(gentle upbeat music) >> People hate to be sold, but they love to buy. We become what we think about, think, and grow rich. If you want to gather honey, don't kick over the beehive. The world is replete with time-tested advice and motivational ideas for aspiring salespeople, Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, Earl Nightingale, and many others have all published classics with guidance that when followed closely, almost always leads to success. More modern personalities have emerged in the internet era, like Tony Robbins, and Gary Vaynerchuk, and Angela Duckworth. But for the most part, they've continued to rely on book publishing, seminars, and high value consulting to peddle their insights and inspire action. Welcome to this video exclusive on theCUBE. This is Dave Vellante, and I'm pleased to welcome back Professor Mark Roberge, who is one of the Managing Directors at Stage 2 Capital, and Paul Fifield, who's the CEO and Co-Founder of Sales Impact Academy. Gentlemen, welcome. Great to see you. >> You too Dave and thanks. >> All right, let's get right into it. Paul, you guys are announcing today a $4 million financing round. It comprises $3 million in a seed round led by Stage 2 and a million dollar in debt financing. So, first of all, congratulations. Paul, why did you start Sales Impact Academy? >> Cool, well, I think my background is sort of two times CRO, so I've built two reasonably successful companies. Built a hundred plus person teams. And so I've got kind of this firsthand experience of having to learn literally everything on the job whilst delivering these very kind of rapid, like achieving these very rapid growth targets. And so when I came out of those two journeys, I literally just started doing some voluntary teaching in and around London where I now live. I spend a bunch of time over in New York, and literally started this because I wanted to sort of kind of give back, but just really wanted to start helping people who were just really, really struggling in high pressure environments. And that's both leadership from sense of revenue leadership people, right down to sort of frontline SDRs. And I think as I started just doing this voluntary teaching, I kind of realized that actually the sort of global education system has done is a massive, massive disservice, right? I actually call it the greatest educational travesty of the last 50 years, where higher education has entirely overlooked sales as a profession. And the knock-on consequences of that have been absolutely disastrous for our profession. Partly that the profession is seen as a bit sort of embarrassing to be a part of. You kind of like go get a sales job if you can't get a degree. But more than that, the core fundamental within revenue teams and within sales people is now completely lacking 'cause there's no structured formal kind of like learning out there. So that's really the problem we're trying to solve on the kind of like the skill side. >> Great. Okay. And mark, always good to have you on, and I got to ask you. So even though, I know this is the wheelhouse for you and your partners, and of course, you've got a deep bench of LPs, but lay out the investment thesis here. What's the core problem that you saw and how are you looking at the market? >> Yeah, sure, Dave. So this one was a special one for me. We've spoken in the past. I mean, just personally I've always had a similar passion to Paul that it's amazing how important sales execution is to all companies, nevermind just the startup ecosystem. And I've always personally been motivated by anything that can help the startup ecosystem increase their success. Part of why I teach at Harvard and try to change some of the stuff that Paul's talking about, which is like, it's amazing how little education is done around sales. But in this particular one, not only personally was I excited about, but from a fun perspective, we've got to look at the economic outcomes. And we've been thinking a lot about the sales tech stack. It's evolved a ton in the last couple of decades. We've gone from the late '90s where every sales VP was just, they had a thing called the CRM that none of their reps even used, right? And we've come so far in 20 years, we've got all these amazing tools that help us cold call, that help us send emails efficiently and automatically and track everything, but nothing's really happened on the education side. And that's really the enormous gap that we've seen is, these organizations being much more proactive around adopting technology that can prove sales execution, but nothing on the education side. And the other piece that we saw is, it's almost like all these companies are reinventing the wheel of looking in the upcoming year, having a dozen sales people to hire, and trying to put together a sales enablement program within their organization to teach salespeople sales 101. Like how to find a champion, how to develop a budget, how to develop sense of urgency. And what Paul and team can do in the first phase of essay, is can sort of centralize that, so that all of these organizations can benefit from the best content and the best instructors for their team. >> So Paul, exactly, thank you, mark. Exactly what do you guys do? What do you sell? I'm curious, is this sort of, I'm thinking in my head, is this E-learning, is it really part of the sales stack? Maybe you could help us understand that better. >> Well, I think this