Jason Peretz on CRM Hygiene for Finance

[00:00:00] Jason Peretz: You have to go back recreate your whole company from day zero, from the first sale because if you don’t do it that way, then it’s not, it’s still not going to pull the data correctly. 

Jason Peretz Introduction

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Role Forward podcast. My name is Joe Michalowski and this episode is brought to you by Mosaic, a strategic finance platform that transforms the way business gets done. And today our guest is Jason Peretz, who goes by JP, so we’ll call him JP for the episode, is the Chief Business Officer at Galley, a company creating the ERP for food data. JP, thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:00:57] Thank you so much for having me. 

[00:00:59] Joe Michalowski: Awesome. So, we have a really good topic lined up for today about CRM hygiene, but before we get into all that, would love to just start with the basics. Can you give us, like, the two-minute background on yourself and how you got to Galley and the work that you’re doing there?

[00:01:13] Jason Peretz: Sure. Yeah. So, background about myself, I began my career in corporate finance. I worked in real estate finance and corporate food cost budgeting, so I was at Jack in the Box corporate, had some amazing mentors there that are actually still there.

[00:01:30] I then went to law school. 

[00:01:32] Jason Peretz: When I was in law school, I did a little bit of, like, restaurant consulting, just finance consulting, but nothing too crazy,

[00:01:39] worked at Corporate Counsel for a bit. I actually started my own company a year before I joined Galley, or a little over a year before I joined the Galley and that’s actually what led me to Galley and to joining the team. So, my company got into this incubator in San Diego and Galley was in the same, same incubator.

[00:02:02] This is when Galley was pre-seed. Things didn’t, things didn’t exactly turn out the way I wanted to with my company and it was a perfect position for me to sunset our software that I was starting and joined the team with just my background in food, food and corporate food cost budgeting and I’ve been here ever since.

[00:02:23] Jason Peretz: So, that was in 2019, mid-2019. So, that’s, that’s a little background. 

[00:02:30] Joe Michalowski: Nice, two things. One, I dunno why I just find it crazy that you worked at Jack in the Box, like in corporate. I just, I don’t know, just a weird thing that I haven’t had anyone come on and be like, “Yeah, I started my career, like, in the corporate offices at Wendy’s or McDonald’s or something.” So, that was pretty cool.

[00:02:45] And then also, glad to hear that you’re in the San Diego area too. I am not, personally, I’m from Boston, but Mosaic, the company is in San Diego, so nice to have a fellow San Diego company on the pod, for sure. So, that’s all great. I’m glad, you know, glad we got you on the episode because, like I said, I want to talk about CRM hygiene today

[00:03:04] and it’s something that, you know, I think you’re in a unique position to talk about because you have that corporate finance background, but you moved, like, a little bit away from finance. So, you’re the chief business officer at Galley now, you’re doing legal, you’re doing finance and you’re working,

[00:03:18] like, really closely with sales and I think at one point you were overseeing sales, so can you talk about, like, what, that position that you’re at with Galley, what it means for managing the CRM? Like, how close are you to that and what is it doing for your job? 

[00:03:30] Jason Peretz: Yeah, no, that’s it. That’s a good question. So, in terms of the CRM, as you could imagine, finance, legal and working with sales, right? So, I work with our head of sales and I, I work with him at the negotiate stage. I’m pretty much, I should be always touching the CRM, right? And that’s, that’s not how it was before, but all our contracts, all our financial data now, it’s all really in, in our CRM, which is HubSpot.

[00:04:00] So, I’m always in it. It wasn’t always that way. I think we’ll talk about our journey to using to using the CRM

[00:04:07] Joe Michalowski: For sure. 

[00:04:08] Jason Peretz: and fully adopting it. But yeah, and it’s still, it’s always a work in progress, so we’re always trying to, like, do things better and, and mosaic has definitely helped with that, so. 

[00:04:21] Joe Michalowski: Love to hear it. I, as you alluded to, we’re definitely going to get into that because the, the reality is that, you know, Mosaic’s big, selling-wise, I, we ingest all this data and, like, helps you spit out, financial data helps you dig into your financial insights, but that starts with having clean data upfront. And so, we have prospects coming in, the biggest pain point that we hear over and over again is, you know, data chaos in the background.

[00:04:45] Joe Michalowski: And the CRM is inevitably, like, the biggest sticking point for that. It’s, it’s like, so customizable. There’s so much you can do with it, but it means, like, if you don’t have it set up or configured correctly, if you’re coming into a company as, like, a new finance leader and it’s not perfectly set up, like, you’re going to have a tough time.

[00:05:02] And so, I know from talking to our CS team that, you know, working with Mosaic, you’ve worked a lot on ARR data specifically, but before we get into, like, that sort of process, can you just talk about, like, that before times, you said you weren’t really using the CRM the way you’re using it now, so what was that like when you

[00:05:19] Jason Peretz: Yeah. 

[00:05:20] Joe Michalowski: first started?

[00:05:21] before we got to where we.

[00:05:23] Jason Peretz: Yeah. So, when we first started, I would say almost everything was in spreadsheets. So, your source of truth should really always be the CRM and our source of truth was just a spreadsheet or maybe a different spreadsheet every month, right? You just kind of like, always create things and then you forget about them and you recreate them

[00:05:50] and you’re like, “Oh, let’s update that. Let’s update that.” Especially when you’re in a software company where there’s not many employees and you’re wearing so many hats, um, 

[00:05:58] Joe Michalowski: Yep.

