Navint is building a new operation in EMEA and has appointed a leadership team to grow its footprint. Leading the team are two Salesforce veterans Satyen (Satch) Patel and Darrens Laws, joined by Robyn Anderson who has been with Navint for nearly four years. Enterprise Times spoke to Satch Patel, EVP and General Manager, EMEA, and Theresa Cowen Vice President, Head of Marketing & Communications at Navint about the launch.
Patel last worked as a senior Strategic Account executive at Salesforce and has a deep experience of the Lead to revenue market. He joined Salesforce from Apttus (now Conga) where he was a regional account director. He also spent time at Oracle and Dell. Enterprise Times asked Cowen how big the team is now and how large she expects it to grow by the end of the year.
“We’re really just launching into Europe and beyond. The executive team is ramping up here, staffing up as we speak. We’re building as we grow, and we’re going to respond to demand. As we sell, we will build we’re going to grow cautiously against demand.”
Navint already has a customer base in Europe. It is likely that the existing team will look to extend that footprint and leverage it to win new customers. The approach to growth is cautious but sensible. Navint often works with large enterprises and the sales cycle are often long. Patel also explained that Navint works across industry sectors, working with companies that want to modernize their revenue streams and monetization models. Industries that Navint works in include financial services, media space, technology companies, manufacturing and telecommunications. Customers include Nike, Tuff Shed and Paypal.
On vendor relationships
Navint focuses on Revenue management and QTC. In the US, it has a large number of vendor relationships across CRM, ERP, CPQ, CLM and other enterprise solutions. ET asked Patel about extending those relationships into EMEA.
“In this marketplace you need a fairly broad approach to your partnerships, just by the very nature of the engagements that you get called into with customers. The market segments that we’re focusing on, the enterprise side of businesses there are not very many organisations that have greenfield sites anymore. They need some form of relationship with ERP, CRM, eSignature, and CLM vendors. One of the reasons why we have those broad relationships is to stay abreast of all movements in that market space. It’s very relevant when we go and see, most organisations.”
“Now, there are some vendors that we work strategically with a lot more than the others, and Salesforce is one of those and there are other CPQ and billing technologies that we also work with. We do try and keep a good eye on all of those technologies and how they’re moving because that’s a part of the USP, our specialism is lead to revenue. There are not lots of people out there in the marketplace that can specialise and consult against the lead to revenue stream with all of these different types of technologies.”
On the opportunity
What is the opportunity that Navint is trying to capture?
“With my background with the vendors I’ve worked with, I’ve seen this market space grow tremendously over the last six to seven years. The technology is now catching up with the demand from businesses to modernise, to introduce the new types of revenue models that they want to go to market with. Technologies in the past were pretty cumbersome and weren’t quite ready to give business that agility and the ability to quickly launch products and pricing without having a huge onerous IT system to back it up with. A lot of the stuff wasn’t actually complete or available, where now the technologies have improved drastically.”
“The CRM vendors are coming into this middle office area with CPQ and billing technologies. The ERP vendors are doing the same, they’re trying to grow out their revenue, billing systems to incorporate subscription type modelling, usage-based pricing. They’re all realising the fact that everything needs to be connected, to allow you to fully service a customer over a reoccurring lifecycle. That’s what’s driven an enormous demand from the big software vendors to invest in this technology. They only invest when there’s customer demand.
“We do well when technology is there, and Navinit specialises in recommending how to put that technology together end to end and make it work in your existing environment. More importantly, a lot of organisations have been going through the full transformation and realising, they want one type of technology all connected to allow them to be more efficient. COVID has exacerbated exactly that problem of inefficiencies in multiple systems.”
First UK and then beyond
With a small team initially, ET asked Patel where he would look to focus his efforts within Europe.
“Absolutely here in the UK and Ireland is a primary focus for us. But other regions such as the Nordics and Benelux where we’ve done some work are also extremely busy regions. We’re seeing a lot of traction across those three regions. Others as we see the demand. What we’ve said we will do is, based on that demand, we will grow accordingly.”
On challenges
Effectively Patel is heading up a small startup in a new region. One advantage he has is that with remote working common, he should be able to leverage the expertise in the US for delivery that Navint has before he builds the EMEA team out fully. ET asked him what his main challenge is.
He answered: ”The main challenge is getting organisations to understand. The number of organisations we speak to that don’t have sales and finance as connected as well as you would think is always interesting. It’s getting organisations to get those two departments to actually agree and work together for the greater good of the organisation is clearly the objective from a lot of the C-suite. But actually getting that done, and getting people to agree, and doing stuff is always challenging.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
The opportunity for Navint in Europe is huge. While Patel acknowledges that the GSI’s have some expertise in this area it tends to be in pockets. Navint possesses the expertise to offer full consultancy service across the entire lead to revenue cycle. Patel believes that there are few, if any, organisations in EMEA that can offer this.
Jim Martindale, CEO, Navint commented “Navint is committed to helping our clients improve the way they go-to-market and automate their most pressing lead-to-revenue challenges. We’re thrilled to formally launch our EMEA operations and the appointment of several strategic hires to grow our business, support our clients and enhance our partnerships. The strength of our local team demonstrates our commitment to supporting our international operations while providing our local clients exceptional customer service. They will allow us to deliver high-value advisory services and CPQ and Billing implementation capabilities to our European clients as we continue to grow our global operations.”
In Patel, Navint has an experienced sales leader who will have connections both within Salesforce and in a large number of enterprises. That, in combination with the expertise and vendor relationships that Navint can bring to the table, could see the company grow rapidly. Perhaps, despite the difficulties in travelling currently, now is the right time to expand into Europe. Customers are less likely to worry about whether their consultant is based in Boston, Lincolnshire, or Boston Massachusetts. However, getting the right sales leadership in place is a vital first step. Navint appears to have done this and could reap the rewards in the coming months.
