Opportunity and Impact: Why I Joined SupportLogic

Nick Tarnoff

VP of Finance, SupportLogic

I have always been told in my life that the best time to find a new great opportunity is when you are happy with your current role and not looking for a change.

I can definitely say that I was in this boat. I enjoyed my role at SAP; I had become not just the Lead Finance Director for the SuccessFactors Chief Revenue Officer, but I was looked to as a trusted advisor by my business partners to really drive conversations and strategic planning across all functions of the business.

But I felt there were aspects of what I wanted out of my career that were missing. I wanted the opportunity to really drive change and decision making for the team and solution area I supported. I wanted the opportunity to broaden my knowledge further across multiple functional areas. I wanted to continue working on process improvement and operational efficiency projects. And I really wanted the opportunity to build and lead my own team. 

Large enterprise organizations provide so many exceptional resources and opportunities, but they can also be a large maze and very difficult to navigate with many layers that makes it difficult to actually be in a true decision-making role. I wanted the opportunity to not only advise on ways for my business partners to influence decision makers to invest in the HXM business, but I wanted to be able to pull the levers myself with senior leaders to make decisions and to take action. 

When I first connected with the team at SupportLogic and learned more about the solution, it intrigued me a lot and tapped into the core of how I had grown up in the SaaS world. My first role at SAP was as the finance business partner for the Customer Engagement organization, a global team responsible for customer adoption, consumption, and expansion of licensed users and modules. It was the ‘boots on the ground’ team that owned customer service and support. This team is the lifeblood of what makes SaaS software survive. While the initial sale is important, without a doubt, a cloud tech company does not take off and become a scalable business model without a happy, sustained customer base that is using the product, promoting the product and continuing to expand in both modules and user count. 

I worked with this team of global professionals day in and day out for 3 and a half years, and lived their successes and struggles on a daily basis. I heard all of the great stories of customer usage, expanded solutions purchases and customers going to bat for our solutions at a wide range of events. But I also heard the horror stories, the failed implementations, the missed escalations, the inability to fix a problem, the challenges with deploying support and services teams, and most importantly (especially for a finance person), the renewal churn. This was always the hardest part to stomach, what had gone wrong, where had we as a team failed our customers. 

As I talked more with Krishna, John, Suresh and Joe, I thought about how my peers at my prior organization could have so incredibly benefited from the solutions that SupportLogic is bringing to the market. I thought about the angst from customer escalation, how many missed tickets occurred due to backlog, how maxed out the support teams were and, mostly, how much revenue walked out the door. I believe that the tools and solutions at SupportLogic have such an incredible runway to support SaaS businesses and, frankly, any recurring revenue business. 

Happy customers stay with a solution and with a vendor. Happy customers consume the product and use what they are contracted for. Happy customers continue to spend their money with you and will likely spend more. As a steward of the P&L and of revenue, that is my job. Make sure that the recurring revenue pipeline is healthy and has a bright future to remain healthy. 

There is no question that the solutions at SupportLogic can do this for any organization. I know the importance of this firsthand and I want to be a part of it. That is why I decided to jump in and join the Executive team and I could not be more excited to do so. 

I know SupportLogic has a great team and a great product, and the best is unquestionably yet to come!