problem of having to upscale teams has been around like forever. And kind of going back to the kind of education problem, it's what's wild is that we would never accept this of our lawyers, our accountants, or HR professionals. Imagine like someone in your finance team arriving on day one and they're searching YouTube to try and work out how to like put a balance sheet together. So it's a chronic, chronic problem. And so the way that we're addressing this, and I think the problem is well understood, but there's always been a terrible market, sort of product market fit for how the problem gets solved. So as mark was saying, typically it's in-house revenue leaders who themselves have got massive gaps in their knowledge, hack together some internal learning that is just pretty poor, 'cause it's not really their skillset. The other alternative is bringing in really expensive consultants, but they're consultants with a very single worldview and the complexity of a modern revenue organization is very, very high these days. And so one consultant is not going to really kind of like cover every topic you need. And then there's the kind of like fairly old fashioned sales training companies that just come in, one big hit, super expensive and then sort of leave again. So the sort of product market fit to solve, has always been a bit pretty bad. So what we've done is we've created a subscription model. We've essentially productized skills development. The way that we've done that is we teach live instruction. So one of the big challenges Andreessen Horowitz put a post out around this so quite recently, one of the big problems of online learning is that this kind of huge repository of online learning, which puts all the onus on the learner to have the discipline to go through these courses and consume them in an on-demand way is actually they're pretty ineffective. We see sort of completion rates of like 7 to 8%. So we've always gone from a live instruction model. So the sort of ingredients are the absolute very best people in the world in their very specific skill teaching live classes just two hours per week. So we're not overwhelming the learners who are already in work, and they have targets, and they've got a lot of pressure. And we have courses that last maybe four to like 12 hours over two to sort of six to seven weeks. So highly practical live instruction. We have 70, 80, sometimes even 90% completion rates of the sort of live class experience, and then teams then rapidly put that best practice into practice and see amazing results in things like top of funnel, or conversion, or retention. >> So live is compulsory and I presume on-demand? If you want to refresh you have an on demand option? >> Yeah, everything's recorded, so you can kind of catch up on a class if you've missed it, But that live instruction is powerful because it's kind of in your calendar, right? So you show up. But the really powerful thing, actually, is that entire teams within companies can actually learn at exactly the same pace. So we teach it eight o'clock Pacific, 11 o'clock Eastern, >> 4: 00 PM in the UK, and 5:00 PM Europe. So your entire European and North American teams can literally learn in the same class with a world-class expert, like a Mark, or like a Kevin Dorsey, or like Greg Holmes from Zoom. And you're learning from these incredible people. Class finishes, teams can come back together, talk about this incredible best practice they've just learned, and then immediately put it into practice. And that's where we're seeing these incredible, kind of almost instant impact on performance at real scale. >> So, Mark, in thinking about your investment, you must've been thinking about, okay, how do we scale this thing? You've got an instructor component, you've got this live piece. How are you thinking about that at scale? >> Yeah, there's a lot of different business model options there. And I actually think multiple of them are achievable in the longer term. That's something we've been working with Paul quite a bit, is like, they're all quite compelling. So just trying to think about which two to start with. But I think you've seen a lot of this in education models today. Is a mixture of on-demand with prerecorded. And so I think that will be the starting point. And I think from a scalability standpoint, we were also, we don't always try to do this with our investments, but clearly our LP base or limited partner base was going to be a key ingredient to at least the first cycle of this business. You know, our VC firm's backed by over 250 CRO CMOs heads of customer success, all of which are prospective instructors, prospective content developers, and prospective customers. So that was a little nicety around the scale and investment thesis for this one. >> And what's in it for them? I mean, they get paid. Obviously, you have a stake in the game, but what's in it for the instructors. They get paid on a sort of a per course basis? How does that model work? >> Yeah, we have a development fee for each kind of hour of teaching that gets created So we've mapped out a pretty significant curriculum. And we have about 250 hours of life teaching now already written. We actually think it's going to be about 3000 hours of learning before you get even close to a complete curriculum for every aspect of a revenue organization from revenue operations, to customer success, to marketing, to sales, to leadership, and