The Keys to Subscription-Based Membership Models with Robbie Baxter

Randy Wootton (00:05):

Well, hello everyone. This is Randy Wootton, CEO of Maxio, and your host of SaaS Expert Voices, the podcast that brings the SaaS experts to you and help us understand where we are today and what’s happening tomorrow. Today, I am super excited to welcome Robbie Baxter, who was one of the early thinkers about subscription business models and monetization. We’ll talk more about that. And we’re going to cover a couple of things. One, her background and interest in subscription models. Then we’ll focus on her two books, The Membership Economy Concept, which is really her manifesto, and then The Forever Transaction, which is really the playbook. And we’ll spend the rest of the podcast digging into some of her lessons learned and best practices for the folks that are in subscription business models today. So thank you, Robbie, for joining us.

Robbie Baxter (00:50):

Oh, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. Randy.

Randy Wootton (00:53):

So, you’ve got a great background. Started off in strategy consulting and then moved into product management, both product management, product marketing for a couple of years for financial services companies in particular, and some HR companies. So you’re an operator as well as a strategy thinker. And then you started your own firm, Peninsula Strategies in 2001, and since then have been focused specifically on subscription management, pricing, and membership mindset. Can you talk a little bit about what it was that was the impetus for your wanting to branch off and start your own firm and what you saw playing out more broadly in the landscape?

Robbie Baxter (01:28):

Yeah, yeah. So two part answer. So what had me branch out was I got laid off while I was on maternity leave the day I returned. And I think it’s important to just share that I know sometimes it looks like what an easy path and people kind of gloss over the rough parts. But my second child, I came back from maternity leave and kind of got hit in the face with a round of layoffs and decided-

Randy Wootton (01:53):

Oh my gosh.

Robbie Baxter (01:53):

I know, I know. And it’s totally legal. And there were people who were pregnant and had just had children who were not laid off, and there were people who did not have children who were laid off, men and women, all the things. But it was still painful. And I said, “For the next several years, I really need to be in control of my own income.” And so at the beginning, it was really more of a stopgap measure where I had control over my time, where instead of having to deal with a whole org chart of colleagues and managers and influencers to ensure my career success. In consulting, you really only have to make your client happy. Right?

Randy Wootton (02:34):

Right.

Robbie Baxter (02:35):

So there’s an ability to focus. It’s a much clearer kind of relationship, so I say, “I’ll do that for a few years.” I really liked it. At the beginning, I was just doing whatever I was qualified for, so at the intersection of marketing and strategy and product and financial services and HR. And if I could make a case and you believed that I could do it and I felt like I could do it, I would do it.

Randy Wootton (02:57):

Sure.

Robbie Baxter (02:58):

And after a little while, I really liked being an independent consultant. I liked the rhythm and the kind of work. As you pointed out, I’d come out of big firm strategy consulting, and I like strategy. And so I was like, “Well, if I keep doing this, I probably need an area of focus.”

My first several clients were just the clients that I got. I was like, “I’ll do the work if I can do the work.” And I was thinking, “What is it that I’m good at? What is it that I like? What is trending?” And my fifth client was Netflix, and this is 2002. So I fell in love with their business model.And at this point, just to give a little sense of where they were on their journey, they had just reached a national footprint in the United States on the mainland where they could turn around DVDs in three days. So, they were able to start doing national advertising, and they were starting to think about expanding more broadly. And I loved the discipline that they had about retention, about understanding the value of a customer from the beginning. So based on where they acquired that customer and under what circumstances, they could predict with a pretty high level of accuracy, how long that person was going to stay on average.

