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Tag: Experience Management

  • Qualtrics IPO Is A Win-Win, Says SAP CEO

    Qualtrics IPO Is A Win-Win, Says SAP CEO

    Just twenty short months after SAP announced their intention of acquiring Qualtrics for $8 billion just prior to their IPO SAP is taking Qualtrics public.

    “The Qualtrics IPO is actually a win-win situation for both SAP and Qualtrics,” says SAP CEO Christian Klein. “When we are talking about Qualtrics let me first outline that Qualtrics was for sure one of the best acquisitions SAP ever did. They performed in the last 9 months above and beyond all the expectations we have set at the point of the acquisition. Now, three months back when I became the sole CEO of SAP Ryan Smith and I discussed a few options about how to move Qualtrics to the next level.”

    “SAP’s acquisition of Qualtrics has been a great success and has outperformed our expectations with 2019 cloud growth in excess of 40 percent, demonstrating very strong performance in the current setup,” Klein stated. “As Ryan Smith, Zig Serafin, and I worked together, we decided that an IPO would provide the greatest opportunity for Qualtrics to grow the Experience Management category, serve its customers, explore its own acquisition strategy and continue building the best talent. SAP will remain Qualtrics’ largest and most important go-to-market and research and development (R&D) partner while giving Qualtrics greater independence to broaden its base by partnering and building out the entire experience management ecosystem.”

    “When we launched the Experience Management category, our goal was always to help as many organizations as possible leverage the XM Platform as a system of action,” Qualtrics Founder Ryan Smith said. “SAP is an incredible partner with unprecedented global reach, and we couldn’t be more excited about continuing the partnership. This will allow us to continue building out the XM ecosystem across a broad array of partners.”

    SAP agreed to acquire Qualtrics just four days before Qualtrics was to go public in 2018, recognizing the potential of bringing together experience and operational data (X+O) to help organizations take action. SAP currently owns 100 percent of Qualtrics shares. SAP will retain majority ownership of Qualtrics and has no intention of spinning off or otherwise divesting its majority ownership interest. Ryan Smith intends to be Qualtrics’ largest individual shareholder.

    Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, discusses the reasons for their IPO and says that Qualtrics has been the best acquisition that SAP ever did:

    Qualtrics IPO Is A Win-Win For SAP and Qualtrics

    When we are talking about Qualtrics let me first outline that Qualtrics was for sure one of the best acquisitions SAP ever did. They performed in the last 9 months above and beyond all the expectations we have set at the point of the acquisition. Now, three months back when I became the sole CEO of SAP Ryan Smith and I discussed a few options about how to move Qualtrics to the next level. The partial IPO, we are both fully convinced, is actually a win-win situation for both SAP and Qualtrics. 

    First, it will allow Qualtrics to focus on the non-SAP customer base in a high closed market. Second, despite the IPO, of course, SAP will remain fully committed to Experience Management (XM) and we will develop further use cases for our customers. We will also continue with the joint go-to-market. SAP is fully committed and will be in the long run highly committed to to Qualtrics and also will remain a majority shareholder of Qualtrics going forward.

    IPO Allows Qualtrics To Go After non-SAP Customers

    We kicked off already in the last 19 months, great use cases for our customers. We launched Human Experience Management (HXM) which helped both to accelerate the sales of Qualtrics but also our core application success factors. We did the same for commerce. In our product strategy, it actually plans to really expand experience management across our solution portfolio. 

    Our employees are very excited about that because they see the benefits for our customers and this is something that won’t change with the IPO. This will allow Qualtrics more autonomy to also go after the market with non-SAP customers as this is a high quote segment.