management. But we have a development fee per class, and we have a teaching fee as well. >> Yeah, so, I mean, I think you guys, it's really an underserved market, and then when you think about it, most organizations, they just don't invest in training. And so, I mean, I would think you'd want to take it, I don't know what the right number is, 5, 10% of your sales budget and actually put it on this and the return would be enormous. How do you guys think about the market size? Like I said before, is it E-learning, is it part of the CRM stack? How do you size this market? >> Well, I think for us it's service to people. A highly skilled sales rep with an email address, a phone and a spreadsheet would do really well, okay? You don't need this world-class tech stack to do well in sales. You need the skills to be able to do the job. But the reverse, that's not true, right? An unskilled person with a world-class tech stack won't do well. And so fundamentally, the skill level of your team is the number one most important thing to get right to be successful in revenue. But as I said before, the product market for it to solve that problem, has been pretty terrible. So we see ourselves 100%. And so if you're looking at like a com, you look at Gong, who we've just signed as a customer, which is fantastic. Gong has a technology that helps salespeople do better through call recording. You have Outreach, who is also a customer. They have technologies that help SDRs be more efficient in outreach. And now you have Sales Impact Academy, and we help with skills development of your team, of the entirety of your revenue function. So we absolutely see ourselves as a key part of that stack. In terms of the TAM, 60 million people in sales are on, according to LinkedIn. You're probably talking 150 million people in go to market to include all of the different roles. 50% of the world's companies are B2B. The TAM is huge. But what blows my mind, and this kind of goes back to this why the global education system has overlooked this because essentially if half the world's companies are B2B, that's probably a proxy for the half of the world's GDP, Half of the world's economic growth is relying on the revenue function of half the world's companies, and they don't really know what they're doing, (laughs) which is absolutely staggering. And if we can solve that in a meaningfully meaningful way at massive scale, then the impact should be absolutely enormous. >> So, Mark, no lack of TAM. I know that you guys at Stage 2, you're also very much focused on the metrics. You have a fundamental philosophy that your product market fit and retention should come before hyper growth. So what were the metrics that enticed you to make this investment? >> Yeah, it's a good question, Dave, 'cause that's where we always look first, which I think is a little different than most early stage investors. There's a big, I guess, meme, triple, triple, double, double that's popular in Silicon Valley these days, which refers to triple your revenue in year one, triple your revenue in year two, double in year three, and four, and five. And that type of a hyper growth is critical, but it's often jumped too quickly in our opinion. That there's a premature victory called on product market fit, which kills a larger percentage of businesses than is necessary. And so with all our investments, we look very heavily first at user engagement, any early indicators of user retention. And the numbers were just off the charts for SIA in terms of the customers, in terms of the NPS scores that they were getting on their sessions, in terms of the completion rate on their courses, in terms of the customers that started with a couple of seats and expanded to more seats once they got a taste of the program. So that's where we look first as a strong foundation to build a scalable business, and it was off the charts positive for SIA. >> So how about the competition? If I Google sales training software, I'll get like dozens of companies. Lessonly, and MindTickle, or Brainshark will come up, that's not really a fit. So how do you think about the competition? How are you different? >> Yeah, well, one thing we try and avoid is any reference to sales training, 'cause that really sort of speaks to this very old kind of fashioned way of doing this. And I actually think that from a pure pedagogy perspective, so from a pure learning design perspective, the old fashioned way of doing sales training was pull a whole team off site, usually in a really terrible hotel with no windows for a day or two. And that's it, that's your learning experience. And that's not how human beings learn, right? So just even if the content was fantastic, the learning experience was so terrible, it was just very kind of ineffective. So we sort of avoid kind of like sales training, The likes of MindTickle, we're actually talking to them at the moment about a partnership there. They're a platform play, and we're certainly building a platform, but we're very much about the live instruction and creating the biggest curriculum and the broadest curriculum on the internet, in the world, basically, for revenue teams. So the competition is kind of interesting 'cause there is not really a direct subscription-based live like learning offering out there. There's some similar ish companies. I honestly think at the moment it's kind of status quo. We're genuinely creating a new category of in-work learning for