Janis Zech: Hello and welcome to another episode. Hey, Philip.

Philipp Stelzer: Hey, Janis. How's it going?

Janis Zech: Yeah, pretty good. Can't complain. We have a pretty good episode, I think. We talked with Markus Benning about how the changes in the markets over the past eighteen months are now impacting revenue operations as a whole. And we look at it from various angles, including customer success, outbound sales, and message marketers. So I think it's a pretty good episode, and it's definitely worth listening to. Markus, welcome.

Markus Benning: Yeah, hello, and thanks for having me, Janis and Philipp. Thanks for the opportunity.

Janis Zech: Yeah, it's great to have you. And yeah, maybe you can give a bit of context about yourself. I mean, I know you've a long career in RevOps and other areas. So yeah, why don't you do a quick intro?

Markus Benning: Yeah, happy to. Happy to. So I founded my consulting business focused on go to market architectures and revenue operations last year. And prior to that I spent basically about ten years building up and running sales ops and revenue operations functions, first in the U.S., where I lived until twenty twenty, and then I moved to Berlin. My last job here in Berlin was at Zenjob, which you might have heard, basically a digital platform to manage supply and demand for short term jobs. Prior to twenty twelve, I spent eleven years with Microsoft in first sales. So I started my career at Microsoft as a seller, a solution seller, by the way, big distinction, and then moved into something that they call, or at that time they called business architecture, which is Microsoft speak for what we know as sales operations. So basically, was able to work with subsidiaries globally on mainly transitioning from licensing sales to cloud sales. And that was a very interesting experience. And yeah, prior to Microsoft, which I joined in two thousand two, I started my career in management consulting.

Janis Zech: Awesome. Yeah, so a lot of experience. Let's maybe dive right in. I mean, from your experience, especially now working with private equity companies and helping, you know, venture backed and private equity backed companies, I mean, what has changed the last eighteen months?

Markus Benning: Oh, well, quite a lot. Right? I mean, everybody's speaking about the shift from growth at all costs to efficient growth. Of course, RevOps is a part of that. There are several things that have changed. One is the investment in tools is being questioned because it's an important cost element. Every RevOps leader that I know is being exposed to basically justify the investment in tools. That can lead to going away from a best of breed approach to a more platform centric approach, which makes sense. It also puts the affected software vendors into a different situation. They need to basically justify their existence based on a different mindset. That's definitely one that every RevOps leader is exposed to. Tool consolidation, how to save costs, and how to make things as efficient as possible. Before we go deeper, let's take a step back and talk about the mindset. So what does it mean from lofty valuations to everybody focusing on how can we get profitable as quickly as possible, especially if you're a venture capital funded company? How much runway do you have, really? Even in private equity, which I also have the opportunity to work with, it's a similar story. The only difference in private equity, because of the fundamental investment thesis, efficient growth has always been the name of the game. Everything is focused on EBITDA. Everything is focused on building a story, either through transformation or growth or a combination of both toward providing efficiency wins. RevOps is, in most companies that I work with, considered a value driver element of the value creation plan, which is what private equity companies use to achieve success. It's more about finding these pockets of additional efficiency layers that then should be activated. It's either through implementing new technologies, streamlining processes, investing in much more structured enablement. So that's basically ongoing. Nothing has changed in that regard. What has changed, though, is the intensity of focusing on unit economics. So if eighteen months ago we were basically talking about ARR or MRR as the only thing that we were going after, now revenue leaders, RevOps leaders, they need to understand what is LTV, what's the LTV to CAC ratio, what is customer acquisition cost, CAC, what are the process elements that influence those metrics, how can I connect the analysis of those metrics with ideally seamlessly designed processes to improve the performance of those metrics? It's a much more metric driven business nowadays, which is a good thing because ultimately that's what RevOps is about, basically understanding how the business works, what are the metrics that matter, the moments that matter in the funnel, and then executing around that.

Janis Zech: Yep. Yeah. I mean, I think there's two really good reports. Iconic published a sales efficiency report, and then also Insights Partners published a report about it. And if you look at the metrics, right, it's really centered around, you know, like, how has growth developed over the last eighteen months, and that has gone down. Quote attainment has gone down. Even net retention has gone down, right, because of seat abbreviation. And then CAC payback is something, you know, being closely looked at as well. So how long does it take to actually, you know, offset the customer acquisition costs? And I think in private equity, to your point, right, this has been something that has always been the main focus. I think that the time frame between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty one or beginning of twenty twenty one was actually more an exception than the rule. What we've observed there was low interest for over ten years and a lot of venture capital and then also growth capital going into the technology ecosystem. And I think one thing that's really interesting to look at is just look at the equity multiples for public traded SaaS companies in that time frame that went from typically eight to twelve to actually, you know, fifty to sixty. And, you know, I think back in the days, I always felt like that's crazy. I mean, it's just not sustainable, and I think we're basically back to the normal rhythm of software as a service.

