which is required reading, I think in services, or tech as a whole, but the Clayton Christensen book, but it is, I figure I should do that, where it's not just us talking, maybe the audience notes out what was that which which, now the jobs to be done is the new innovators dilemma. But the classic there is the the Polaroid Kodak compact decks, these companies that create an industry and then cannot turn away from an existing revenue stream in as significant enough way and devote enough energy and resources to the new business that potentially cannibalizes the existing business and so you can be a Kodak that invents digital photography but can't turn away from the film business and so that winds up beating eating you alive. And so I agree with you on that, you know the coastal wheats, adopting the new things and there are other things that are still very important at the same time as your the business and you see where the industry is going. You've gotta be

Jeff  33:35

also very tempted to say on all these books

Eric Elia  33:41

you should you should you have seen the trip right? Or the trip to Italy trip to Spain? No, it's on Netflix and you should watch it. Steve Coogan has been in a bunch of movies Night at the Museum as well as maybe fill in men or whatever and funny, funny British comedian his his English stuff over there as the best he does that his talk show hosts show. It's really good. I forget the name, the name of it, but the trip is him and this other great voice actor and comedian. And they get assigned by a newspaper to go do roadside tour of eateries in the English countryside. And the whole shtick is them, like talking like this, going on their lives and their careers. And the one guy being a cartoonish version of his egotistical self has kind of made it in Hollywood the other guy being small town like relegated to to English media, and men but they do both two voices. And it starts off with like the famous one they do in every division three now they did UK than they did Italy and Spain. As they do Michael Caine go back and forth during no Michael kind starts here. No, you want to do the 60s Michael Caine that's a little bit different than The other one, and they do a Connery. Right. And then the latest one, they do a great Bowie. It was after he passed, and they were doing like, you know, oh, you can do Bowie in his younger years or go with us later.

Jeff  35:18

Or if they did great on that show about the musicians, but we should probably stop in the middle of a great example of sorry,

Eric Elia  35:25

getting I wanted to do this, this client, you talk about the money, yet, it was a little bit of a yellow flag in that they ordered pizza and salad for lunch. I remember when we were on site, and they had to know the exact count of people and be make sure they were ordering. Not much. Because even the lunch bills were getting accounted for, with a high degree of scrutiny. And so there were there were some yellow flags and how this was going to be managed. And then

Jeff  36:03

not only that, like when I went to their offices, it was like walking through an old mall that only a quarter of its open now. No Claire's is still open. So yeah,

Eric Elia  36:13

yeah. And so So I think, you know, out of that, you know, I look back, and we did the best we could with that one. But I think the, you know, the takeaways were it was a company with expectations of being served as a large company, but with the budgets of a mid sized company, yet the amount of streams that was potentially going to deliver was significant to our business. And we will be with them for for a long time to come. Just an odd footnote is that that company was a strategic investor and bright cubs very first seed Series A. That, and I remember, I remember going down to them right when we were first launched, getting the company going. So we were hoping to work with him for a long time. But yeah, it was it was an interesting one. And then we we obviously had some, some odd personnel issues. Well, that

Jeff  37:09

is a great way to put it by

Eric Elia  37:10

grappled with in, in providing services.

Jeff  37:15

So yeah, that is true. And on that note, I you know, I don't want to have to have legal run through the podcast and talk about it. But I don't know if I ever told you this story. But

Eric Elia  37:28

I have to say more. So that this, this is actually entertaining and people. Yeah,

Jeff  37:32

so I had well, you know, I never know who's gonna be listening. But I had an employee that I had let go for personnel for actual, like work performance reasons. Yes. And then somebody from that customer reached out to me and said, Hey, I'm just need this file. This person was about to email it to me, can you do that. And when I opened up the laptop, I had seen some, at the time, AOL Instant Messenger, or perhaps Skype conversations, transcripts, immediately, that just made me bring the laptop over to legal and say, I need you to tell me what to do about this. Just a funny note on. So there was a, you know, some stuff going on between this person and the customer. I'll leave it at that. But I do remember that. Elizabeth, who pulled me aside before I had to, like, you know what this person go and everything had been the first person I ever let go, I certainly made the ads make the recommendation that I've not done the talk before. And she's like, you know, I learned this from Rupert Murdoch, or was it right? And so let me know if you need any help. I've kind of seen it all. And then this whole series of events that happened, like over the weekend, and then I'd come back in on Monday and brief rod, and she's like, I've never dealt with anything like that.