And that was fascinating to me. And I started to see how everything that they did at Netflix was a little bit different than how other companies did it. They were much more focused on retention, they were measuring engagement. They weren’t that interested in getting the most new customers. I had come from a lot of companies that were all about, “How many new logos do you have this year? What’s new to talk about?” And people that were responsible for retention in these companies that I’d been working with were usually quite junior and were not seen as strategic at all. And suddenly at Netflix, everything was flipped on its head, and it was all about keeping the customers you have, not taking customers who weren’t going to be valuable in the long-term, tremendous discipline around offers and pricing structure. And I started thinking about where else this could apply, and who else, what other kinds of companies could do well by thinking about retention.

And I went back to the B2B companies, what today we call SaaS that I’d been working for as product manager and product marketing and thought, “Wow, these same principles probably apply here.” And they probably also apply with newspapers who’ve been doing subscription for a long time. And wow, there are a lot of industries where this can apply.”

And so as I was sort of focusing in on what I was calling premium services, what I was calling recurring revenue business models, I didn’t have a name for it yet, but as I was doing that, other people started to call and say, “Hey, we heard you worked with Netflix. We want to do some of the same things as Netflix. We want to be the Netflix of bicycles, or we want to be the Netflix of news.”

And this time, and I started saying, “Well, what does that really mean for me? When I say that, what does it mean? What is similar? What are lessons that can be applied across different industries? And what’s unique to an industry?” So as an example, the second company that I worked with in this kind of subscription space as a consultant was PayCycle, which is now a part of Intuit, payroll for very small businesses. And I came in guns blazing saying, “You need a two-week free trial,” because that had worked so well at Netflix. And I learned pretty quickly that actually wasn’t the best offer because when you’re selling payment systems for your employee payroll, the biggest challenge is not the cost of the software, it’s the cost of getting up and running and the risk of what happens if it doesn’t work and you don’t pay somebody on time. And so the money, the two-week free trial, they didn’t care about a free trial. It was, I don’t know, 39 or $49 a month. What they cared about was being confident that the onboarding process would be successful. And so just starting to think about what’s the same, what’s different in those early days was really challenging and kind of a puzzle that I enjoyed trying to figure out, even as I was working with these different companies.

Randy Wootton (07:11):

Got it. And so that’s what was the impetus of the catalyst for you to write the book, Membership Economy, which I guess you started it in 2004 after you finished Netflix and you published it in 2015. And what a lot of people may not realize, is that you actually got your book out before Tien Tzuo’s Subscribe book came out in 2018, which really, I get it. He’s working at a big company, he’s got a bunch of money to get the marketing out, but some of the ideas that you were working with even predated him, which I think is fabulous. It’s a great book for people across the interweb that’s listening to this right now to, if you want to go back and do the archeological dig of who was doing the thinking around subscription as a business model and membership as a way to include and increase your business, I got to tell you Robbie Baxter’s books is one of the ones to start with.

And it sounded like that you were really out in front and you had people calling you, asking you. What were some of the takeaways beyond the ones we’ve chatted about around this idea of The Membership Economy for businesses? So for all the people out there at B2B, we talked a little bit about retention and focusing on that area of customer success, Gainsight has really driven that forward. I was part of that world at Salesforce, it put a huge premium on that. I was there in 2012. But just that whole business model that undergirds The Membership Economy, do you have a couple other thoughts or best practices you would want to illuminate for our listeners?

Robbie Baxter (08:33):

Yeah, I think one of the really important things is that if you want to justify recurring revenue, you have to have a product that solves your problem on an ongoing basis. So, how you design the product becomes really important. It’s not just about slapping subscription pricing on something and calling it as a service.

The underlying product has to be designed for easy deployment, for expansion over time, for not just… I always think about there’s an acquisition benefit, there’s a reason that somebody buys your product, signs up, signs the contract, gets started, does the small experiment, but then the onus is really on the subscription business owner to engage the users and expand the relationship over time. So, it’s a function of is it the right product for that? Is the product designed for onboarding and for expansion over time? And it’s also about the organization being structured in a way that they can tell, as I mentioned with Netflix, they can tell in the first two weeks your likelihood of becoming a good customer. And I think the same thing is true in many businesses. You can tell right away, are the things happening that indicate that onboarding is successful, that the right people are using it, they’re using the right set of features, they’re engaging their colleagues appropriately? And I think that the way those pieces fit together is really important.

