(exciting music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're having a CUBE conversations at our Palo Alto studio, taking advantage of a little break in the conference season to catch up with some people, and a little bit of a quieter time's kind of nice. We're really excited to have our next guest. first time on theCUBE. He's Bob Glotfelty. He's the head of Supplier Success at Taulia. Bob, welcome. >> Thank you for having me. >> Absolutely. So for people that aren't familiar with Taulia give us a little information on what's Taulia all about. >> Yeah, so we're a financial supply chain company. And we help businesses get paid early when they need cash. So if you do business with a large buyer, you can use Taulia to receive money early, earlier than your normal net payment. >> So, cash flow is always important especially >> in small businesses. >> Bob: Always >> So why Taulia? What's different than if I just did factoring or went to my local bank or whatever? How do you guys fit and what's kind of your value of that service there? >> Yeah. So we work with really large brands common household names, Home Depot, Coca-Cola, John Deere, brands like that. And we allow them to offer early payment financing to their entire supply chain. So these big multinational companies, they have tens of thousands of suppliers, all of them looking for the ability to get cash when they need it. And for us it's just a click of a button away and you can get paid and get any sort of cash flow you need right then and there. >> Right. So you're obviously kind of a network >> Bob: We are. >> You're in between parties and generally it's a one way direction in terms of who's the supplier and who the buyer is for a particular transaction. So how do you go to market? You mentioned a bunch of big names, I assume there's a bunch of big name suppliers but also small suppliers. You're in charge of those suppliers' success. So how do you go to market? It's always the classic kind of network problem, chicken and egg problem, right? You need the customers to make the network work, but you can't get the network working until you have people on both sides. So how do you guys kind of solve that puzzle going to market? >> Yeah, so today we have over two million businesses >> Jeff: Two million >> Two million >> Jeff: I guess you solved the chicken and egg problem. >> We solved the chicken and egg. We see pretty good network effects at this point but the way we go to market is to first sell the very large brands. And they bring their supply chain onto our network where they can do invoicing and see the status of their invoices and payments, deliver purchase orders, any sort of financial transaction between the parties. But the real nugget of value is the ability to get paid early. So yeah, we have about 130 billion dollar plus companies that act as the payer for that early payment and their supply chains are pretty sizeable so that's how they get that number up to two million. >> And then you guys just take a little piece of the transaction I imagine. >> In some cases, yes. In other cases we do it for a subscription, but primarily yes. >> Okay. So it's interesting we've been having a lot of conversations about engagement and kind of lifetime value of the customer versus transactional. Obviously, a payment is a very transactional thing. How do you guys think of the world not purely in terms of transactional and try to get more of a deeper relationship with the customers? >> Yeah, so I think the piece there that you really want to think about first is who is our customer? It's really obvious that these big global brands are a customer of ours. They pay us. And we're taking a fee on that transaction. That makes sense. But a real shift that we did about two years ago was to really view the supplier as the customer in the equation and making their experience absolutely the best it can be and that shift has brought implications in terms of how we've gone to market and how we've serviced these companies. Some of them are huge. We have billion dollar plus companies that are receiving payments from other billion dollar companies. And then we have the flower shop down the road and they do four invoices a year and it's this full market from the biggest companies in the world to the smallest. All looking for cashflow on their own terms. And it's a pretty effective solution for everybody in that chain. >> So it's pretty easy to identify fortune 50, fortune 100, send a sales person out there and get it done. It's a completely different animal toward kind of the broad side of that supply chain network so how do you service them? How do you stay engaged with them? A lot of them, I'm sure, cannot support a direct sales effort. It's just too expensive for the transactional volume or the dollars going through the system. So how are you approaching them and as to your title, helping them be successful? >> Yeah, so you're absolutely right. If you have a small mom and pop shop they might have the highest need, but you can't afford to have a sales person call them and say, "Hey we have this great opportunity for you." So for them it has to be extremely low touch but really effective, really easy, really simple. And so for them they receive an email from us, log in, takes about 35 seconds and once they're in, they can see their invoices, take an early payment. We take all of the effort away for them. And it's so easy to do because we've worked with these large companies before that to get them live and pull all these invoices, all this information into our system and just make it really easy and self service. For the larger companies, we have one pair of buyer and supplier that transact over a billion dollars on our network and for them it's very high touch because, as you can imagine, that level of transaction.. You can have a lot of sales people calling. >> Right. So I got a lot of questions running through my head. But I'm curious, just on this billion dollar to billion dollar connection, again, what value do you add that two billion dollar entities couldn't just work out between themselves? >> So it's an interesting dynamic, right? So if you're billion dollar company A, and you're working with your customer, you want to get paid as soon as possible. You want your money on day one. I provide the service, pay me. A billion dollars over the course of a year, right? That's a lot of money >> Greg: That's real money. >> If you're the payer, well, what if I could just hold my billion dollars a little bit longer.. I get interest on that, I can invest that elsewhere, so there's working capital in play for both sides. And so there's this dynamic where both people want the money. One wants it now and one wants to pay it later. And we're the intermediary that makes that transaction seamless. >> Right. And it's interesting, we talked a little bit before we turned that cameras on is that you guys can add a lot more granularity in the transactional options that aren't traditionally offered beyond one or two or three kind of three percent, 15, net 30. You guys can kind of break that down to almost create a marketplace of what's the right number on a much larger continuum than just those two options. >> Yeah, so that concept is referred to as dynamic discounting. And it's different than a traditional early payment term in that, you know, you said three percent, 15, net 30, it's pretty expensive, but okay. On day 20, the