Chris Strom:
Hey everyone, we're back with a new episode of The RevOps Hero Podcast. And for today's episode, my guest is Emily Critchfield. She's the VP of RevOps at Superhuman. And this is a really interesting company with a really interesting story and with a whole lot of somewhat unique revenue operations, challenges and goals and changes as a part of that, so I'm super excited to get into this episode with Emily here. Emily, thanks for joining us here. And to start off with, I'd love to hear a bit about your background and experience in RevOps in general and how you came to join Superhuman.
Emily Critchfield:
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Story on me is I've been a strategy and ops junkie, I think supporting various revenue organizations through hypergrowth at many different companies. So before I joined Superhuman about a little less than six months ago, I was most recently at Samsara doing a very similar role, also led through the IPO, which was a really fun experience. And prior to Samsara, I was at Zendesk through the early hypergrowth years also, and also had a variety of strategy and ops roles at VM. Consider it a few decades of experience, let's say. And yeah, six months ago, a couple of old colleagues that I've worked for or worked with at Zendesk and VMware reached out to me and said, "Hey, we are ..." At the time it was Grammarly and there was a really exciting opportunity ahead. First lesson for me is never underestimate the power of your network. These are some folks that I worked with maybe 15 plus years ago that thought of me and I'm super grateful to be on board now.
Chris Strom:
Oh, nice. 15 years later.
Emily Critchfield:
Back working with the same folks. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So maintaining active networks I think has been a really powerful theme in my career and one of the reasons why I joined Superhuman.
Chris Strom:
Oh yeah, that's awesome. And then for Superhuman itself, it's a super interesting story. I've had connections with them going back to 2017, 2018 or so, but back then it was a totally different company. It was originally a standalone company called Coda, which is an all in-one kind of document manager/low-code, no-code app builder, really. And their original pitch was combining a document and a table into one single document. And that was something I was really struggling with. I saw them on Product Hunt back in the day, signed up for the beta and eventually started.
We migrated all of our internal operations at ClearPivot over in Dakota. And we've been running our company on a combination of Coda and HubSpot. Coda, HubSpot and QuickBooks ever since then. So that was all the company Coda. And then I think about a year ago or so, it was a really interesting move. Shishir, the CEO, said he had gotten introduced to the CEO of Grammarly and they started talking and they decided they wanted to basically merge together.
And I know on paper it was actually eventually Grammarly that bought Coda, at least on paper. But then as part of it, Shishir, the Coda CEO also at the same time took over as CEO of the new combined company. I thought that was really interesting. And then shortly after that, they went out and bought the Superhuman mail product as an additional company. And so now these three companies were all one. And then just six weeks prior to us recording this episode, they renamed the whole company into Superhuman. To the best of my knowledge, that's the very unique backstory on this company and where it is today.
Emily Critchfield:
That's exactly right. And super excited to hear you were a Coda early adopter, super user. That's really exciting. I actually came at the company through the Grammarly side when, like I said, my network reached out to me. I was talking about it with my husband and I was like, "What's Grammarly?" And my children who are of elementary school age were actually the ones that were like, "Mom, you don't know what Grammarly is?" And so once I started diving into it, realized just how big of a brand it is, how beloved it is, 40 million users worldwide and just this product that for a certain generation of people, they've been using it since they were in school.
So even now, my children in school, all of their teachers use Grammarly and teach using Grammarly. So it's a super interesting brand, and that's how I came about. And then it's exactly like you said, you have a great memory. I think it was December of last year. They announced the Coda acquisition. Shishir took over as CEO. And then it was really in June when I first joined when they announced the Superhuman Mail acquisition as well. And so I got my hands on Superhuman email and there's nothing like the feeling of Inbox Zero. So Superhuman Mail has been a super interesting part of our story, but also personally something that I've adopted that's really changed how I think about productivity and communications. That's really been a game changer for me both personally as well as an executive and all of that in the last six months. So now, we are Superhuman, which I'm really excited about.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. And I see you're rocking the Superhuman swag there with the. I think they're calling it the Hero. Is that the name of the person in the logo?
