John Breul: Building Smarter Partnerships with AI, ERPs, and Hyperscalers

John Breul - Catalyst Summit SF
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[00:00:00] John Breul: Sometimes when we get down the line and you're getting to that procurement stage and like you're like, oh my gosh, this is gonna delay my deal.

[00:00:08] John Breul: If they find out we're transactable in marketplace and like maybe our competitor isn't, they're like, oh, we're definitely doing that. Yeah. And I know how to do that. We can do that. And 15 minutes. So we're doing that. And so that's been pretty interesting and pretty powerful actually.

[00:00:26] Chip Rodgers: Hey everyone, Chip Rodgers. We're back for another episode of Inside Partnering and, gosh, I'm so excited to be talking to John Breul.

Uh, John, welcome.

[00:00:34] John Breul: thanks. Hey, thanks for having me, Chip. Yeah.

[00:00:37] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. So John is, vice president of global Software Alliances for FloQast. And, uh, FloQast has been just terrific, right? a lot of growth through 800 and 800 plus employees and global company. And, you've, your background is.

[00:00:58] Chip Rodgers: A number of technology [00:01:00] companies going back to I think BMC, early days, way back. Yeah. BMC back the day, Workday and, um, uh, FinancialForce Yeah. Force. Yep. Yeah. And, always in partnerships and working with working with partners. just really excited to have you join John.

[00:01:17] John Breul: Yeah, thanks for having me.

[00:01:18] John Breul: And, yeah, lot, lots of partner, experience to talk about. I started my career in sales actually. But yeah, that, that whole string you just listed was all the partner world.

[00:01:29] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. That's terrific. So tell me a little bit about your role at FloQast. Let's start there. what is it that you're focusing on and what are your, some of your initiatives going on these days?

[00:01:40] John Breul: Yeah, so at FloQast, I lead, like my title indicates the Software Technology Alliances team, and that really is the partners that we work with in three main buckets. It's the, other FinTech ISVs that are complimentary to FloQast. We we're a, we're a accounting transformation platform that helps our companies, the accounting teams, that our companies basically streamline [00:02:00] their core processes, like close and compliance and now a lot of things that they're doing with AI to automate some of that, reconciliation.

[00:02:08] John Breul: And When you think about that, there's a group of ISVs that we partner with, around that. and we can streamline their processes by having better integrations and just a better, better together story there. We also work with the ERPs, we integrate with all of the kind of big ERPs.

[00:02:26] John Breul: So you think about the SAP, Microsoft Sage, Intacct, Workday, some of the even more industry specific ones like Yardi and LL Tech. and then, also our we have a, relationship with AWS and Hyperscaler marketplace side. Yeah.

[00:02:42] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. So those three. Three sort of pillars of, yeah.

[00:02:47] Chip Rodgers: So let's start, I wanna dive into the ERP folks, but I also, let's start first with, some of the technology, complimentary technology partners. Talk about that. How, what are the, what does that look like? What are the, [00:03:00] are you doing integrations? Them, I would assume. Yeah. And, then do you also do the whole go to market with them as well or?

[00:03:07] Chip Rodgers: Yeah.

[00:03:07] John Breul: Yeah. it's a, it's interesting 'cause there's a lot of change happening in that space right now. so we have some traditional, and when I say traditional, we're not that old of a company, but we have some relationships that have been going on for a few years that are more in the traditional direct integration.

[00:03:21] John Breul: Like we part, we have a great partnership with a company called D Defend, which does about 70% of the public filings, SEC, statutory reporting. Pretty logical connection between what we do. And they do. they're going in, companies are trying to get you ready to go public. They got a mess in their accounting department.

[00:03:36] John Breul: We can help them clean up vice versa if they've got, you know, FloQast in place. But they need help on the statutory reporting 'cause it's a. Required part of going public. Yeah. We can recommend them. And we, are, we've traditionally, we've just had a referral relationship with them. We're currently announcing some really exciting stuff on the integration side, so that's pretty cool.