We’re in Silicon Valley. In businesses that start SaaS or that start subscription, some of these things might be more intuitive, but a lot of large companies are in the midst of painful transformations to this model. And I think they often start with the tail wagging the dog, which is, “We need subscription revenue to justify higher market valuations, so let’s start charging differently and we’ll fix everything else as we go.” Instead of saying, “This is a very holistic transformation and we need to look at what this means, not just for pricing, but for the product itself, to the aftermarket, a post-sales experience, the way our people answer the phone, the way we talk about the product, the way we acquire customers.” There’s going to be some customers where it’s easy to acquire them, but they’re never going to expand over time. And so it’s not worth it to bring them on. They don’t align with your model and they’re not going to let you scale.

Randy Wootton (11:07):

So a couple of things there. One, just that last point, I think it’s really interesting that you see a lot of people right now within this subscription business model writ large, there’s this almost tribal battle between sales-led growth and product-led growth. And the answer is not either-or, it’s actually and, I think. And a lot of companies are going to have to embrace both. But if you’ve been primarily a sales-led growth model, where you have marketing and sales, engaging with customers directly, you’re doing negotiated agreements, you’re getting an invoice out, it’s usually an annual type of contract with a renewal type motion, if that’s what your core go-to-market model is, and you say, “Okay, now we’re going to tack on PLG,” it’s a radically different way of thinking about the world.

Even the last couple of SaaStrs I’ve been to, it’s all been about PLG and usage-based model and, “What does that mean? And your product is actually going to get people to sign up.” But it’s not just about saying you’re PLG. You have to think about, well, how do you go to market? How do you create a self-serve freemium type of experience? How do you take the post-sales experience to drive conversions to a paid model and then execute the renewal motion? So I think to your point, it’s really a business bet, as you’re moving either from on-prem legacy to subscription, or within subscription to break out different go-to-market models. I think that was one of the points you’re making. And so the whole company has to be aligned around that.

The other one that I think you were sort of pointing to, which I fundamentally believe as well, is even in SaaS companies today, you do see this gap between sales and customer lifecycle management. And so getting a customer sold and then getting them up and running, so the implementation and the adoption and the renewal and the expansion. Everyone talks about, “Oh, it’s one big cycle and we treat everybody well.” But you’re shaking your head no. What’s your experience been and what’s your suggestion for SaaS companies to think about there?

Robbie Baxter (12:54):

Yeah, there’s still, I think, a little too much of the throwing it over the wall, overselling or selling to someone who doesn’t… You need a lot of discipline, I think, in a SaaS model. So you need to know, this kind of customer, this is how the relationship’s going to expand over time. And I think together to start to set expectations about, where is this relationship going to go after the moment of sale? The moment of transaction is the starting line, not the finish line. And something else that I know you think a lot about and you’ve alluded to a couple of times, is this question of the current subscription model, is that the end game or are there other models or are there other ways of thinking about this? And for me, it’s about customer outcomes. And the customer comes to you and they don’t say, “I want to buy some software,” or even, “I want to subscribe to some software.” What they’re saying is, “I want my employees to make smarter decisions,” for example. And so that assumes that the employees are using the product, using it regularly, using it well, and I think a lot of companies would rather be billed on that because it aligns better with the outcome. Right?

Randy Wootton (14:05):

Right.

Robbie Baxter (14:06):

Rather than paying for a seat, which is an entitlement, paying for usage, metered payment, there’s a lot of different ways that I think organizations can go as they move toward aligning their pricing with outcomes.