[00:05:59] Jason Peretz: it’s pretty tough. So, we were pretty much in spreadsheets. We did use the CRM, obviously here and there, but my first instinct before, you know, fi, three months ago or so, three to five months ago was, “Hey, let’s look at these spreadsheets for our source of truth.” So, yeah.

[00:06:21] Joe Michalowski: So, like, you ha, you had the CRM though, so it’s not like you, you didn’t have one and you had to use spreadsheets and then you moved into it. So, when you were making that, when that thought process was going through your head, like, “Hey, look, let’s look at the spreadsheet,” was it because there were just obvious gaps in the way your CRM was set up or that, like, you didn’t have time to address or is it just difficult and too time-consuming to go back and clean up that data?

[00:06:43] Like, what, what, how did you think about the CRM before you started cleaning it up?

[00:06:47] Jason Peretz: Yeah, no, that’s a, that’s a good question. So, before we cleaned it up, the CRM was kind of just being used by our head of sales and controlling his pipeline. We had CS using the CRM for onboarding workflows here and there, but they ended up not really fully adopting it either. Like, I, I’ve looked at the onboarding pipeline that they had created and it hadn’t really been touched in a few months or

[00:07:18] probably longer. So, it was, it was mainly used for sales, right? And we used HubSpot to store all the data on companies for, that were in the pipeline that had, you know, entered their information on our website, whatnot, on our contact list. So, it wasn’t being used really at all as a source of truth for ARR data, which is the most important thing now that it’s being used for.

[00:07:46] I guess there was one area where we were using it. You know, we had this column of our current ARR, but it’s kind of like, that was a secondary effect of, “Let me put everything in a spreadsheet and then update the CRM” versus, “Now all, everything works for me.” Right? Like, I was working for the CRM and now that we, have the CRM is working for us, 

[00:08:08] Jason Peretz: So. Yeah.

[00:08:11] Right, right. 

[00:08:11] Joe Michalowski: As it should, for sure that is what you want to get to, no doubt. I want to complete this picture of, like, the before times. 

[00:08:16] Jason Peretz: Right. 

[00:08:17] Joe Michalowski: So, I would love to know, you know, maybe, maybe it was monthly, whatever the cadence was when you’re trying to calculate ARR and you’re trying to track that, like, what does that process look like?

[00:08:26] How long did it take you? Like, you said, a lot of times you’re just building a new spreadsheet because, like, you know, some get lost and 

[00:08:32] Jason Peretz: Yeah. 

[00:08:33] Joe Michalowski: {..} would love to know, like, what the, the before situation looked like for them?

[00:08:36] Jason Peretz: Yeah.

[00:08:37] So, before it was just all being, I would just pull a data export from Stripe. We use Stripe for payment processing. So, I would pull a data export from Stripe and I would do all the revenue recognition myself. Then we hired an analyst and when we hired the analyst, his name is Mike, he’s incredible,

[00:08:58] he and I just decided, “Okay, we need to actually build a system for this.” And we built a revenue recognition system, so we have really good, good, really a good way of managing all of our, you know, ARR but, and it’s still in sheets for that, right? The revenue recognition, but historics, like, being able to have it in a system, 

[00:09:25] Joe Michalowski: 

[00:09:26] Jason Peretz: it’s totally different, right? Because Mosaic and hundred other softwares aren’t going to pull from my spreadsheet. They’re going to pull from my CRM, right? So, now the first thing that we do, like, in the middle of the month, and we have live data now, right? We didn’t have that before. It was, like, a once-in-a-month poll.

[00:09:42] So, so now it’s just, everything’s in the CRM and we can see everything real time, so it’s really nice. 

[00:09:48] Joe Michalowski: Awesome. It was, it sounds like,

[00:09:49] Jason Peretz: Yeah. 

[00:09:50] Joe Michalowski: so, I mean, one question I had was kind of the catalyst for making this change. I know you mentioned, 

[00:09:54] Jason Peretz: Right. 

[00:09:55] Joe Michalowski: you brought on that analyst and it sounds like, We really have to

[00:09:57] Jason Peretz: Yeah. 

What’s the Catalyst for Cleaning up the CRM?

[00:09:58] Joe Michalowski: does that mean the catalyst for making this jump to, like, finally getting the CRM in shape? Was it just getting somebody on board that had time to help you do it

[00:10:06] or was there some other, like, something happened where you were like, “Okay, like, this is getting ridiculous. We really have to change.”

[00:10:12] Jason Peretz: Right. It was a combination of that and then Mosaic, right? Is we weren’t, we signed up for Mosaic and once we signed up and, you know, we, we had to upload CSVs to Mosaic at the beginning and we saw that we just need to clean this up, you

[00:10:32] Joe Michalowski: Okay. 

[00:10:32] Jason Peretz: know? So, the catalyst was Mosaic and also having an analyst, having someone to help me because cleaning up a CRM is no joke.