[00:03:53] John Breul: But what's one of the biggest changes we've had with that group lately is we have a new platform called Transform. And [00:04:00] Transform is essentially a builder platform for our customers to be able to, a non-technical user, to be able to ba basically build an agent that automates a lot of the core accounting processes.

[00:04:10] John Breul: Love it. And in that process, there's a, that kind of has changed the dynamic in how we're partnering with some of these ISVs that are in that FinTech stack. Because in the past we would kinda do point to point API integrations or basically just do flat file like batch processing. Yeah.

[00:04:26] John Breul: But today, if we can connect to them and share both ways, the data that we're handling and really the metadata and everything else around it, then AI can take advantage of that. And we're finding that to be just a really interesting new angle and we're just honestly trying to still figure out exactly what are those implications.

[00:04:45] John Breul: It makes our integrations a lot cooler and more flexible, but what does that mean as far as where the value is and like how the customer like interacts with those integrations. It's a work in progress, but we're excited about it. Yeah,

[00:04:58] Chip Rodgers: you and everybody else, right?

[00:04:59] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. [00:05:00] we're all trying to figure out Yeah, where, what are the, how can, it's, you're only limited by your imagination, right?

[00:05:06] John Breul: Yeah, exactly. And then just, even like talking to our sales teams and go to market teams about like, how do we talk about the integration together?

[00:05:14] John Breul: it's just changing the language and, I think right now there's so much excitement, especially, maybe not especially, but. Accounting. I don't know if there's actually studies about this. Accountants are like some of the most stressed out people about ai. Like literally because they don't know how much of their work's gonna get automated.

[00:05:31] John Breul: They don't know how it's gonna change their jobs. So right now we all are trying to like, get them comfortable that they, it's gonna be a good thing. And so that, that part's easy. Some of the more like down in the weed stuff, we're still figuring out.

[00:05:45] Chip Rodgers: I assume also hallucinations are not a good thing where you're trying to do gap accounting, right?

[00:05:50] John Breul: Yeah, no, and, and, and FloQast has like really done a nice job of we're one of the, only companies out there that's ISO 42 0 0 1 [00:06:00] certified, which basically addresses a lot of that stuff. You have to actually build into the way you're developing product, like mitigating for HAL hallucinations.

[00:06:09] John Breul: as you can imagine. Auditing is a big deal in the accounting world and you can't, you cannot have changing data in the background. So there's a lot of rigor that goes into that on our side. In some ways that actually helps us with some of our other partners, honestly, because if we can take in their data and ensure that it meets those standards, we can actually take some of that risk off of their plate.

[00:06:32] John Breul: And our customers have actually really glob nodded to that Okay. That makes me feel good. I can feel good that FloQast has taken a look at this before I'm actually posting it to my GL or presenting it to my auditor, and it's actually been a huge part of how we got in traction early on here.

[00:06:47] John Breul: Interesting.

[00:06:49] Chip Rodgers: I love to I really wanted to get into AI and, talk about how, how it's impacting how you guys are taking advantage of it, both from a product standpoint. So you just, talked about the, [00:07:00] that, the AI agent integration. And then, also even in your sort of day to day, as as the partner team, working with, ai, are you.

[00:07:12] Chip Rodgers: Where are you at these days?

[00:07:14] John Breul: it is funny that you mentioned that. Second thing is just this morning on my team call, we were doing a little AI practice slash play. Because one of the things that we've always, anybody that's been in the partner world for a while, you struggle with okay, you partner with someone, but they're trying to sell their own stuff.

[00:07:31] John Breul: There's, their customers need to hear about you, but like, how do you get, how do you make it really easy for like their sales organization to talk about your solution? it's a challenge, right? Because you don't know their stuff that well. They don't know your stuff that well.

[00:07:47] John Breul: But one of the things we've found that's been really effective, like, probably 10 x the effective rate I've seen in my career is like. We've gotten really good at building like we, as in the royal we, we've gotten [00:08:00] really good at building out these like very specific prompts. Talking about like why a customer, say for example, I mentioned Defend, you're just talking about this one today.

[00:08:08] John Breul: Like how do you set up a prompt that makes it highly likely that a Defend customer would want to hear about FloQast? And there's all these things about What's been changing in their leadership, like how many accountants do they have on their team? what are some challenges that they've had around, an audit or whatever.