    Qualtrics IPO Is A Win-Win, Says SAP CEO Christian Klein

  • SurveyMonkey CEO: Selling To the Enterprise Has Been Wildly Successful

    SurveyMonkey CEO: Selling To the Enterprise Has Been Wildly Successful

    “We really took a strategic imperative about two and a half to three years ago to step up our enterprise game,” says SurveyMonkey CEO Zander Lurie. “This has been a company that has thrived in going direct to end-users. We’ve built up a user base, a paid customer base, today of almost 700,000 people. But over the last three years, we’ve elevated our game. Today, enterprise represents 20 percent of our business. It helped us deliver our best quarter in history. We’re now growing 20 percent year-over-year.”

    Zander Lurie, CEO of SurveyMonkey, discusses how the company is driving its massive growth by focusing on enterprise solutions that are sold by the seat, in an interview on CNBC:

    The Category For Experience Management Is Massive

    The category for experience management is massive. Companies today are differentiating their products and services by their ability to be customer-centric. Everybody has access to off-the-shelf software and you can buy keywords on Google and you can target folks on Facebook but the ability to really be sensitive to what your customers care about and want is critical. Usabilla is the solution that we acquired earlier this year. They have a customer in KLM Dutch Airlines who was able to improve their app experience by a 2.8 to a 4.2 rating using our product. It really is about, can your managers and can your marketers listen to that feedback, understand the bugs, and then deliver and take action. That’s what survey software can do.

    We don’t compete with Adobe and Salesforce at all. Frankly, there are hundreds of thousands of Salesforce customers who need to be buying enterprise survey software. We exist in the Salesforce ecosystem and really try and help Salesforce customers get better data and get sentiment data from what their customers really care about. Salesforce, Microsoft, Adobe, those are big systems of record. They provide you a lot of operational data. Where SurveyMonkey competes and thrives is delivering for customers that sentiment data. How am I really doing? What can we improve upon? That’s where we’re selling a solution into the Salesforce ecosystem and we partner with Salesforce in a really productive way. It’s part of the reason they bought into our IPO last year. 

    Selling To the Enterprise Has Been Wildly Successful

    We really took a strategic imperative about two and a half to three years ago to step up our enterprise game. This has been a company that has thrived in going direct to end-users. We’ve built up a user base, a paid customer base, today of almost 700,000 people. But over the last three years, we’ve elevated our game. Today, enterprise represents 20 percent of our business. It helped us deliver our best quarter in history. We’re now growing 20 percent year-over-year. 

    We set about on our IPO last year and told investors our plan to make this business a lot more valuable. The two key driving factors first is to elevate our sales motion to sell directly to the enterprise. That has been wildly successful. We doubled year-over-year a hundred percent growth in revenue in the sales channel. We now have almost 5,000 customers, up 60 percent year over year. We now compete in that ecosystem and we have a really disruptive product. Consumers love our product. We’re now selling into the organization with a really talented sales team. 

    There’s Been So Much Account Sharing On SurveyMonkey

    Our team’s product is the collaborative self-serve product. We have a unique opportunity here. There’s been so much account sharing on SurveyMonkey over the years and in the current security environment, we’re asking people to pay for their own seat. That has driven a really healthy paid user growth. We see continued growth in those two areas. As I said, growth for us we’ve accelerated growth now twenty percent year-over-year, but we do it a disciplined way. We’re still able to deliver over $13 million dollars of unleveraged free cash flow in the quarter. We’re just not a company that’s going to grow at all cost. We want to have both healthy growth and disciplined cash flow.

    We use politics in a fun way to help get a beat on what’s going on out in the world. Just like we ask questions about if you are potentially interested in buying an electric car or what do you think of Impossible Burger or Beyond Meat, we also ask questions of the two and a half to three million people on our platform every day of who might you vote for and what issues are important to you. That really does give us a particular read on what American consumers are thinking.

    Selling To the Enterprise Has Been Wildly Successful, Says SurveyMonkey CEO Zander Lurie
  • EmployeeXM – The “Coolest” and “Most Sophisticated” Employee Experience Product

    EmployeeXM – The “Coolest” and “Most Sophisticated” Employee Experience Product

    “There’s a gap between what they think is happening and really what’s going on,” says Qualtrics CEO & Co-Founder Ryan Smith. “So we said, hey, we’re going to go hard into developing the coolest, easiest, and most sophisticated employee experience product (EmployeeXM). We’re going to build that and we’re going to tie it together with the customer experience.”

