Ross Meyercord, the newly named CEO of Propel Software, recently met with Acceleration Economy Chief Analyst Tony Uphoff and Cloud Wars Horizon host Tom Smith. Meyercord spoke on a range of topics including: why he chose Propel for his next role; his emphasis on customers, the importance of the cloud for PLM technology, and customers’ current buying priorities and mindset.
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Highlights of our discussion from this crossover interview spanning Cloud Wars Horizon and CXO2 channels are below:
Highlights
00:35 — Last month, Meyercord was named CEO of Propel Software, a company that Acceleration economy has analyzed in the context of its product value management and product information management software. He joins Propel after holding executive roles at Pluralsight, Salesforce, and Accenture. The discussion will focus on his priorities for Propel and give our audience some perspective on how things are looking as we head into 2023.
01:43 — Explaining his decision to join Propel, Meyercord notes his time in the SaaS industry, including with Salesforce, and he’s seen how SaaS has really been taking over the world as a business model. The product lifecycle management (PLM) market is the fourth largest software sector after ERP, HCM, and CRM. Yet it is almost entirely still on-prem. But Propel seven years ago was born in the cloud. So it’s been able to continue to iterate and drive value with customers now and now has a seven-year track record. “We built 200 customers, we have gross retention rates in the high 90s. So I just love the opportunity.”
04:10 — Meyercord says technology as a core strategy for the business is on par with overall corporate strategy and product strategy. He met with a number of different customers recently, including MSA Safety, which provides safety equipment for first responders and firefighters and is typical of the challenges that customers face. They have a twofold problem: One was their inability to manage the product life cycles in a cohesive fashion. On Propel, they could bring all that together and drive process and standardization and ultimately time to market for those products. Once they had the product definition started out there, their teams that were dealing with their customers were no longer connected, they didn’t have the ability to have that product information in the hands of their customer teams. And the differentiator for Propel is that the customer record and the product record are linked.
08:15 — On customer centricity, Meyercord notes that as a former “practitioner,” he’s implemented and managed PLM but has also spent his entire 30-plus-year career working with customers. Now he has a jewel of a product built by founder Ray Hein and team, and Meyercord’s mandate is to expose that jewel to more customers and engage the partner ecosystem in a way that they can see the value in working with Propel. He says a 10x growth of the customer base is “very achievable.”
09:36 — Addressing current customer priorities, Meyercord says leaders recognize they can’t cut their way to growth as they move forward; it’s really about innovation. For these companies, they need to determine how they can either get new products to market or get existing products to market faster, how can they drive more rapid iteration cycles on those products, leveraging customer feedback, and a solution like Propel is really important for that. It’s all about lead time. Finally, customers are going to invest in areas that are going to drive the return for the business, and really help get those products out to market.
11:54 — Explaining why the cloud is so beneficial to customers, he notes the value of the cloud has been proven just about everywhere, except in the area of product data. But in his discussions with customers, it’s clear they believe that product data does belong in the cloud; a couple of things, the pandemic, and supply chain crunches of the past several years really cemented the conviction with customers for that to be true. On-prem PLM solutions have been in place for a long time and they’re not bad solutions, but customers can’t stay current even when those products, those on-prem products are driving great innovation. Customers get new innovations pushed to them multiple times a year.
14:36 — Addressing the benefits of Propel’s focus on the Salesforce platform, Meyercord notes, “I have zero of my resources that I spend managing cloud operations, I have zero resources that are building security and overall platform and visualization and workflow engines, and all those things which I inherit from the Salesforce platform. So I can take all of my innovation dollars and headcount and all those great engineers, and their focus specifically on building on top of the platform for the functional solutions to drive benefit to our customers.”
18:40 — Propel is growing fast, in fact, it’s coming off its best year ever in terms of new customers, and last quarter also set a record for new customers. The company expects to continue to take market share by attracting new companies which are agile as well as legacy customers who have been working on-prem.
20:39 — Addressing economic factors and customer mindset, Meyercord notes that Propel, like any tech provider, won’t be immune to macroeconomic turbulence but is continuing to see strong demand and strong growth. “But we have we have to be in our game, we have to make sure we’re meeting the customers where they are, that we’re maniacally focused on value.”
