Janis Zech: So welcome to another episode of the RevOps Lab. I'm here with Robert Gimbel. Hey, Robert. How are you doing?

Robert Gimbel: Hey, Janis. Thanks for having me. I'm doing very well.

Janis Zech: Great. Yeah. So really excited to talk to you about, you know, your journey at Camunda. You joined as the first employee and spent essentially fourteen years together with the founders building the business in various different roles. And we're gonna talk about, you know, how you build a scalable and especially predictable revenue engine. And, yeah, I mean, maybe share what you're doing right now and who you are, but, you know, I'm really excited about diving in because there's so much wealth of experience here.

Robert Gimbel: Yeah. Thanks. I can, like, briefly introduce myself, but let's not spend the majority of the time there. So I'm Robert. As you said, I've spent a lot of time at Camunda in various different roles. I was responsible for the product and engineering organization initially when we launched the product, helped to build that up to a size of thirty employees in that org at the time. Did a little bit on the admin side of the firm afterwards before transitioning into the CRO role. That was at a time when the business had already proven itself in the market, ten million revenue of ARR exceeded. And basically, was my mission to build an org and a revenue engine that could get the company to one hundred million euros. And that mission in terms of the org was accomplished last year. That's why I transitioned out, and now I'm working as a go to market adviser helping various different firms to go through similar journeys.

Janis Zech: Fantastic. So I found a quote from Jacob Freund, who is the CEO of Camunda. And what he said about you is, like, if I wanna point out one key strength about Robert it would be his unique ability to build and operate scalable structures, and the degree of stability, predictability, and efficiency is outstanding. So the bar is really high for this, just so you know. But I love this because I think it follows the theme, you know, of what we have in mind when building revenue organizations. Maybe for context, like, tell us a bit about Camunda, the go to market motion, and kind of the ASP sales cycles to set the scene, and then we'll dive into predictability.

Robert Gimbel: Yes. So in a nutshell, Camunda is a technology product, a platform that allows you to orchestrate processes end to end. It's sold into the IT, and they take it to then build custom applications with it. And that can be all sorts of applications. To give a few examples, it could be customer onboarding for a bank, it could be claims settling for an insurance, it could be network provisioning for a telco and all that kind of stuff. And they take the basically the essence of the workflow engine and the platform around it to basically accelerate them building such solutions, orchestrating various different endpoints across systems and devices and humans. That's complex, right? Like that's core business for these large enterprises. The bigger an organization is, the higher the value, the higher the complexity of their existing IT landscape. So that was who we would generally target with a solution that naturally transitions into a complex consultative sales with longer sales cycles six to eighteen months. We saw anything even longer, very few instances of it being shorter. But generally, the deals we closed would fall into that. The ASPs would be in line with that ranging from yeah, five to six digit ARR numbers initially and then growing over time.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Maybe important, the company is very developer focused. Some of their technology is open source, so we would always have open source components that you would distribute for free and then commercialize on with an enterprise offer. And so, obviously, if you have an open source approach to the go to market, can you describe how was your pipeline generated?

Robert Gimbel: That matured over time, but initially, you could refer to it even as product led growth in the sense that we would give out the product for free in the form of an open source project and people were able to play around with it, mainly software developers and probably software architects or enterprise architects. And they would build proof of concepts with it and thereby considering to integrate it into critical projects. And whenever that happened, there was the possibility that they would turn to us and ask for commercial vendor backed relationship including support and maintenance and later on add on features. So from a pure demand generation perspective that drove a lot of inbound in the early days, I think all the way to the ten million euros and even beyond, it was almost exclusively inbound driven. So people surfacing to us, they're like, hey, I've used your product, I want to integrate it into my project, I now need a price for your Enterprise Edition. And later on, we added partners to that. We also added an outbound element to it. And we also sourced through our own customer success teams quite a significant amount of pipeline.

Janis Zech: And that was then mostly expansion opportunities?

Robert Gimbel: Exclusively expansion, yes.

Janis Zech: Yes. Okay. Why?