Eric Elia  39:00

And Elizabeth had an armed guard contingent, like starting like satellite TV and yeah, like, the Middle East or Asia or something. And so she'd seen a lot but yeah, yes.

Jeff  39:13

Yeah. So I mean, that just kind of gets into like, you know, you have to deal with these things. You have to do swift movement as my sort of things from those. You have to put a team together. But if it's not working out, it's not my product. Well, if it's like you have a delivering the diamonds, you've got to pull people off. You've got to move people around. Not like, like knee jerk, but pretty close to knee jerk, right? Like, I mean, you need no three month project. Three weeks in, stuff goes sideways, you kind of have to make some quick decisions. So we have to do a little bit on that project. And you know, yeah, prepared me for things to come but I think that's pretty good way of covering that one down. You know, one other Really interesting thing that I think we both worked very hard at was that we had to convince and talk about for a little bit here, a sales team, that not only are we not going to slow the deal down, but we are going to increase your commission check exponentially. If you just let us get in and talk to the customer and set correct expectations and maybe find out a little bit more. And I will tell you one of those persons who now runs I think sales for that group. What was the biggest you know, I think, you know, we're talking I'm I was started off as a sort of inside salesperson, I'll forget all the services now like lectures about like, the value of bringing professional services into your deals.

Eric Elia  40:45

So yeah, he was an early adopter. Yeah, importance of that. The other person I think of and, and the history is fantastic with the client was gee, good, or

Jeff  41:00

No, I just, obviously has to be part of the conversation. Yeah. Like, there's a Why are you always at the top of the, you know, the sales and President's Club and everything like that? And he's like, look at these deals, and you pull them up and you look at the services deals, it adds three, four or 500k. To the deal.

Eric Elia  41:19

Yeah. And he was, he's one of the best, best sales guys I've ever worked with, because I knew the terrain. And he, he was smart about services. But I remember I remember he, we were pitching Sun Microsystems. Oh, yeah. pre pre Oracle. And he, he brought us in really early. And we we work together on the proposal. And it was what I look back whenever I want to call it a night. Yeah, I'm working on a proposal. And I realized that the way you had

Jeff  41:54

the added bonus of being in San Fran at the time, I did,

Eric Elia  41:57

I did, I did. And I can go down there and be present. But whenever I mean, even when it's a West Coast client, like when I think about like, oh, the proposals done enough, and I'll call it a night. Yeah, I think back to that son proposal, and that I said, You know what, I think we can take this a little bit further. And I brought images into the proposal case studies annotations, as hell work for them. I put in an extra three, four hours that night on the proposal, and we killed it,

Jeff  42:28

those times when the deal and those little things, I was actually thinking of maybe starting a resource center of like, you need to do this to win deals, because now you can crank out a price tag in an email, right, you can maybe drop it into a dock, where you could maybe actually, I'm sorry, I'm gonna get all flustered here, whoa, like, take some pride in your job. And

Eric Elia  42:51

well, there's, there's another, I want to finish son, and then I want to come back to this. But on this son side, they wound up being the ultimate referenceable customer, though not only not only did they adopt the full strategy, which was like a video portal, right. But they adopted, they tracked leads in their funnel out to lead gen. For new customers, through the video flow through their advertising. And they, they built a discipline of publishing on an ongoing basis and using what we built. And they had the right people in the right roles. And interestingly enough, one of those key people drove that now is at Bright Cove. Linda Crowe, okay. Yeah, big big driver there, she's over right coach now and was in really super smart. And, and she's, um, and so then they want to becoming this ultimate referenceable customer, Oracle, acquire them in Oracle inherited all of that and all the best practices and became a great a great customer over there. And I think a lot of the stakeholders at both sun and Oracle, who embraced working with us at that close level became experts and video strategies, and were really at the forefront of Canada's enterprise marketing side. But, you know, coming back to the proposal thing in my last few years, I also found the high fidelity proposal is as valuable sometimes as the low fidelity proposal. So sometimes when you put forward the fully baked glossy PDF, it conveys to people that it's a set in stone sort of thing. And the reaction they have is like a yes or no, but I have found some times like inviting people into a shared Google Doc with some commenters. Yep. And or, or even like a bullet point email with some rough numbers that it is well thought out is what would be in the PDF. Yeah, but it conveys to them like this is half formed. We can work on this together as partners. Yeah. It's for certain clients, it's the right technique.