Markus Benning: Agreed. And I think that's a great description you're doing. Exactly. So in a sense, it's healthy. Right? So it's basically, you know, back to basics. One of the key elements that also companies are now realizing is based on realization, wow, it's very expensive to actually win a new customer. Everybody is focusing on customer acquisition costs. The other concept that I see many companies now focusing on, what's the cost to serve an existing customer? And then related to that, the question, is it even the right existing customer? What was the decision that the customer made to sign up with us or to purchase our services or products? Is it still for us, from an efficiency perspective and a financial efficiency perspective, a good decision to continue to work with that customer?

Janis Zech: You're referring to essentially customer success operations or account management operations, what's happening after the post sale.

Markus Benning: Exactly. Right? So early in the funnel, meaning classic marketing topic, we need to know who we pitch to and why, what are the personas. But it's equally important to apply that concept to what I call the right hand side of the funnel. So after the sale, you know, onboarding, impact, growth, expansion, you want to know which customers you are serving and why, and how much does it cost you to serve these customers. In some cases, also be bold to make decisions to have difficult conversations with those customers about, for example, pricing because you want to elevate the efficiency of that customer being in your cohort so that many companies are now focusing, do I have the right customers and why, and how do I measure the efficiency of that customer relationship, and then how I drive toward proactively improving the composition of my customer cohorts because it is so expensive to win new customers, number one. And number two, nothing better than what I call a customer success qualified lead, meaning that the customer success team has a close engagement rhythm with the existing customer and due to that identifies leads to drive either upsell or cross sell motions in the existing customer. Those deals are much easier to close. They close faster. Companies are giving their existing customers much more love than before.

Janis Zech: So are you referring to customer success ops as something that has professionalized? I mean, do you see RevOps teams now having a stronger focus on everything from, let's say, the contract assigned to how do we onboard, train, and, you know, how do we do our quarterly reviews, how do we move from being reactive to proactive, and then also, you know, renewal and upsell, cross sell. And is that something you are observing in the scene right now?

Markus Benning: Yeah, it's definitely something that is happening and even with more rigor and also with much more structure. If you think about RevOps, the functional model has always been marketing ops, sales ops, and customer success ops, and basically linking those three functional approaches to one. I call it horizontalizing and aligning with the value creation across the funnel. Many companies start naturally with sales ops. Actually, they start earlier. They have a CRM system that somebody manages. That's the first step into actually doing sales ops. Then you start wondering, well, it might be a good idea to integrate with marketing and or customer success so that those pockets of operational decisions are no longer made in silos but rather in the connectedness of the go to market motion. Now that still makes sense, what we're seeing is basically a much stronger focus on professionalizing your go to market motions on the right hand side of the funnel. Really, I hear a lot my customers asking me, okay, what customer success tools do you recommend? We need to find kind of a tool that supports us in something we want to call customer lifecycle management. How do I measure the customer's health? How do I measure the signals of their product usage and turn that into signals that help me combat potential churn, that help me identify opportunities to expand. So there is definitely a renewed focus on customer success as a driver of business outcomes and with that also the focus on operationally managing that with a very efficient approach, which requires processes, systems, tools, enablement, and, of course, the right customer success strategy.

Janis Zech: And you mentioned, like, also the cost of serving a customer. So what in your experience are, like, the strongest drivers to increase the costs of serving a customer? So, like, what's a bad customer? Like, when should you get rid of someone or try to get rid of someone?

