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Our guest today is Andie Dovgan, VP of Global Sales for Creatio.
Creatio is a global software company providing a lead low-code platform for process management and CRM. The company combines an intuitive low-code platform, best-in-class CRM, and a robust BPM in a single solution to accelerate sales, marketing, service, and operations for mid-size and large enterprises.
Andie is a results-driven leader with 15+ years of experience in enterprise-level SaaS sales and worldwide business development. He is committed to helping Creatio clients in transforming their businesses to address challenges and grasp opportunities of the digital era. He is highly focused on value delivery and a consultative approach in sales and account management.
In This Conversation, We Discuss:
- The importance of interpersonal communication in global sales
- How Creatio’s low-coding plug-and-play automation simplifies the production processes
- Empowering and investing in your team/employees to grow their skills
- What helps Andie excel in his role in global sales
- Hiring mistakes
- Lessons learned when recruiting
- Growing your sales team
 Resources:
Connect with Andie Dovgan: LinkedIn
Creatio – https://www.creatio.com
 Connect with Cameron: Website | LinkedIn
Get Cameron’s latest book: The Second in Command – Unleash the Power of Your COO
Subscribe to our YouTube channel – Second in Command Podcast on YouTube
Get Cameron’s Online Course  Invest In Your Leaders
The post Ep. 161 – Creatio VP of Global Sales, Andie Dovgan appeared first on COO Alliance.
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Our guest for this episode is Andie Dovgan, the VP of Global Sales for Creatio. Creatio is a global software company providing a lead low-code platform for process management and CRM. The company combines an intuitive low-code platform, best-in-class CRM, and a robust BPM in a single solution to accelerate sales, marketing, service, and operations for mid-size and large enterprises.
Andie is a result-driven leader with several years of experience in enterprise-level SaaS sales and worldwide business development. He’s committed to helping Creatio clients in transforming their businesses to address challenges and grasp opportunities in the digital era. He’s highly focused on value delivery and a consultative approach to sales and account management. Andie, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. I’m very pleased to be here.
Looking forward to learning from you and with you. Where are you from originally?
Take a guess.
I’m going to guess. Croatia?
Quite close. I was born and raised in Eastern Europe in Ukraine. I started my career in Eastern Europe, then worked a little bit in the UK, and moved to the US in 2015. Since that time, I’ve been really in love with the country. I enjoy my time staying here. Also, for full disclosure, I do travel a lot. Pre-COVID, I probably was spending in planes more times than I was spending at home. My wife was not super happy about that, but now I guess we enjoy the other side of this journey.
Why were you traveling so much?
I have a global responsibility. I always see teams in EMEA and APAC. I also preferred to spend a lot of time with my customers and was one of my partners. I’m a strong believer that even in the digital world, you need to find time, share this energy, and connect with people. I tend to believe that doing that in person is an easier way of doing that. You can do that digitally. In previous years, we all learned how to do this much better. I can’t wait for travels open again to connect with my customers and connect with my teams and share more meaningful time together.
Even in the digital world, you need to find time, share this energy, and connect with people.
Do you think you’ll travel as much as you used to, or will you have more of a hybrid now? Will you travel and still use digital to connect?
I’m not 100% sure. I believe that it will not be the same. I do expect that I will travel this 2021 and probably even more in 2022. I don’t believe we will come back to the schedule we used to have. The majority of people and companies, which is relatively obvious, got more comfortable with digital tools, and it’s more efficient. On the other side of things, I heard lots of stories. I have a few customers in Israel, for example. Now, Israel is ahead of the curve with vaccinations. They told me that people are so hungry for events in person activities as they are a little bit more open than the rest of the world. There is a big flow of people go going to the events and socializing because everybody is sick and tired in their zones.
It might almost be that the first people to go and travel and have those relationships will strengthen the relationships too. It’s almost like people that were on video several years ago had a big advantage because now everyone’s on video. That makes a lot of sense. I want to go back and talk about the global, APAC, and Indian stuff later. Can you walk us through in layman’s terms what Creatio does?