[00:08:28] John Breul: And you can really put all that into a very targeted prompt and even push it at a very specific, like for example, the customers that we know are mutual customers or the customers that we know of theirs that are hot prospects for us. And we can make a very, specific. Very compelling. Ask actually, and basically tee up the seller on the partner side to just basically send it, and you can actually even prompt it to fill in the email template for them and just say, Hey, you could copy and paste this and send this to these three people, which we also identified by ai.

[00:08:59] John Breul: And [00:09:00] our hit rates, like I said, I haven't, it's, this is not scientific, but Back of the napkin, just from the, we've been doing this for maybe a month or two. I'm seeing like response rates that are like literally 10 x what I would expect. Wow. from the past. Just because it's just very

[00:09:17] Chip Rodgers: tailored, very specific.

[00:09:18] John Breul: Helps us really target. Yeah. And it helps us be very tailored. And it's the kind of thing that like, I know, 'cause I've sat in the alliance manager seat for a lot of years, tailoring those kind of messages. Two, three of those a day would take you a lot of, a lot of calories and a lot of time.

[00:09:36] John Breul: Yeah. we can crank out, I don't know, like a hundred in five minutes. Yeah. so it's pretty crazy. yeah. So that part is been a huge impact on just a very tactical but very practical level for us. Yeah. I think on some of the other stuff, it's just, just having a thesis around who we should be partnering with.

[00:09:53] John Breul: We do, I, tinker around with that quite a bit. as a leader on the team, I think about Hey, strategically, like [00:10:00] this is where we're trying to go. Here's the audience we're trying to get to. you can do some pretty cool, you can get some pretty cool responses from, that we use personally at or personally at FloQast.

[00:10:10] John Breul: We have a, uh, a contract with Gemini, but like Gemini Pro or whatever, but I, chat, GPT, the others, they all they can offer a lot of the same kind of responses, but I think it's actually really helping even like just be more efficient about thinking through strategy. Even so I, I think that kind of like selfishly like how we use it on our team, those are some of the key ways.

[00:10:33] John Breul: like I mentioned before, we have a partnership with AWS and there's some pretty interesting things you can. You can get some good tailwinds with some of these hyperscalers around ai, if you're pushing the message with them and showing use cases. And they don't know how to talk to the Office of Finance.

[00:10:47] John Breul: We do, but we have these Office of Finance applications of ai. Oh, by the way, they're powered by, whatever. Bedrock or, yeah. in our case that's what we talk about. But, so those are [00:11:00] some of the kind of the, go to market stuff. And then, the other thing is, some of the companies we partner with are.

[00:11:06] John Breul: Are not as agile, not as forward thinking, and we can put an AI sheen on their story. So we've been leveraging that a little bit too.

[00:11:13] Chip Rodgers: Interesting. that's terrific. so a lot of ai both with partners and customers and even internally. So that's, that's, it's fantastic.

[00:11:24] Chip Rodgers: I love the use case. That's really cool. Yeah. Let's talk a little, so you just mentioned, working with, AWS going to market with AWS and co-selling. How is that process working? How's it, going? How are you find, and you, I think you already touched on some of the key elements, which is, hey, we, were we really deep on this vertical Yeah.

[00:11:46] Chip Rodgers: And we can really help. So tell me about

[00:11:48] John Breul: that. Yeah, It's a, good question. we launched the AWS partnership. A year and a half ago, basically it was in response to some feedback both from like our peers and [00:12:00] from board members and, just the market in general.

[00:12:03] John Breul: A lot of what we like our thesis going into it, I would say like most of it has actually panned out and some of it has not. one of the things that you were definitely seeing is Acquiring software like ours on a marketplace like AWS marketplace is a mega trend. There are definitely we sell, we, as you can imagine, accounting is a very ver horizontal function.

[00:12:25] John Breul: So we can technically, or whatever functionally sell to just about anybody. But historically we have done really well in like high growth, high tech biotech, like high growth companies who are like. Dealing with a lot of complexity in their accounting, those folks oftentimes will also have kind of a bias to like doing a lot with a hyperscaler.