Emily Critchfield:
Yeah, I think so. And the tagline being that we want to make all people into Superhumans. We're really excited about the rebrand. And it was a ton of work, a real team effort, and a really splashy rebrand that I got to be a part of in my very first few weeks here at the company, so it's been fun.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. Yeah, that's quite a thing to come into. From here, let's talk about what this looks like specifically from a revenue operations perspective, taking three pretty different companies and starting to bring them together into a single team, a single brand, and everything that goes into that. I'd love to hear how you're going about the operations of all that.
Emily Critchfield:
Yeah. I'll talk a little bit about how the organization is integrating and ingesting as we've gone through these acquisitions, and then I can also talk a little bit about the RevOps team structure overall. So really with these acquisitions, for me, it always starts with people, obviously. Really getting to know who the players are and how the various RevOps resources and teams are structured across these different companies so that we can really start to lay out processes and policies and really start to scrutinize where we're aligned or where we have differences. That was priority one for me.
When I got here, a lot of the Coda integration had already been assessed and was in motion, was in execution mode. And so a lot of the past few weeks and months for me has really been understanding what the sales motions are. So not only understanding all of really the lead through close on opportunity, what the stages of the sales process looks like, but also really understanding process as well, things like forecasting or how account books are assigned.
And then from there, in addition to just understanding who the players and the basic sales processes or go to-market processes are, it's really then defining what are our goals. For the remainder of this fiscal year, of which we're now in Q4, we're really focused on a co-sell motion. So one of the things that we stood up between ourselves and the Coda team is while we weren't going to integrate everybody into, for example, one account with one account owner, we really wanted to remove some of the friction by which sellers could introduce their, for example, if you're a legacy Grammarly seller and you want to introduce the idea of Coda to your customer, how do we incentivize and remove friction from our various reps in order to give them the freedom to introduce one another? So that's really been our focus in this first phase of, let's say, co-selling as part of the integration.
And then going into next fiscal year, we intend to have more of that integration complete where we have single account owners that are thoughtfully assigned based on where the customer has come to us from, whether it be Grammarly, Coda or Superhuman and where we think the opportunities are so that we're setting up our accounts for single ownership, but really strategically and so that it's really clear what roles and responsibilities are, but yet they still have the ability to get help from various ... These are other technical resources on product specific help or assistance they need in a deal cycle. So those are the topics that we're thinking through as we're setting up sort of account ownership and team structure for first Superhuman going forward in our next fiscal year.
Yeah. So it's been a lot of lessons learned so far. I think really understanding what the objectives are in terms of what do we want to achieve together in terms of a go to-market motion? Is it sell separately, co-sell or fully integrated? Really understanding where you are and defining those milestones and defining the KPIs as such has been a game changer for us.
Chris Strom:
So at the moment, currently the sales team, there's still the Grammarly sales team and the Coda sales team, and then next year you're going to merge the sales teams. And you mentioned then how will you go about assigning accounts to different teams or managed territories at that time?
Emily Critchfield:
Yeah, it's a really good question. A very small percentage of our accounts truly overlapped in terms of active instances of multiple products. And so it's really, like I said, an assessment of what the opportunity is or what the play is. So it's going to really match what our go to-market strategy is for next year. And so while there probably will be some accounts that are assigned sort of legacy which rep was already engaged in the account, we do want to think about our customer experience. It's also then going to think we're going to think about our go to-market motions and strategy overall as we think about becoming a multi-product company in the future and really developing our motion around selling an agent platform, that's how we think about setting up our go to-market overall for next year and is going to really help us to align on how we want to assign accounts out across our AEs.
But going into next year, the AE structure will be much more, I think, singular and integrated with more maybe pre and post-sales help or specialists to help customers, not only throughout the sales process, but then really on the post-sale, the adoption, the onboarding, the implementation of the solutions that we want to offer next year. So we're definitely going to have product-specific subject matter expertise that I think we're also going to introduce to really encourage adoption for our customers.
Chris Strom:
Would that be a solutions engineer type of role?
