BOOST Your ERP Podcast
BOOST Your ERP Podcast
BOOST Your ERP Featuring CloudExtend
Ever wondered how embracing technology and automation can revolutionize your business? Join us as we chat with Chris, founder of Cloud Extend, and learn about his entrepreneurial journey that led him to discover the power of NetSuite and create a wildly successful chain of nine stores. Chris opens up about his unique experiences and shares the invaluable lessons he learned throughout his fascinating journey.
Dive into the world of tech and automation with Chris as he talks about his role at Celigo and their integration platform, Integratorio. Learn how Celigo empowers businesses to connect disparate systems and automate processes, leading to growth and success in the mid-market and beyond. Chris emphasizes the importance of customer service and building strong relationships when working on complex projects, drawing from his experience developing a custom online booking system for his limousine service.
Lastly, don't miss out on Chris's best business advice that has helped him succeed in the challenging world of entrepreneurship. Discover the power of challenging the status quo, empowering people to do the right thing, and making small yet impactful changes to boost your business. Listen in and gain valuable insights that can help you overcome the challenges of implementing and adopting systems like NetSuite, and ultimately transform your business for the better.
Speaker 1: 0:00
Well, welcome everybody to the Boost Your ERP podcast. Here we're with Chris from Cloud Extend and we're really excited to talk about really their part in the ERP, which is a really cool part, especially if you're looking at CRM functionality, part of Natsuite, and just like your interactions with customers. Quite honestly, a lot of us are about customers, so it's a really great podcast today. So, chris, welcome.
Speaker 2: 0:27
Hey Todd, Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
Speaker 1: 0:30
No problem. So well, first off, Chris, I really just tell me a little bit about yourself and where you're from, where you go to school, stuff like that. So why don't you start there?
Speaker 2: 0:39
Yeah, sure. So going way back. right, you see the gray hairs, or if you're listening, i have gray hairs. So I go way back. I graduated from Boston University and I had a degree in business with a concentration in management information systems. So if anyone remembers Cobol, i did some programming in Cobol Fortran. Once I graduated I worked for a pharmaceutical company for about a year programming in the SAS, sas Computer Language. Then I realized I took a course in entrepreneurship in college and I said I wanted to be president. I knew I wasn't going to be president of the pharmaceutical company there sometime that year. So I left the company and I started my own company, put president, ceo on the business card, every title that I possibly could, and started really with a small car detailing shop. So my brother and I washed and waxed cars. We bought what was called a leading edge computer back in the day. It was like $4,000 for a computer, $5,000 for a laser printer. We bought a mailing list of people that lived on rich streets in the neighboring towns, sent out some letters. That took off and then we ultimately also opened up a limousine service. So we had a bunch of limos and town cars taking people back and forth to the airports. And then, through that relationship, a few years later we met someone from the local telephone company who was just starting. cell phones were just coming out. I mean, this is back when you had to pay $3,000 and you had to have the phone installed in your car. So we had kind of that expertise with people that worked for us on how to rip a car open, put the phone in. So we started getting involved in that business and that ultimately evolved over the years into a chain of stores. We had nine stores in Connecticut and Rhode Island. So that lasted. I'm going to say that was 25 years actually, from 1986 through 2011 when we sold the company, and we'll go one step back to 1999. We had some trouble with our accounting system and I called the company. It was a DOS based accounting system called DackeyZ. I called their tech support and they said press F4, then press F9, which I did. And then he said wait, don't press F9. I said too late, he goes. oh, I'm so sorry, he goes. where's your backup? And I had like 50 floppy disks from a backup from like a month ago. So I finally said this is time to go and get something new. So I looked, i found Net Ledger at the time small ad in PC magazine, $10 a month. We actually back then. it was so easy to implement, we were up and running in about a week. But it was like literally a dream come true. I have, i'm in Connecticut, so we skied a lot. I had three small girls at the time. They're all in their 20s now, but we were able to go and take off on weekends and go skiing And I could look and see okay, well, you know today our limo is brought in. this much revenue, gps, where's the car? The cell phone stores which store is performing well today, which one's not. you know which one hasn't made their deposit. So all that could be done like literally on one screen. It literally changed my life, no joke.