I know that you, Cameron, are big on vision, so we will start with our vision. We create a world where everyone can automate business ideas in minutes. The primary idea here is that, with technology being such a big driver of growth and now almost every company needing to become a technology company, there is such a big demand for applications, process automation, digital transformation, and all this fun stuff.
We also see that there is a shortage of technical resources and developers who can create those applications and automate those processes. Creatio provides what we call a low-code no, code platform for customer engagement and operational processes where people like you and I, without a technical background, can come in and create our applications, create our processes, and automate them without technical skill.
We are so passionate about that because if you look at the current market and with the speed of the growth, not only us but lots of analysts out there expect this to be the next revolution. If the population of people that have development skills is so small, and if we equip everyone to go and create technology, then we can end up in a much different world, a quicker world and more empowered. That’s what we do specifically in this low code, no code space. We are focused on customer engagement and business process management automation which is very close to operations and internal employee operations.
On the CRM side, do you compete against Salesforce, or are you completely different?
We don’t position ourselves as the head-to-head competitor to Salesforce. For example, if you open up a Gartner quadrant for sales automation, you’ll find ourselves and Salesforce in a leader quadrant. Usually, Creatio is a wider tool where you want to automate multiple processes, including sales. We are much benefit for process-intense industries where there is no clear line between where sales ends and operations start. Creatio is a platform place that allows you to automate all those kinds of interconnected use cases and processes.
Is it the automation of processes as well, then?
Absolutely.
It’s not the documentation, something like Process Street. It’s more of a combination almost of that and Zapier.
I will give you a few examples from different industries. Let’s take financial services and say banks or credit unions would use our product for every single agent to the customer. For example, customer onboarding, knowing your customer, and all those procedures. They would use it for ongoing consultations across and up sales. The system will pre-generate products or the next best actions. We can also do marketing campaigns, but we can go even further with stuff like account opening or credit card operations. All those processes can be interconnected. We ended up given to a branch relationship manager one single interface and multiple processes that allowed them to be much more successful.
Let’s take a manufacturing space. That’s where we can do order fulfillment, product configuration, and even supply chain processes combined with traditional commercial functions. Because of low code capability, it’s a very different kind of field from your traditional enterprise approach. You can come in and create those processes much better. For example, a COO or another leader in the business line should be empowered and know their process much better, and they should be empowered to create this technology without going and hiring ten different developers and waiting six months until this product is live.
I got you. Now, this is taking the place of needing the engineering teams to build their own internal systems. You’re more plug-and-play.
It’s tuff that is already available for your industry or your function. Think about that as Lego blocks. You go and create your application without the need to engage a lot of technical resources. IT team loves it as well because now their backlog is not so overwhelming, and they can delegate certain stuff to their business people.
Now it’s all lining up. Andie, how did you get involved in Creatio?
I haven’t been with a company for a lot of time. You can see my career. When I talk now, I work a lot with agencies when we hire people. They always go and check out my background and come back to me and say, “You are so unusual profile for the industry because, specifically in our space, people tend to change jobs much quicker.†I have been with the company for a lot of time. Another interesting caveat about my career is that, for me, it was always the first-time job. When I joined the company, my first role was Account Executive for SMB.
My first deal was $300. Seven months from that time, I got to my first team leader position and regional director, then to VP of sales, and I got global responsibility. That’s how it went. That’s one of the reasons why it went that well because I was surrounded by very smart people, much smarter than I am. They inspired and gave me that opportunity, and I decided that if I had this time and this desire to grow, I would invest all that I had into growing and learning as quickly as I could.
Being surrounded by people much smarter than you can inspire you and give you that opportunity and desire to grow.
How many people were in the company when you joined?
There are 150, something like that.
It was a good size when you joined. How many are there now?
It’s 600 and growing. We add in more.
It was 150 people when you joined and 600 now. You excelled from a sales role into a director role, a VP role and a global role. What do you think it was that had you excel? What was it that they saw in you as a leader?