Randy Wootton (14:20):

Yeah, I think you’re absolutely spot on. Part of the reason I joined Maxio was because it was really focused on the space of usage-based pricing, and to your point, aligning the value prop. So, a couple of takeaways and then we’ll shift to your next book, The Forever Transaction. But one, what I heard from you was understand the value of a customer at time of transaction. And it’s going to take a little while to do that, you’re not going to know that when you’re just getting started.

So then, what can you do? You can give a freemium offering, but then you have to understand the early signals of potential customer value that you can monetize over time, what’s working, what’s not. I think the other thing we had chatted about in our pre-brief, was when you’re early, you often end up taking lots of different customers because they’re going to pay you.And the challenge is getting super crisp on the ICP where you have real value and the customer is going to grow with you over time. So if you’re moving from a B2C to a B2B model, there’re going to be a bunch of customers, you’re going to disappoint, but being okay with that and segmenting it.

I remember when I was CEO of a company called Percolate, we were a social media platform that was trying to make a strategic transition into customer content marketing, a CMP. So, the entire business had been built for one use case that we were trying to extend and expand so we would be a broader TAM. And what was interesting, is we actually had to segment out the customer base, and with the board talk about the two different customers, “These are the customers, these new customers, this small business is where we want to go. Don’t get distracted by looking over here because we’re not optimizing for it. We’re not investing resources in terms of technology or additional service. We want to keep them as long as we can, but if they’re not going to move with us into this new world, we’re going to let them go.”

And that was probably one of the hardest conversations I’ve had, is you see this business, deliberately you’re canabalizing it to fund what is going to be the future business. And so I think for companies, especially that are getting out of the gate, is understanding what your core value prop is, where it’s going to resonate, and then continually evaluating what’s working, what’s not, in that construct.

Robbie Baxter (16:16):

Yeah, I totally agree with you. And it is painful and it does require education of your board, your investors. You have to set expectations and say, “Hey, we’re going to actually turn down some short-term revenue so that we can build the machine, so that we can scale.” Going after too many different types of customers and too many different kinds of use cases can be really distracting.

And the other thing is, if you subscribe to quarterly capitalism where you’re compensating everybody on the number that they hit at the end of March or the end of whatever quarter it is, and they may not even be around the next year, you’re teaching people the wrong habits. The habit we want is for people to come and stay and expand.

Randy Wootton (17:06):

Well, that might be a perfect segue to your next book, The Forever Transaction. So, if The Membership Economy was your manifesto, identifying these broader themes in the marketplace and applying the lessons learned in a B2C Netflix world to the B2B world, and you had several companies you worked on the front line with to manage that, you then translated that into this Forever Transaction, which is really the playbook. Can you talk a little bit about how that came together and what are the couple of points you would highlight for people that are, again, B2B SaaS or thinking about this idea of The Forever Transaction, making sure you’re lined up in terms of your product and your incentives to create success?

Robbie Baxter (17:47):

Yeah, so I wrote The Membership Economy, as you said, I started making notes for it in 2004. It didn’t come out until 2015. So I was really nervous that nobody was going to see what I was seeing. I was having a lot of conversations with people, just trying to help them connect the dots, that what newspapers do really well is what software companies should be thinking about, or let’s try to connect the dots. And membership, it is important that your users and your customers are engaging with each other and building stickiness and all of that. So Membership Economy was like, “Here’s my one pound business card. If you like it, let’s talk. If you don’t like it, you probably aren’t going to like me that much. Let’s just save ourselves all some heartache.” But that was 2015 and people started getting on the bandwagon and being interested in subscriptions. And what I started hearing then was a lot of people coming to me saying, “Look, hey, we’re talking and talking and talking about subscription. We’re afraid to actually make the commitment to move to a SaaS model.” Or, “We have been subscription forever, but it doesn’t seem to be working the same way. And it seems like these other companies, like Salesforce, are eating our lunch and we’re not sure what they’re doing differently or why their subscription or their SaaS model seems to work much better than ours.”