Markus Benning: Yeah, that's a cool question. So usually there are some signs. So when you see a customer that suddenly, first of all, slow adoption, slow onboarding is always a sign for future problems, potentially even churn. And those are the customers that are then more difficult to manage when a customer suddenly increases the number of tickets that they generate. And because of you as a company maybe not having a proactive engagement model, you're basically in a reactive mode that usually increases the cost because in the worst case, you have to start a rescue mission. You have to basically prevent that churn from happening, which is very costly. You need to send in your partners. If you have your own services team, you need to basically put a SWAT team together to rescue that customer. That's all very expensive. And then also the fit for purpose, as I call it. So you want to analyze those customers where always you might have said, okay, we're going to go after that deal because it's a lighthouse win. It's a well known logo. We need to have that customer, but you were never really certain how they will use your tool and solution. Well, that's going to come and bite you in the moment the customer is realizing, do we really have impact? Do we want to actually go into a renewal conversation? And then if you didn't have that strong alignment with the value perception of the customer, then it's almost too late. And then you again start a rescue mission, the CS team, for example. In many companies, customer success folks, they're not really sales focused. They love the customer. They love providing value. But in order to rescue a deal, what they do is they call the AE. Right? And then you basically have to resell a deal, which then takes resources away from what the AE should be really doing. And then it complicates the whole motion. So there's a lot going on in that regard, and it goes back to ideally being proactive. And many companies are now realizing they're thinking in terms of customer lifecycle management, which is something I'm hearing. So how do you manage proactively the lifecycle of the customer and drive an engagement model that is even differentiated ideally by segment, higher engagement rhythm, more personal, higher cost but also associated to higher revenue, higher value perception, and more transactional customers. Well, that's where you try to decrease the cost to serve, but you still want to run those customers efficiently because they have a strong baseline to expand from. And many companies are thinking, okay, how can I turn this around? I want to turn from becoming reactive to basically embracing my customer and what are the processes and models that I can apply in that regard. One of those is customer lifecycle management, many companies are not really now focusing on.

Janis Zech: I mean, I think I fully agree, but, like, as long as the basically, the lifetime value of the customer is lower than the cost of acquisition, it's fine. Right? Like, it's fine to have these customers. You don't have to, like, make so much effort in order to, like, you know, keep them. If they churn, they churn. It still has a positive impact on your balance sheets.

Markus Benning: Exactly. Right? So you want to have that differentiated approach. Right? What's the cost to serve? Do we want to keep that customer? You know, it's a much more deliberate, focused, and intentional approach toward customers. You just don't focus on taking in anybody that shows up. You basically say, okay, why would this customer be able to build a successful story with us? And those customers that I have, I definitely want to keep them because churn is very, very expensive. And you basically want to build a solid relationship, clarity in the value story. Many companies are refocusing on getting product marketing aligned with the new reality and focusing on impact, you know, and impact and value perception and also aligning that with different personas, meaning clarity on who makes the decision and why and where is the actual value perception. Those are topics that I see happening in many companies right now and with good results actually. You know, it's not rocket science that we're talking about. It's basically just, you know, good common sense and leveraging the fact that we have customers, and we want to give them some love.

Janis Zech: Just to summarize, so what you're suggesting is essentially going from reactive to proactive, segmenting the customer, creating a customer lifecycle management process that, you know, runs from the onboarding, you know, training reviews to the renewal and expansion discussion, and then really understanding what does customer success look like. Right? So looking at product analytics data, if you have those, and understanding what metrics are the benchmark, comparing those deviations to go from the reactive to proactive model, and also understanding unit economics and, I guess, the ICP even better on the customer success side, which I think is very much something we know from the top of the funnel and mid of the funnel. But it's probably a bit newer on the customer success side and feels like a well needed professionalization to drive more revenues. Right? Is that a fair summary?

Markus Benning: Yeah, very, very fair. So, you know, it's looking holistically, you know, and especially if you're a company that has been focused more on winning new customers, you know, where in the past, again, it was about how many new logos. I know board meetings that have been entirely focused on how many new logos were won. That has changed completely. Now the question is, okay, how many new logos did we win, and how many of these were aligned with the ICP? So the ideal customer profile is definitely a topic that is coming up big in companies and not only applying to the early funnel but also to the existing customers, to the cohorts. And the other topic that I see in that context coming up is the clarity on metrics. So companies are really looking at why do I need to measure certain aspects in the go to market funnel, and what does that KPI tree look like, and do I need to make adjustments, and do I have the processes defined and measured in a way that it's clear what is an MQL, what is an SQL, what is a qualified opportunity, what is an onboarded customer and why, what defines that, what is a customer that is perceiving impact and why, and what is a customer that I can consider in a growth and expansion phase. So to apply the rigor that we usually see on the left hand side of the funnel, usually at the sales motion, sales stages, to apply that same rigor on the right hand side with existing customers is also something that many companies are focusing right now, and it makes complete sense.