[00:12:48] John Breul: In our case, we're only on AWS so we just are on the AWS marketplace. But our experiences is because of that. Whether they're another software company or maybe they're a high growth biotech or whatever, they'll have spend [00:13:00] commitments with the hyperscaler. That gives it's free money.

[00:13:03] John Breul: It, yeah. that's, that was the dream that we were sold. It hasn't turned out to be quite that straightforward, but it is, it can be a very big factor. it, where we've actually seen the bigger effect is on renewals. Like a lot of our customers that have been long time customers, they just have now ported their subscription onto their marketplace and they've done that because they wanna take advantage of that, Spend, commit, burn down. and we've definitely seen real I would say like removal of friction on renewals. Once they get going on that, it's it's just kinda like renewing, like we renew our cable bill or whatever. Like it just is on there, right? and so they just keep going through it.

[00:13:44] John Breul: And there's benefits to actually, there's a kind of a word counterintuitive. Yeah, I guess counterintuitive incentive to not necessarily negotiate. 'cause if they're coming up a little short in their spend, commit, they want to put more money in there because the, they, [00:14:00] the consequences for not hitting a spend commit are worse than what goes away, what they get if they don't, if they don't hit it.

[00:14:07] John Breul: so I think that's some of the stuff we've seen. I think that, some of the challenge stuff we've seen is. I think this would probably be true of any hyperscaler, but in the case of AWS, their primary buyer is the dev side. It we don't sell to it. We, our motto is built by accountants for accountants.

[00:14:25] John Breul: And one of the big reasons we've gotten a lot of traction is our solution is basically implementable by accountants. And so they don't necessarily ever have to talk to it. So those two. Groups don't necessarily meet. So it's been a little bit of an interesting thing to think about like where do we intersect with AWS And actually one of the areas we found that's pretty interesting is we do meet, especially in larger organizations, we meet at procurement.

[00:14:51] John Breul: 'cause procurement knows about the spend commit, right? They know about marketplace. They've done lot usually have done lots of marketplace transactions before. [00:15:00] Yeah. And when they find out, this is like, the kind of opposite of what your normal experience with procurement with. It has been, is like sometimes when we get down the line and you're getting to that procurement stage and like you're like, oh my gosh, this is gonna delay my deal.

[00:15:16] John Breul: If they find out we're transactable in marketplace and like maybe our competitor isn't, they're like, oh, we're definitely doing that. Yeah. And I know how to do that. We can do that. And 15 minutes. So we're doing that. And so that's been pretty interesting and pretty powerful actually. Yeah.

[00:15:31] Chip Rodgers: that's amazing. I think, I think there's some folks at AWS Chris, Bruce and Matt Matt w who would really like to hear that story.

[00:15:40] John Breul: Yeah, I'm sure, they would. I, okay, so since we're gonna, if you're gonna pass this along to them let me, so here's our challenge, and I've, even shared this like at AWS events, like with their, with their leadership team, et cetera.

[00:15:53] John Breul: In fact, Chris, I think, was in this meeting is they were just asking like, what are your biggest challenges? [00:16:00] There's not a Office of finance line of business sales motion at AWS so finding a, way for an AWS seller to logically bring up FloQast to somebody who actually would care Is a big challenge. Yeah. yeah, we talked about, we meet at procurement, but that's after we've done all the legwork. So with the

[00:16:19] Chip Rodgers: business

[00:16:20] John Breul: side. Yeah. Yeah. We have not really cracked the code yet on like how do we get. Co-sell help on the business side. And I think AWS actually, it's on their radar.

[00:16:31] John Breul: They talk about it a lot. Like they, they want to have a line of business focus. They don't have it right now. And so we're trying to, we're a tiny fish in a ginormous pond, but we're trying to encourage them to have more of a line of business focus. And if they do, then I think it'll make it a lot easier to unlock that part of the.

[00:16:48] John Breul: The co-sell value.

[00:16:50] Chip Rodgers: and I, suspect there are a lot of folks that are at AWS in the field that have that experience. They're just not aligned that way.

