Another Serent CXO Summit is in the books! Every year, we gather leaders from across our portfolio in sales and marketing, customer success and operations, finance, human resources, and product and technology for this cross-functional event to learn, build community, and share strategies for growth.
This year, we focused on three key themes:
- How to maximize M&A for growth
- How to use AI to increase performance; and
- How to continue to keep employees inspired and engaged
Themes and lessons learned aside, what keeps our executives coming back year after year for this event is the comradery and community that comes with being a part of Serent.
How to Maximize M&A for Growth: Lessons Learned from M&A with Quorum
In an early keynote, the CEO and co-founder of Quorum, shared an operator’s perspective of Quorum’s journey from purely organic growth to active pursuit of inorganic opportunities. Quorum has leveraged M&A to create a unified product platform and thereby solidify its position as a leader in the government and public affairs industry.
Along with Kevin Frick, Partner at Serent, who provided an investor’s point of view to the narrative, they weighed their hard-won lessons learned doing acquisition in a competitive and consolidating market.
Here are some of the key pieces of advice they shared:
- Dedicate an executive to post-merger integration (PMI), or Hire a consultant: Dedicate a person to lead your team to manage changes, align business processes, and integrate systems that can maximize the value of the merger or acquisition as quickly as possible.
- Communicate clearly with all constituents: Prevent misunderstandings and create focus by ensuring that customers, employees, and partners are well-informed about any acquisition activity and the strategic rationale or benefit.
- Align on resources and product strategy: Maintain a strong focus on capturing synergies, and despite all the integration activity, do not forget to plan on how the company will continue to drive revenue and win long-term success!
How to use AI to increase performance: Generative AI (“GenAI”) within the Serent Portfolio
AI is revolutionizing how businesses operate, and our portfolio companies are no exception. Our in-house SVP of Product and Technology (“P&T”) led a panel of executives from BQE, CallRevu, ePayPolicy, and Quorum to discuss how they are leveraging AI to transform product interactions and optimize processes across the board.
While each company expressed that they felt early-stage in GenAI adoption, here are a few use cases shared from the Serent portfolio:
- Use GitHub Copilot to free up developer time
Developers at ePayPolicy are using GitHub Copilot to accelerate development lifecycles and streamline processes. The team saw a 60% improvement in unit test coverage with the same time invested. By leveraging Copilot, the team is reducing time spent on repetitive tasks and can dedicate resources to more strategic projects.
- Train chatbots on help center content
BQE offers 24-7 support 365 days a year, which can be costly and demanding. To free up support team’s valuable time for challenging cases, they trained a chatbot on BQE’s help center as well as targeted outside content. The chatbot “learned” thousands of pages of content, so it can serve visitors immediately and effectively on demand before hand-off to a team member. The answers are so on-point and in-depth that even internal support engineers now use the chatbot for help.
- Increase content creation and decrease costs
BQE is also ramping up its content creation by expediting the ability to interview content experts and use AI to produce a draft in each respective subject matter expert’s unique style. This process has enabled them to produce high-quality blog posts that maintain a consistent brand voice and rank higher on Google while simultaneously reducing content creation costs.
- Enhance product features
CallRevu has integrated AI into core operational workflows to enhance its product offering. As a leading automotive communications intelligence platform, they previously relied on manual processes to piece together call transcripts. In the last six months, they have added a robust automated call summarization feature to their product using AI. This integration has reduced budgeted costs by $1.5M. Quorum has also integrated AI into their Grassroot CRM product to enable their advocates to write more targeted campaigns.
These are just a few examples of how our portfolio is harnessing AI. It’s exciting and inspiring to see how our leaders are using it across all parts of the organization.
How to continue to keep employees inspired and engaged: Impactful OKRs that Rally Your Team
The Head of Customer Success at Studio Designer, and one of Serent’s Growth Team members, shared why business goals fall flat and how OKRs can actually inspire teams to achieve them. In this interactive breakout session, portfolio leaders drafted their OKRs and shared them with the group. One of the session’s biggest learnings was differentiating the objective from the key result. While objectives are aspirational statements of what we want to achieve, the key results identify the specific ways to measure the achievements.
While the CXO Summit is a great time to hone OKRs and learn what other companies in the portfolio are doing, we continuously hear that the connection that comes from being amongst peers in the same function is the most valuable aspect of the Summit. Through Roundtable discussions and our popular “What’s Keeping You Up at Night” breakout, leaders can share what they’re working through and even struggling with day-to-day, knowing someone in the room has most likely experienced a similar problem and can provide some perspective on how they at least tackled it.
While the annual event itself is over, we know the conversations and learnings from it will continue throughout the year amongst our portfolio leaders. We are proud to partner with so many talented executives and facilitate their continued growth and success. That’s what makes the Serent Summits one of the most impactful traditions within the Serent community. We’re already looking forward to next year’s event!