Robert Gimbel: Because the technology we refer to it as horizontal. Right? We weren't focused on just one use case, and once you did that, you were done, but you could adopt it for multiple, for a variety of different use cases. So if we entered a big organization like a large insurance company or a large bank, we would typically land with one or two projects and then expand that over time going from, like, to multiple other areas of their business where we could also create value.

Janis Zech: Yeah. So up to ten million, one go to market motion, mostly inbound, open source. What were your criteria to open an opportunity?

Robert Gimbel: So first of all, most important was consistency to me. That was a big thing, right? Like that's when everything started. You typically have a lot of noise further up the funnel, right? Not that you shouldn't track metrics and all of that, but as soon as you convert that into pipeline, I always refer to it in front of sales like that's the moment you let everyone else off the hook, right? That's when you say this is good enough for me to take ownership and, yeah, convert it at a reasonable rate into actual business and revenue. So that was a critical milestone to reach and we had clearly defined criteria. It was inspired by BANT, classical good old BANT with small variations to it. And the biggest focus was on the need of the customer. Was there a problem with the customer that was really relevant to them and it was a priority for them to solve it? And did it relate to our Enterprise Edition as a solution, right? Like I always say you want to find these two elements, something that's really relevant to them and that you are able to actually solve with what you have on offer. And if that's strong enough, typically, these other elements like budget and, like, hierarchies and meeting important people like economic buyers and so on, they can get resolved. But if you don't have a strong need, you can even have all that other stuff and a good timeline. It's just likely to fall apart later on if you don't have a strong enough reason for them to make a move.

Janis Zech: And how did you get in touch with them? I mean, they download the product. You know, they love to, you know, just basically try it out. I mean, how do you know those criteria exist?

Robert Gimbel: Yes. First, you're right. Like, you know many people are using your product because you can see, like, certain stats, but you don't know who they are. Right? Like, open source works without any barriers to adoption. So we needed to surface them in the first place. We refer to it as like community surfacing. And there were multiple different things. The highest quality yielded our contact us form on the website, which we would place. Everyone like, hey. If you wanna talk to us, this is how to get in touch. And then we would also host events, physical in the first days where we would do, like, meetup kind of events in different areas where we had a lot of customers. We would then go there and speak to people, get to know people. We would take their registrations, thereby collecting also the contact data and then we could follow up. Later on, we also did a lot of digital events and we would also publish certain content that was gated behind forms. They're like, if you want to read about this, you need to leave your contact data. And then we would humbly position the Enterprise Edition and ask them like, hey, are you interested in this, yes or no? And that's how we would get in touch. And then we would qualify against like, okay, are you aware there's a free edition? Why would the Enterprise Edition be interesting for you? What is your reason for looking into the technology in the first place? Is it because you like to play around or is it part of an IT project that your organization is running? If so, why are they running it and so on. Right? You try to get at the reason for them getting in touch. And what you wanted to find is like, I'm doing this on behalf of an organization that is committed to solve a problem, and you are part of the list of the alternatives. So in my pipeline criteria, having competition was a plus, not a minus. If they were also looking at alternatives, it was a strong sign for us that they were committed to eventually make a move and make a decision.

Janis Zech: Yeah. I mean, I think it's a classical idea of how much intent is there, and you can measure it by understanding the pain and the economic impact of solving that pain, right, and, you know, where they are. I assume that, you know, like, most open source companies are adopted by developers, and you mentioned this also initially. How do you then get path to power? Right? Was the pain the main criteria to understand, okay, if there is that specific pain, then we also get access to the right, you know, stakeholders, develop champions, and then sell the solution? Yeah. What were some of the learnings there?