[00:16:56] John Breul: Correct. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. And one of the areas we are seeing some [00:17:00] traction is they have put a lot more focus on industry.

[00:17:04] John Breul: And so we've got a couple of competencies. We've got, a competency in retail, we've got a competency in SMB. We're hoping to have a gen I competency later. That's gonna give us some traction. But like our sweet spots line of business. So it would be awesome if, if they would actually focus on that.

[00:17:20] Chip Rodgers: Yeah, that's terrific. so we've talked about, the technology partners, cloud providers, AWS how about the ERP. Vendors, I know a lot of your business is with NetSuite, but across all of them, right? SAP and SAGE and all of them. Yeah. What, tell, talk about that, those partnerships.

[00:17:39] John Breul: Yeah, I mean it's, it's interesting 'cause the, two things that, flow, cast kind of anchors between is the gl, which is the ERP and whatever kind of cloud storage system a, company has. So those are the. The two things that are like, have to know, have to integrate with every single customer.

[00:17:59] John Breul: and then [00:18:00] what we do is we help basically reconcile what the accountants are doing day to day, usually in some form of a spreadsheet with their GL, and making sure that all ties off and everything else. So we have to have a really close and strong technical relationship with those partners.

[00:18:15] John Breul: And historically we've had, with some of them, we've had a pretty good go to market relationship. I'd say, to be fair a lot of those ERPs have developed more capability in our area. And so it's a little bit interesting to try to navigate that with their sales teams. 'cause they've got kind of something in their bag that's a bit overlapping with what we do.

[00:18:36] John Breul: It hasn't really slowed down our momentum with our customers much. I won't, without disparaging anyone. I would just say that like our whole mantra of being like. Built by accountants for accountants really works like the, when you're, when your focus is not accounting software and you're just building functionality for accounting software, you just have a different approach.

[00:18:59] John Breul: And, I think [00:19:00] we, we continue to, it hasn't really slowed our momentum down, but from a partnering side and we mainly partner with them on the technology side 'cause it's just, it's compli complicated to put together a, Like an easy, digestible, like comp, better together story with some of them.

[00:19:15] John Breul: But yeah, we do have relationships with them. We do have, yeah, we have, we will be at Sweet World next, was it next week, two weeks? it's the biggest event of the year. we got 1500 customers that'll probably be there and yeah, so it's still a very important relationship for us, but, more on like the technical partnership side rather than the go to market.

[00:19:36] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Talk a little bit about, John, how you're, what are how are you and your team, measured? What are the goals that you're looking at? How are you, tracking that? And what are your, what are what's a win? What's a success for you at the end of the

[00:19:52] John Breul: year?

[00:19:54] John Breul: shockingly we're tracked on sourced revenue. I think pretty much every partner team is, what's [00:20:00] been interesting is so we have that metric, but we also have some other metrics now. For example, with the AWS relationship, because of the kind of the follow on benefits, my team gets tracked on how many customers are transacting in the marketplace.

[00:20:13] John Breul: So that's a new metric we've added in the last whatever year, and a half. The other thing that we've gotten really focused on, especially in like with the whole push and to transform like the agent builder, the AI fo focus is how do we leverage our relationship with partners to drive more attachment with our install base and reduce churn.

[00:20:33] John Breul: And so that's a metric that's been a big trend in how our value is and my team personally gets, is measured on, is like, how do you, how do we increase the utility of flow, cast acre, increase the number of connection or integration points to FloQast to make it like a more valuable, but also just harder to get rid of.

[00:20:55] John Breul: Right? Sticky. Like sticky. so churn is something that we've just started to [00:21:00] measure on my team. our. Ch Like looking at our part mitigation. yeah. Like looking where are our partners involved and what's the churn rate on those customers versus where they're not involved and what's the churn rate on those?

[00:21:12] John Breul: And the, it's not, I'm sure I, you just read anything like the, we're seeing the same trends everybody else is. Yeah. We're partners. Where there's more integration points, churn rates just fall off a cliff. And so that's kinda like that net, we'll, we will get more sophisticated on it.

