• Vinod Muthukrishnan is the Chief Growth Officer of Cisco’s Contact Center Business Unit. In this role, Vinod leads all go-to-market activities of the business unit including strategic communications, marketing and partner & sales enablement. He was previously Co-Founder/CEO of CloudCherry, a customer experience management platform, which was acquired by Cisco in November 2019. 
• CloudCherry was built to track customer journeys, learn from them and create experiences to satisfy customer needs. Cloud cherry is unique in many ways. One instance would be that while many other tools build survey engines, CloudCherry is a customer journey engine. Other products aggregate results that ultimately show up on a dashboard. CloudCherry’s dashboard dealt with a quantification of delight. All visualization flows backwards from an outcome. 
• 12 months into the journey, to their dismay Vinod and his team discovered there were two Unicorns in their space. This is the time they had investment from family and friends. The market research part prelaunch was restricted to the fact that there was a problem that remains unsolved.  
• This was the time when every month a friend or family member had to invest to make payroll.  
• An inbound customer from US signed up for a $40K USD account over phone. It was a red flag to the assumption of the Target Market segment CloudCherry was after was possibly all wrong.
• The key learning was to be agile in thinking and validate one’s assumptions. The initial focus on the hospitality industry turned out to be completely wrong. So was the bet on SMB’s. 
• You need to read the tea leaves. The mega acquisitions in the space that was underway threw up some interesting information. Each of these DecaCorns took 19-20 years to get to $300mn in revenue before they were acquired. We had to take a call as to the right moment to exit. 

These and more Stats, Data and inside stories in this insightful episode of SaaStories 

Run time – 54.51 mins.