Vanilla News - July 2020 Edition!
Hi Vanilla!
Welcome to the latest edition of Vanilla News. The previous post is available here.
Finance
There are many changes coming up in the finance world!
Goodbye Nethris... hello ADP!
On June 30 we finally said goodbye to our old payroll provider Nethris, and we will welcome ADP as our new provider starting July 15 2020. If you still haven't extracted your pay stubs and tax forms, we highly recommend you to do so as soon as possible. We will send your new credentials to log into ADP around July 15.
We also want to welcome a new tool that we will deploy within the next 2 months to simplify expense reports. Nexonia! This means, no more expense reports on an excel sheet, or manual approvals via email. You will be able to track your expenses, take pictures of them, send them directly to your supervisor, and approve them through their mobile application or the web. More details and training to come closer to the launch date.
We are also getting close to the finish line to choose a new accounting system that will create synergies between our sales, CSM and finance teams. We'll keep you posted!
Development
Internal Combustion Beavers
The ICB Force had one of its best months ever. First and foremost they closed a record 270 issues! That's 67 more than intake and now brings our support backlog below 100. An amazing milestone. This is going to afford us more time to work on the product and allow us to concentrate on those little feature requests that often come in that just make sense to do.
In addition to this, ICB also started to plug away at their Codename: Herald work. Of note is the "Private Discussions" plugin that allows you to show an abbreviated view of discussions to guests in order to entice them to sign up. This plugin is still going through feedback, but it will be available to everyone after the Herald launch and works with and without private communities. I would also like to note we also released a beta for a different structure for sitemaps that point directly to discussions. Have you had SEO "experts" complain about our sitemaps? Maybe this feature can be turned on for them. Good news: they can toggle it themselves from the sitemap settings popup.
Chimeras
Chimeras were able to quickly accommodate an urgent Get Satisfaction migration for Skuid on a 6 day timeline as their forum was about to be shut down. There are other Get Satisfaction customers in a similar situation that we're ready to help move over to greener pastures on Vanilla. We built our first custom theme using Foundation for Callaway! To start July off, we welcomed our new Project Manager, Andra and we're all very excited to have her onboard.
Team Supreme
Team Supreme continues to work on features for the Codename: Herald launch. The great thing though is everything they are releasing will make it into our products as a whole so I really recommend you keep an eye on their demos. Most of last month's work involved search. We also launched core user cards which is a cool feature that is often requested (note that it's behind a feature flag). User cards are very much an MVP release right now. We want to hear what information and options customers would like to see on the cards.
Give us some good feedback pleaz.
Success
Our two new CSMs are coming along really well. Faten is taking on new customers and Kirstie has already taken on all of Saad's old customers. Success continues to fine tune our documentation, editing and creating new client facing docs. Since we started tracking this initiative, we have published 25 articles with 8 more just pending reviews. This initiative will go a long way to getting our customers the info they need easily and reduce some load on our support teams over time.
Sales
What an incredible and wild ride the first half of 2020 has been. Through Covid, and all of its implications, Vanilla has managed to achieve a record Q1, and now a record Q2 of $108,000.00 MRR. An extraordinary achievement! This goes to show you that our product and overall solution offering is helping organizations succeed, even in the harshest of financial conditions.
Some special mentions for H1/Q2:
- Brendan: 173% of quota in Q2, 9 deals including Tek Savvy at $7100MRR
- Gabe: 118% of quota YTD
- Janie: closed Kaseya in June to add to her impressive titles
- Joe: Closes Vanilla's largest MRR deal with IBM to lock in a record Q2
- Robin: 100% of quota YTD
- Vlad: 176% of quota in Q2, including Teamviewer - a Khoros switch and a deal he worked for over 12 months. He had virtual beers with them this week!
- Rhys: Updated our trial process, the look and feel of our trial sites, and joined countless calls to secure the deals mentioned above.
Our $10M ARR stretch goal is now in sight! What a great quarter, congratulations All!
Marketing
June brought about a more normal pace here in the marketing team. After riding high on the huge success of our Vanilla Conversations event, we went back into our usual cadence of two webinars and an ebook per month.
In July, we are featuring Pragmatic Institute's Community Lead, Georgina Cannie, discussing everything about Communities of Practice. We're also speaking with AI expert, Venessa Paech and how you shouldn't hammer the flowers with AI.
In addition, we refreshed our ebook on Dev Rel Communities. You can check out our latest content in the Learn section of our website.
Support
Support continues to work on its internal processes, spinning up a section of the staff forum to help us have better conversations despite the shift and time differences between us. We’re working internally to examine our onboarding process now that Mike and Elize are acclimated to Vanilla, and hoping to make process improvements ahead of any new hires. Aside from that we continue to examine our new analytics, and adjust Freshdesk workflows based on the incoming data.
Operations
This month we welcomed a new member of the ops team: Benoit! The ops team continues to work on the Codename: Herald federated search platform in collaboration with R&D as well as some smaller internal projects to move us forward and maintain our network. We are also starting to prepare for the work we’ll need to do in support of IBM. This includes a new information security offering and a new datacenter!
Thanks for reading!