[00:10:41] I mean, you have to go back and recreate your whole company from day zero, from the first sale because if you don’t do it that way, then it’s not, it’s still not going to pull the data correctly, right? So, one of the things, when I was talking with RCS rep at Mosaic is, we can also just do this and create it from 2020 on

[00:11:01] and I was just like, “Let’s just create it from,” you know, we started making money in pretty much 2019, “so let’s just create it from 

[00:11:07] Joe Michalowski: 

[00:11:09] Jason Peretz: 2019 on.” 

[00:11:10] Joe Michalowski: Um. 

[00:11:11] Jason Peretz: So, that was, that was a lot of work.

[00:11:13] Joe Michalowski: I, no doubt. I want to get into that because, you know, again, like I said, this is something that gets it really, I think it touches the heart of a lot of the people that come onto Mosaic and, like, great that, you know, we can be a catalyst for people to kind of clean those things up. But I mean, if you’re gonna pay for software, you might as well get

[00:11:30] the most out of it. So, it’s not like you’re going to sit there and upload those CSVs all the time. You want to use Mosaic for the things it’s going to be used for.

[00:11:35] Jason Peretz: Right. 

[00:11:36] Totally. So, I liked what you said, before I get into, like, the how of all this, I really liked what you said about, like, you could have just started in 2020,

[00:11:45] Joe Michalowski: where you were like, “You know what? Let’s, let’s do the whole thing. Let’s go back. Let’s go all the way back to 2019.” I’d love before we get into, like, the nuts and bolts of that CRM cleanup, I’d love to hear how you think about kind of laying a foundation for data integrity and data efficiency for Galley, because that’s gotta be the only reason why you would say, “Okay, like, let’s go through the pain of actually doing it from day one.”

[00:12:09] otherwise, like the easy way out, obviously, you’d save yourself some time and some headaches. So, curious how you think about that for, for Galleys future?

[00:12:16] Jason Peretz: Yeah, I mean, now, right now we have a system. We didn’t really have a, you know, a system before, so the source of truth was living in spreadsheets, now everything’s in the CRM, right? So, when you’re talking about data integrity, you pretty much have every piece of information you want in our CRM. So, you have their contract, you have their products, you have their ARR, you have that history.

[00:12:42] Joe Michalowski: Yep.

[00:12:42] Jason Peretz: And actually, we don’t even use HubSpot’s, like, our CRM’s dashboards, we just use Mosaic. Like, we don’t, we don’t use the dash, it’s just really nice to see it all in Mosaic, right? Because it’s just all linked there. 

[00:12:56] Joe Michalowski: Yep. 

[00:12:57] Jason Peretz: So, we have all that financial data in Mosaic, but you know, I used to get slack messages, emails, whatnot,

[00:13:04] Jason Peretz: “Hey, what products are these people using? Hey,” you know, whatever it was and now it’s just, all the data’s right there. So, super important. We’re still constantly improving things, right? Like, we’re not perfect. We still have work to do on our end. This is a newer thing for us, cleaning up the CRM. It’s not old.

[00:13:21] It’s not like we did it a year ago and we’re just experts. But we, when you work at ton in a few amount of months, you get really familiar, so. 

[00:13:32] Joe Michalowski: Awesome. I think that last point, working over the last few months, that, that’s kind of where I wanted to get to. It’s like, what, that’s kind of the meat of this topic, right? It’s like, yeah, great, everybody should be on board with, “we need to get our CRM cleaned up.” This all sounds great. The end, the end result sounds amazing.

[00:13:49] The, the middle part where you actually have to go through and do this work, I’m sure was not easy, so I’d love, I’d love to start with, like, some of the steps you had to take. So, like day one, 

[00:14:00] Jason Peretz: Right. 

[00:14:01] Joe Michalowski: you’re sitting down with your CSM and you both kind of agree, like, “Great, 2019, we’re going all the way back. We’re going to rebuild this thing.”

[00:14:09] Where do you start? Like, what do you have to do on step one? 

The Process of Cleaning Up a CRM

[00:14:11] Jason Peretz: Yeah, no, that’s a good question. Step one

[00:14:15] is, first of all, you kind of have to clear out your pipelines, right? ‘Cause I don’t, I don’t really know exactly how Salesforce works, but I know for HubSpot, you really have to have this idea of a sales pipeline and a renewal pipeline. And then you have to go back and you have every single customer in your customer base and you have to recreate that journey.

[00:14:38] So, literally your starting point is the first customer. 

[00:14:42] So, you take the first customer and you get their first contract, you put in the CRM, you put it in the renewal pipeline and you just keep going. And we got it so clean now that it’s to the day, like, the first contract starts May 30th, 2019, ends May 29th,

[00:15:01] you know, 2020, again, the next renewal starts in May, you know, et cetera. So, we got it down to the day, so it’s super clean because if you overlap that day, what we learned is that it just double counts the MRR for one month, or the ARR for one month or MRR for one, one month, if you’re looking at it that way.

[00:15:21] Joe Michalowski: Yup. 

[00:15:22] Jason Peretz: So, it’s kind of frustrating and that’s what we did. And we don’t have, we’re an ERP system, so we have, you know, our customers pay us a, a good amount of the subscription, right, a high subscription 

[00:15:35] Joe Michalowski: Yup. 

[00:15:35] Jason Peretz: amount, but we don’t have that many customers, so we actually only went through about, like, 300 or so contracts, I would say, maybe a little more, so yeah. 