invoice gets approved and you're not going to get paid til day 30. Well in that traditional term, you just wait. And on day 30 you make that payment at zero. But both parties could benefit if, on day 20, it could be a two percent discount or on day 25 a one percent discount so we use a sliding scale to say, this is the daily rate so if you get paid late or even before that day 15, the rate adjusts and both parties are happy with that outcome. >> Interesting. So you're here as part of Marketo covereage. So how do you use Marketo? How have you been using it? I think you said this kind of supplier side initiative.. Smaller supplier side has been a couple years old, has this been a part of that effort? And give it a little color on what Marketo let's you do that you couldn't do before. >> Yeah, so personally a big fan of Marketo. I've been using Marketo now for a little over three years. And I used it on our marketing team when we were selling the big buyer customers, right? We've probably used Marketo now for I think five or six years and yeah we love it. So the big transformation that we did about two years ago was this sort of strategic shift from looking at just these buyers, these payers as our customers, and really looking at the suppliers. The ones receiving money. And we implemented Marketo strictly for them as a sort of a second step, we have two instances of Marketo and it's to engage our users at pretty much every touch point along the life cycle between first hearing about who they are all the way to taking early payments, submitting invoices, and doing all of these various aspects on our network. >> And what are some of those kind of engagement touch points that you do outside the core transaction and how are you measuring success on engagement specifically? >> Yeah, I think we probably touch everything in terms of our marketing stack and what we do. As long as it's something that's targeted. So for us, advertising, doing pay per click advertising it doesn't really help us. We know who the user is, we know who their company is, and we want to target them, so it's more of an account based marketing at scale and we're trying to sort of touch them in any of those tools. So heavy on email, direct mail, retargeting, things of that nature. Some industries, we even use fax. So whatever touch points we can get into a business where we can target that individual or that company, we use. How do we measure success? It's a variety of things, it's engagement. How frequently is somebody logging in? How often are they logging in? How much are they doing on the network? Are they submitting invoices through us? Are support calls going down? But then, ultimately, the big piece of value is do they choose to take an early payment and are they boosting their own cash balance through us? >> I would imagine you're way focused on getting many more transactions through the machine once you have a customer, you know, kind of that point to point relationship set up between two entities. Huge opportunity to do more, kind of, spread their wings within the network and run more transactions through. >> Yeah, and so every time we bring on a new buyer or a new payer, a new billion dollar entity that's making payments, we want to engage them and get them into that dynamic of saying, hey, I'm getting early payment with one and yeah maybe my terms are different or there's different relationships going on, but we're always trying to build the network, build engagement, build their recognition of us, so they think, hey I have a capital project coming up and it's really expensive. I should just take an early payment. That's right there. There's no paperwork, it's not debt just click the button, there's the money. And we want to be top of mind for them at any time, and it's necessary 'cause with two million suppliers, you don't necessarily know when they're going to have a need and the way we've solved that is through engagement. >> Right. So as you look forward, I can't believe were almost to August I usually say, "What's your plan for 2017?" but we're kind of past most of 2017. But as you look forward, kind of, what are your priorities as you guys move forward? You said you've been at this latest initiative for a couple years, what are you looking forward to down the road, what are some hurdles that you want to overcome, and what are some successes that you are kind of striving towards? >> Yeah, so if I look at our team that does this today, two years ago it was zero. Today it's about 20. And we're a company of about 250. So we've gone from essentially minimal focus on this to about 10 percent of the company. And for a software company, that's quite significant and that's just folks that are 100 percent dedicated to the experience and the education of our suppliers. We have an entire support team and all these other teams that interact, but a customer success focus of 20 is pretty good growth so I think when I look out a lot of it will be continuing to expand on what we've done. I think we've only begun to touch on the surface of the need that these suppliers have and we haven't done enough touch points with all of them, both big and small And we're continuing to see the hockey stick go straight up. So it's continuing to add fuel onto the fire of these existing initiatives that we've been doing. >> That's great and you talked, again, a little bit before we turned the cameras on about, you know, this has really significant impact and can make or break a company and you obviously feel that. >> Yeah, so I've spoken with many companies that just couldn't be happier to have a finance instrument right there for them whenever they need it. And I've spoken with some that say that, you know, hey we were close to going out of business we expanded too quickly or we didn't quite understand how long it was going to take to get paid and you get in these liquidity crunches, and if you're a small business or a relatively young business, the banks won't finance you. And so we've had some that they're in business today because they're able to leverage that opportunity, and it's not just those that are looking to save their business, it's a lot that are looking to grow. Right, they're saying-- >> Greg: Growth can kill you right? It's like the joke, you have some little product and you know, guess what? You just got a PO from Walmart. Guess what? You just got a PO from Walmart. >> Exactly >> And you've suddenly got a really big debt 'cause you got to put a lot of bits and parts together to get that shipment out to fill all the stores, so growth is as bad, if not a worse problem on the cash flow side, than not growing. >> Yeah, and so we fill that gap. And for many small businesses, we're the best option out there both in terms of price, but hands down the easiest, so it's a pretty effective thing and you talk to these businesses and you hear how happy they are to be so much more successful while using Taulia you can't help but be really happy for them. >> Alright, well, Bob thanks for stopping by >> Yeah of course. >> And sharing the story of Taulia, and for businesses out there that need cash, Go to Taulia. T A U L I A. Not quite like it sounds so thanks again for stopping by, and really enjoyed the conversation. >> Thank you. Happy to be here. >> Alright he's Bob Glotfelty from Taulia I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We'll see you next time, thanks for watching. (exciting music)