Jeff  45:02

You know, it's funny because me, I feel that way as well. And we're both talking about our experiences in post product company, able to suck up the teeth a little bit. Because we have to kind of generate our own stuff, like all of our deals and services were brought in by the sales guys who needed that extra 30% of our expertise to be able to like, hey, well, we want your platform, but we need to build this experience, or we need to figure out x, y, and z. Whereas what we're talking about in that sort of second proposal is that, like, we need to go in some business. And we need to kind of worry about what our perception is like, and the pricing, and I'm saying there wasn't any of that when you're working for a product company. But like fuel is a deal as a product company in the services thing. It's like, Oh, it's okay. You know, but like, in the agency, where you're kind of, you know, your own salesperson, and, you know, banging the phones and doing all that other stuff. You know, you got to put extra thought into that.

Eric Elia  46:04

Yes, absolutely. And you, you get that pattern recognition over time as to the sorts of people that you're engaged with, who want to be either sold to, or they want to Parker, they want to be spoon fed, they want to be part of the process. It's, you know, much, much different types as a, as a buyer now at SoulCycle, where we're, we're building a whole bunch of interesting things. Now I see a range of different product, professional services teams, and how they sell and how they approach it. And I see, I see that, for certain companies, the all in one, we're gonna kill them with services, because it, it will give them the comfort that this is going to be done, right? That resonates really strongly with a lot of stakeholders. You know, at the same time, this, this could be a topic for another another pod, perhaps. But I've seen now within the same category of different approach, where companies are building the services into the sale, and there's no separate sale. On the services side, and there is a, we took, we talked about this a little bit best, there's a customer success team that is focused on getting them up and running successfully. And that's either a nominal, like 10k extra charge, or no extra charge, and you're not gonna be penalized, because they want you to get up and running and be successful with that. Yeah,

Jeff  47:40

I actually, I want to touch on that in a different podcast, I had to do that in virgin. And it really just depends on the level of service and what the services at Virgin, it was more of like an implementation team. It had to be attached, you know, created three different strata, you know, 1015 25, whatever it is, but you had to sign up for one. And then you go through this 3060 90 Day sort of thing. And then you're out and you're done. Much different than the sort of like creating the custom experience and those types of things. So yeah, they're all They're all different. And, you know, in the personality types are different the people that you hire, and then you get into does the CSM. Do that, do you have a separate implementation teams, I'm gonna touch on that in a little teaser for for one coming up in the future. So but it's imperative, you need to do that in a SaaS based world, you can't just say, Here's your URL, get after it. Unless it's like, literally, you need to drop these three lines of JavaScript into your, you know, into your homepage, and you're good. So

Eric Elia  48:50

even even then, like, I dropped three lines of JavaScript, then I need to integrate it with my Salesforce implementation or, or, you know, or my, or my, my

Jeff  49:02

SAP system.

Eric Elia  49:06

I don't want to touch that project, or, you know, my analytics or whatever it is, and then it's and then it's like, so you get to do that here. Do you have a partner you can refer me to nose? Or where the docs and suddenly there's an ecosystem around the thing?

Jeff  49:22

Yeah, and that was a great model that was created a break of before I got there, which was there was a analytics team, the AD team, they sort of mentioned in there. i We had a bunch of topics to cover, we probably have time for only one more. Did you want to choose upon any one of those? I feel like package offerings could be as you say, a separate conversation. I think

Eric Elia  49:44

packaged offerings in T centralizing culture should have a separate conversation.