Speaker 1: 3:51
Wow, that's a great story. So let me go back to college. So, boston University, your business major, so what did you take away from that? Just curious, you know, if anybody's like going to school and stuff like that, i'm like in today I think there's a really interesting paradigm How much school do you go to, or how much do you go through? And to me, what did you learn when you were going to college and stuff like that?
Speaker 2: 4:16
So, todd, honestly I wish I could tell you I learned a lot about business. I learned how to go out late on a Thursday night and get up early on a Friday morning, still make class, you know. so I was an average student, i think, probably 3.3, 3.5 GPA. I put the work in, but really my experience came from running my own business. I got more out of that than you know any years in college. Nothing against BU. I learned a lot, you know, just being in that environment in the city. I learned a lot about life and about business there too.
Speaker 1: 4:48
but yeah, Yeah, and it was interesting in my previous career. You know I at one point I went to landscaping business and had multiple crews and things like that And I always say that there's so much practical things that I learned about business being an owner. You know that have benefited me throughout the year. So I get that And you really, you know the accountability is probably the best teacher. When you own a business, you really do have to have, you get that full accountability and you always carry that forward Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, so. So tell me about the, tell me about your implementation, for took about a week. What was that like? Was there? much data, or did you just kind of start out? What did you do there?
Speaker 2: 5:33
So, yeah, i actually imported. I have to go way back now and try and remember this, but we didn't import transactional data, so we imported, like you know, gl balances. As of a certain point in time, we imported products, we hired a company who I was a little annoyed, but they charged me five grand but they did the work in one day. But they actually they built it was really smart what they did. So for our limo service we had, we had, i think, vans, stretch limousines and sedans and then different airports. So they built matrix items for us inside of NetSuite. So then on the website someone could choose, you know, the matrix items, so the sedan and then the airport, and it would match the price. So people could just check out online and book their trips in advance. So that was pretty slick. I was just, i was just annoyed because they did it in a day and charged me five grand, which you know, in today's dollars is probably, you know, 15, 20 grand.
Speaker 1: 6:28
Yeah, so what year was that? That was 1999.
Speaker 2: 6:31
Wow.
Speaker 1: 6:32
So you're, you're really cutting edge at that point As far as like being able to select the go to online and be able to select the pricing and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: 6:41
So, yeah, that was cool And I remember back in the day. back in the day there was a yeah, bill Bailey and also Evan Goldberg who founded NetSuite, and Bill Bailey was one of the programmers. You know, they reach out to me on a weekend and say Hey, we're pushing this update to custom forms. Can you make sure that they still work? I don't think you'll see that happening, you know anymore.
Speaker 1: 7:04
No, that is crazy. Well, to me that's really cool. So you really do have the full experience with NetSuite starting out then. So so how did you get into this industry then?
Speaker 2: 7:16
So, because of my ability, i just loved working with NetSuite in my company. We built out, really, as we saw, like the entire business was built and running up on NetSuite. So when I sold my company in 2011, i had to work for the company for a one-year period. So I worked for them, fulfilled that engagement and then started reselling NetSuite. So I did one implementation for an appliance company in Rhode Island. Through that I met the folks at Salingo. It was a tough decision. I flew out to California. Tech was really wild then. You think of pool tables, ping-pong tables and foosball and all this crazy stuff. So I went to their office in California and said you know what? this is something I'd love to do. So I made the decision for the first time in what? 27 years or so not to work for myself. I joined the small company of 35, 40 people and it's really been a rocket ship ride since then.
Speaker 1: 8:23
Yeah, in what year was that then?
Speaker 2: 8:25
That was December 2012.
Speaker 1: 8:27
2012. Okay, so about 10 years. So Saligo, so you joined Saligo. tell me a little bit about Saligo's growth. Tell me, for those that are listening, a little bit about Saligo and Cloud Extend.