revenue teams. And so we're in this kind of semi and sort of evangelical sort of phase. So really, status quo is one of the biggest sort of competitors. But if you think about some of those old, old fashioned sort of Miller Heimans, and then perhaps even like Sandlers, there's an analogy perhaps here, which is kind of interesting, which is a little bit like Siebel and Salesforce in the sort of late '90s, where in Siebel you have this kind of old way of doing things. It was a little bit ineffective. It was really expensive. Not accessible to a huge space of the market. And Salesforce came along and said, "Hey, we're going to create this cool thing. It's going to be through the browser, it's going to be accessible to everyone, and it's going to be really, really effective." And so there's some really kind of interesting parallels almost between like Siebel and Salesforce and what we're doing to completely kind of upend the sort of the old fashioned way of delivering sort of sales training, if you like. >> And your target customer profile is, you're selling to teams, right? B2B teams, right? It's not for individuals. Is that correct, Paul? >> Currently. Yeah, yeah. So currently we've got a big foothold in series A to series B. So broadly speaking out, our target market currently is really fast growth technology companies. That's the sector that we're really focusing on. We've got a very good strong foothold in series A series B companies. We've now won some much larger later stage companies. We've actually even won a couple of corporates, I can't say names yet, but names that are very, very, very familiar and we're incredibly excited by them, which could end up being thousand plus seat deals 'cause we do this on a per seat basis. But yeah, very much at the moment it's fast growth tech companies, and we're sort of moving up the chain towards enterprise. >> And how do you deal with the sort of maturity curve, if you will, of your students? You've got some that are brand new, just fresh out of school. You've got others that are more seasoned. What do you do, pop them into different points of the curriculum? How do you handle it? >> Yeah we have, I'll say we have about 30 courses right now. We have about another 15 in development where post this fundraise, we want to be able to get to around about 20 courses that we're developing every quarter and getting out to market. So we're literally, we've sort of identified about 20 to 25 key roles across everything within revenue. That's, let's say revenue ops, customer success, account management, sales, engineering, all these different kinds of roles. And we are literally plotting the sort of skills development for these individuals over multiple, multiple years. And I think what we've never ceases to amaze me is actually the breadth of learning in revenue is absolutely enormous. And what kind of just makes you laugh is, this is all of this knowledge that we're now creating it's what companies just hope that their teams somehow acquire through osmosis, through blogs, through events. And it's just kind of crazy that there is... It's absolutely insane that we don't already exist, basically. >> And if I understand it correctly, just from looking at your website, you've got the entry level package. I think it's up to 15 seats, and then you scale up from there, correct? Is it sort of as a seat-based license model? >> Yeah, it's a seat-based model, as Mark mentioned. In some cases we sell, let's say 20 or $30,000 deal out the gate and that's most of the team. That will be maybe a series A, series B deal, but then we've got these land and expand models that are working tremendously well. We have seven, eight customers in Q1 that have doubled their spend Q2. That's the impact that they're seeing. And our net revenue retention number for Q2 is looking like it's going to be 177% to think exceeds companies like Snowflakes. Well, our underlying retention metrics, because people are seeing this incredible impact on teams and performance, is really, really strong. >> That's a nice metric compare with Snowflake (Paul laughs) It's all right. (Dave and Paul laugh) >> So, Mark, this is a larger investment for Stage 2 You guys have been growing and sort of upping your game. And maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, we're in the middle of Fund II right now. So, Fund I was in 2018. We were doing smaller checks. It was our first time out of the gate. The mission has really taken of, our LP base has really taken off. And so this deal looks a lot like more like our second fund. We'll actually make an announcement in a few weeks now that we've closed that out. But it's a much larger fund and our first investments should be in that 2 to $3 million range. >> Hey, Paul, what are you going to do with the money? What are the use of funds? >> Put it on black, (chuckles) we're going to like- (Dave laughs) >> Saratoga is open. (laughs) (Mark laughs) >> We're going to, look, the curriculum development for us is absolutely everything, but we're also going to be investing in building our own technology platform as well. And there are some other really important aspects to the kind of overall offering. We're looking at building an assessment tool so we can actually kind of like start to assess skills across teams. We certify every course has an exam, so we want to get more robust around the certification as well, because we're hoping that our certification