    Ryan Smith, CEO & Co-Founder of Qualtrics, discusses the genesis of Qualtrics and how it has evolved into a sophisticated and integral platform for the enterprise in an extensive interview with Jason Calacanis:

    We View Ourselves As a System Of Action

    In the beginning, it was very much around being able to collect data, kind of being on the front end of that. You were able to collect data. You were able to put it into an analytical system and then you were able to report on it. Because of that, we were kind of branded as this survey platform for a long time. I’d say over the last eight to ten years all the survey is a form. There’s a form engine that allows you to do anything you could ever want to do with a form. A form can be through text, a form can be through a chatbot, it can be through anything. Then there’s an analytical platform and then there’s a reporting platform.

    A lot of our investment has been into actioning. We view ourselves as a system of action. How do you actually gather data that doesn’t exist? What experience management is — most organizations are in a world where they’ve resigned to the fact that they have all the data that they need. From our standpoint and what we see it’s the opposite. We’ve got operational systems that are telling us what’s happened. But the “why” is able to be collected in ways that never could have been done in 2002 because we have such amazing access to people. We think it’s just starting, especially now that we can go gather the “why” data through 13 or 14 different methods. It all comes together and you get a full picture. You see what happened and now you get to see “why” and that’s pretty powerful.

    If you’re thinking about the Google Analytics side it would be like these people visit our site. These people abandoned their shopping carts. These people are doing this. Or I’m an LA Hotel and I see a bunch of people from LA visiting. I don’t know why they’re visiting. They’re not staying with me. They used Qualtrics and the first ten people say that they’re there for the happy hour menu. The one person shop running IT just pops up the happy hour menu through Qualtrics without changing their whole website. Now they’re at home and they’re delivering a great experience and it only shows up for the people from LA.

    EmployeeXM – Coolest, Easiest, and Most Sophisticated

    If you look at the airline industry one of the interesting things is we power probably all the feedback on the 30 or 40 different airlines around the world. Most people know Qualtrics for the customer feedback because they’ll fly and they’ll get an email or a text that says thumbs-up thumbs-down, how was your experience? What we’ve seen as we launched the XM (Experience Management) platform, and this is what SAP is so excited about, we created this category because of all the uses we were seeing on Qualtrics. Our employee experience was taking off in a way where we were like, whoa, 50 percent of the customer problems have to do with an employee.

    Then at the same time, the average tenure here in the Bay Area is like 18 months. I don’t know one CEO that says we’re going to go recruit and spend all this money but we’re going to bring people in for only 18 months. So there’s a massive gap. There’s a gap between what they think is happening and really what’s going on. So we said, hey, we’re going to go hard into developing the coolest, easiest, and most sophisticated employee experience product (EmployeeXM). We’re going to build that and we’re going to tie it together with the customer experience.

    The Inside Manifests Itself On the Outside

    From the time they start in the company to the time they exit how do we know everything that’s going? Even in the recruiting process, how do we make sure that as a company what we think we’re delivering is being received on the other side? I believe the inside manifests itself on the outside. We’re seeing this across brands. Now we’re seeing the customer and the employee. If you look in an airline, they’re using us on the customer, the employee, the product, and the brand side.

    If you look at when someone goes and shows up to a gate a lot of times they’re upset before they even get there. The employee deals with an upset customer and that impacts the entire experience. When you rate or you think about how your flight was you’re only thinking about the brand. It’s a bunch of experiences tied together. We’re helping organizations manage all their experiences for the first time on one single platform. It doesn’t make sense that you’ve got five different software’s doing this. We’re doing this at an enterprise level. That’s how people are using it.

