Andrew Oliver, Head of Revenue at Gatekeeper

Speaker: Andrew Oliver, Head of Revenue, Gatekeeper

Andrew Oliver: Hi. So in terms of the challenges we were facing prior to working with Pete and Emily, I'll split that into three core areas. Two focused on Gatekeeper, the organization I work for, and one more personal. So the first one I would say was that Gatekeeper was guilty of trying to be everything to everyone. For those of you who aren't aware of our solution, we're a vendor in contract life cycle management solution and we help people solve problems around vendor management, contract management. The reality is most organizations in the world have suppliers, vendors to manage, contracts to manage. And so our TAM, our Total Addressable Market is huge. That's both a blessing and a curse. And while historically, we saw some benefits to that as a bootstrapped organization, customer acquisition was incredibly important to us, as it is to anyone, but they ultimately were funding our growth. And we saw benefits through COVID as well, it really mitigated and spread our risk as some industries thrived and some were decimated and some in between. It meant that we were able to really kind of catalyze on the tailwinds for ourselves through that kind of period. But coming out of that process, you know, we started to see some cracks appearing throughout our customer journey, in terms of, how do we communicate, how do we attract the right customer when there's so many different variants, how do we sell to them? How do we on board them? How do we manage them through the success process? There was just so much differentiation, it was getting really, really difficult and things were starting to break. So that was definitely one challenge. Second challenge related to that was, the inconsistency with which our teams spoke about Gatekeeper. There was no real common thread, common message, coming from, even leadership, sales, customer success, marketing and so forth. And that was compounding some of that first challenge that we saw. I just talked about a moment ago. And then the third challenge that I face more personally was that you know, I was going on my own growth journey from being an early stage employee here at Gatekeeper to being the sales department, to building a sales department to building a revenue team. And that came with, you know, a number of challenges having not done this before. And that was something where Pete and Emily were also able to help.

Andrew Oliver: So, in terms of what I like about Pete and Emily and the way they worked with us, engaged with us: a number of areas. First and foremost, that they're systems thinkers I call Pete, "Mr Framework", he has a framework for everything. And that makes working with them very easy to understand where you are, where you're going and provides you with a kind of tool kit for execution. So you're not felt like the theory all sounds great, but how do I actually make it happen? They really help that kind of transition between those those two key stages. Secondly, they'll challenge you. They have a really nice way of asking difficult questions that will challenge your own thinking and beliefs about your organization, about maybe your role, how you work; your team, and so forth. And a good way of kind of discovering the core pains and how to solve them. So that's been a really useful learning experience as well. And finally, I think they're just good people. They are advisors to our business but I class them both as good friends as well. And only ever a WhatsApp away from being able to support and help in any way as we grow our business.

Andrew Oliver: So, in terms of the results that we have managed to get and achieve through working with Pete and Emily, I'll first refer back to those three challenges I mentioned we were facing. and then look at a couple of significant milestones. Gatekeeper's achieved this year, which we wouldn't have done without Pete and Emily's help. So, first up, Gatekeeper was trying to be everything to everyone. That's now a thing of the past through the work with Pete and Emily, we've got a much more focused value proposition, a much tighter ICP. We've gone from trying to service a massive TAM to being very focused around a particular Serviceable Addressable Market - SAM. And that's given us the, given us a lot of confidence to go forth and really focus and win customers we know we can make successful rather than trying to help everybody. That relates to the second challenge about the inconsistency of messaging that now is a thing of the past. We talk about Gatekeeper and "Vendor & Contract Lifecycle Management" with consistency across the organization through the customer journey. Having everyone sing from the same hymn sheet is vitally important in terms of communicating that type of proposition we've developed to our market, to our prospects, to our customers. And then thirdly, the more personal challenge of needing to grow with the business as we, as we go through this steady kind of growth, as I go from being the sales department to building a sales department to building a revenue function. You know, Pete in particular has helped me massively through that journey. It's something he's done on multiple occasions. And so there's no problem, challenge, obstacle that I face that he hasn't faced and he can't help me through. So it's been a massive shortcut for me and given me a lot of personal belief and confidence as well. And in terms of those couple of milestones that Gatekeeper's hit. One, we entered the Gartner Magic Quadrant this year within the "Contract & Lifecycle Management" section, but we were really able to kind of communicate our niche proposition around "Vendor & Contract Lifecycle Management" and entered the Quadrant as the only bootstrapped self funded organization within our particular category, which we're particularly proud of and they really bought into this very focused message and proposition that we have, to fill that kind of niche area of the Quadrant. Secondly, Gatekeeper no longer is bootstrapped. We went through our first funding event fairly recently, from a global and leading private equity firm in the B2B software space. That was obviously a very long and complex and demanding process. But I think critical to our success, there was this very tight message, this tighter ICP, and a lot of focus and drive they could see within the organization to dominate this part of the market that we've identified. And we wouldn't have identified that without Pete and Emily's help.