becomes the global standard in understanding for the first time in the industry what individual competencies and skills people have, which will be huge. So we have a broad range of things that we want to start initiating now. But I just wanted to quickly say Stage 2 has been nothing short of incredible in every kind of which way. Of course, this investment, the fit is kind of insane, but the LPs have been extraordinary in helping. We've got a huge number of them are now customers very quickly. Mark and the team are helping enormously on our own kind of like go to market and metrics. I've been doing this for 20 years. I've raised over 100 million myself in venture capital. I've never known a venture capital firm with such value add like ever, or even heard of other people getting the kind of value add that we're getting. So I just wanted to a quick shout out for Stage 2. >> Quite a testimony of you guys. Definitely Stage 2 punches above its weight. Guys, we'll leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on. Good luck and we'll be watching. Appreciate your time. >> Thanks, Dave. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, thank you everybody for watching this Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante, and we'll see you next time.

>>Yeah, >>from The Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's the Cube covering IBM. Think brought to you by IBM. >>Everybody welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the IBM think 2020 digital event experience. My name is Dave Volante. Manish Gupta is here. He's the global managing director for chemicals, petroleum and industrial products that IBM Manish. Thanks so much for coming on The Cube. How you doing out there in Saratoga, California? All good. >>I'm doing great. I'm doing great, given, considering everything. The role of all of this. >>I mean, right, it's tough times, but look it, We can still, you know, have a smile every now and then, right? I mean, you know, it's very nice for a lot of people in our hearts. Go out. Everybody there. So I I want to start off one of the areas that you're steeped in is the energy sector. You know, generally, people are very much concerned about oil. Price of oil drop below, you know, zero went negative. People have been paying people take oil and understand that was a technical, but still the prices of depressed >>I >>learned about credit risk and the like. But what's your take on what's going on in the energy sector right now? >>Yes. So I think the companies that, uh, that have taken on a lot of debt and don't have a stable operating conditions will naturally suffer through this in the oil industry. Clearly, until the prices come back with will be as demand picks up, that would be several months to more than that. As we can imagine, we'll see the The more stable companies, the more I'll say companies that have ah longer balance sheets survived for sure. In addition, you know, the the other aspect of it is of course, they're all double down on making sure your companies and your free services companies or double down on productivity conserving cash as well as considering how they accelerate. In my view, there transition are more more profitable areas of growth as demand comes back, >>is there? Is there a silver lining here? I mean, in normal times, you know, of the oil price drops and the like, a tax cut. Um, I know the government. The United States government, anyway, has been beefing up its strategic reserves that has a history of buying low Is there any good that you see coming out of this? So >>So I think the good that'll come out is is surely that the stronger companies will come through more successfully. The company that have taken less risk, the companies that have that have invested in more more stable operating platforms and and at the end of the day, I think, the companies that have taken a more future proof strategy for their business portfolio. So whether you take a B B, for example or a shell, they're actively working the words deporting the energy transition. I think that will be the You'll see an acceleration of companies starting the thinker off where they need to go in the future. You support the energy transition. I think the silver lining of the end of the day will be, Ah, that as is, sometimes you just said oil is very precious. Resource, therefore, should not be burned. And and so the question at hand is, you know, what do you do with with all the oil that's available? What do you build out of it? Whether it's petrochemicals, I think that transition to more future proof product portfolio on business model will be will be truly the silver lining. >>How about the broader industrial companies that you follow? I mean, they were sort of moving down a path of digital transformation. I o t obviously is the big theme within many industrial sectors. What are you seeing in the broader? >>So I think in the broader base clearly, you know, supply chains and the spread of barely, you know, demand demand dropping prior demand signals which were sometimes ignored for historical reporting. Ah, that that is now becoming more important. I your sense and response by then. So as you step back and look that that they need to maintain business continuity is, of course, the highest priority. But as they come out off this, we expect that we're thinking of this is as the future for industrial sector will be. What we would call is hybrid. I you