[00:15:46] Joe Michalowski: Yeah. I mean,

[00:15:47] Jason Peretz: But, 

[00:15:47] Joe Michalowski: thank God you didn’t have, like, high volume, like, 

[00:15:50] Jason Peretz: right. Yeah. 

[00:15:51] Joe Michalowski: a thousands of customers to go through. It’s still pain, but less pain than it could have been. 

[00:15:54] Jason Peretz: Yeah. I mean, the, yeah, that would have been a big pain, but even with our smaller customer base, it still is a pain because one customer has multiple contracts most of the time, right? So, it’s, it’s kinda tough. 

[00:16:10] Joe Michalowski: Yeah, I can imagine. I don’t envy you or, or your CSM, but it’s a great topic to keep kind of digging into. I’m curious, I know everything was living in spreadsheets, but 

[00:16:21] Jason Peretz: Yeah. 

[00:16:22] Joe Michalowski: I want to give you the benefit of the doubt and say that your spreadsheets were immaculate, the most perfect spreadsheets we’ve ever seen, but I’m guessing that, guessing there might’ve been a gap here or there, like,

[00:16:34] did you run into any issues where it was like, “Yeah, we gotta put these contracts in, but I’m missing X, Y, and Z data.” Like, did you find things that were missing? And if you did, like, how did you, how do you handle that when you’re so far after the fact?

[00:16:46] Jason Peretz: Um, so you’re talking about, like, if I was missing a contract or missing, like, 

[00:16:54] specifically, what are you talking? Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:16:57] Joe Michalowski: If there’s data point that you’re trying to get historicals on or is it just like, “We put in whatever we have and, like, I wish we had some extra data, but like, you know, we just don’t have that about this customer.” 

[00:17:05] Jason Peretz: No, we, we had all the data, right? Because we went all the way back and we pulled every single invoice from Stripe 2, so that we had all, we had all of our data. So, the spreadsheets are, were pretty accurate, right? But there’s just a small margin of error, just when you have spreadsheets and you’re making updates.

[00:17:26] Especially when it went back to, like, 2018 and 2019 before, before I was there, right? So, I shouldn’t have said 2019. We started making money May, 2018, but it wasn’t a lot, right? Like, at that point we had, before, when I came, came to the company, I think we had 10 or so, 15 customers around that. So it

[00:17:45] Jason Peretz: was, wasn’t a lot. But, yeah.

[00:17:48] So, there was some data that was just kind of recreated in the past for that, but it’s just not even material now, right? 

[00:17:55] Joe Michalowski: Right Um, to piggyback off of that, is there, when you got first got to Galley, you know, if you noticed that maybe there’s something up with the contracts that just wasn’t in perfect shape and, like, what, was there something in particular you remember having to change, moving forward to get that data in a good spot?

[00:18:12] Is there anything that was missing in those first, like, 10 to 15 contracts that you’re like, “Okay, like, we gotta, we gotta update this moving forward.”

[00:18:19] Jason Peretz: Yeah. I mean, we’ve just, we’ve done since, since, since I got here in 2019, we’ve done so much work, like, in the product, packaging our product, you know? We, we keep improving, like, we spent pretty much all of last year looking at how people use our product to package it correctly and it’s really tough.

[00:18:39] And I remember, actually, talking to Joe about this, like, a year ago, right? At, at Mosaic and he said, “You guys gotta get on that” because, you know, now we’re at a point and we’re still working on this, but probably in the next month or month or so, we’ll be able to understand our, you know, product packaging even better

[00:19:00] and our skews. Because we didn’t have a concept about before, right? It’s like someone signs a contract, it’s X amount per month and that was it. At the, at the point in time, right? Obviously, a lot has changed since then, but, yeah, I would say that definitely packaging the product is, you know, huge. 

[00:19:20] Joe Michalowski: Gotcha. I’m going to come back to that point because there’s a question I’m going to ask about, kind of getting more granular, but before I get there, curious that, one thing I’ve heard from our CSMs a lot is that just by going through this process of cleaning up that historical data, you kind of like learn a lot more about your business.

[00:19:37] Like, you’re just forced to look at all of this stuff on such a 

[00:19:39] Jason Peretz: Yeah. 

[00:19:40] Joe Michalowski: deep level. Were there any, like, surprising insights that you uncovered about Galley that you were like, “Oh, like, this is a really good thing that I can bring, you know, to our sales leaders,” something, is there anything that’s stood out to you

[00:19:51] based on this project?

[00:19:53] Not too much because I’ve pretty much been here

[00:19:55] Joe Michalowski: It’s probably a good thing to be honest. 

[00:19:57] Jason Peretz: since, yeah, I, I’ve pretty much been here since, like, very early, right? So, I’ve kind of been here through all the ups and downs, all these conversations. I’m assuming if someone else wants to jump in and if it wasn’t me and was to recreate this, they would probably be more objective and learn more from the whole process. 

[00:20:19] You know, we, we, our platform changes a lot, right?

[00:20:23] Like, we used to, we actually used to sell to SMBs and, you know, mid-market customers, now we sell to enterprise customers. So, it’s, it’s totally different, right? It’s just, it’s just totally different.

[00:20:37] Especially when you’re looking at these, some of these older contracts, the deal value was just much, it’s, it just changed. That’s all. So, product change too, right? Like, it’s really tough building an ERP system. Really tough, 

[00:20:53] so. 