It’s a combination. It’s less dependent than me. It’s dependent on lots of different factors. If you talk about myself, when I saw an opportunity, I was going all in, and I was investing a lot of energy and time into learning the skill or the field because I was super curious and saw that as a great potential for growth. If I didn’t have that skill back in the time, my approach was I would then go and spend as much time as I could to go and learn that. I ended up working fifteen hours a day, including weekends, just to bring myself up to speed with the knowledge and skills that I had.
In the meantime, I was super lucky to be connected with our CEO, who is a great mentor. She’s an amazing businessperson and an amazing woman. She inspired me to grow and learn lots of things. The software industry is very different from the majority of other verticals. This is a super-growing space. It presents lots of opportunities. Each new year brought more and more opportunities for growth.
My thinking process was, “Why don’t I just go and invest in knowing the field I’m in, like business process management, automation, CRM?†As I have been with the company for a while, I learned a lot of useful knowledge I can reuse in my conversations with customers, employees, and partners. Like a good wine, each new year, I was becoming better. That’s why I didn’t want to leave because I knew that in a new field, I would need to learn all the stuff. Now, because I was investing in that knowledge, now is time for me to shine and use it.
Are you a Bordeaux or a Burgundy? Which good wine?
Probably both. I’m not that sophisticated in that space.
I’m a good wine, but an unsophisticated wine. You talked about learning and focusing on learning and getting skills you didn’t have naturally. What were some of those skills that you worked on?
Lots of those. I was investing a lot into it. I structured it into three major buckets. I structured those skills into learning the domain and learning the field. In our space, we’re talking about custom engagement, and this is a huge body of knowledge. For example, Gartner defines 24 different quadrants in this space. Each quantum is represented by hundreds of different vendors, and it’s getting even worse or better.
I know which angle to take because there’s so much more specialization in the space. I’m connecting that with business problems and understanding different businesses. For example, you take a company that does waste management or pharmaceutical business on how they would use or engage with customers and learn there. Also, here is a technical aspect. I was also investing a lot into knowing how the database is structured and what methods can be used if you make an integration.
Lots of people were telling me why we are learning that. My nature was I wanted to understand how it works. Now it’s helping me in my conversations with CIOs or technical people. The second era was more related to how you scale and lead sales teams. This is probably the most interesting field like, “How do you hire?†If I count how many mistakes I made in hiring, I can open up a museum with all my hiring mistakes. It was a super complex field.
How do you onboard? How do you enable? How do you empower people? How do you make sure that they are successful? How do you need to act as a leader? How do you change that? I saw, Cameron, in your stories that you took your company from $2 million to $100 million in your role, then you were talking about like changing environment in the company. As we were experiencing hyper-growth, I needed to catch up with that speed. There is a great article called 48 Types of VP of Sales. When I read it, I was so inspired because that’s my story explained. I didn’t know back in that time that when you are leading a smaller team, there is one type of VP of sales, and when the team gets much larger, your role completely changes. I was learning that intuitively.
Creatio: When experiencing hyper-growth, you need to catch up with that speed. When you are leading a smaller team, there is one type of VP of sales, but as that team gets much larger, your role completely changes.
Sales scalability is a big part. I’m so passionate about that. That’s where I invest a lot of time. There are tactical things like, “How do we structure deals? How do we run meetings? How do we do one-on-ones?†It’s everything related to the tactical aspect with a big focus on deal management. We compete against big boys, and you mentioned some of our competitors. We want to make sure that our sales process and the way how we engage with customers are very different and that the customers see the value. Our goal is for them to use our technology and empower them so that they can see, “I haven’t heard about this technology, but it’s awesome. Those people are awesome. Let me give it a try.â€
It’s amazing. I love that you broke down your learning or thought of your learning into three buckets and focused on those. I like that some of them were on your executive functioning skills. You even mentioned, “I launched a course called Invest in Your Leaders. It’s twelve-course modules.†Two of them, you just rattled off. “One of them is one-on-one meetings. I have a module on one-on-one meetings. Another one is running effective meetings and another one on interviewing.†It’s all the skills that most managers don’t get strong at. I also love that you thought that you wanted to learn about the industry, deal-making, and the VP of sales roles. I don’t think most people approach their own learning that way. Do you do that with your employees as well? Are you focusing on growing them too?