And so I wrote The Forever Transaction as a how-to, and I broke it into three parts. So the first part is for a company that is just getting started, dipping their toe into these models. Whether they’re in a large company and they have a little team off in the corner that’s trying to figure this out before the company sort of bets the farm on this model, or if you’re just starting de novo, you have no business startup company, we’re going to start with subscription. And that’s about, what is your forever promise? What is it that you’re going to do for your customers on an ongoing basis? How are you going to improve their condition? How are you going to solve ongoing problems? Who’s your ideal member? And what is the offering that you’re going to build that is both attractive enough to get them to join or sign up and engaging enough to expand over time?

The next section of the book is about scaling. So you’ve figured it out, you’ve put together a model, I always say, with chewing gum and paper clips, and now you’re ready for the concrete and the rebar. How do you build a system for scale? How do you build an organization for scale? How do you set up the right KPIs for scaling a subscription-based business? And that’s a lot about culture, too. What kind of people do you need? What kind of mindset do you need? And then the last part of the book is about staying relevant. I think one of the risks of a lot of businesses that are recurring revenue is that when you do it well, customers relax into the relationship. This is just how they solve their problems, how they get things done. Periodically, you come out with an update, they barely even notice that it’s very easy to just be lulled into this relationship, they stop looking for alternatives. And I think a lot of companies confuse loyalty with inertia. So, just because your customers aren’t leaving you does not mean that they love your product, or that if they were out shopping today they would pick your product again. There may be fantastic new competitors in the market, but because your customers aren’t shopping, they don’t know to be disappointed in what you have or haven’t been doing. So, in that late stage, what companies will say is, “Our customers that know us love us, but nobody seems to want to join anymore. We’re having trouble getting new customers.” And so I wrote the book explaining, breaking down each of those three phases, and what are the problems you’re likely to see and how do you attack each of those problems? And what I noticed is people are like, “Oh, you’re seeing around the corners. How did you know we have that issue?” And it’s like, “Well, they all go together. They all go together.”

Randy Wootton (21:50):

Yeah. And I think that’s one of the interesting thing about the SaaS business model in general is there’s, well, obviously for Maxio, we help people understand their SaaS operating metrics and we’re able to pattern match across the 2,300 customers. And I think all VCs and PE firms are doing the same. So they say, “Look, if you’re a vertical B2B SaaS company, this is what your net retention should be. This is how much you spend on sales and marketing.”So I do think there’s pattern matching going on and everybody has the playbook now, many years after you started to identify it with your first book and then write out the how-to book. And so I think it’s a wonderful book for people that, again, are either getting started or trying to scale, especially for our early customer base.We talked about a couple of examples, but I’d love for you to share with the broader audience. One was Strava, I’m a huge fan of Strava. I’ve been an early adopter of it. And I think when you talk about your, I think it was in your first part of the book and how do you create that forever promise? Can you talk a little bit about Strava and what they got right and what you think some of that, again, it’s primarily B2C, but I do think there’s some directly applicable lessons learned for B2B companies with that model?

Robbie Baxter (23:02):

Yeah. So, I’ve been talking with the Strava founders since the beginning, so since it was an idea on a piece of paper. And they’re both athletes and they wanted to create a community for athletes, in a way for tracking and competing and encouraging one another, very much around community. And so to build community, there’s sort of a chicken and egg problem. You want to build the community before you have anything really to charge for. So they were very ad supported early on or sponsor, they call it sponsor supported, and really focused on just getting all the athletes using the platform, being able to engage with one another. And they had a subscription. I found this really interesting. They had a subscription, I think it was like $5 from pretty early on.

Randy Wootton (23:49):

It was. 4.99.

