Why I’m Buying Copies of Tien Tzuo’s New Book for All Our Employees

I am fortunate to have known Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora, for more than ten years. We first met when we were both members of a "breakfast club" of SaaS startup CEOs.

We spent mornings once a month meeting over Specialty’s pastries and coffee (or McDonald’s the day I was supposed to cater and only remembered last minute!) talking about how hard it was to get people to understand the SaaS model. I remember hearing Tien’s vision about the Subscription Economy back then and thinking, “Wow this guy is smart” and, “Really...Cars as as service...Will that happen?”

Coincidentally, we had become an early customer of Zuora at my last company (LiveOffice), where I got a crash course in the Subscription Economy. I say “crash course” literally, in that I knew NOTHING about subscription businesses when I took my last CEO role, and that lack of knowledge almost crashed the company. In the Subscription Economy, everything changes—including (most notably) the operating model. Thankfully, Tien was there to help me get through the transition.

Fast forward almost a decade and Zuora has gone public and it seems like everything around us is becoming “as-a-service.” Meanwhile, in running Gainsight and helping to champion the Customer Success movement, absolutely everything we do is an offshoot of the move to customer-centric business models that the Subscription Economy advocates.

As such, I was honored to get an advanced copy of Tien’s ode to the new digitally-transformed economy, "Subscribed."

And after having just devoured it, I can say that the book is the perfect intro—or re-intro—for anyone trying to understand the broader trends of Digital Transformation, XaaS, and Customer Success.

For me, the big highlights were the following:

Age of the Customer

Tien had courtside seats to the beginning of this new era, having been employee 11 at Salesforce.com. He talks about the pre-"mega tower” era of the company, when the team worked out of Marc Benioff’s rented apartment. Tien connects the dots to today and talks about the massive shift in power from vendors to customers that Forrester Research refers to as the “Age of the Customer.”

As my Marketing team thinks about how to tell the story of Customer Success in the context of larger themes, these intro chapters are pure gold.

Subscription Everywhere

Tien then comprehensively catalogs how the subscription trend is affecting all parts of the economy from retail to music (yes there is a Kanye reference) to transportation to media to software. Perhaps the most fascinating examples come from centuries-old stalwarts like Schneider Electric, which leveraged the internet of things technology wave to invent new subscription offers. Tien also profiles the winners like Adobe, Autodesk, PTC, and Cisco that made it through the transition.

Tien further alludes to the early innings of this transformation happening in even the most high friction of industries like healthcare, government, and education.

For my Sales and Customer Success teams looking to connect with their clients’ strategic goals, these sections provide a decoder ring to map to our clients’ world.

Read more here.