Speaker 2: 8:38
Yeah, sure. So Saligo has really become the expert in business process automation for the mid-market and now, moving well beyond the mid-market, we've grown to be one of the most important automation platform companies in the world. We're global. We've got offices in Australia, netherlands, us, probably some other places as well. I can't even think about Companies around the world now standardized on our enterprise-wide automation platform that we call integratorio, to connect all the disparate systems together, automate their business processes and especially in the NetSuite space. Saligo continues to be the dominant NetSuite leader for over a decade now. Now with Cloud Extend, as Saligo grew, i joined Saligo as the director of account management and the only account manager. So, as I mentioned, we were small then. So as we started to grow, i started to have people under me in the account management department, which later became like this massive customer success department, had a conversation with our CEO, jan, about what to do with these applications that had some traction, didn't get a lot of attention, had a lot of potential but were definitely not integration opportunities. They weren't running on our integratorio platform. So we had an integration with Gmail, an integration with Excel so customers could manage NetSuite data inside of Excel and then push it back up to NetSuite. They could get an email in their Gmail and then attach it to a NetSuite record. So we had to make a decision then is this a business that could grow? Should we just stop supporting it entirely? Initially, our CEO, jan, thought that we should have a separate team come in and run it. As a member of our small executive team back then, i was against that. We had a sidebar and he said listen, i want you to run it. I think that we can grow this. Let's see if there's something here. So in hindsight he was right. We've grown that business. How many X right now. Many, many, many X. And we've expanded not only into importing data into NetSuite with Excel, but also being able to schedule, save searches so you can run your data out of Excel on-demand. Their on-schedules, then link Excel to Power BI, build these really awesome dashboards. In fact, i run the entire Cloud Extend business on Power BI dashboards that use our application. Then we took the Gmail integration and we also ported that over to an email integration for Outlook as well. That also really took off. In fact, netsuite used to have their own integration. They end up like that after we built our integration and now they recommend that customers use our integration.
Speaker 1: 11:36
Yeah, that's the first time that I ever, as an implementer, ran across the legal actually was with the Cloud Extend products. Really, that's when I really, i guess, started taking notice. I had heard of the names of legal and I spent a lot of my previous as an actual consultant in the CRM and e-commerce. That was always the first question is hey, how do I get my emails in there? That really was to me when I first, as an implementer, started recognizing it As a business GVO. we started taking more notice of when the integrator IO, the integration as a service, that really started hitting about four or five years ago. for us. We have a great team of developers, but at that point we're like, okay, do we want to create a custom integration every time? Do we want to do that or do we want to at least standardize on a platform? I shared with you in the past that one of the things that we're happy with the product the integrator IO but we're always really happy with the service response that we got from Sleego and that was really one of the biggest differences is that when you're in the middle of a battle, you need an answer and you need it now. You need somebody to pick up that phone and not just have one on one support. but hey, somebody's down. If there's an integration, usually there's something fairly pressing that you're trying to get.
Speaker 2: 13:04
Yeah, especially, you've got orders flowing in, right, You've got to fulfill a thousand 10,000 orders that same day. They're not flowing in. You need someone to answer that way.
Speaker 1: 13:13
Answer right now We take our relationship seriously because we put our word behind our work. That was one of the things where we really started to work more with you guys. Thank you, that's always been very well, so thankful for that. So your Cloud Extend you kind of have your department, you break it off and you get to Cloud Extend, a little bit broken off from Saligo. So how long has it been since then? They kind of made that decision to have your own team with the Cloud Extend.
Speaker 2: 13:42
So that's been roughly six years. I think it's six years this March, wow, 2017,. I think, yeah, in fact it is because I went out to India back then and I'm heading back out to our office in India. We've got my teams, got 24 developers over there. Saligo's got hundreds of developers over there, so I'll be back out there to start building our roadmap, planning our roadmap for 2024 and beyond Awesome. But yeah, it's also helped us having our own. We call it a brand because, unlike Saligo's IPass integration, where it's typically someone like yourself or maybe one or two people supporting that at a company, for us there's tens of thousands of end users. Any one of those end users might have a question or need support. So our application actually has we use a product called Intercom and that's embedded directly inside of our application So a customer can open the chat, talk live with our support team, start a Zoom meeting, get answers proactively as they're typing their question, the articles will start to service. So we've had a lot of success really building our model that way so we can support lots and lots of end users at scale.