Robert Gimbel: Yeah. It was typically a bottoms up journey, as you say. Right? You start at the user, software developers. They are not irrelevant. They're important. Their opinion matters more and more, but, of course, they are not deciding on budget and these things. So you needed to understand why you are talking to them. Is it because they tried out a new piece of technology on Saturday afternoon just for fun, or is it, as I just said, right, on behalf of something that's going on in the company? And then you basically worked yourself up. Right? If they ask you for a price, you would ask, like, yeah. Okay. Who's asking? That's complex. We need to understand certain characteristics. And then you say, like, for — I give you an example. We need to scope your license to a particular use case or project. Who can help us do that? Do you know that? No. I don't actually know perfectly well. It's that that was more like a business perspective scope. So, yeah, can you introduce me to someone who knows? Or your enterprise architecture team has certain questions that go beyond the pure API, but more like towards the long term maintainability. Yeah. We can get them in touch. And we would also do things like an on-site POC, for example, building a runnable prototype within a certain time span. And then at the end, we would also motivate them to invite the decision makers, for example. And to be honest, that wasn't the CXO level. Right? It was mid level IT management, but they did have enough budget authority to basically being able to afford us for a specific project. But it also meant that we follow the land and expand strategy. Right? I mean, we were not a commodity product, but still the amount you landed with was much smaller than what you could eventually get to.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a fantastic motion and, obviously, something that allows you to essentially get the attention, almost like have a paid POC, and then level up over time. Right? And POC, still six figures here in the enterprise, but, I mean, usually, you need to get to actually time spent with you to, you know, okay. There's a strategic initiative. We can solve this to then essentially build a strategic partnership over time where you not just help on one specific workflow, but maybe multiple and really, you know, are deeply entrenched in the IT infrastructure of the company. I wanna switch gears a bit. Like, so let's assume, you know, we open the opportunity. There's a strategic initiative. Given the sales cycles, like, you know, what do you think is the most important step in the entire sales process to close a deal? Right? Like, what was it for you guys?

Robert Gimbel: I mean, the standard answer would be discovery now. Right? Like, what you learn during the discovery phase helps you close a deal. I think the way we thought about it was we need to guide the customer through the journey in a way that we always give them what they need at a particular point in time. And you need to do that well through the entire journey. And you're only as good as your weakest part in doing so, right? If you're very poor at negotiating contracts, that's where you're going to lose your deals. So for us, it was we wanted to find a general need first, then we would open the opportunity with a few criteria around it. Then we wanted them to get to an actual evaluation where you would say, like, at the end, we come out with a product of choice. This is either us or someone else, but you make that decision and we help you facilitate that. That's when our solution engineering and sales engineering team got heavily involved. Afterwards, you're not done, right, when you're dealing with a large bank because then comes a different phase where it's less so about the product, and it's more so like, yeah, you're our preferred product, but we don't know if we can get to terms with you and all the other stuff that we need to resolve, like pricing, security, contracts, warranties, liabilities, SLAs and whatnot. So we could spend an equal amount of time during that phase negotiating with procurement and legal and compliance. And then it's about closing, right, getting people to actually sign the thing. I mean, that's a bit simpler, but not to be underestimated, right? Like, who needs to sign? Oh, well, that was the person who left the business yesterday. Not so great. That can kill a deal even in the latest stages. So we basically aligned our internal goals to the goals of the customers in the various different stages. I think that is key and that makes you operate really, really strong.

Janis Zech: So you had a really strong view on your sales process that you then essentially, you know, made the customer follow? So starting with, you know, kind of pain and strategic initiative and then going through the different stages. How many stages did you have and, you know, where are some of the kind of entry exit criteria you implemented?

Robert Gimbel: So, like, I'm describing that now from assuming we have opened an opportunity, and that was a five stage process basically. So the first stage was about getting them to evaluate against specific criteria and all of that, right? Like we know there's a need. There's some relevant problem, not necessarily a super strategic initiative. It could also be, like, a specific project of importance. And still, it could mean that they accept that for a little while. And that little while could be a few years, right? Like, yeah, we know that's a problem and we should be solving it, but not now. And then they make this movement like, now we're committed to solving it. We're putting actual budget and people behind it. We can do a POC and these kind of things. That was the next stage where we would want to convince them that we are the preferred product of choice. And afterwards, it was called negotiation. The goal of that was like, hey, we can find agreeable terms both commercially and non commercially, like just contractually. And then the final stage was closing. Like, we agreed on a final version, but did we manage to sign it from all sides without sneaking in stuff that we had deleted before and so on. So, yeah, it was actually four stages. The first stage was prior to us opening the opportunity, which was called to be qualified.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. Great. And, I mean, in such a business where you have long sales cycles, I mean, what kind of, you know, operating cadence did you work on specifically? Meaning, you know, how do you run your forecast process? You know, what were the different areas that were included, like, reviews or pipeline reviews? Like, how was that set up at Camunda?