Jeff  49:49

Yeah, no, let's do that. So

Eric Elia  49:53

he would she would do a fun round. Yeah, let's do the fun, fun, funniest services story and people who The most funniest funniest services story. Oh, I

Jeff  50:05

thought we touched on a couple of there's there's so many of them. Oh my god,

Eric Elia  50:08

I got two gems. Okay. I'm ready. So my my we had had, we did some tension with this German Cup Jesus. Sorry. So we went, we went to, to Germany to make good. Set the experience, right?

Jeff  50:30

Make good. That's a is that an East Coast?

Eric Elia  50:32

Might be? Make it good? Yeah, I think I heard that in a Sopranos episode. And so when we got there, I found we found out that the account manager was sleeping in the office of the main stakeholder at the client

Jeff  50:52

totally forgot about the clients. That's not normal.

Eric Elia  50:57

So not normal. And it was because of the amount of work that was getting done. Absolutely. It probably would have been better to set up the tension with the client first and then come to the story. But we could do that. But the funny part, we have this big meeting set up where we're going to make the good with the client. And there was a lot of tension for a lot of reasons, both internally and externally. And yeah, the narrative is completely flipped around. Do we have time for me to start with the other side?

Jeff  51:27

Yeah, fire away. Yeah.

Eric Elia  51:29

Okay, so So the client, the client, big German media company, huge, big revenue, super important to us first, first big entree into, into Europe,

Jeff  51:42

the New York Times size of the New York Times and bigger, like bigger,

Eric Elia  51:45

yeah, bigger, like New York Times, plus getting that. And then the funny one, I remember this bizdev guy sold them. Platinum support, which didn't exist, you know, and upright, COVID Hustle. God bless the hustle. And I bring that story up from time to time, sometimes you gotta make shit up on the fly. And to get the destiny so. So we scoped out a project. And we brought on two new people out of the European office to help get the project going at the time. One of them was a designer, or not one of them it was a developer. And then the and then the other one was, and he was gonna build some integration, customer integration or something. And then the other one was kind of an account lead who's going to run the project in Europe. So they're moving forward with what they're doing. And we check ins every week. And and this the project lead and you're upset. We're on it. We got it. Yeah, we're on schedule. We're on schedule. And then the week week, it's supposed to launch where is it? It's like, what do you mean, I thought you guys were doing it. They're like, what? What are you talking about? And he flat out lied internally. And we were under the gun. I said, Well, what has your guy who you hired he vouched for? What has he done? Like, he hasn't been able to get it up and running yet? So we had to, we went burn month, we had to take it on internally in the US team. And then the client says why I was also expecting this requirement that we did not deliver. And, and we said, Well, no, it's it's not. It's not in so w. And he says, what's in the proposal you put forward. And he sends us a proposal back. And he wound up changing the content in the PowerPoint, to say we had promised something that we did. And this is one of those things where he knew that we knew we knew that and we all knew. But he was using his power in the size to say, you can't call me a liar, because I've got $100 million of business coming. And over the years and and we found the original PowerPoint did the compare it was not there. Yep. So we had to make it right. We had to CEO had to get involved. And then I had to go to Europe to fix this. So there's tension now with me and the project manager who blew it. There's tension with me and the client. We go over there. We're on the train to going from Amsterdam to Dusseldorf, and I meet up and I've got the head of services is this older guy who had run like Ben inservices lotus, another staff who had visions of of this operating a different way. We're on the train and the project manager guy goes at me for like, what he wants, terms of his career and building up and after he had completely crapped the bed on the project. Our boss now is sitting there is looking at us and will not intervene. nonconfrontational, he's waiting, and he's looking at and he's like so what's where's my path up? Or where's this? And where's that Mike? Well, you got to get some success. It's some pelts on the wall successfully before you're looking at your path upward. And then the head to head there support services looking at it like I'm not getting involved with this. We got to get off. We're gonna we're gonna meet the client for dinner. Yeah. We gotta get off the train. And the older guy waits to let people off the get on the train, he's being polite. In Germany, the trains run on time. endorser are open for like 30 seconds. doors close on him. I'm looking at him. And we nothing to do so. Fortunately, he went on to the next town from Dusseldorf, which was cologne, or vice versa. Got the next train turned around, go to the hotel. And we go to dinner. And we go to one of these great local beer halls with the pork knuckle and the local beer and the whole deal. And then I'm now with all the tension. And everyone who's pissed off at me for kind of holding our ground. The Peacemaker Who was the guy gets stuck on the train stuck on the train and another city. Were at this dinner making amends and building the rapport back up. And it was it was awkward, but you often in those settings when you get to be face to face, you can course correct and said yeah,