    EmployeeXM – The “Coolest” and “Most Sophisticated” Employee Experience Product – Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith
  • SAP CEO: We Out-Innovated Everybody

    SAP CEO: We Out-Innovated Everybody

    SAP announced the completion of its $8 billion acquisition of Qualtrics which brings critical real-time customer experience data to its customers. SAP CEO Bill McDermott explains how the combination of Qualtrics’ Experience Management (XM) Platform with SAP’s enterprise software and cloud services is not only a game changer for companies, but solidifies SAP as the world’s business software leader:

    “Where did we leave them in the dust? We basically out innovated everybody in terms of how you run your business better. Now the idea is how you create an unbelievable human experience so you inspire your people to take care of your customer and create a loyalty effect that’s unlike any other company in the industry. That’s what we do.”

    Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP, talks about how the integration of Qualtrics into SAPs enterprise solutions will help businesses know their customers with real-time sentiment analysis, in an interview with Fox Business at Davos 2019:

    With Qualtrics Your Brand Will Become a Religion

    I think it’s really important that you focus on the business of your customer and stay obsessed with that and not get caught up in a lot of tech jargon. That’s why I’m glad we’re the business software market leader.

    There is a huge trust deficit in the economy. Customers aren’t necessarily getting what they paid for which is why there is a $1.6 trillion deficit from customers that defect from companies that are out there in the marketplace today. So how do you keep a loyal customer? Today’s systems create operating data. You know your customers, you know your people, you know your suppliers. But we need to know what are consumers saying in real time, in the moment? We need that sentiment analysis.

    Qualtrics is the number one experience management company in the world. From now on, your customers, if you are CEO, will love your products. In fact, they will be obsessed with them. Your brand will become a religion because every employee is an ambassador that’s connected inextricably to the customer experience. That’s Qualtrics.

    If you are a customer of SAP, now you have all the experience data. I call this X-data. This is data from all the consumers that are experiencing your product and your brand. You combine that with the O-data which is all the operational aspects of how you run your company, from your demand all the way through to your supply. You know everything. You take X plus O and you have the winning formula.

    The Enterprise Has Been Redefined by SAP

    We surveyed, with Qualtrics and SAP, along with the World Economic Forum here, we surveyed 10,000 individuals on a random sample in 29 different countries. Once of the questions was, “What are you really worried about out there?” Most humans said we are worried about being replaced by robots. We said, “Is tech for good or is tech for bad?” What’s happening in your world with the perception of technology? They said, “A little bit better than negative, but somewhat ambivalent.” That’s a concern.

    They said that they are basically trusting the people that run their companies, even more than the people that run government. There is a trust deficit out there. It’s really important that we close that trust deficit at the leadership level. It’s also important that companies get the human experience going with their own employees and their customers. That’s why I think that this experience management positioning for SAP is fundamentally going to be a moment in time where the enterprise has been redefined by SAP.

    Over 77 percent of the world’s transactions run through an SAP system. We manage everything from the customer relationship to how you manage your people to how you build great products and how you ship on time and deliver. Now we have experience management which is the ultimate touchpoint for customers, and we put it all in the cloud. So you can be nimble, you can be agile, and you can upgrade quickly. You don’t need a whole lot of resources to maintain these systems. We are moving faster than anyone in 25 industries and in 193 countries around the world.

    About the S/4HANA Upgrade

    S/4HANA is now the system from the demand signal of your consumer in any channel including ecommerce. We know your consumer. We align the product in the proper configuration, at the proper price based on the customers history and all the loyalty that they should earn in their business with you. We ship. We take care of the whole supply chain. You get what you want at the price you procured for anyplace in real-time in the world. That whole value chain is SAP.

    4HANA is now in a cloud. So you can run your entire company from end-to-end on top of SAP’s 4HANA platform in the cloud. Game change. Again, I go back to, that’s all the operational data and all the operational processes. Now, if you can add experiences to this with Qualtrics you’ve got an unbeatable competitive advantage.