I can always get better with that. I’m seeing my role now as a person who shows them a vision, helps them to define themselves and helps them to own their development. I provide support, empower them, and inspire them with many different examples. There is so much information now that when they hear about like personal development plans, some people can get bored like, “Another training. Another session.â€
What I’m trying to do is listen to my employees, understand them, and try to shift their vision towards becoming better themselves, which also sounds like a cliché, but there is more to it when you deeply listen and invest your time into understanding your employees. If you come back to them with something that is super relevant, there is a big energy and power in that process. I would love to learn about your one-on-one strategies and the stuff you mentioned.
It’s interesting. I’m preparing a course that I have to speak about at an event. I’m talking about growing our people. If you grow your people, they grow the brand. I was scribbling down some notes based on what you were saying that a lot of the learning with the PDP is where if the person doesn’t see the reason to grow, they don’t want to grow. It’s like the seven-year-old in school. If they don’t care, they’re not going to learn.
It doesn’t matter how good the teacher is. The student has to want to learn. If they want to learn about math because it’s going to help them understand soccer better, be a better skier, or help them trade baseball cards or whatever, they’ll get excited about learning. For our employees, they need to be excited about their own growth to make their job easier, make them more successful, or have them jump up in their careers.
I was watching one of your TED Talks or some other presentation when you mentioned an experience of learning French. That resonated well with me because sometimes people just miss out on an opportunity to learn and develop the strongest skills versus just investing time into things that you suck at or are not strong at. When I listened to that, I was, “Gosh.†That’s one of my takeaways. I invested a lot of time into stuff I was not good at. I was better off taking all the time and energy and placing that in terms of what kind of value-add activity.
Is that why you moved into the whole global role as well? Are you good at global relationships, understanding people, and deal-making? What is it that helps you excel in that area?
I don’t have a very concrete answer for you on that. I think that we were growing very globally. I was the one who took ownership of that. I have always had a lot of interest in growing the global organization, connecting different people and cultures, and showing respect to their cultures. I also knew from the bottom of my heart that if we are successful here in what we are selling our product and I see my customers being super successful with the technology, I want customers in the Middle East. I want customers in Australia. I want customers in every single kind of country. Why don’t we go and expand there? That’s the approach. When we made a decision we were going to invest in traditional regions, I was the one who wanted to take the lead.
To expand on this topic, I enjoy this part of my job because you need to show empathy to different cultures in different countries and be very prepared. When I travel into a country or you are meeting customers in a specific culture, my approach is always to spend a lot of time understanding this culture, understanding what to say, what not to say, so that I can show respect. I will be treated as an outsider because I’m not coming from this country, but you can earn respect, and you would be surprised how much you can do with that. There are lots of examples in my professional life when after doing that thing, you can build so much better relationships.
Spend time understanding the culture – what to say, what not to say – so you can show respect. You will be surprised by how much you can do with that.
I was going to ask you about that even before you mentioned it. I’m curious about what some of your lessons have been in working globally with some of the different cultures, countries, or regions. Can you maybe give us 2 or 3?
There are plenty of it. You need to understand few things. You need to understand the pace and the approach to the decision-making process. For example, here in the US, people tend to be very quick with decisions. When I first came here, I was amazed at how quickly some decisions have been made. I was like, “Where are the complications? Where is all those tough stuff?†There was not many of that. In some countries or some areas of the world, people are much slower. If you tend to accelerate them and you are used to doing that, for example, in the Americas region, you will hit the wall very quickly.
People don’t want to be pushed. You want to complement their process, but you don’t want to change it. That’s what I’ve learned, understanding how to be nimble and agile. Also, how to connect their journey with what you can do on your side. The second big part is I got much better in relation to relationships within different countries and overall knowledge of different geographies and cultures. I invested in that. I was spending at least two hours on my Sundays learning about the history of different countries so that I could better understand them and better understand the backgrounds. At the end of the day, there are much more similarities than differences.