Robert Gimbel: Yeah. That's a great question because you define things like how they should work, and then at the end, it was a hundred seventy people in my organization alone. Right? The company was much bigger at the time, so you cannot naturally expect everything to follow the textbook rules, right? Not because people sabotage you, but people are not aware or people understand it differently. You made a mistake while defining them. So we had actually quite a few cadences to monitor the important bits of our engine. So for example, on a weekly basis, we would check every opportunity that was opened against the criteria. And while that was on the sales managers primarily who did that, we also did that from a RevOps perspective, basically double checking what people had put into Salesforce and why that would actually align to our criteria. So that was almost a daily thing.

Janis Zech: Just for me to get that right. So you basically had every opportunity that was open checked by the manager against certain criteria and double checked by RevOps against that criteria.

Robert Gimbel: Yes.

Janis Zech: Why do you think that is so important?

Robert Gimbel: Because that was the basis of our longer term forecasting. I could rely on very consistent conversion or close rates for these opportunities. I knew if we opened a hundred opportunities, we would close a certain amount of them. And in times — there were times when we became sloppy and, obviously, the pressure was on for the pipeline, so there was a short term incentive to just open stuff to make it look good and, like, yeah. Of course. And, again, not because of negative intentions. Right? Or you're bringing in new people, new AEs to the business, and they wanna create their pipeline, they wanna fill their pipe, and they rather take too much than too little, so you need to guide people in the way that you want the business to run. And we were hiring a lot of people. We were growing and pushing the limits on pipeline creation. So it was important to maintain a strong eye on the consistency of the quality of that. And that was basically the motivation.

Janis Zech: Okay. So you're really good at, you know, looking at what gets into the pipeline. How did you look at, you know, what is already in the pipeline and what was the cadence there?

Robert Gimbel: Yeah. I think this is equally important — the weekly sales forecast call. And that was about, like, what are we going to close this quarter? What are we going to close this month, this week? And also, like, towards the end of a quarter, we would already start to look into like what are we going to close next quarter. That was basically a very classical roll up, more based on a deal per deal rather than like a probability kind of a view, what was in and out. We had different categories there, commit, upside and so on, not unheard of, I would say, nothing special, not trying to reinvent the wheel, but then, yeah, doing that really with diligence, having week over week changes. Well, last week this was all committed and now where is it? Like why did it change? What did we learn? So we had this. We had a monthly lost review where we looked at lost deals and tried to learn from them mainly with the sales managers. We also had a renewals forecast. We haven't so much talked about that, but since you mentioned the cadence, that was also weekly. And then we also had a monthly pipeline forecast, like, separating, like, pipeline generation from, like, closing the pipeline we have. I was a big fan of not mixing up these two discussions because that would typically lead to unfocused discussions. So it was either about how do we close what we have or how do we go about the fact that it's not enough and we need more pipeline.

Janis Zech: Yeah. And also breaking out the new logo versus renewal, it's very different cadence, very different people generally.

Robert Gimbel: Yeah. Those were two different forecasts. And I think the last forecast I added was a hiring forecast because people would naturally then, like, focus on the outcome and the results, and they would, like, deprioritize, like, building for tomorrow. And that typically means you need to bring in the people that you have on your hiring plan. And if you bring them in too late, they cannot help you produce the results of tomorrow when you need them.

Janis Zech: And I assume — so you mentioned that you did a deal by deal forecast. Was every rep asked to submit forecast calls, or was it mostly the managers that reviewed the pipeline then submitted the forecast calls?