Emily Critchfield:
Yeah, there will be various. We have pre-sales ones that are more SEs for sure. But then even on the post-sales side, we have onboarding and implementation resources and other resources that are helping our customers to really not only get set up, but then also encourage adoption, utilization and retention throughout the customer lifecycle. So that's something that we're thinking deeply about now as we set up our next fiscal year.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. And how to staff it and how much to staff it and also the different support levels needed. I would guess the Coda product suite will probably take the most significant amount of solution engineering just because you can do so much with it.
Emily Critchfield:
Yeah, that is really true. It's something that is so flexible and can do so many different things. And so, one of the things that we've already come out with is more targeted solution bundles, I would say. So the first one that we launched just recently is called our MarketingHQ, and it's really a bundled product between our legacy Grammarly product as well as Coda and really helps CMOs and marketing organizations with brand compliance, faster time to launch campaigns and really organizing resources, content, messaging, all those sorts of things to get campaigns out the door more efficiently. And that's just one of, I think, many more solution specific bundles that we'll want to sell as we evolve into a multi-product company. And therefore, you're absolutely right, we will be organizing the right resources and technical help to help our customers be able to have more out-of-the-box solutions, but then also be able to properly implement, adopt, and utilize our solutions after they purchase. So that's, again, one of the things that we're really excited about and really eager to delight our customers as we continue in the next fiscal year.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. I've been talking with some of the people because we're new to Superhuman partners ourselves too. So we've been talking about the current MarketingHQ bundle and messaging and it's probably a little bit more like product marketing versus RevOps, but I think it will be really helpful in terms of creating a unified narrative between two different products that on the surface might appear quite different.
Emily Critchfield:
Yeah, that's right. And we're also starting to adopt these solutions ourselves and really experimenting with how we can use these to solve really department level functional level problems on how people work, how they use data and how they collaborate as well.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. Yeah. And along those lines too, something we were talking a little bit about just before recording this was what learnings about different ideal customer profiles between different types of products and what's your learning there. Love to hear more about that too.
Emily Critchfield:
Yeah, that's really been something that we're thinking deeply about as we set up our go to-market strategy for next year. Historically, these three products have had maybe somewhat varied buyers. Grammarly, we see adoption across different functions across an organization. A lot of organizations even go I-wide or org-wide on adoption, especially in places like education, higher ed, colleges, universities, and institutions. They're adopting it for and making it available for all their students, for example.
Coda specifically has had more of an engineering or product background in terms of the ICP. It's been the most, I think, frequent motion or play that our Coda sales teams have run. Although it tends to be a land and expand as well, we certainly see going viral in an organization and then all of a sudden even some big institutions or big organizations are interested in adopting it with a much bigger footprint outside of just a product or an engineering org.
Whereas Superhuman is really interesting, it's actually been executives at companies that have tried the product and love it. Because if you think about it, it's really powerful for executives or C-level folks to use to get through their inbox, to stay on top of what next steps or actions might be, to set up calendar things. So it's been a lot of C-level or generally executives that we've seen adopting Superhuman. Superhuman Mail, as well as their EAs as well to stay on top of tasks, activities, follow-ups, meetings, et cetera. That's been really interesting and, again, a super powerful product.
One thing that I love in it is the ability to sidebar internally on an email thread so that you don't have to take things out of your email and go back into whatever your instant messenger is of choice or messaging app is of choice. It's really powerful to be able to share and collaborate on a response directly in the app and be able to then reply directly and be able to see it and track it all. So another reason why I've just personally really been excited about this as a product and can really understand why executives, those people that have to get through really dense emails, but have a lot to do every day love it and adopt it so much.
Chris Strom:
Speaking of selling different products, I would imagine even the pricing and quoting and follow-up billing for these different products that historically previously had totally separate quoting and billing systems is probably going to be a big task too.
Emily Critchfield:
Yeah, that's exactly right. Really thinking about how we bundle and how we price the value and how we sell and position it against other products and solutions across the market is definitely something that we are still formulating as we create these HQ solutions or as we're thinking about how we sell, how we evolve into more of an AI operating system or agent network, how we price there. There's a lot of intel and signals that we're picking up on the market, and that's really guiding us on how we're going to bundle and price our products as well across these three historically disparate solutions.
Chris Strom:
In terms of intel and signals, like things that people are telling you directly, or things as you're watching the market and watching how other people are doing their pricing?