Janis Zech: Yeah. We've all been there that, you know, you close a big deal, you're super happy, you ship it over the line, it's a bad onboarding experience already, there's a lot of information missing in the CRM, and you're thinking, my god, you know, and then the customer comes in with huge expectations towards your road map. It destroys your product road map, and you're basically in a situation where, you know, the rescue team starts before you even have success in the experience for the customer. It's just negative. Right? It's just something that is noise. So I think, you know, maybe let's go a bit more to the top of the funnel. Right? Like, you touched on the ICP topic, ideal customer profile. You know, how has that changed on the top of the funnel and then also going into the SQLs? I'm super curious about that.

Markus Benning: Yeah, it's you know, there's this, I mean, you hear a lot of noise about traditional outbound is dead and so on, you know. That's one thing you hear, which I, by the way, disagree with fundamentally, not only because I'm an Outreach alum, but because I do believe that the go to market motions still make sense, traditional outbound and inbound. But you have to look at them differently with a different light, meaning what is the ultimate outcome that you want to achieve, and then applying and modifying the existing setup, especially if you think about the sales model overall, and being more differentiated. Companies are realizing now that the classic thinking about, okay, first I have to achieve product market fit, and what I do until then really doesn't matter much. Well, that's no longer true because you still need to be cost efficient to get toward product market fit. And then companies also talk about something that is called message market fit, and that's where it gets interesting because you want to have that in order to be effective when you do outbound motions. They still make sense, but they need to be looked in a much more comprehensive context, which requires then also to obtain more data, understand the decision triggers and drivers of your potential customers in a much better way, and by doing so, being much closer to the prospect, understanding the ways decisions are made, you know, that goes into not being present on LinkedIn, but really understanding why people are on social media, do they prefer certain platforms, and taking that information in to make the overall outreach and the outbound motion, for example, in the early funnel, much more meaningful and much more outcome focused and a much better experience, which also has to be more personalized. So what are we seeing if you think about ICP and the application to early funnel processes like outbound, where we're hearing people say the traditional classic outbound is dead. Maybe that's a little bit of attention grabbing on LinkedIn. I do not believe that outbound is dead by any means, not only because I'm an Outreach alum, but because I believe that a well constructed and desired outbound motion will still add a ton of value to any pipeline. But what is happening is that the process is turning from a highly mechanized process where, basically, eighteen, twenty four months ago, it was basically about you wanted to scale outbound while you hired more SDRs. Now the question is, how do I make outbound more efficient, more personalized, more aligned with the decision triggers and value perceptions of my prospects? And for that, it's important to really have an up to date ICP and also understanding why personas do think a certain way about solutions and why would it matter to them so that the whole outbound process becomes more based on reasonable and structured data, not only firmographic, technographic, but also social media sourced data to understand why a prospect is present at certain channels and certain platforms and what drives their decision making so I can personalize the outreach and also provide relevant content. And that's also where we see another trend where AI is coming in. Generative AI is definitely helping many companies in many aspects to basically provide in a much faster and quicker way the content that is relevant to have a reasonable conversation with a prospect and then to get that meeting, which is the ultimate outcome. So fundamentally, outbound is still relevant, but it's changing in the way it's being executed and focused on. And then, of course, in everything, companies are looking how cost efficient can I be with outbound? So how can I still achieve the outcomes, but in a much more cost efficient way? So everybody's looking at how are we designing our process for scale, for simplicity, and for standardization, what I call the three S's, you know, scale, simplicity, and standardization. They're always present. They should be present in everything that RevOps does. They're even more important nowadays in any process that RevOps is aligned with or tasked with to design or to improve.