Also, when it comes to value, customers that use our system, for example, in Sweden, Columbia or Singapore, receive similar value. They might be organizationally at a different stage of maturity. That’s why we are working with the customers to help them to evaluate their maturity level. Lots of customers think about like technology being like a solution for all issues. It could be, but you need to align that with your operational and process maturity. We are helping our customers to understand, “That’s where you stand now. That’s what you need to do. Those kinds of processes you can automate now. That’s what you can do in the future. Don’t blow the ocean. Start with something simple.â€
How about culturally? How are some of the cultures different inside their companies? I know that in Thailand, for example, you would never criticize your boss. In India, it’s hard to fire people. Have you noticed any differences there? In Germany or Switzerland, they are much more precise. Have you noticed anything different?
Yes. There are so many different examples. For example, my first visit to the Middle East was full of learning. In some countries, there’s a good metric that they saw that shows different cultures and nationalities and how they behave in a business setting, like level of directness and speed of making decisions or something like that.
For example, if you are selling to some countries where people are super direct for somebody who is not used to that, this can come out as aggression, and you can get offended or even insulted if you’re not prepared for that and vice versa. If you try to be very engaging and aggressive with some Asian regions, this will not go well. My rules are quite simple. First, I always try to learn before I do something. As I’m starting the meeting, I’m trying to be quite neutral and expand into where I see the culture and how a customer interacts and builds up on that.
You almost started in the center and migrated into it, but you do your research. It’s incredible knowing how you’ve researched about countries, cultures, me, and the show and worked on your training. That has to be probably your biggest skill or one of.
I had lots of conversations or meetings when I was not prepared, or that could go much better if I would do my homework. That’s a hard lesson I’ve learned. You mentioned about empowering people and helping them to develop. I’m trying to find this right balance between being spontaneous, comfortable and nimble, but also having enough rehearsals and dry runs until you do something.
For example, you’re talking about one-on-ones, and I’m coaching some younger leaders and managers in a team. They need to have their first one-on-one conversations with the employee who might be nervous. How do you go about it? You go and role-play and rehearse, and you probably will get a much better result in that.
Has learning always been easy for you?
In some aspects, yes. In some, not. I was not the brightest in school, to be honest with you. I was not very strong at math. I push myself right now because it’s now in a digital world. You have to understand and be super comfortable with numbers. For example, I would go and get some awards in literature. I was writing good poems and all those things, but math was never my strong thing. With my first degree in Psychology, I entered the university and was fascinated with this field, then became pretty good in school. It depends on what the subject is.
Creatio: In a digital world, you have to understand numbers and be super comfortable with them.
In this rise that you’ve had in Creatio, where have you struggled? Where have you had to work the hardest?
Here’s my biggest struggle, and that’s something that is super important. As I indicated, we are now in such an incredible spot with our technology being so demanded and people being focused on that. My biggest struggle is when I go to bed at night, I’m thinking like, “What is the stuff I haven’t done?†When I look at my teams and processes, I see 20 to 50 things we can do better, improve, and implement. I think my anxiety is coming from the fact that they haven’t implemented them, and they’re like, “We’re starting a new day, and we haven’t talked about that for a couple of months and haven’t done it.†This frustrates me.
The second aspect is when you are investing in something, you are doing this, and you’re developing, you always will hit the wall and fail. You need to be prepared and ready to have a strategy of what you’re going to do if you fail. That’s another hard learning that I had. Whenever I think about some critical event or something important from a hiring perspective, organizational design perspective, or deal management, I always think about, “Everything is good when it goes according to this plan. What if not? What is my plan B? What are the worst situations that could happen? Am I unprepared to approach?â€
You mentioned hiring mistakes a little bit ago. What was it that had the hiring mistakes happening? What mistakes did you make?