Emily Critchfield:
Definitely both. Doing a lot of market research as well as thinking about not only who we're selling to, what kind of budgets we're selling into, how to price and package, how we want our ICPs or the personas that we're selling into to think about our solution, and therefore how we should price it to most easily match the value that these personas are getting out of, not just Grammarly, Coda and Superhuman Mail, but really the solutions that we're packaging on top of it. We want to be able to price in the way that demonstrates the value and then also aligns to the personas that we're selling into as well as their budgets.
Chris Strom:
So that's just for three different acquired products so far, but you're also looking ahead too, right? Do you want to talk about how you're thinking about templatizing it for additional expansions in the future?
Emily Critchfield:
Yeah. So as a RevOps leader, I absolutely anticipate that we will continue to look at and possibly acquire other companies as well. So as a RevOps leader, it's super important that I think about how we get more efficient, not only just for internal RevOps, the operational burden of integrating various systems and making sure that our sales teams are able to access the information they need to be able to do their jobs, but really thinking about how we can unlock value from our acquisitions faster. That's something that I'm learning more and more about.
One of the things that I'm really pushing my team to setup is having more of a template or having more of a playbook that we use every time we do an integration or really any other product launch or pricing and packaging change so that we have more of a starting point, more of a set of questions or a checklist, or like I said, a template that makes this process just that much more repeatable, let's say, so that each time we do a change or a transformation like this, the lift gets a little bit easier. And so I think we already have gathered lots of lessons learned that we're turning into more of a playbook approach on these so that, like I said, it's not really just about getting more efficient, but also unlocking value of that acquisition faster.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. And probably a lot of it starts with being extra intentional about documenting what you do, even for things like you just merging the records together. Don't just do it and then move on, but do it and then write down how you did it and/or what you would do differently next time. I'd imagine that's probably where it starts.
Emily Critchfield:
That's right. And lots of retros, lookbacks on lessons learned and how we improve and making it more repeatable where we can.
Chris Strom:
So you're being intentional about planning out time to get together just for doing retrospectives and talking it through.
Emily Critchfield:
Yeah. And it's really not only a RevOps effort, but rather with all of our cross-functional partners that are involved as well. Something like this takes a lot of cross-team collaboration. So I think it's really important that teams come together and align on not just lessons learned, but again, just what are the decisions, what are the milestones that we should just align and plan for every subsequent time to make this lower lift for everybody so that you're not going from zero to one every single time you do an acquisition. So we're preparing for the next one, don't know when it's going to happen, but we'll be ready for it.
Chris Strom:
Yeah. I know we've probably all worked with teams where it feels like it's just constant firefighting mode and it's just going from one emergency to the next. I think that's probably a lot of the value of intentionally blocking out retro times and look back times together so that you're not always reinventing the wheel and going through a mini crisis every single time you're doing a new initiative.
Emily Critchfield:
Yeah. It's really important not to distract sellers. That's one of my key principles as a RevOps leader. So the attention is to make this as seamless as possible and really thinking ahead proactively about how you define process policy, not just systems, around what you want your sellers to do when you're in the middle of an acquisition, when you're going through integration, and ultimately when you want teams to execute.
So thinking really proactively about the various scenarios of where they may run into each other or how a new customer may come in, how do we define what we want the customer experience to be? We really think very closely about what are these scenarios and what do we want the customer experience to be. And then internally, we then document what are our processes and policies really of how we define what we expect our sellers to do. So rules of engagements, that sort of thing, all the way through how they're going to get comped, right? What are the incentives that incentivize the behavior or the processes we want them to follow?
Chris Strom:
Yeah, in that way, they're just looking to hit and exceed their quota and they don't want to get bogged down with, "Oh, I forget how to do this," or, "Oh, we changed that last week."
Emily Critchfield:
That's exactly right. All of that just leads to distraction. So you really want to minimize that and you want to keep it as simple as possible. So that's why a Superhuman have been using this approach of sell separate at first, don't get distracted. Then we remove barriers and start to incentivize them to at least make intros and do a little bit of like co-selling, and then in the future we'll continue to build upon that.