know, supply chains will need to be local and global manufacturing will need to be both traditional. A swell is additive. I you know, you you produce more, more locally and in addition of products and services will need to be a combination of digital and and physical. And at the end of the day if you step back. I saw something recently that said, Ah, you know who's leading the digital transformation in your company Now the multiple choices were the CEO, the CDO CIO, or is it? And this option was circled over 19. If you think of it in simple terms, covered, 19 is creating the acceleration of digital transformation because the only valid response in in my mind as you look at these ah as these different hybrid models is a consideration of technology being being a fulcrum off, getting a future proof of black mom. >>So it would seem to me that the financial framework are going to change. The The notion of how you made money for the last 10 years is not going to be the way you make money going forward. Yeah, there's there's likely to be some share shifts. In other words, those that figure out how to be profitable with this sort of new model perhaps could gain share efficiently. And and maybe you're going to see some share shifts in the industrial zone. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yes. So companies that are in what we would call essential of vertical industries will definitely be the ones that they continue to grow. You take a simple example, or for spectral chemicals companies, companies that make make plastics as well as chemical, they're going to a variety of other applications. Plastics. Interestingly enough, it's now a resurgence, and the reason it's resurgent is it's really it's a boarding, you know, hygiene, packaging, medical packaging, etcetera, etcetera. We'll see industries that shift that way if we step back and look at a broader and broader ah study that was done actually about 10 years ago by Harvard. With that, the companies that survive a recession, I think it said about 9% of the company's actually flourish coming out of a recession, about 75% take three years to recover and on the remainder was. I think if you do the math about 17 18% Ah, do not survive. But to do such a recession now, the ones that drive through >>I >>had a dual focus on both the customer experience and customer engagement and shifting to areas of higher value by thinking of what they should be doing and how they should be doing doing those things and Secondly, they also focused a lot on on operational improvements. And whether that's obliging, that's manufacturing. It's whether it's outsourcing non core functions. Automating that's a problem that you're focused on customer on operations is the hallmark of a successful outcome. Was what the study studied determined putting that that that your focus is what will be the the prime hallmark as we come through this >>interesting it Now, of course, biology sort of got us into this problem in technology. Deal with some of these issues on Help us get out of this problem. And what specifically is IBM doing? >>Yes, So we've We've identified seven areas off focus as we think of off coming out of this crisis, and we have referred to those 78 years of off focus as being our emerge. Stronger areas of focus the ones that I think are relevant, are including new ways of working. Ah, cyber resilience. Thinking of extreme motivation, automation. An intelligent work flows thinking off, making sure that we are eating our clients with having more in a more system that are available on demand, helping them create platforms and applications that can work regardless of the location At the end of the day, we step back for a brief three areas of focus that we see will be new. It new ways of working and supporting work. They're working or remote working. Ah, extreme automation. When industrial companies come back to work safe, distancing, he's going to be the norm as well as allowing for but the fact that you want to be you want to be prepared for the next crisis. Therefore, extreme automation, whether that implementing robots and factories or or implementing solutions that guide you in the worker safety or workers being close together as well as supporting customer engagement or the customer experience is being done. Putting that extreme automation layer through so that so that the reliance and the ability to cooperate with out the workforce becomes more important. I think it's really the acceleration that we expect. We'll be able to support our clients with, uh, as as they come out of there soon, as they as they had after the next normal. >>You see software robots as being a part of that sort of automation friends, you know, r p A and the like >>for sure that that's an important part, especially in the back office functions that will be software robots and, I think, layered on top of that when you buy AI. Then you have AI augmenting a lot of professionals, whether it's chat bots in customer call centers or technical service centers or or it far greater increasing in automation processes that could be automated. But then the AI would would support for the rest that can't be simply automated but need intelligence support as well. >>So if I go back to your CEO of a Harvard study, last thing I want to be I'm on the board just feels, is in your 17%. I either want to be in the 90% if I'm well positioned right now, and maybe you have an opportunity to do