It’s all sorts of stuff, but I’m getting better. It is inevitable. If you hire a lot of people, grow a team, and do that in different geographies, it is not an easy job. I like this quote by Mr. Welsh. I don’t want to misquote him, but at the end of his career, he was doing 50% of efficiency, which is considered to be a good result. Every second hire was a success. That’s why I had a number of occasions when I needed to learn. When I came here to the US, I needed to learn how to conduct interviews in this country because the experience was different.
When I started building our team in England, it also was a different experience. Let’s face it, Cameron. Hiring salespeople is super difficult because they are trained to sell themselves and get through that initial talk. Here’s an obvious statement, but I wanted to emphasize that because it’s so relevant. You can find somebody who is widely successful in one spot, and you put them into another environment, and it’s a complete failure. Understanding what configuration of the skills, qualities, and traits you’re looking for is super important.
You can find somebody who is widely successful in one spot, but when you put them into another environment, it’s a complete failure.
For example, I’m hiring a regional director and another VP for one region. My scorecard has 70 items. I score my candidates against 70 items, and each has a very detailed statement in the detailed questions I’m asking. After that, I’m pretty confident that I’ve collected enough data to make a decision. As I was doing my initial interviews, I didn’t have a scorecard. I didn’t have enough experience. I was buying stuff I shouldn’t buy, but that’s learning.
What are the top 2 or 3 things you’re looking for in people in sales? Maybe start at different levels, like entry-level sales, to more global sales. Are there different skillsets that you’re looking for? There has to be.
I will give you three categories. The cultural fit is super important. You want to be surrounded by the right people. Here at Creatio, we are always trying to level up and raise a bar. I taught myself not to hire people that I’m not excited about. When we are bringing them, they should increase the capacity of the team. They shouldn’t be on the same level. They should be increasing. It’s a very difficult exercise specifically for our HR team and our hiring partners because we’re very demanded by the customer. To build a great company, you have to do that. You have to accept the challenge.
Coming back to my point, cultural alignment and cultural fit are very important. We have a clear picture of who we are as a company, as a personality, what kind of quotes we enjoy, and what traits probably are not a good fit for us. Having been super clear always helps. Secondly, there are a number of professional competencies. We want salespeople that inspire our customers. We want people that can challenge their status quo and have an intelligent conversation with the COO so that conversation will lead to a number of insights. To have that conversation, you have to have a certain amount of skills.
How do you structure discovery calls? How do you work on a solution? How do you package up the solution? How do you work with your pre-sales team so the customer sees that process in action on the first demo and can engage with that product at that stage? Also, do you understand the industry? Do you understand what is going on in this space? If I will put you on a call with the COO of this company, what would you tell them and why? How would you get them excited? It’s a well-thought process. As we move on, we keep enhancing it to make sure that every month, we produce even better and more accurate results.
What are your leadership team meetings? What are the normal meetings that your leadership team has? Imagine you have a few different types for different things, but can you give us your normal meeting rhythms that you may have as a leadership team?
We have a number of those. We have a weekly cadence on a weekly basis. We are a big user of our own technology to the point that we are obsessed with using our technology and all the data in the system. We have this rule that you always look at certain dashboards and certain information beforehand so when you go to a meeting, everybody’s aligned and on the same page on the data. There is a cadence on the key indicators that define success of our business. Each area represents its own performance indicators. For example, in sales, we have super focused on the area of bookings, the contracts we are signing, and the expansions of the existing customers. When we talk about customer success, we are looking at the NP score.
Are we having super happy customers? If they’re not, what is their complaint all about? We are very focused on making sure that our customers are big fans of Creatio technology. There are lots of additional operational metrics, channel updates, and lots of stuff. We have a cadence, and it goes through each metric. There is a big strength in doing that on a weekly basis because everybody is super aligned. If we have a problem, we see the problem early on in the process. We all, as a leadership team, can jump in and try to address it.
We have some additional kind of alignment updates. For example, I lead our sales enablement function, and we produce a lot of different assets. We create vertical materials. We create many materials to help our sales team be self-sufficient and go and be much more efficient in the field. What I do is spend some time showing the executive team what we have to make sure that those assets are being utilized by all the teams. For example, if we are talking with the customer in the early stages about those particular use cases and processes, we need our customer success team to know about that. We also need our channel team and partners to know about that.