[00:21:29] John Breul: Right now it's we're figuring it out, but okay, that net retained revenue thing is gonna become a big part of how we're measured. So yeah, I would say that kind of the traditional sourced influence stuff. And then just looking more at churn reduction.

[00:21:42] John Breul: And then now we've got some hyperscaler specific stuff like marketplace transactions.

[00:21:47] Chip Rodgers: So maybe, final question. I know it's not part of your purview, your domain, clearly the accounting firms, Deloitte, pwc, those guys [00:22:00] globally are doing a lot of business and care about the capabilities that you have.

[00:22:05] Chip Rodgers: How do those relationships. Work.

[00:22:08] John Breul: Yeah, it's interesting. I was actually the first, consulting partner guy hired at Workday way back in the day. And so have a lot of experience, the domain, I know the domain pretty well. Um, but like at FloQast, just over the last year, we've, we've we've been evolving our partner strategy where we've worked with more kind of like regional boutique folks that we could, be ex subject matter experts they could implement. And because of our tar target market has historically been mid-market. That's been who we focused on in, in the last year and a half or so as we've been getting traction up market.

[00:22:42] John Breul: We just announced a partnership with PWC about a year ago. We announced a partnership with EY just like a month or so ago. It's, there's a couple of reasons that, it makes sense. Like a, we, want them that, with that like trust air cover that you get from those in like the bigger accounts.

[00:22:59] John Breul: And as we move into the [00:23:00] enterprise and, expand into those accounts that really like where they have really, strong relationships, that's important. But there's also a lot that we bring to the table to help them be just more like efficient and I guess maybe modern and, forward thinking in their approach.

[00:23:16] John Breul: Like the whole way that they, the, this whole agent builder. Thing that I'm talking about. they're embedding that into their practices, right? Like they're gonna be able to,

[00:23:23] Chip Rodgers: that's terrific.

[00:23:24] John Breul: And they're gonna be able to like, realize a lot of the benefit of, being leading edge on ai, like driving efficiencies within, their finance transformation projects.

[00:23:35] John Breul: Without having to develop it all in house and, letting us be the subject matter experts there. So I think, going forward, we're. Super bullish on the big four because big built by accountants for accountants resonates with those folks, right? that's who we're talking.

[00:23:51] Chip Rodgers: We know that world.

[00:23:52] John Breul: We know, they know that world. so they're, it's almost like the opposite side of the coin of AWS, right? Like they [00:24:00] know the accounting world, they know that line of business like the back of their hand. And then we're providing more of almost like the technical kind of. Chops or the backup for them to, the tools to be able to actually execute on what they can advise on.

[00:24:13] John Breul: and so it's, a, really interesting high growth area for us and, one where, not to discount the whole implementation thing. FloQast is not terribly difficult to implement, but we do have a target of 75% of our implementations going into partners. So there is that bit, but it's really more about how we're empowering their bigger finance transformation projects.

[00:24:32] John Breul: Yeah.

[00:24:33] Chip Rodgers: That's really cool. Yeah, that's great. what a great, so not only are they a partner working with customers and additional feet on the street. But they're also actually. Leverage their customer. They're leveraging,

[00:24:46] John Breul: yeah. and, some of the st some. Yes. In some cases, like EY is using us in their managed services group where we're basically powering their managed services group.

[00:24:54] John Breul: Yeah, new stuff happening all the time there that we're figuring out as we go. We're, we're still a pretty, we're [00:25:00] relatively young growing company, so some of this stuff is, is we're just learning it. But it's exciting for sure. Yeah.

[00:25:09] Chip Rodgers: That's a great. Place to, to end.

[00:25:11] Chip Rodgers: John, this has been fantastic. Really appreciate you taking some time and spending time with us and sharing what's going on at FloQast and, and just partnering in general. 'cause you've been doing it a long time, so bring a lot of that experience to the table.

[00:25:24] John Breul: Yeah, appreciate the opportunity.

[00:25:25] John Breul: Really enjoyed talking to you. Yeah,

[00:25:27] Chip Rodgers: fantastic. So thank you all as well, and we will see you again next time. Thanks everybody.

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