[00:20:54] Joe Michalowski: No doubt, actually, it’s probably a really good point. I think a, a lot of times when we talk to people, they’re like, the first finance hire, like, in, like, things just weren’t in place and so they’re trying to get caught up to speed. 

[00:21:05] Probably a real boon for you to have been in that position so long

[00:21:08] and you do have that context about the business by, you know, it’s still not an easy project, but maybe slightly easier than someone coming in completely blind to all of the things that have changed over the time. So, that’s probably a really good point to make, too. 

[00:21:21] Jason Peretz: Right. Right. Totally.

[00:21:22] Joe Michalowski: Uh, yeah. So, you know, obviously I, not a Mosaic plug at all, but I want to kind of round out the, we, we kind of got through the tough parts of, like, taking the steps to clean up that data, going back to the beginning and, you know, the end goal is to change the way you track and calculate ARR, so,

[00:21:40] can you just compare, like, what, what the cadence is, of looking at ARR now is compared to what it was before and, you know, how that’s helped you? Like, what are the benefits that you’ve gotten from{..}? 

Finance Processes Before vs. After CRM Cleanup

[00:21:50] Jason Peretz: Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, it’s just, first of all, number one, it saves so much time because I did spend a lot of time, like, pointing people to spreadsheets and to information and whatnot. You know, now it’s super easy because I just make everybody a Mosaic account and I’m like, “Here it is. Don’t ask me any more questions.

[00:22:11] Here’s the number,” you know? And it’s just right there. So, it’s, it’s really easy. There’s no questions like, what’s our NDR, what’s our gross dollar churn, blah, blah, blah, right? Like, there’s no, I haven’t had a question, actually, in the last month about that. So, it’s all there, right? So, that’s changed a lot and it’s been super important because now I can see, you know, we didn’t really have a good way of tracking expansion

[00:22:38] and churn because it’s all on spreadsheets, so it just be me creating another spreadsheet, another spreadsheet, another spreadsheet. Now it’s all in HubSpot. So, HubSpot’s telling a story of every single customer, aggregating it all together and then Mosaic pulling that data. It’s really, like, seamless, so I don’t have to think about it anymore.

[00:22:58] Joe Michalowski: Uh, love to hear that. I would love, uh, 

[00:23:00] Jason Peretz: Yeah. 

[00:23:01] Joe Michalowski: you know, probably clip something and get to send it to the team and just get to put in, like, customer feedback and let everyone here, you know, the benefit of the hard work here, but, you know, getting finance or in your case, a chief business officer out of, like, the ad hoc hell, just the constant, like, one-off questions, where it’s like, “Okay, like, let me go dig into

[00:23:20] five spreadsheets to find the one answer for you this one time.” Uh, if we can do that for people at Mosaic, I think we’re in pretty good shape, so 

[00:23:27] glad, uh. 

[00:23:28] Jason Peretz: Yeah, especially, especially when you’re going out for funding. 

[00:23:32] Joe Michalowski: Yes. 

[00:23:33] Jason Peretz: Like, that’s, it’s, you know, night and day difference. 

[00:23:38] Joe Michalowski: 

[00:23:39] Jason Peretz: So, it’s really tough, right? Going out for funding before we were just, I was just creating a bunch of spreadsheets to give people information. And I didn’t actually know all the information to give people or invest, investors, perspective investors, whatever, whatever you call it,

[00:23:55] but like, I would just, sometimes they’d ask, “Hey, what’s this number? What’s your gross dollar churn?” And the first time we went out for funding I didn’t even have that spreadsheet put together, right? So, you just have to put it

[00:24:07] together. Now there’s a metric. I just can pull it. There’s like a metric library that just pulls from HubSpot,

[00:24:14] so. 

[00:24:16] Yeah. And we 

[00:24:16] actually. 

[00:24:17] Joe Michalowski: Give me a, week. I’ll go build that spreadsheet real quick. 

[00:24:19] Jason Peretz: Yeah, no, really. It was like, yeah,

[00:24:22] we’ll get that answer to you in five days. And that happened all the time. So, we actually did our, I mean, we have a big announcement to make, hopefully soon, don’t want to jinx, jinx anything, but we did our fundraising rounds without Mosaic and, you know, even this most recent one that, you know, might come soon,

[00:24:46] it was all in spreadsheets. So, now that I have Mosaic, you know, I’m just kind of hitting myself on the head and I’m like, “Damn. Why 

[00:24:54] Jason Peretz: didn’t I have this before?” 

[00:24:55] Joe Michalowski: Just go raise another round. Just get just so, 

[00:24:57] Jason Peretz: Yeah. 

[00:24:58] Joe Michalowski: just go raise some more money just for the fun of it. Just go use it. 

[00:25:00] Jason Peretz: Yeah. It would just be me clicking ‘Export png’ 12 times and there’s my slide deck, so. 

[00:25:07] Love to hear it. Yeah. 

[00:25:08] Joe Michalowski: Love to hear it. A preemptive congratulations, so knock on wood. I’m not going to knock ‘cause 

[00:25:11] Jason Peretz: Yeah. 

[00:25:12] Joe Michalowski: you’ll hear everything, but quietly

[00:25:13] Jason Peretz: Yeah. 