Janis Zech: It feels a bit like, you know, all the marketing channels are actually changing, whether you look at outbound content, you know, ads. And I think the interesting part on the outbound discussion is a lot of people just basically refer to it because they think outbound has become this numbers game and on the quality level, maybe not great quality. But if you think about when do you have a potential buyer that is in the market and wants to, you know, buy a solution, like, I think that's a really interesting question. Like, yes, typically, outbound is not focused on these, but can you actually think about triggers that increase likelihood that those folks are actually in the market and are buying? Right? And if you think deeply about those things, and then you have a meaningful message, I think you refer to as the message market fit, right, that is actually resonating with your persona, and you have persona based messaging. And you have basically also a quick understanding of how you can help solve those pain points, it matters a lot. Right? And it's another very attractive channel. Then the question is, you know, kind of what's your CAC to CAC payback ratio there, right, by channel? And that's then probably the details, really important details. But yeah, I think it's a very generalized discussion on LinkedIn. And I lately saw this, I don't know if you saw that, but, like, I saw this notion of to book one meeting, you needed three hundred touch points, and now you need one thousand two hundred. So I do believe it has gotten a lot harder, but has it gotten, you know, five times harder, three times harder? You know, I don't know. I think everything has gotten harder in twenty twenty three because the buyers are just more rigid about how they buy software. Right? So companies that had product market fit two years ago or felt like they have product market fit might not have it anymore because the buyers want different things. And I think, you know, if you think about revenue technologies, right, which I think we all spend a lot of time analyzing and building, and I think there's a clear trend towards consolidation, which feeds essentially the customer success angle. Right? You have more products to sell, cross sell, upsell, so you can increase your average contract value on the existing customer side. But, you know, on the new logo side, right, the expectations towards what you actually want from your vendors has changed quite dramatically. And I think that's a super interesting topic as well because the perception and the buying committee is changing. And there's just a lot more rigor in not just buying whatever, you know, shouts the loudest and, you know, maybe has the best story, but what actually creates a scalable stack that helps you, you know, win more or drive more revenue.

Markus Benning: Agreed. Yeah. And in some cases, actually, if you put yourself in the shoes of a, you know, up and coming software vendor, in some cases, you need to play defense. You know, you're basically put on the spot because you are the best of breed solution, and there's this platformization happening, this cost reduction, to your point about consolidation in the marketplace happening. You know, companies, they focus on, okay, need to play defense, but how do we use that opportunity to become better in our offensive game? And that requires then also looking at creative approaches. One thing that I see happening, which is incredibly powerful, is community. Many companies now focus on really understanding and taking in the concept of community as an asset, as an angle, as a lever, and working on leveraging that for the business outcomes. Community as a platform to position yourself as a thought leader, what are the tools, the communication means that we can use. Podcasts like this one, podcasts have basically grown like mushrooms. Again what you see there is a differentiation of quality and quantity. Then again, going back to community, how do you engage proactively with the community, not only participating, that's the passive community game, but how as a company do you proactively participate in that motion? Because that's where people come together that are like minded, that have a common interest, and usually share information. And it's a fantastic opportunity to be present and to position thought leadership, which then improves usually the likelihood of then applying with that relevant content and a transformed and much more personalized and ICP centric outbound motion. All of that is playing together. So again, as you said earlier, you need to be as a company much more thoughtful than before. Eighteen, twenty four months ago, it was basically just scale is everything, cost doesn't matter, let's go. And this is why it's so interesting to be in RevOps nowadays because RevOps, if it's well positioned and understood in a company, is actually the main driver to help steer the business in those directions from a strategy, process, systems and tools, enablement and data perspective. And if we look at that, it's an incredible time to be in RevOps because you're being looked at with a totally different set of eyes and totally different expectation. I know RevOps leaders that are now being pulled and invited to board meetings to present efficiency levers to board members. That was not the case eighteen months ago, or there might have been some cases. The level of interest in go to market efficiency has increased substantially, which is a fantastic opportunity for anyone associated to RevOps.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I think the aspect of community led growth is super interesting. I mean, it's another channel on the marketing side that creates a lot of awareness these days. What I find very, very interesting in marketing is that it felt like a few years ago, you had a few different channels, and they were very measurable, and the attribution layer were a lot clearer. And now everything is multi touch, you know, like, how does community led play into your outbound, right, which is, first and foremost, from my point of view, an awareness channel. Right? It's not high intent. So probably measuring low intent is a lot easier. But how do you measure, you know, how do you measure these, like, branding awareness channels that are a lot harder to measure? How do you attribute them? I think that's a big challenge for RevOps because, obviously, it has a lot of ripple effects on to where you spend your money. So, yeah, any thoughts there?