Robert Gimbel: Well, it was a roll up. Right? Like, let's assume I'm a team lead. I do my own forecast with my team, same standards, but not everyone attends that. And then I go into the bigger forecast and I bring my team's number and I bring it to my manager who then brings it to the CRO and the CEO, so to say. So it would roll up, but the weekly sales forecast I was referring to was basically happening on all levels.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Okay. Okay. So every level had their own kind of meetings around it. Everyone had to submit a specific number every week, and then you track change, and that ideally you do it on a deal by deal basis to also factor in kind of swing deals. I assume that often happens in enterprise and can, you know, completely derail your forecast. And what would you say are, like, the biggest learnings when you think about, you know, like, predictability?

Robert Gimbel: I think you need to make it a priority in itself. I think that's, like, don't just talk about it, but lead by example and measure predictability and celebrate when you're doing it well. So we had a clearly defined process for forecast accuracy. Like, we would take the fourth forecast of a quarter, like week four, everyone got logged in, we put it onto a Confluence page, and towards the end, we wouldn't punish publicly the people who got it wrong. There's multiple reasons for that, right? But we would celebrate the teams and people who got it right. And everyone, it was kind of a friendly competition, including finance submitting a number, and so that showed the importance of it. That was more for the in quarter forecast. When it came to, like, year over year forecast, right, like, sometime in Q3, you need to come up with your sales number for the next year. That wasn't the way how we did it. We went more about, like, okay, what's year over year development? How does that relate to pipeline developments? How does that relate to CEOs or boards ambitions for the business? And we would still get a pretty accurate number there. It was with a margin of error of ten percent from a year over year.

Janis Zech: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the annual planning is another big topic we could probably spend another hour on, also really, really important. In terms of sales metrics, I'm curious, like, what did you look at every week? What was important to you to run the business?

Robert Gimbel: I would say, first, you need to look at what do you close and how does it compare to plan. It's so basic, but it does get overlooked with all the other stuff you can look at for very legitimate reasons, but this is still the holy grail. If that doesn't work, that's also, like, where you need to focus right away. So that was number one, how did our sales develop. And I was never indifferent about, like, can we close the deal this week or next week? Doesn't matter. Yes, it matters. Like, it mattered a lot to me because if you close it this week, you could close another one next week. And then we looked at new opportunities being created, right? How many did we get over the line, get accepted through these criteria and all that diligence machine? That was quite important. Then we would have, of course, like a weighted pipeline kind of a thing. Like, how does that develop? How much pipeline do we have in which stage? And then I will speak on monitoring the close rate of cohorts. So we would always take quarterly cohorts of pipeline. And we had to travel back a year in time for that, right? But not filtering by close dates in Salesforce terms, but filtering by creation date and see how much of that pipeline did we close. And sometimes we had quarters where we said like, oh, normally we close twenty percent, but this one is ailing at below ten percent. What's wrong there? Are we going to make up? Are some deals stuck? Or did we get sloppy in the way we created pipeline in that quarter? And are we making sure we're not repeating this?

Janis Zech: And could you see any correlations between, let's say, oh, we're hiring a lot and suddenly close rate goes down in terms of the cohorts or, I don't know, seasonality or I don't know. Like, any anything you could find out? I mean, I think it's a super interesting approach.

Robert Gimbel: So, obviously, younger cohorts would show a lower close rate or conversion rate simply due to the sales cycle and the variance in it. Then, yes, we like, it made us adjust the criteria and also adjust the focus. So sometimes, let's take an example, you have a market like India. There's tons of developers. It's not a high GDP and so on. So we would open a fair amount of opportunities for India, but they wouldn't convert. Why so? Because our value proposition of the Enterprise Edition wasn't as attractive in that market. So that led to us raising the bar for opportunities being created in the first place from such geos. And we would also find, like, that very large enterprises, they would convert, but it simply took even longer than the other ones. So, like, above fifty thousand employees and so on. So not a concern per se, but we need another two quarters of patience on that. And, yes, of course, when we hired a lot, yes, you would see, like, that the close rates weren't as good in the beginning as they became over time. Yes.