Chris Strom:
As part of the process and policies, you're telling me previously about how you all internally are utilizing Coda to run basically your RevOps mission control. So I'd love to spend some time talking through that.
Emily Critchfield:
Yeah. So admittedly, I was not a Coda user like you for many years and definitely not before I joined Superhuman. So Coda was Udemy. I've run forecast processes, forecast calls at various companies in the past and hadn't really crossed my mind that there could be a solution out there that could really help us go from just data visualizations and roll-ups to really building an entire operational processes, a really important critical one like forecasting within a Coda Doc in partnership with a lot of finance resources. Our CFO himself, who is from our Coda acquisition and a huge proponent of using Coda, really coached me on the possibilities of how you can run these types of operational processes using the product. We set out on a mission to simplify and organize and really standardize the way that we were thinking about forecasting, the way we were executing forecasting, and then the way that we were discussing forecasting.
And so prior to using Coda for forecasting, we were using a really clunky dashboard that had trouble loading. There was no way for reps to actually input their forecast. So they were doing it on a separate Google Sheet. The Google Sheet had conditional formatting that they could override, so it was a tingled mess. When I walked in the door six months ago, our Friday forecast meeting for an ops person, our CRO and various other resources across our revenue team that listened to the whole thing, it was two and a half hours every Friday. And a lot of that was everybody talking about their forecast and their data slightly differently because everybody had a different way that they were inputting their forecast, a different way they were assessing their forecast, so forth and so on.
So lots of opportunity here. Fast-forward to us really consolidating a lot of the data and the signals on forecast into one place. We now have one input sheet in Coda where all the leaders input not only their call for the week, but also their notes for the week. So essentially a pre-read for our forecast call that follows the structure. It goes something like this where if your forecast has changed for the week, it's gone up or down. Why? Really explaining any differences in forecast at the early part of a quarter when we still have the ability to generate pipeline. If you're under the forecast, you really have to talk about current quarter pipeline generation. We expect reps to talk about pipe gen overall, and then obviously there's also time to talk about risks as well as help needed, right?
And so every rep has to do that by Thursday, end of day. And again, all their notes are captured as a pre-read for myself, our CRO and other sales leaders, so that when it gets to the forecast call on Friday, one way that we've shaved down the time from two and a half hours is we really focus on the reps that have a change in their forecast or have the highest risks to their forecast.
Within this mission control doc, we have not just their ability to submit their forecast, but all the metrics they can need to really help them make a call. So goes down to the AE level by manager, they can see their pipe coverage, their pipe gen, their top deals that are still open, their top close one for the week. They can see their top slip deals or deals that have shrunk in size or changed in value, et cetera, et cetera. It also has their pacing for the week. It has all sorts of information that they need to be able to really assess where the hotspots are in terms of calling risk or strength in their forecast.
So it's been really transformative for our team. One, it's given everybody the same lens, the same data, the same one source of truth for all of those various metrics that they then help create their call from. It's also standardized the way we talk about forecast, and it's really helped us to be able to, because the data is not the issue and the consistency is there, we are then actually able to deep dive into the hotspots that we see, pipe gen slowing down or some deal signals that we're seeing that are trends across different leaders. So we're able to really hone in on where we need to focus and where we need to maybe change strategy or change direction and execution as a team. And so it's really, I would say, increased the value of the content of our conversation on forecast calls and really helped us to become more efficient as well. So it's been a great use case for us to actually be able to use our own product to really revolutionize the way that we do such a critical process like forecasting.
Chris Strom:
And is a lot of the source data for a lot of this coming from a Salesforce org that you're then bringing into Coda? Or are you bringing other sources directly into a Coda Doc?
Emily Critchfield:
That's exactly right. It's mostly from Salesforce, but Coda also has a Databricks integration that we can use now for a Databricks user. And that's what we use to really be able to format our data in the way that gives us those powerful insights that we use for the call.
Chris Strom:
So you're bringing a lot of that into Databricks and then you're connecting Coda to Databricks. Can you do a two-way connection? Can you make updates directly in Coda that then pushes back into Databricks?