Speaker 1: 14:52
Awesome, that's fantastic. So let's talk a little bit. One of the reasons why we have the podcast is really, at Gover's Office, we always wanted to be very transparent. We always tried to be transparent and be really good partners, and part of the reason why we do the podcast is so people can understand, and I always said different times in my career I'm like man, i wish I had done this before I did this. Because you get that insight. You're like, wow, i could have done so much better jobs. So just have some questions, really, because we get a unique perspective from where we sit on this site. So to kind of share some of that really agnostic. So my first question is really what's the best technology advice anyone's ever given you?
Speaker 2: 15:38
You know I'm going to say this came from our CEO, yan, to me, and we had a discussion about our competition once and he said, chris, i hired you because I trust your vision. So trust your vision and don't hyper focus on your competition. And I do that. I maintain that now all the time. And a really good case in point is we have this vision for our email applications to really automate as much of the manual effort in syncing emails as we can. And we had a competitor maybe, if we get into it, i'll talk about, without naming the competitor, how bad that scenario was. But this competitor introduced the ability to sync contacts from NetSuite to Outlook, which is something we didn't offer. So internally we had these let's call them arguments And some people were saying on the sales side hey, we need to build a contact sync right away, because XYZ companies built a contact sync And if we did that, it would have slowed down our automation journey. So engineers are not a limitless resource. So smartly, i think in retrospect, rather than reacting to the competition, we just put our heads down and we just doubled down on our email autopilot. And I mean, truth be told, we didn't really do it just blindly. We have this product board where customers can come in. They can add their ideas, upvote them, so we already knew that some customers had requested this. But in speaking with customers, we also knew that, a this wasn't a priority And, b more people saw it as a liability. More customers saw it as a liability having all this contact information from their NetSuite out in the wild sitting on their employees' phones. So really, who would want to walk around with their entire customer list on their phone? And now, even with privacy laws, i'm not even sure how smart that would do So in retrospect. We rarely get customers asking for that. We would have lost three, four months' momentum just to match a customer. So, just by doubling down on our vision and not hyper-focusing on our competition, i think that's one small example.
Speaker 1: 17:49
Well, that's really cool. That's a great point. A question on your customers when the board and the feedback and things like that, do the customers ever surprise you with the ass that you guys haven't thought? I'm just curious Are most of them just like a confirmation of what you guys think you should be doing?
Speaker 2: 18:09
Yeah, good question. It's really more customers reinforcing what we've been thinking, because we've been doing this a long time and we've got our own internal roadmap. I'm trying to think of one. Yeah, okay, so one idea that we didn't think of. We haven't implemented this yet and we haven't really, so it's not really on our short-term roadmap, but we've had customers that want to be able to select, say like 15 different emails, all from different people, and then attach those to a NetSuite record. So that's something that we want to try and build. But there's some limitations, at least from the engineering side, on being able to grab that many message IDs and associate them with a single NetSuite account. So we'll have to find some way to program around that. That's something we didn't think about internally that surfaced and we could see the value in that.
Speaker 1: 19:00
Yeah.
Speaker 2: 19:04
Yeah. So one other one, something we should have thought of and didn't in our Excel application that Netsuite's got a multi-select field. We had this convoluted way of uploading values for a multi-select field when you want to push an update to Netsuite. If you want to choose three out of the 10 values, you'd have three separate rows. So a customer said why not make it simple and just have comma separation between them? It just made perfect sense. We just hadn't done it. It wasn't a priority, but that really just, and it was done pretty quickly. It's now available.
Speaker 1: 19:41
Yeah To me and I'm really thankful I share this with other people. At times where a customer like they're coming into Netsuite with our delivery team, want to implement and they're like well, do you have lots of experience in this industry? It's always good to have experience in that industry They're like okay, we're looking for some partner that just does this. I've always shared with them that I'm like hey, you know what? that's good to have experience in there, but we have an experience in the service and the warehouse, distribution and finance and things like that. It's always so interesting when you can cross pollinate. I'm really thankful when we can work with customers who are like hey, have you ever thought about doing this? It's so simple, so that's really important to be able to have that access. I'm glad that they can get that to you.
Speaker 2: 20:34
Yeah, i agree, 100 percent One. We give them that forum to our product team. Product managers right now are implementing a customer advisory board So we're able to select the 10 customers for each product, bring them in once a quarter on a Zoom call, share our roadmap, get feedback. So I wish that happened yesterday, but that's happening as we speak right now. We'll kick it off on March 13th, i think I'm going to be in India, so we're going to have some customers beam into our engineers as well there in the conference room and talk about how much our products have helped them. I think that would be good for all of us to hear as well.