[00:25:14] Joe Michalowski: knocking on wood. And that’s amazing. So, the question I wanted to roll back to, you mentioned a little bit ago was like, kind of the difference between the, like, the granularity of data you had at the beginning when it was just like, “Hey, here’s, like, the contracted dollar amount”

[00:25:28] and now, like, the amount of information you have, something that we’ve talked about a lot, like, for articles, when I talk to people internally, there’s like a delicate balance. I’ve heard that you don’t want to add too many, like, required fields for sales. Like, you don’t want to make life too difficult for the people that are inputting data, but you also want to be able to get

[00:25:48] really granular financial information. So, how, how have you thought about kind of playing those two sides? Especially since, like, you’re so close to sales, like, you don’t, you’re not just the finance guy in the back.

[00:25:59] Jason Peretz: Right. No, that’s, that’s totally right. We still need to do a better job at that, right? We do have, we do say a lot of the time, “Oh my God. Let’s create a property of this, like this, and let’s grab it in HubSpot” and then you have, like, hundreds of properties in HubSpot, right? It’s just inevitable.

[00:26:16] It’ll just keep happening here and there. In terms of ARR, nobody touches except for our team, right? Nobody touches dollar amounts, so when contracts get signed and I guess, I don’t know if this is advice for other teams, have somebody own the dollars and owned, own the dates because that’s where things get really messed up. If you accidentally date something wrong, put a wrong dollar amount, think, “Oh, this be calculated as MRR instead of ARR,” I don’t know how everybody calculates in HubSpot, it could mess things up. So, having kind of like a, a dedicated team, I would say it’s called RevOps, right? I would say it’s revenue operations.

[00:27:05] That owns the, the metrics in HubSpot is really important because you can’t expect every single sales person BDR, AE, you know, director, VP to, you know, care enough and you don’t want them to think about making sure the dollar’s correct or the dates correct, you want them to sell. So, I think that’s, like, the biggest thing

[00:27:32] and that’s what we’ve kind of adopted here, is that nobody’s touching those dollar amounts in that closed one column. No one’s touching the dollar amounts or the dates in that renewal pipeline and that’s it. Right? You dedicate that to one person or one team, so. 

[00:27:48] Joe Michalowski: Makes a ton of sense. I think, 

[00:27:49] Jason Peretz: Yeah. 

[00:27:50] Joe Michalowski: we did, uh, we did, a webinar about, like, the finance-sales relationship, at one point. We had a director of RevOps, RevOps on it, his name was Brian Schmitz 

[00:27:57] Jason Peretz: Oh, cool. 

[00:27:57] Joe Michalowski: from logDNA. And that, that was his point exactly. I think you could tell, like, I think someone in that role takes a lot of pride in being that kind of bridge between what finance wants and what sales needs to do, which is sell and

[00:28:11] I think, I think, based on what he said, spot on, it’s the exact same thing. It’s just, you want those salespeople focused on selling and if a RevOps person can, can make that a smoother transition, so finance gets what they want, need to, makes a ton of sense. And so, 

[00:28:27] Jason Peretz: Yeah, 

[00:28:27] Joe Michalowski: love that. 

[00:28:29] Jason Peretz: And started early 

[00:28:30] Joe Michalowski: Yeah. 

[00:28:31] Jason Peretz: or else, or else you’re going to have to do what I did 

[00:28:34] Joe Michalowski: Yep.

[00:28:34] Jason Peretz: and what we did, which is recreate the past and I don’t think we’re the first company that did that, so. 

[00:28:42] Joe Michalowski: No, I think, I don’t think you’re even the first Mosaic customer, to do that I think it’s a 

[00:28:46] Jason Peretz: No, I don’t 

[00:28:46] think so. Actually, when, when I, when we just signed for Mosaic, Caden, the CR,CR,CSM at Mosaic said that we were in, like, the 50th percentile of clean data and I was just thinking to myself, “Wow. People probably

[00:29:03] Joe Michalowski: No. 

[00:29:04] Jason Peretz: have nothing in their CRM then, because ours wasn’t great, so.” 

[00:29:09] Joe Michalowski: Yeah. Like I said, even just listening to, like, gong calls, it’s a, it’s a revelation to hear people, it’s just, you know, I, I work in marketing, like, it’s just sad to hear people be like, “It’s, it’s distressing.” It’s like, wow, like, this is a huge pain point for people and, you know, I, I think that’s kind of where I want to take us next.

[00:29:27] You gave a couple pieces of advice for people going through this process, but I’d love to, to push and, like, maybe have another one, takeaways from going through this process yourself, something that, maybe you learned, like, after the fact that’s like, “Oh, if I had to do this again, like, at another company, here’s maybe what I would have done instead.” 

Advice for Maintaining CRM Hygiene

[00:29:45] Jason Peretz: Yeah. I mean, you’re always going to learn so much, especially in these situations, starting early at a company and with just seeing the growth and being there for the growth, but I would definitely start the co, like, just a process, right, of how to set up the CRM and update the CRM early. Because if you have to do it the way that we did it and probably,

[00:30:14] I dunno, I bet you like 80%, 90% of companies, especially startups, are just, I think I said 50% before and I’m, I’m pretty sure it’s more, right? They’ve just, you don’t think about these things in the beginning and then when you have to recreate the past, you really kick yourself and you’re just like, “Wow, why couldn’t we do this before?”