Janis Zech: That was awesome. I love this so much because it's a very metrics driven approach to, you know, managing. Right? And I think what that defines for me is that you basically look at the hard data and then you try to understand why that actually happens. Right? And you dig deeper to have a conclusion instead of, you know, having, like, a preemptive, you know, like, idea and solution in mind, but you really start with, okay. This is the reality. Let's understand the reality, and then let's think about what we can do to change it. And, you know, this simple thing of — you know, it sounds very simple, but it's actually not. Right? Like, okay. We have to change the criteria of opening an opportunity, you know, then it has a big impact on, you know, your whole funnel metrics. Right? And I think this is, you know, also my main takeaway here is, like, being really diligent on opening an opportunity and then being diligent about the entry and exit criteria per stage so that you actually can compare apples to apples. So I think in most sales pipelines, the reality is that that isn't managed very well. And then you look at your close rate or your cohorts, and they're all over the place. And it's just because you really don't know — you basically can't trust the data, and hence, you can't really, you know, make good decisioning on the management side.

Robert Gimbel: Yes. I think that was what you just described was at the back of my approach. Also influenced because I haven't gone through a classical sales career. So what did I know about all of that? So I said we're going to make data based decisions. I think what is crucial, you need patience to build up a strong data foundation. And you also need simplicity in how you set things up. There's no point setting up, I don't know, twenty stage sales process that you change every other year if you can't manage consistently through it. So we try to keep it simple as good as possible, sometimes succeeded better than other times. And then that gave us this good foundation that we could then leverage over time.

Janis Zech: Fantastic. Maybe final closing question. I mean, I think we could go on into hiring. We could go on into annual planning, but, you know, in the interest of time, I think this is a fantastic rounded package already. Like, you spent around, like, five years as a CRO, right, like, before moving into the CRO role. And if you think back now, like, what were, like, some major learnings or things you would do differently in that role? Anything that stands out?

Robert Gimbel: Yes. I think the first thing I would say, and it's something I'm saying to the clients I'm advising these days, it's very easy to buy into the classical go to market playbook of a SaaS company, right? Like you define a sales target, you derive the number of sales resources you need, maybe pair them with pipeline generation resources, hire a lot of people and that keeps you busy. And then it takes a year or two and you realize that things are not working as you thought they would work. And there were areas where that happened to us as well. And the learning I took from that was you should prove before you scale. Like, if you transform from, I don't know, having five sellers, try to get to ten and don't jump to, I don't know, twenty five right away. Because what that does is you're busy a year building this, building up these resources, and you're not making sure that they are actually successful in their roles. And then you're not doing your company justice, but you're also not doing the people justice. Right? And then you read the news about, like, a reduction in force here and so on. And I think that's a manager's responsibility to prevent that from happening. And that's why I would say whenever you try something new, you break out of your current approach, make sure you can prove — take some risks, right? But it's enough risk to do it with five people. You don't need to do it with ten or twenty additional people right away. I think that is a big learning. And another one is, if you want, second one is, I think, if you're very good at inbound demand generation, it doesn't translate into outbound because you're meeting the customer at a completely different stage in their journey. And you don't have any experience in offering something valuable at that early stage, right? You're good — like we were good at receiving customers who were ready to implement, had already played around with a product. We love it. We want it. We already decided for you. Give us a price and so on. The playbooks you develop for that are fundamentally different when basically meeting someone who has never looked at your solution, who isn't even aware of the problems you're solving, who maybe even realized having these problems in their apps. That's another one.

Janis Zech: Robert, thank you so much for joining. I think this was fantastic. So many valuable learnings. Yeah. I hope we can have you back one day. Thank you so much.

Robert Gimbel: Yeah. It was a pleasure. Thanks for having me, Janis, and all the good questions and for guiding us through the session.

Janis Zech: Awesome. Have a great day. Bye.

Robert Gimbel: You too. Bye bye.