Speaker 1: 21:15
Yeah, that's awesome, very cool, Okay, so the kind of leads. The next question is similar to the first What's the best business advice anyone has ever given you?
Speaker 2: 21:31
All right. So I'm going to say the best business advice actually came partly from me But my old company. we had this round table where we wanted to build a mission statement. So we had all these convoluted we want to be like the company that changes the world all these other things and they sound great, very hard to do. In the end we just decided on the mission statement was do the right thing. So I think that piece of business advice that came from that round table has been the best piece of advice I got over the years. It really is as simple as that. I remember reading years ago that the Ritz-Carlton just allowed every employee, whether it was someone at the front desk, janitor, housekeeping, to spend up to $2,000 to resolve any customer issues right on the spot. So I think just by giving, empowering people to do the right thing, always backing them up, i think that is the best piece of business advice. Some people will say the customer is always right. The customer isn't always right. I hate to say it, but they're not always right. Even translating do the right thing. we had one of my regrets is that we had a customer actually very aggressive with one of our coworkers and made this coworker so set that they were really in tears. I should have just cut ties then and there with that customer. So that would have been an example of following my best business advice and doing the right thing. So that's a regret that I have for not following that.
Speaker 1: 23:11
Yeah, to me as a company as well, it isn't just with the customers, it is with the employees, and I think that we've all learned in the last two or three years how important and it really takes and I share with my team. We share that sentiment. Do the right thing, take care of the customer, take care of your coworker, fight for each other, not against each other, and things of that. The thing that I've always really found interesting is that it takes a lot less energy When you do the right thing. Then it is to do the wrong thing and pay that consistent price long-term. So that's great advice. Okay, so, as we talked a little bit before, we have this unique perspective of the industry and you have great perspective of Nesweet as a customer. So I'm really interested to see your answer on this. My next question is what do you see from your perspective that the best business is? Because you get this big cross-section of customers and you see the ones that are doing really well, you see the ones that are struggling. What are the best businesses? and I don't necessarily mean like dollars. You can tell with those. What are they doing right out there? What do you see being done successfully?
Speaker 2: 24:23
I would start with challenging the status quo. What worked last year is probably not going to work this year, and you've got to be able to recognize whether it's working or not. I think the best companies, the best business people out there are making lots of small minor adjustments and then doubling down on what works. Maybe they need to tweak a pricing model. Maybe there's pricing discounts and you need to adjust those because people are buying fewer products now, but you need to make sure that your company still gets the revenue that it needs to actually build and enhance those products. Some companies might need to start charging for support if they need to keep supporting that. Make some minor tweaks along the way. So I think you've got to make small changes and then, once a change starts to work, you can double, triple, quadruple down on it and then really push that through and see the benefit.
Speaker 1: 25:13
That's interesting With that from your perspective. At times we sit on this side of the aisle when we're consulting or getting your product or service, stuff like that. What are some of the things that are really hard to get across that you know are really successful? Is there anything stand out in your head?
Speaker 2: 25:35
So something that's hard.
Speaker 1: 25:37
Sorry if you can just repeat that Yeah, so at times, at times where we'll be like, hey, instead of just taking your chart of accounts that you have now, get your chart of accounts right before you convert over to Nesb. That's an example. Spend that time and really map out what is your ideal chart of accounts and spend that time and energy to get an ideal for the growth of your business. But when we're doing an implementation, at times it's really tough because they're trying to do the full-time job and change the system. It's not always easy to say, hey, i need to stop my implementation, get my chart of accounts right before I go the next step. So at times we're just like, look, trust us, it's going to be better long-term then to go doing that later. Well, it's a lot more painful once you're in. Do you ever run into that type of situations with some of your customers?