I like the fact that you’re reinforcing to make sure that the tools are used. I find companies often build all the tools that we don’t use them.
That’s a benefit. I also wanted to mention this to complete the answer to the question. Also, we have more kinds of executive brainstorming sessions and more vision-driven discussions, which is also not super unusual. Our COO does an incredible job setting up the vision and coming up with the questions that always challenge us. We always have those very interesting, thought-provoking debates about topics.
What I also enjoy about Creatio is that each new year, the vision is getting so much clearer than the questions. We’re discussing questions surrounding the vision, not questions about who we are as a company and what we want to do. Those questions are all answered, and we have such a clear direction about the growth, the values we’re bringing to the community, and how quickly we can get there.
It’s no surprise that you’re growing as fast as you’re growing and as successful as you’re growing. I was going to ask you a question to wrap things up, but I thought of something else. You guys just raised some money back a couple of months ago. How has that changed the company? You raised a fair amount of money.
We did. It’s also important to understand that in the previous February, we were bootstrapped. We were a very successful company, and we never acquired external capital. That helped us to have to build good discipline about how we managed the company and helped us to build a very strong team. In regards to this, we had and have a very clear vision of how we want to invest the amount. It will be divided into several areas. The first one is a product vision. We are product first company, and we are so proud of the product we’ve built. That has been included in numerous Forrester and Gartner reports and others.
We still see how much stuff we can do on top of that. We are so inspired by that. To give you an example, we had this offsite session. Our product team was showing us this new concept of a product. I did a mistake. I stood up and said, “if that’s a product I’m going to sell, you can raise my quota by 10% or more.†My CEO caught me on that, and I got an increase in my sales target. I was so inspired and fascinated by the technology and the speed of development and bringing it to the customers that I couldn’t resist. Product development is a big piece.
Secondly, we’re a very channel-driven company. I’m talking about this global expansion. It was not possible without dedicated partners and channel communities as we have. We want to support, grow our channel community, and empower, engage, and help them to achieve even more with us. The final is we will be growing sales teams. We will be growing our brand. We will be investing in it. We want everyone to know about Creatio.
Creatio: Global expansion is not possible without dedicated partners and channel communities. You want to support and grow your channel community and empower, engage, and help them to achieve even more with you.
For example, we are now being listened to by lots of COOs. If they have an idea about process automation in a specific application they want to build, and if they talk to us, they will be fascinated with what we can bring to the table. That’s why we want to be heard and invest more time in creating this link. If you have a problem with business management, automation, and customer engagement, Creatio is a great fit.
I’m excited to watch you guys grow. You didn’t even mention the number, but you raised $68 million, and you were bootstrapped until now. That’s pretty extraordinary to do that kind of a raise. What’s beautiful is you built a 600-person company by bootstrapping, which means you’re well-run and well-managed. There’s no waste. You’ve built a really strong, efficient company, and now you’re going to fuel it. It’s going to be cool to watch. Let’s go back to the 22-year-old Andie. What advice would you give yourself when you were just starting out in your career?
I would give myself a few advises. The first one would be, “It’s an incredible world. If you work hard and believe in what you do, you will be amazingly surprised at what you could achieve if you put your heart into that.†Not seeing boundaries and limitations is so important. The advice I would give is there’s so much buzz going on. With each year, we are getting more of that stuff.
I love this book, The ONE Thing. It’s a very strong concept. When you define what is important for a business, those are two metrics or two things you need to be focused on. If you go, engage, and deliver, you will be in your place much quicker. I would give those to advisors and also would give lots of tactical ones about certain things that I would do differently.
I’m not surprised you’ve got good ones. You’re such a strong learner. Andie Dovgan, the VP for Global Sales for Creatio, thank you so much for spending time with us on the show.
Thank you so much, Cameron, for having me. It was a pleasure.