    I’m signing up customers left and right on this idea in Davos because this has been the number one thing that businesses have forgotten. You have to have the experience under control with your consumer and it has to be real-time sentiment analysis. Just think, it’s five times more expensive to get a new customer than to keep the one you have. Don’t you want to know how they’re doing?

    No Signs That There is This Global Slowdown

    We have a very strong business. There are no signs in our business that there is this global slowdown. Because we serve the best run businesses in the world we are usually an early indicator of what’s going on out there. We see a very optimistic future. Our pipelines and our business model have not changed one iota. I think there is this disjoint between the consumer companies and the consumer world and the enterprise.

    SAP CEO Bill McDermott: “We out innovated everybody.”
    SAP Bill McDermott: “No signs that there is this global slowdown.”


  • SAP + Qualtrics – Why Did They Do It?

    SAP + Qualtrics – Why Did They Do It?

    SAP released a compilation video (below) featuring SAP CEO Bill McDermott and Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith that really sums up well why SAP is acquiring Qualtrics:

    Bill McDermott: First it’s an honor to team up with Brian Smith, a great CEO, and an inspirational leader. We couldn’t be prouder of our relationship with Qualtrics.

    Ryan Smith: This is a once in a generation opportunity and we’re gonna change the whole face of enterprise technology with this combination.

    Bill McDermott: SAP is the fastest growing cloud company in the large-scale business software industry while Qualtrics is the fastest growing business software company in the experience management space. If you combine those two forces you have a juggernaut of cloud growth.

    Ryan Smith: There are two types of data. You have operational data which is telling you what’s going on and what just happened. These are your analytics, this is your CRM product, this is your HCM product. Then you have experienced staff which allows us to get human sentiment in the moment to understand the why, how someone feels. SAP owns the operation systems from end-to-end, we own the experience systems from end-to-end. The ability to combine those and have one single view will transform the way we even think about CRM as we know it.

    Bill McDermott: We want to be the jet fuel that propels them to 193 countries with the biggest business software sales go-to-market force in the world in 25 industries, small, mid, and large alike. Every customer should know that X-Data and O-Data are together now.

    Ryan Smith: We are fired up today is a new beginning and with all the resources from SAP, we’re super excited for that.

    Bill McDermott: And the loyalty effect is what the experienced management of Qualtrics and the operational data of SAP drive. So X-Data, experience, and O-Data, what’s going on in the operations, put that together, you could inspire everyone in the company to take care of everyone outside the company.

    Ryan Smith: I could not be more excited to work with SAP, McDermott, all of the SAP family. The Qualtrics family is excited and we’re going to go do something legendary.

  • SAP CEO on Qualtrics Deal: A Global Growth Juggernaut in the Cloud

    SAP CEO on Qualtrics Deal: A Global Growth Juggernaut in the Cloud

    SAP CEO Bill McDermott says that buying Qualtrics creates a “global growth juggernaut in the cloud, the number one business software growing in the cloud in the world.” McDermott says that he’s here to build a company for the generations, not just for a few days and that this is a fundamentally transformational deal, one that will reshape the entire industry.

    Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith says that combining forces with SAP will change the experience economy forever. “This is by far a once in a generational opportunity and it’s going to change how everyone thinks about cloud and SAAS and CRM and ERP and HCM forever,” said Smith. “Why wouldn’t we want to be a part of that?”

    Both SAP CEO Bill McDermott and Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith talked about the acquisition on CNBC Squawk Box this morning (Watch Video Below):

    SAP CEO: If You Can Combine X-Data and O-Data You Can Change the World

    We’re reshaping the enterprise application software industry. What led us to this deal is that all CEOs you talk to want to run their companies on an end-to-end basis. They want to deal with their customers in every channel, they want to fulfill, and that requires operational data. SAP touches 77 percent of the world’s transactions, but the operational data doesn’t ask the right question. It doesn’t say, why does the customer feel a certain way about your brand, about your products, and about their experience. This new category called experience management is all about x-data and if you can combine o-data and x-data you can change the world.