Speaker 2: 26:28
Yeah, i think some people might buy before they're ready. Although buy and they won't really be serious. They've got this idea that, hey, i read that this product's going to help me or competitor to purchase this, so we're going to purchase it too and stay a step ahead of them, or at least stay up with them. But you've got to be serious about actually using the product and that buy-ins really got to come in from the top level down. For example, for us we like to say, if it's not a Netsuite, it didn't happen. Netsuite should be your single source of truth. You can't just when an employee leaves the company, their emails leave with them. Sometimes their files are going to leave with them. No one's got that 360-degree visibility. We do see customers. They're excited to use our application. They'll go through a training session and then all of a sudden the usage will start to drop down because they're not really enforcing that from the top down at the start. You're not going to see the benefits right away. The benefits are going to come maybe two months, three, four months down the road when someone needs that piece of information and either that person's not there anymore, or their application, or they send that individual in the company an email saying, hey, did you ever ask the customer this question? and what was the response? But it's right there in Netsuite because they attached that email or they attached that file. So you've got to start using the product before you can really start seeing the benefit. Some customers will stop early because they don't have anyone on their side really enforcing the usage until the adoption increases, because they see the benefit.
Speaker 1: 28:01
Yeah, and that's going to be one of my questions I had later. I'll ask you now because I think it's a great timing. It's one of the things that we see in implementing Netsuite. it's a huge shift, it's a monstrous shift for a company and you start tracking information like you have. There's a big shift and it really comes down to change management and really what you're talking about. Is there anything that you guys do to help facilitate change management and how you look at that or how you help people through that?
Speaker 2: 28:32
I think, for the most part, we've been pretty good about change, and I think of it internally, change internally, and we're really transparent with each other. Our business metrics are all available for anyone on the team to see. So, in short, if we're making a change, that writing has been on the wall for everyone to see for some time and everyone's had some input. While we're not a democracy, we're also not a dictatorship. People have a voice and there's lots of transparency. So I think being transparent is the best change management practice you can have.
Speaker 1: 29:09
That's very cool To me. I never really thought about it. But that's true with your Cloud Extend product that you don't see that immediate result. You can't. I mean it's certain instances but it is over time where you see that full profit when you see all that history build up and stuff like that. So, yeah, it takes a certain amount of trust that is going to be worth it down time. Do you deal much with the executive levels with those buying decisions, or is that a director of IT work Who's normally making that decision on that?
Speaker 2: 29:44
Yeah, so it depends on the product. So we've got our Excel. applications are typically someone in the CFO or controller, someone in accounting or finance. They want to build reports in Excel or Power BI, so they need something to extract that data. Yeah, they want to end of the month. they want to create journal entries. They've got all the data in Excel. they don't want to go through the UI or CSP imports, so they want to do it quickly. So that's an accounting finance type buyer Yeah, on the email side it's typically someone on the sales team. So VP of sales, a sales manager. Sometimes it'll start at the grassroots level. Someone in a sales team sees the benefit of being able to put their emails into net suite Just for themselves alone, never mind for the rest of the company. They don't want to hunt and peck through their emails. they want to put contracts in there just by syncing the file over. sometimes at the grassroots level, but more often than not starting at VP of sales. Yeah.
Speaker 1: 30:40
Interesting. So once again, going back to your vantage point 2023, there's always challenges every year. A couple years is COVID and a year ago was hiring and things like that. Now it's potential recession, refining and fasion. It's cliche, but there's always opportunities with that, i guess. From your perspective, what opportunities do you see out there that people should be taking notice of?
Speaker 2: 31:12
Well, i can speak for me personally with regards to opportunities that I see for our customers and for ourselves internally as well. I don't think we've done a good enough job in communicating why someone should use our products. During demos the Account execs. they're going to show customers how the product can update Netsuite data from Excel, build reports, attach emails, but we haven't done a good enough job in explaining the why before customers even start their buying journey. So why is it important to make sure that your communications are in Netsuite? Why is it important to have your report sourced directly from Netsuite safe searches? So we're not getting way up in that channel before people even think about buying. So I think from an us perspective, that's an opportunity that we're missing on. It's something we're actively working with our marketing team now so that we can start planting those seeds early. You and I we did a webinar recently together on our side. So activities like that to really help drive awareness way before someone even starts making that buying decision, that is an opportunity that I see.
Speaker 1: 32:21
Yeah, that's very cool. So we always joke around here in our dev team that Pixie does sprinkle something and then just make it happen. So if you could sprinkle Pixie does with their customers, what would it look like if you wanted to change? So to me, if you had a five gallon bucket of Pixie does, what would you use it for? Would you go back and change something, or would you use it for something going forward?