Emily Critchfield:
Yeah, it's a really good question. Today, how we have it set up is actually, for example, when you're looking at the top 10 opportunities in a tabular format, we're talking about what's set to close this week. We create a direct link to the Salesforce opportunity that takes you directly there, and that's where we're still instructing our reps to make changes or make updates to their opportunity. So we're linking back out to Salesforce.
Chris Strom:
Okay. Linking back out to Salesforce for updating anything on the opportunity record itself probably.
Emily Critchfield:
Yeah. And what's really cool is our sales leaders, including our CRO on that tabular format, they can also use a cool flag that's I think we call it raise for discussion. So you can essentially raise your hand on a deal. And so we use that to guide how to streamline the call. We really focus on the deals where our CRO or our other sales leaders have questions about. And all of that information is available when you link back out to the Salesforce opportunity and then you're able to raise your hand on a deal, pop in your notes on why you want to discuss or what your question is. And then we're able to resolve those quickly during the forecast calls as well.
Chris Strom:
So that gives you a way to quickly highlight those specific flag deals to cover?
Emily Critchfield:
You can even use that as a pre-read again. The beauty of using a collaborative doc like this, which is maybe somewhat different than other forecasting tools that you see in the market is it really becomes an all in-one really powerful tool to collaborate, comment at, and resolve questions folks have or align on next steps asynchronously. So that again, that two and a half hour Friday forecast call can really be shaved down because most of the insights shared in the commentary is given async and before we even hop on the phone. So everybody is prepared with any remaining questions that they want to discuss live, but a lot of it has been done already during the pre-read.
Chris Strom:
And you're doing that every single week, huh?
Emily Critchfield:
We're doing that every week. So our reps are expected to enter in their call and their notes in that format or the four or five questions they have to answer about their forecast every week. Then we as execs review on Thursday afternoon into the evening. And then Friday we pop into spending our time on the most impactful topics rather than going leader by leader and reviewing all the same things and before not really knowing or being able to see what was really important. So this has really helped us to focus and make a bigger impact to where we need to change course or where we need to double down to remove roadblocks or accelerate our path to closing various pipeline deals. So it's helped us to collaborate much more efficiently now.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, it sounds like it. With this whole system you've developed internally for yourselves, this might make the next great Superhuman bundle after MarketingHQ. We can probably take a lot of learnings from this system you've built internally and build a SalesHQ bundle out of it.
Emily Critchfield:
SalesHQ got a great ring to it. You're exactly right. Something that hopefully will be coming to a web store or a reseller near you, SalesHQ. So look out for that. But you're absolutely right, Chris. This is just one example of how powerful a solution Coda can really deliver for an organization. Really any organization that really wants to take data visualization or a spreadsheet, but really be able to powerfully collaborate on it and build operational processes around it. I just haven't seen anything like that on the market, so we're really excited.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, I know, that's what I love about it. I've been using it for so many years myself.
Emily Critchfield:
I love to hear that.
Chris Strom:
We've talked about quite a few things here. Is there anything that you wanted to make sure we covered here before we wrap it up here?
Emily Critchfield:
First of all, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed this conversation. I would also say that Superhuman, we're just getting started. These are really good solutions that functional departments can use to, like I said, collaborate and build operational processes using the products that we have today. But really the mission of Superhuman is we want to become the AI super highway that follows our customers across all the surfaces where they work.
While HQs are really exciting and we're starting to experiment and build them internally and be able to go to market with them in the near term, something that we're also thinking about is then creating the AI operating system that goes along with them so that eventually our users will be able to deploy our agents, build their own agents, bring their own agents, and really make work much more powerful, make users much more efficient, and then ultimately make all of us Superhuman.
We're really just getting started. There is so much more ahead and I've gotten the privilege of getting a front row seat into some of the solutions and the thinking that we're doing on just how powerful this technology could be in the future. I'm really looking forward to everybody out there learning more about our mission and our product and the possibilities ahead. Stay tuned. There's lots more to come.
Chris Strom:
Yeah, I'm excited to see how it develops going forward. In the meantime, this has been really great being able to talk through all of this. I've been learning a lot here myself, and I think a lot of the people who listen to this are going to learn a lot on their end as well. So I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us here, Emily. Thanks for coming on.
Emily Critchfield:
Thank you. Yeah, this was great.
