Those who’ve been around Simwood a while will know we’ve never really gone in for fancy job titles or buzzword bingo. “Chief Revenue Officer” is definitely one of those. Yet here we are.
Today I’m delighted (and, if I’m honest, slightly amused) to say that Simwood has hired a CRO: Raj Dass.
Why? Because for 30 years we’ve been a bunch of engineers, misfits and contrarians who accidentally built a multi-continent carrier while ranting about how the industry is broken. That has served us pretty well. But there comes a point where “build amazing stuff and hope people notice” stops being a strategy and starts being wilful negligence.
Our recent non-survey survey made that painfully clear. You told us that you trust our technology and reliability to an almost ridiculous degree; that you rate our call quality and latency; and that even those who were fairly venomous about other things weren’t questioning the fundamentals. That brought a tear to my eye. It also confirmed what we knew in our bones: we’re world-class at logical, engineering-led stuff.
Where you quite rightly kicked us was around some of the fuzzier, human bits. Being efficient, API-first and heavily automated doesn’t help us there because, perversely, if we did require loads of forms filling in and took months to do anything, you’d have multiple touch points with an account manager. We don’t, so you don’t and that’s on me.
While I love spending time with our customers solving complex problems, to be perfectly blunt, I don’t own any golf bats and have zero inclination to dress like a 1950s American. However, most of our competitors do and they’re very good at it. Just because they do better than us on the entertainment side of things, and we’re objectively better at everything service depends on, doesn’t mean we can’t and shouldn’t be better at relationships too.
The survey made it pretty clear that because we’ve been weak in this area, many customers and more potential customers also don’t know all they should know about Simwood. A depressingly large number of you didn’t even know about things like our 100% SLA with chunky credits, simply because we haven’t exactly shouted about it since it was last relevant (our last outage) back in 2018! Again, if we had service volatility anywhere near our competitors (and ignoring the fact I’d have shot myself long ago) you’d have spoken to your account manager lots more and be intimately familiar with our SLA. Perhaps that’s why they don’t have one? When people who love what you do don’t know all you actually offer, that’s not “being modest”; that’s commercial incompetence.
Raj is here to fix that. He’s spent his career running and scaling sales and commercial teams in the same worlds we inhabit – telecoms, cloud, SaaS, contact centres – at some very credible carriers, and Bandwidth. Where I see a beautiful network and a chance to refactor a stack, he sees process, pipeline and how to turn opportunity into a delighted customer not to mention contracted, invoiced and paid revenue
We need both!
The polished corporate speak version of that is that Raj will “own the revenue engine end-to-end” – customer success, sales, marketing, partnerships, the works. That means:
- Being much more deliberate about who we serve and how, based on what you told us in the survey rather than our own navel-gazing.
- Building a grown-up, data-driven commercial process without turning us into everything we hate.
- Making sure existing customers get more value and competitive advantage from what we already do, and that we’re not the world’s best-kept secret in the very niches where we’re objectively strongest.
If you’re a competitor, you’ll probably see the same RFPs, but with Simwood turning up a bit more organised and a bit less apologetic. We’ve already been quietly enjoying a very healthy win rate against some very large incumbents in certain areas; adding someone whose full-time job is to systematise that should make life interesting.
If you’re now worried Simwood is “selling out”, hiring a CRO, and next week I’ll be on LinkedIn posting selfies or inspirational quotes over stock photos of city skylines – relax.
We’re not suddenly about to start charging dirty origin surcharges, disabling our nuisance call filters so the grannies amongst your base get fleeced, or dropping our fraud mitigation so you get fleeced, or indeed any of the other objectionable behaviour of our peers we’ve been calling out for years. We’re not going to be flying round the world with cuddly toys. Moreover, we won’t be spamming you inviting you for a coffee every 5 minutes! The survey reinforced that what you value most about us is integrity, reliability, professionalism, quality, and technical leadership. That doesn’t change because we’ve finally admitted revenue deserves an adult in the room and want to raise our game in our weakest area to match the areas we lead.
Raj is joining us because he likes what we are, not because he wants to turn us into the thing we’ve spent decades railing against.
If you filled in the survey: thank you. You gave us the permission structure – and the kick – to do things like this, not as vanity hires but as deliberate steps towards being the company you told us you want us to be.
If you’re a customer, partner, or someone who has meant to talk to us but never quite got round to it, expect to see more of Raj. If you’re on the other side of the table, running revenue for a carrier and wondering why your deals are suddenly a bit more competitive – well, you might be seeing more of him too.
Please join me in welcoming Raj (he starts on April 13th). And if you catch me using terms like “GTM” and “pipeline” unironically in conversation, you have my permission to remind me where we come from.
PS, nobody you know in his new team has gone anywhere. Amy, Parnita, Mariam, Tekla and David are still here. Pete who valiantly led them in his spare time remains CCO and will still be involved in commercial discussions where appropriate. His second C has varied between Compliance, Commercial, and my insult-du-jour, but he needs to be able to focus on the very important other things he does, without being bullied by ambitious and capable ladies! I’m very grateful to him for taking us the first leg along this path and getting us ready for Raj.