Robbie Baxter (23:53):

4.99. And it didn’t have a lot of great benefits, right? The interesting thing, and I had this experience a long time ago with Zoomerang, which was an early competitor of SurveyMonkey, and SurveyMonkey’s a client of mine, ultimately swallowed up Zoomerang. One of their biggest problems is the pre-product was good enough for most people, right? Same thing with Strava, right? The pre-product is actually great for most people. And so they actually did some research and said, “Well, who are these people then that are paying? What is the value they’re getting?” And what most people said is, “I love you guys so much that I want you to be around and I want to support whatever you’re doing. And if that subscription ever becomes valuable and has more features, I’d love to be the first to get it, but I’m just happy to pay $5 a month.”

And that was really eye-opening, the kind of loyalty they’d built, the kind of habits that they’d established with people really gave them permission to do other things. And when they did really focus on what they called their season of subscriptions where they beefed up the subscription offering, they moved a couple of popular features behind the paywall, very controversial, and added some other features and benefits, they were really focused on, “Who’s going to get value? Who’s not? How do we move the right people there? How do we make sure that they use those features and appreciate them? And how do we communicate that we’re taking…” And this is a hard thing for a lot of businesses, when you take something that used to be free and you move it behind the paywall, “How do we explain why we’re doing that?” Price increases and moving beloved features, those are things that are particularly hard to do when you’ve got a subscription type of relationship with your customer.

Randy Wootton (25:32):

I think you’re right. I think of Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, and you have these early adopters who just want to use something cause it’s cool and new, and then how do you cross the chasm to get to the early majority? But in doing so, how do you not forget the people that brought you there? And so as an early Strava adopter of the free product, I 100% hear you in terms of when they initially were charging five bucks, my friends and I were all like, “Okay, five bucks a month, that’s fine, support them.”

But then there was this existential crisis about, “Wait, they’re charging more and more features are going behind the paywall.” But I think in this, and what’s different today, is we believe in a subscription economy as B2C. You’re just used to paying subscriptions. And so rather than buying the prepackaged product from Best Buy, you’re buying subscriptions. I can’t even tell you in my own family how many different subscriptions we have. In the B2B world, I think similarly, it’s on average, I heard companies that are 20 million have 100 something SaaS subscriptions. And so it’s super easy to put it on your credit card and have it be part of your OPEX, not your CAPEX, and functional leaders are able to sign up for these things. And I do think the onus is on the company to be able to continue to develop and deliver and educate on the value that they’re creating for their customer base, which really goes to your third part of the book.

We probably won’t have time to get in the second part, but the third part I thought was great. You talk about the graying of the customer base and the idea of the product has to be competitive today, and many software companies lose focus on being current. And one of the examples you gave was the gym example. I don’t know if you want to talk a little bit about that, or you have another one about customers that take for granted their customer base and aren’t staying current. And what can you do specifically to make sure that you’re current, make sure that you’re integrating the voice of the customer or make sure you’re getting the feedback loop so that you’re staying current for today?

Robbie Baxter (27:33):

Yeah. I think that the issue is if you just listen to your customers, they’ve become members. They’ve taken off their consumer hat, stopped looking for alternatives, put on their member hat, they’re going to say, “We love you.” They might have a random feature that they really want and give you a hard time about that, but for the most part, they’re not really the only people you need to listen to.

If you want to keep acquiring customers, first of all, you need to be balancing your acquisition metrics with those retention metrics. And so from the voice of the customer perspective, it should be an orchestra and not just the violins. And what I mean by that, is that you’re not just listening to existing customers, you’re listening to lapsed customers, customers who used to be your customers and no longer are, you’re listening to prospects who are considering you and have other alternatives and are really focused on what’s going on right now in the market, and you’re listening for lost prospects. So, win-lost record, the ones that you lost, you should still be asking them what they think, what they’re thinking about, what they value. And that’s really the voice of the customer. It’s the customer you want and not just the customers you have.

