Epicor CRO Rachel Barger on the importance of cross-team collaboration

When Rachel Barger joined Epicor as its CRO last month, she knew she was going to interact with “the brain and the heart of every organization” the software company does business with.

Epicor provides enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools for small and medium-sized businesses, which Barger calls “the underpinning of not only the US economy but the global economy.”

“It should be all of our mission to help those organizations have the tools and the capabilities and the frameworks and technical foundations to allow them to grow and realize the potential that they have,” she said. “Because high tide lifts all boats.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about joining Epicor. What are you hoping to bring to the company in terms of revenue strategies and leadership?

The thing that I loved about Epicor [goes back to what] I always say about ERP: It’s the brain and the heart of every organization that uses it, because it really does run the business. It helps them connect with customers better. It’s a really amazing toolkit and technology to help customers be their best…I loved our customer base, the fact that we cover “make, move, and sell”—and it’s a real ecosystem. It’s “how do you make the goods that then are distributed, that then are sold?”

We really support the SMB and mid-market, and those are the businesses that really need the most support in helping them to grow and shape our economy and what’s coming next.

When I look at my role, the role of the CRO has, I think, really changed over time. I see my role as being critical to helping all of the customers in our ecosystem to adopt and really get the most out of their technology investment. Because in the world of SaaS, you need a customer to fully adopt, so they stay with you, so they renew, so that they double down across your solution set and really look at you as a strategic partner. When you think about that, in my role today, I have many different ways to do that. First, I have the opportunity to inspire our customers about how they can change their business with us and how we can be a strategic partner for them across that journey. Then I have the opportunity to make sure—whether it’s with us or with a strategic partner—that they have the right team to help them implement and get the very best practices, set themselves up for success, and really have a great jumping-off point in becoming a part of the Epicor family. Then the third piece that I love is customer success and retention. We have the opportunity to use telemetry, use insights, use personal connections, use digital connections to understand how our customer is using the technology, help them to use it better, help them to get re-inspired about new upgrades, and then ensure that we have that virtuous circle.

It seems like your priorities include a lot of cross-team collaboration. How do you plan to continue to prioritize that? Any strategies you’re using to get people to work together across the company?

Something that I talk a lot about [at] whatever company I’ve worked at is the concept of a super team. I love super teams, and I think that when we organize ourselves around a customer or an industry and put together a number of different cross-functional teams all with one purpose and goal, then we can achieve great things. So, whether that’s taking a look at putting together individuals from marketing and business development reps, with sales, with pre-sales, with services, and working them as a super team, that’s an amazing opportunity. Whether it’s post-sale working across product, support, customer success, retention, that’s another amazing super team. I see my role as a connector and I sit across a significant team, and then I collaborate with my peers. The more that I can model that behavior and create opportunities through interlocks internally, through meetings that we’ve organized with customers, through partner interactions to create that connection, the better.

I also think [about] technology. We’re leaning in with a brand new revenue platform that we’re using. [It’s] very AI-based, but leveraging the opportunity to take in information from all of our interactions with the customer, be it meetings, email, communication, digital touchpoints, and serv[ing] that up in a way that’s really easy for all sorts of collaborators within the team to use and gain insights from. Whether it’s human connection through super teams, whether it’s technology innovation with AI and the opportunities that we have to share that way, I think those are the things that you just have to set the foundations and encourage the team that that’s the way forward.

Are there any changes that you’re hoping to make at Epicor now that you’ve seen how things work at the company?

A couple things. One is something that I was inspired [by] talking to Epicor before joining about how the entire company…is looking at reducing time to value, and that’s a journey the company’s already started on. And again, that’s with services and product together. How do we, from the moment the customer starts their implementation, reduce that cycle time—leveraging best practices, leveraging AI capabilities on data migration, all of those types of things, framework requirements, processes—to help a customer, instead of going live in 12 months, go live in 90 days? That’s the nirvana. Even six months—that’s a far cry from where they were before. So that’s number one. I think that’s a huge opportunity, not only internally but for our customers.

The other piece that I’m going to bring is I really believe in a strong partner ecosystem, be it resale partners, be it implementation partners. That’s something that whether I was at Cisco, SAP, UKG, that I’ve always brought and really prioritized. And I think Epicor, we’re on our journey to having a strong ecosystem, but I think we can really double down in that area. And that’s another piece that I’m going to bring. Then the third piece is, we all talk about business outcomes, and it’s critically important. But I think there’s a whole stream of information from how we market to a customer, through how we speak to a customer prospect, through how we deliver to a customer and prospect that has to be related to the key business outcomes that a customer is looking to achieve. And you can do that through concepts like sales plays, through account-based experiences, or account-based marketing, through website and digital interactions. But it’s a red thread, and it helps the customer to have a drumbeat and know what you represent and what they can expect to receive from you.

Any advice or suggestions that you have for either folks who want to be CROs anyone new to the CRO role?

I think it’s the best job in the world. And why is that? Because I get to touch the customer, and I get to…every day, all I think about all day is how to make customers more successful, how to reach customers in different ways, how to understand customers’ businesses differently. And so the first piece of advice I’d give is just to be curious. I’m so lucky that I can do a plant floor walk through, or I can go to a distribution center and put some steel-toed boots on and walk through and see some of the automation that they’re using. Be curious and understand your businesses; that’s going to help you to advocate better for product roadmap and all of those things. And your customers will understand that it’s genuine and that you really care about their success, and you can pattern your business after them.

The other thing that I’d say is it’s all about communication nowadays. We’re all moving so fast. We’re all in disparate offices across the globe, even, in many instances. And when you’re taking organizations through change—as so many of us are with AI, with the speed of business—it’s so critically important to help your teams understand, what are the pillars that really drive you in retention, or in revenue? We really need to always bring in new customers. We need to give customers extreme value when they’re working with us, and we need to inspire customers to stay and grow. And how do you help each member of your team, all the way down the organization, understand their unique role in those pillars? Because if you can communicate that and communicate it ad nauseam—you think you’re over-communicating, but you’re really not—then they will understand their mission, and then you can move forward a lot faster.

The last piece is embrace AI, embrace it with humans in the loop. It’s not about replacing human interaction, it’s about replacing administration or creating more opportunities to collaborate, and allowing the human to shine through, and giving your teams more opportunity to build relationships, and be curious, and understand their customers better. I really do believe the more we all embrace that, the more we’re going to be able to deliver value, and the more enriching experiences our employees will have because they’ll get to do more human things and less administration.