so. But if not, I'm in that fat middle. And I really wanna be ableto come out of this stronger, even if it may might take a couple of years. So my question is, it seems like companies, they're gonna have to, at least in the near term, potentially sacrifice profitability in order to gain that business continuance, business resiliency that you talked about. Can they can They have their cake and eat it, too. In other words, can they maybe take a near term hit on profitability? But they ultimately become more successful and more profitable? Maybe using data >>the data would be one thing. I think the other part of this will will using data, for example, to predict demand forecast where where the puck is going and the use of data on on a monthly basis is going to be inadequate. Clearly right. Getting more more capability for real time demand sensing to create platforms that allow us to allow companies to understand where needs are emerging so that they can pivot there. Ah, their product portfolio accordingly, Collaborating with customers in in a far more I'll call it CO create crowd source way Ah would create more resilient customer relationship that come out in the future as well. And at the end, I think they'll be also an element around asset like strategies, which requires partnering with IBM suppliers etcetera, which then allow data to be the foundation where you can essentially say I'm using this much of this capability our forces, I'm investing in insignificant of capital a place. >>So when I talk to executives. I'm hearing the consistent themes We very much are concerned about the health and well of our of our employees getting remote home infrastructure going once we ensure that they're healthy, we want to make sure that they're productive getting staying close to customers for sure. Making Short Foster are in line because there's so much uncertainty. But not a lot of time right now is being spent on sort of the long term strategic aspect of the organization that maybe will come back slowly. So what advice are you giving the organizations right now in this situation? >>Yeah. So I think the biggest focus would be, as I think, Winston Churchill said, this never based a good crisis. Eso So considering considering that as being the backdrop Ah, these are the times when, when recognizing what would be the sources of value, like I said before making sure the dual focus is kept in mind, apart from of course, ah, employee health and safety and engagement. Ah, then then, in addition to that, keeping in mind that the localization off supply chains will need to be a big topic keeping your ah, as they say, powder dry for but the opportunity of buyer and march. I would also be an element start considering how you re configure your supply chain. And at the end of the day, another important element would be making sure that you are Ah, you. As you come out of this, don't lose sight off sustainable development. No as well as you go back to the things off the fact that since digital will be an important fulcrum come out the other end apart from the other elements we talked about that you start prioritized those digital transformation programs that focus on both operations and supply chain as well as customer engagement. And that becomes a key focus and no longer just driven by, Let's say, the straight business case, but also persisting and ending. The resilience will come out and deal with people prices as well. >>So many of those things that you just mentioned might have been culturally challenging for a lot of organizations prior to over it. But in a way, organization's going to get covert Mulligan or the CEO. You know, the boards of directors might have felt like okay, we had to make some changes, but we got to be careful now with Covic being such a disruptor. Uh huh. Organizations been really drive forward and set up for the next decade. Bring us home. What do your final thought? >>Yeah, I think boards and see years have Do you have to really think of this in stages and and start to Of course, the initially the start of this crisis was not not planned, but recognizing that this recovery will appear in stages, so we think of it is respond, which is where most companies are the next day being ah you know, being being recover, which is getting started back up or dealing with demand and so on. And the third stage being green went I think boards and see years need to start putting perhaps three work streams in place around these three different time horizons. And keep that they're planning in place so that they can effectively work to recovery while they have a separate stream. That's focusing on the reinvent, but they're more resilient and more prepared, and they are able to take and take advantage of both the opportunities as well as of getting more resilient company for the future, >>great insight and an awesome advice. Thanks so much for coming on The Cube. Really appreciate your time. >>Appreciate it. Thank you for the opportunity. >>You're very welcome. And thank you for watching everybody. We're seeing the pattern emerged where? We're not just gonna go back the last decade. We're really gonna have toe prepare for the next decade. Business resiliency and business continuance and flexibility. It's a whole new world, folks. This is the Cube covering IBM. Think 2020 the digital event. We'll be right back right after this short break. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.