Jeff  56:35

that's a great lesson there. And we did in that. And I stressed it everybody I work with ever is that you got to meet the people in person, right? Even if it's impossible, dude, now do a video conference or whatever. But every project has bumps. And they're a lot easier to navigate through. When you've had you've you've broken bread. Who is with them? Right?

Eric Elia  56:58

Yes. Very good job of extracting the moral and that's

Jeff  57:03

so you know what, I know we had some other stuff listed. I think we can touch on that. Especially I'm really wanted to chat about patriots season two, because it took a dramatically different

Eric Elia  57:13

I haven't I have not watched it. Oh, yeah, watch it. That was my business travel show. And I watched it going back and forth. And your recommendation season one, which is funny, because a lot of season one is business travel related. And so it's just funny to be in that world. And so for better or worse, better. I'd say I haven't been doing cross country trips

Jeff  57:37

yet. And so I'm excited to get sick because I usually call these when I'm sick, right? Yes, dial it up. file through it. That's that's a it's an intro. That was all I want. I won't give you too much on that. But in touch on Gronk. Yes, my hearts broken. But the guy was too banged up. I mean, he just couldn't. Yeah.

Eric Elia  57:55

For a guy who portrays himself as a meathead party boy, reading these stories now he saved his entire $54 million contract didn't spend a dime of it yet lived off of endorsements. Live this frugal life wearing jeans from high school. Yeah. And now Now he's like, I'm set for life. I don't have CTE yet that I know of. And I'm like, I'm moving on. I gave him credit.

Jeff  58:21

Probably see him on Shark Tank in five years. But so if you'd wrote sixes versus Celts, which, you know, I'm assuming because the Sixers actually beat the Celtics one time, but I think it was Terry Rozier the Celtics made a comment or news Morris basically it was like, Yeah, I know. It was a big win for them. But I thought confetti was gonna pop out of the ceiling after they won.

Eric Elia  58:43

Yeah, he could have just shortened it all and said Tatum?

Jeff  58:47

Oh, yeah, well, false. I mean, my God. But that is

Eric Elia  58:50

one of the most bizarre stories, right? And I mean, I guess, step back on the Sixers and say, trust the process, get as many draft picks, a bunch of them are gonna bust. And then you're gonna get a transcendent player or two out of it, and fill the rest with free agents and then your your contender, and that that's where they are. And it's just a shame. Okafor. And false handout as badly as they did, right. And one of them turning into a role player would have been nice, right? Yeah, it's true.

Jeff  59:24

It's a good point. So Eric, thank you so much for being Thank you. First guests. I'm going to get this up and live as soon as I can, which hopefully tonight and we definitely have enough stuff I think to cover for the next one and maybe grab some questions along the way. So appreciate it. Any final thoughts or anything or are we good?

Eric Elia  59:47

I think this is a great topic that is much needed. I think I'm excited to see kind of this dialogue be you know, perhaps like something that gels this conversation around And yeah,

Jeff  1:00:01

I feel like whenever I hear people talking, it doesn't go as in depth, right? So I didn't want to do though, like, Oh, tell me about your five years of Comcast. Now let's get into this. Like, like, let's get that out of the way. Let's talk about some actual situational stuff, right? Because people might have just gotten a police department handed over to them, or maybe, you know, as a senior leader operator, but maybe also there's somebody who's being asked to step up, and, you know, it's just not out there for the day to day like PS villages, like not working anymore, right? I mean, I just don't see a resource out there. So, you know, hopefully people get some value out of it. And, and, and learn some lessons. So it's been great talk. Are we are we recording now or are we are recording I am gonna stop in a second. But no, those are my thoughts on it. So yeah.

Eric Elia  1:00:54

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I hope I hope you'll have me back again. All right.