Markus Benning: Yeah, so you're absolutely right. It is important to focus on what I call the data model. Right? So basically, to your point about how to measure that, many companies are realizing, hey, our data model is really not clear. Do we really know what was the outcome of that campaign? Or we participate in seventeen different podcasts, but why and what's the impact and what's the attribution? And that is incredibly important for RevOps leaders to proactively reach out and embrace the marketing world in that regard. Now, of course, the marketing world has established KPIs and ways to measure brand equity. The wheel doesn't have to be reinvented in regards of, for example, perceptions about brand and also measuring impact of different marketing tactics. But what is important from a RevOps perspective, I think, is to proactively incorporate that sequence of measurements into a data model that is focused on the outcome overall. It starts back to ICP, if you start acquiring customers because of the marketing strategy not being aligned with what is the real customer that we want to have, what is the ideal customer profile. If there's a disconnect, then you might have fantastic metrics from a marketing execution, but ultimately you end up acquiring customers that are not contributing to the LTV in the best possible way, the lifetime value. So what I see happening is many proactive RevOps leaders just starting to think very broadly and connecting the dots and saying, in order to maximize LTV, which is a key unit economic, we need to actually start very, very early in the funnel and actually work with marketing to align and create a connectedness in the measurement of what our marketing activities are and why, how do they produce outcomes that we can then process with our go to market machinery, so to speak, toward good outcomes in regards of unit economics. So that's something that is very important, and again, to stress the importance of a data model. So I think any RevOps leader, any RevOps team needs to really invest quality time in understanding what are the moments that matter, what are the metrics, what are the KPI trees, and also driving bold decisions on decommitting from vanity metrics, right? For example, activity based metrics that many companies still measure, well, they're fine, but put them in the second or even third level of the KPI tree. And then the first level, put the metrics that really stand for outcomes and that can be continuously measured so that trend views are possible. And then enable RevOps to be the driver of insights out of that data so that they can help detect, ideally detect trends and look and convert signals into decision triggers for the go to market leadership. That's the ideal world, but that requires, of course, building a solid foundation in regards of being able to measure those data across the funnel.

Janis Zech: Yeah. We'll actually have an episode about funnel metrics and what matters in the coming weeks with Charles Saunders because I think that's a really interesting topic to look at and often done maybe not right. So how do you get that right, especially across, you know, the different functions? As you mentioned, right, from marketing sales to, you know, success and see the entire funnel and also the outcome on the renewal side. Right? It's a long period. Right? So really difficult to do, but has a huge impact on the business overall. Look, I mean, I feel like we could continue talking, but we're running up on time. So I want to ask you, you know, one closing question, and then I think we have to invite you back in a few months to see how all these topics have evolved. But, you know, if you think about, you know, like, back onto your career, I mean, what were, you know, some of the biggest learnings if you were to start your career in RevOps today? I mean, what's the one or two things, you know, you think are crucial if you were to start now?

Markus Benning: Yeah, so that's a fantastic question. Thanks, Janis. So I think if I look back at my career, I think what immediately comes to mind is the connectedness to the business. In order to really run RevOps in a meaningful way, you individually as a leader but also your team needs to be very closely aligned with the business, the business affinity, the understanding, the commitment to achieve success and outcomes, even down to a compensation model that exposes the RevOps sales ops team to revenue outcomes. Those are things that are, I think, essential because you can only be relevant to the level of you understanding and actually co driving and carrying the business, and there needs to be an alignment. The old idea of, oh, we have some techies that run the CRM, and we have some ops people that know how to run marketing campaigns, and we have someone sending out the renewal notices, basically an operative and process centric understanding is not good enough. You need to elevate to be a business partner. That's very important. The other thing that comes to mind, what also drives me in my career, which is always linking outcomes with empathy, meaning you need to be focused on business outcomes as an owner and driver of RevOps. And I mean this for any individual, any leader that is in this space. And most important is to understand and to have empathy for the people that carry out the processes that you have the opportunity, the honor, to be designing for the company that you're working with because ultimately it's a people business. So technology is good, processes are excellent, leverage, I always say the P words. And especially don't forget the P word that means product. You always want to really well understand the product that your company is selling and why. Linking that with empathy for people because ultimately they are the ones that drive the outcome. And not limiting that to the internal world, but also understanding the people outside of the company, meaning who buys and why and what drives them. Those are kind of things that come to mind that are kind of differentiators because they're easy to forget. You can really spend a ton of time becoming the master of processes and implementing the CRM in the best way possible. You should never forget the people that actually end up using the tools that you're implementing.

Janis Zech: Yeah, I love this closing note. I think that's fantastic advice for everybody going into this fantastic and interesting role, which I think has so much potential in the next decade given what we just heard. Markus, thank you so much for sharing all these fantastic views and learnings. Really enjoyed the conversation. Wish you a great day.

Markus Benning: Thanks so much for having me, Janis and Philipp. Thank you. Bye.