    Ryan I have known each other about three months. We spent a lot of time together, a lot of text, a lot of phone calls, and we fundamentally wanted a transformational deal, one that would reshape the entire industry and here we are.

    SAP CEO: If You Want to Survey Somebody You Hire Survey Monkey…

    Have you looked at acquiring SurveyMonkey? No, they do surveys we reinvent customer experiences in a whole new category called experience management. If you want to survey somebody you hire Survey Monkey, if you want to fundamentally change the way an enterprise thinks about its culture, its brand, its products, and its people, now you’re talking Qualtrics, the leader in the marketplace by a factor of 10x. We’ve always bought the biggest and the best one and thankfully with the high trust that Ryan and I developed and our companies developed we’re ready to go.

    SAP CEO: A Global Growth Juggernaut in the Cloud

    When you’re talking about this particular company, Qualtrics, they’re growing at 40 percent on a year-over-year basis in the cloud. They have a very serious go-to-market strategy, but it’s modest in size. We’re growing at 41 percent year-over-year in the cloud and we have a very large go-to-market machine, more than 15,000 people touching the customer every day. If you combine that rate of growth you have a global growth juggernaut in the cloud, the number one business software growing in the cloud in the world. So digest that dear shareholders.

    We’re saying and we’re very clear on this, we’re going to grow total revenue in double-digit, operating income in double-digit, not to mention being the fastest growing cloud company in the world. So today this will be digested. Now they’ll know, why did he do a big one when he said he was more likely gonna do tuck-ins? Because I never thought I would get Qualtrics and it takes some skill to pull deals like this off and convince a great entrepreneur like Ryan that he’s better off with SAP than going it alone when he’s 13x oversubscribed in his IPO.

    SAP CEO: I’m Here to Build a Company for the Generations

    So that’s what took a little bit of time and when we pulled it off together this weekend we were literally crossing each other in the air at 39,000 feet, so this was high-stakes. Now that we’re here, we’re doing all-hands meetings, we’re talking to the media, we’re talking to the bankers, and I expect the stock to do extremely well as the day progresses, and more importantly in the mid and the long term. I’m here to build a company for the generations, not just for a few days.

    Qualtrics CEO: We Created the Experience Management Category

    We were planning on ringing the bell on Thursday. I was home this weekend just to kind of take a little break after a week on the road it was going really well. We were 13 times oversubscribed with the best still ahead of us and then we had an opportunity to combine forces with SAP and change the experience economy forever. I think in my conversations with Bill it’s something that we only dreamed of that we could make this happen. It’s pretty special.

    We’ve been doing this for 16 years. We transformed the entire experience management category, we’ve created it. We’re powering the feedback for 14 different airlines, 200 financial institutions, and we’ve really created this category to go do something big, that was the goal. We never had a financial reason to go public, we bootstrapped our company longer than anyone and we had no investor pressure. We’re one of the only companies that has been cashflow positive and high growth since its inception. The reason why we were going public was to create this massive new category.

    Qualtrics CEO: A Once in a Generational Opportunity

    When Bill approached us with a once in a generational opportunity that we could take all the power of Qualtrics and our 9,000 brands and have that sit alongside SAP and have every ounce of customer feedback go into the entire product process with an ERP system, reshape how the world thinks about CRM, and everything that we’re doing to power all the employee experience of the whole world that’s all available overnight. That’s something that we couldn’t turn down and we chose to be here.

    Our IPO was already way oversubscribed, it was gonna take off and everyone was looking at us saying, hey this is the next $20 or $30 billion dollar standalone company. But we want to win and this is what winning looks like and we’re going to reshape the entire industry and Bill’s on board and we’re excited.

    We were pretty set on going public and so it wasn’t till this opportunity came through this weekend where we said, hey look, this is by far a once in a generational opportunity and it’s going to change how everyone thinks about cloud and SAAS and CRM and ERP and HCM forever. Why wouldn’t we want to be a part of that? We couldn’t be more excited and like I said this is a pretty special team with Bill and me.