Speaker 2: 32:49
If I had a five gallon bucket of Pixie does, that I could do anything with. I think I'd really use that to bring a quality and peace to the world. So I mean, imagine a world where we really saw each other for who we really are, as individuals, and not for our race or religion or sex. Now, there's a lot to unpack there, so I'm just going to leave it there and I'll take the five gallons of Pixie dust and throw it on there and let the magic happen. Now, if I had to reserve like a small bit of that Pixie dust for our customers, i would say go through the training when you purchase our application. Go through the training, learn how to use it. Stick with it for a few months so you can start to see the benefit. Make sure you get those executives really tracking their metrics and saying, okay, well, we bought 20 licenses. Who are the two users that aren't using this? and why not? And you guys start using that because by not using it you're doing a disservice to everyone else. That gets larger over time.
Speaker 1: 33:51
Yeah, yeah. And what's interesting is that we have a great staff here on our Boost team And the one thing that I always share with them is that the contributions you make to people's business is measurable on how well Nesweet runs. But one of our key initiatives is are we making people's lives better through your interactions? Because everybody's fighting something and it may seem so, but like, well, i'm just going to stop for well, yeah, but somebody's on the other side is fighting a battle And if we can make that battle better going back to your world, peace and things of that nature that it is small things, but to me, i always enjoy the opportunity Can we make somebody's lives better? And I think that at times you do that because we all have a job, and it's good to hear that, and I know that just working with your team you know Justine and different staff you guys have always been very proactive in trying to help people, so that's a kudos to your team on that.
Speaker 2: 34:52
Well, it kind of also goes back to that customer story that I told about, where, you know, someone I worked with was literally brought to tears by that customer. Yeah, if we were all just a little bit nicer to each other, a little more aware of everyone's circumstances, i mean, just be nice, maybe you have an issue with a product or maybe we have an issue with a customer but put a smile on your face, have that conversation. You know, we have every customer's best interests at heart And so we want to help everyone solve every problem. I'll leave that one at that.
Speaker 1: 35:24
Yeah, yeah, great. So well, last question I have for you is you know? so where does somebody go if they want to start leveraging cloud extend, Or where do they go? What do they do? What's the best way to start? You know if, if you were in their shoes, you know and you had to, you had to walk down the path they would. What would you do And how would you start?
Speaker 2: 35:43
Okay, so first I get all of our products. So I mean literally, you can start a free trial. So you go to our website, cloud extendio. You can find different use cases there, so validate your use case. You know you want to do reporting. Learn about our analytics app that pulls the data out of NetSuite into Excel. Start a free trial. The free trials come packed with all the resources you need to be successful. You can meet one on one with a solution consultant. You'll literally be up and running in less than 30 minutes. And then again, once you buy, just make sure that your entire team gets on board and trained And that's also free And we record those sessions so that you can share those with new companies, that new employees that come on board as well. And then, once your team is using the app, you know they get access to free support directly in the application. They get assigned to customer success manager And I would encourage them. Our CSMs reach out to you, know, have meetings, and it's not just about you know. Hey, did you hear about this product that we have? you know there's some upsell involved because we want to make sure you're aware of other products that might benefit you, but there's no hard sells. It's their job to make sure that you're successful with the products that we have And then, if you're not, to help you be successful and then build awareness of other offerings that we have, not only at Cloud Extend but at Celigo as well.
Speaker 1: 37:02
Awesome, awesome. Well, like I said before, we've had great experience with you and your staff and our customers have as well, so glad to see that you guys are continuing that on, okay, well, well, that's all we have for today, for if you have any questions on GVO, go to govirtualofficecom. We also have our Boost Your ERP LinkedIn group. I'll go ahead and request access to that. We have lots of articles on tips and tricks, but just on general thought processes Are you using upsell manager? Are you using support cases? Are you doing this or that? And that's a great way where we also try to share that transparency in our background. So make sure you go, and we try to put a lot of content in there. So, but, thank you very much, chris, thankful to have you on and I appreciate your time.
Speaker 2: 37:46
Thank you.