[00:30:37] So, I think setting that up and making that important early is just going to save you so much time and money later on. And it’s mostly, and it’s time that’s the money, right? It’s just, it’s a lot of manual work that you can’t get around. It’s really hard to automate, fixing the past with a bunch of PDF contracts. Really hard to do that. 

[00:30:59] Joe Michalowski: Automating the passwords require having the data set up and, like, that’s, that’s the crux of the issue. It’s like, you don’t have the data set up, it’s like, what are you automating without it? Nothing. You’re in trouble. Um, so I think that’s a great piece of advice.

[00:31:11] Jason Peretz: Yeah,

[00:31:11] I think that’s the biggest thing. And seen people post about this on LinkedIn before, too, right? I don’t think I’m the first person saying this, but I saw the people posting about this on LinkedIn probably six months ago when 

[00:31:24] Joe Michalowski: Like, “Uh.”

[00:31:25] Jason Peretz: you’re just super busy, you know, trying to, you know, do everything.

[00:31:29] So, yeah. 

[00:31:31] Joe Michalowski: JP, maybe you’re going to be the voice that people hear and instead of that six months that they spend saying, “Ah, I’ll get to that later,” maybe you’re going to be the one that gets them over the edge and they’re gonna be like, “You know what?” 

[00:31:41] Jason Peretz: Do I have that 

[00:31:42] good of a voice? 

[00:31:43] Joe Michalowski: I think so. 

[00:31:44] Jason Peretz: Yeah. 

[00:31:45] Joe Michalowski: I think you’re all set. I think they’re going to hear it,

[00:31:46] they’re going to go. “Okay. I think JP is right. I got to get on this. I think we’re going to be all set.” Uh.

[00:31:51] Jason Peretz: Well, I hope I can convince everybody. And maybe they’ll hear it or the next person will hear it when they start their company or when they just sign their first customer, so. 

[00:32:02] Joe Michalowski: Yeah, founder, founder alert everywhere. Just, the day you put 

[00:32:05] Jason Peretz: Yeah. 

[00:32:05] Joe Michalowski: put that CRM in place, like, get this figured out. 

[00:32:08] Jason Peretz: Yeah, 

[00:32:09] Joe Michalowski: Hire JP to to do it, maybe he’ll consult for you and get it figured out. 

[00:32:12] Jason Peretz: Yeah. And honestly, like, there’s, there’s so much material out there to teach you this too. So, the way we did it, was we YouTube a bunch of things, we talked to, actually, mostly just our CSM at Mosaic and he’s like, “Yeah, this is how we’ve seen other customers do it.” I’m like, “Great. We’ll just do it that way.”

[00:32:31] And we actually used Mosaic to audit our CRM, so, yeah. So, if I had a date wrong, I would see something’s off in Mosaic and I’m, hover over a customer and that, we actually did it that way. 

[00:32:45] Joe Michalowski: Nice. Love to hear it. Love to hear it. Yeah. I mean, spoiler alert, uh, you know, I told you before we start recording this, that my, my goal is to start building some of those resources from Mosaic. I think we have, like, most of our CS team is, like, 

[00:33:00] Jason Peretz: Right. 

[00:33:00] Joe Michalowski: they deal with this every day. Like, they’re seeing it in so many different customers

[00:33:03] and so there’s a clear need for people to have resources to get this done. Obviously, like, first and foremost, it’s the decision to take the time to actually do it, so everything you’re saying about like, starting early is, it’s spot on, but it’s like, “Okay, well, what if I did? And, like, now what do I do? “And so, I think everything we’ve talked about so far is super helpful for that work that I want to do to build that out,

[00:33:24] so I just want to say thank you for, for all the insight, 

[00:33:27] um. 

[00:33:28] Jason Peretz: Of course. And I’m, I’m happy to help you guys because you guys helped us so much, so.

[00:33:32] Joe Michalowski: Sweet 

[00:33:33] Jason Peretz: up exactly how we did it, except I think

[00:33:35] Joe Michalowski: Oof. 

[00:33:35] Jason Peretz: that we did it exactly how you guys told us to do it, so. 

[00:33:39] Joe Michalowski: I’ll, uh, I’ll let you. 

[00:33:41] Jason Peretz: Maybe you already have that written. 

[00:33:42] Joe Michalowski: I’ll let you focus on Galley and I’ll make Caden, uh, walk you through the whole process, so, like, save you some time. So, now this is amazing. I know, you know, we’ve been talking for a bit, so I want to get to the one last question that, that we ask

[00:33:53] Jason Peretz: Yeah. 

[00:33:54] Joe Michalowski: everyone that comes on. Nothing to do with CRMs, unless you want it to,

[00:33:58] just what is something you, you know now that you wish you knew when you started your career in this finance sort of legal businesses world?