Randy Wootton (28:44):

Right. It’s almost backing out to the idea of your ideal customer profile, the Venn diagram overlap of people who don’t know you, people who know you that bought you, people who are current customers, those who bought you and left you. And I would even maybe offer plugging in with analysts. So, reading the analyst reports to see what they’re seeing play out, going to conferences, seeing how these themes are playing out and what’s hot, what’s not, going around and kicking the tires on other company’s products.

I think early stage startups can be so convinced that they have the right way and that no one else is doing it, that they lose track of how the market has evolved. So it’s not just about what you’re doing, but it’s how the market is evolving and your ability to respond to that.

Robbie Baxter (29:31):

Yeah, absolutely.

Randy Wootton (29:32):

Well, great. We’re almost out of time, Robbie, but I do want to make sure that people have an opportunity to find you. What’s the best way to get in touch with you? Obviously they can find you on LinkedIn. Are there other places? I know you have a website where they can find both of your books. Are there other ways that you would recommend them getting in touch with you?

Robbie Baxter (29:46):

Yeah, those are the best two ways. So robbiekellmanbaxter.com, my name, and you can find me on LinkedIn. I post every day about the wonderful world of recurring revenue. So those are probably the best-

Randy Wootton (30:01):

In close, what’s your most recent post that you had that you think everyone should know about of recurring revenue?

Robbie Baxter (30:07):

Oh gosh. Well, so apropos of your comment about your family, I recently posted about subscription fatigue. And this idea that not only are we all comfortable with buying subscriptions, but we’re pretty sophisticated and we’re pretty tired of it, we’re more discerning. And this, I think, is true both as consumers, we’re all consumers, we all subscribe to streaming and newspapers and personal productivity apps and all the other stuff, but also as businesses.

Trying to manage, it’s very easy for anybody in the organization to subscribe just using their credit card and expensing it back. But somebody has to be paying attention to all of those and making sure they all work together, that people are using them, that they’re getting the value that they were promised, and that becomes really complicated. So figuring out how do you sell and how do you keep people engaged in a world of subscription fatigue.

Randy Wootton (31:04):

So many interesting things there, we’ll spend two more minutes on it. One, so I used to be in go-to-market tech, and we would go see chief marketer would publish how many vendors there were in the MarTech world, and now it’s north of 10,000. So 10,000 vendors are trying to get marketer, CMOs or people on their team to use their technology. Super hard. And it’s one of the reasons I came to Maxio ’cause we were selling the CFO, and the CFO and the function of finance hadn’t yet been fully penetrated by SaaS tech.

But having said that, I think over the last year, year and a half in particular, what you’re finding is a lot more attention to how much is being spent on internal software. So, one of the data points I’ve heard people say is, you should have about 2% of your revenue going to internal use software. If it’s more than that, something’s wrong and you need to go on a software diet. So to your point, subscription fatigue has really driven, I think, subscription dieting, and that’s both killing products and asking for discounts. I think with a tech recession that we’ve seen over the last 18 months, I don’t know a vendor who isn’t battling at every renewal to demonstrate the value they offer and why their customers should pay this price. And in fact, what you’re seeing more broadly is some of the big guys are forcing price increases ’cause their overall revenue’s not going up. So you’re in this really difficult situation where people like software, excuse me, Salesforce, have come out and said, “Hey, it’s going to be 9% across the board increase.” And people are like, “I got to have Salesforce, but my budget’s not getting bigger, so what do I cut? What do I cut?” And if you’re not the must-have for the CMO, the CRO, the CFO, you’re going to be on the chopping block. And so it’s a really hard environment in the subscription fatigue, subscription diet in these constraints that we’re all feeling at this time.

Robbie Baxter (32:52):

Yeah, yeah. You want to be the avocado in the subscription diet with a good branding campaign and making the case for those healthy fats. Right?

Randy Wootton (33:02):

That’s right. Absolutely Robbie. Well, with that, thank you again for your time, really appreciate it. Best of luck and I look forward to your next book.

Robbie Baxter (33:09):

Yeah, thanks. It was great talking to you, Randy.