Finance Career Advice from Jason Peretz

[00:34:06] Jason Peretz:  I hope this doesn’t sound too basic, but startups and software and SaaS is really hard, but anybody can do. That’s kinda, like, the thing that I always think about, I don’t have, like, a engineering background or anything. You know, and you see, before I got into software, right, I started at Jack in a Box Corporate, worked in Corporate Counsel,

[00:34:32] before I, like, got into software, you always see these companies all the time, you know, landing these massive rounds, being worth billions of dollars and the ideas, they come up with sound super simple, like, some of them, right? It’s like Venmo, right? It’s like, 

[00:34:52] Jason Peretz: even, there’s so many of these types of software, even some B2B platforms, which are super simple and you don’t realize until you work in SaaS, how hard it really is to get to that level and how hard it really is to build a system to scale. And I would say that, you know, anybody can kind of do it, any, there’s so much information on the internet, it’s just really hard. And, and don’t be deceived when you see a super simple idea, someone raising all this money,

[00:35:27] building it to massive scale. They worked really hard to do that, so.

[00:35:35] I don’t think that’s too basic at 

[00:35:36] Joe Michalowski: all. I think that’s great. I mean, it’s, it’s the reality, is like, yeah, you could, you can do it too, it’s just, you gotta work really hard at it. I think that’s a perfectly fine lesson to to be 

[00:35:44] taken away. 

[00:35:44] Jason Peretz: Yeah. And it’s not just, I say it’s, it’s really hard because it’s just, it’s not just hard work, it’s smart work too, right? But, just the concept and the competition and everything around it, it’s makes it really hard, so. 

[00:35:59] Joe Michalowski: Yeah, no doubt. 

[00:36:01] Well, amazing. I appreciate you indulging me. It’s, it’s my favorite question to ask. I mean, I love getting in the weeds of the finance stuff, but I enjoy when somebody comes on and as somebody that does content, works in marketing, can apply a lot of this stuff to my own position. It’s really not just a finance thing,

[00:36:18] it never is that anytime somebody comes on, so appreciate you indulging. 

[00:36:21] Jason Peretz: I’m, I’m glad to hear that. 

[00:36:23] Joe Michalowski: Yeah. So, love it. So, as we come up on time, I want to give you your time to shine here. So, where, where can people go to connect with you, JP, learn more about Galley, the work you’re doing? You can plug anything you want if it’s unrelated, whatever your time to, it’s your floor.

[00:36:38] Jason Peretz: Yeah. I mean, you, if, if anyone wants to connect with me, they can just send me a message on LinkedIn. I actually read pretty much all my messages there. Um, you know, some of it’s spammy, but I get through most of it. And then if you want to go learn more about Galley, just go to www.galleysolutions.com  

[00:36:58] Yeah. So, you can submit your information there, learn more about us. We’re, we’re very similar to you guys, where we replaced spreadsheets. Right? 

[00:37:07] Joe Michalowski: Everybody wants to replace a spreadsheet. Last thing, I’ve last 

[00:37:10] follow-up question. 

[00:37:11] Jason Peretz: We do bunch of work, but we do replace spread, we do replace spreadsheets, so. 

[00:37:15] Joe Michalowski: Everybody, I think I would pitch the Mosaic the exact same way. Last, last, super quick question. Are you on the “Spreadsheets must die” sort of train or like a, “We must live with spreadsheets forever and we want some help,” like.

[00:37:27] Jason Peretz: I used to live on spreadsheets probably until, you know, just a few months ago, I would say. So, I’m starting to move to “spreadsheets most die,” especially a Jack in the Box Corporate, I remember I was living in spreadsheets, I mean, period integrated with our excel, right? 

[00:37:50] Joe Michalowski: Yup. 

[00:37:51] Jason Peretz: So, it was all spreadsheets.

[00:37:53] Um, you know, now I’m definitely headed the other direction, especially after seeing what’s out there and this kind of, like, new wave of software, mean, just, it’s amazing. I can’t wait to, like, public companies can use stuff like Mosaic and other tools, so. 

[00:38:11] Joe Michalowski: Yeah, finance, finance deserves more than a blank spreadsheet to work in and that is, 

[00:38:15] Jason Peretz: Yeah. 

[00:38:16] Joe Michalowski: that is the truth. 

[00:38:17] Jason Peretz: I mean, ultimately, right, at Jack in the Box Corp, like, we, all your work is done in a spreadsheet. So, when you’re publishing a SOX report or whatever for your food cost budget for the next year, it’s all in a spreadsheet and that’s literally, 

[00:38:31] Joe Michalowski: 

[00:38:32] Jason Peretz: it was, this was in 2015. So, I don’t know how much change since then,

[00:38:38] but, yeah. 

[00:38:40] Joe Michalowski: I’m going to guess, not a lot, but, maybe, maybe somebody from Jack in the Box that’s still there can, can email me and correct me if I’m wrong. I’d love to talk to them too, so if you’re out there. 

[00:38:48] Jason Peretz: Yeah. I mean.

[00:38:49] Joe Michalowski: Hit me up. 

[00:38:50] They 

[00:38:50] Jason Peretz: we’re an amazing team, so. 

[00:38:52] Joe Michalowski: Yeah. Awesome. 

[00:38:52] Jason Peretz: Amazing people to work with, so. 

[00:38:54] Joe Michalowski: Cool. Well, thank you. Thank you so much, again, for joining. Really appreciate you taking the time to be with us today.

[00:39:01] Yeah, it was great having you on The Roll Forward and hope we can do it again some other time. 

[00:39:05] Jason Peretz: All right. Thank you so much, Joe. Appreciate it. 

[00:39:07] Joe Michalowski: Alright. Bye, JP.