GitLab Product Marketing, 6 Jun 2019

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From YouTube: How GitLab.com Subscriptions Work

Description

Sales Enablement session on 2019-06-06
Handbook page: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/product-marketing/enablement/dotcom-subscriptions/
Original issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/marketing/product-marketing/issues/641

A

So hello and welcome to today's sales enablement sessions I'm very pleased to have today Lyle and support team on the call to talk to us about get lab comm subscriptions and with that I'd like to pass it over to Lyle.

B

Thanks Willie Tom, it sounds like you're unmuted and maybe in your car, so I'm just gonna go ahead and share my screen, so I'm Support Manager for America's West, but I used to be the Support Manager for Caleb calm and on the call we also have Cynthia, Jacqui and Amanda, who are the real experts? I just get to do the presentation.

B

So if you've sold get lab comm, you probably have figured out that it works a little bit different than self-managed, or maybe you haven't, which is all the more reason why we wanted to talk to you so self-managed licenses. You know it's one license: users get it. Everybody gets equal access to all the features, but Caleb dot-com subscriptions are a little bit different. They can get applied to any namespace I'm get lab comm and that can cause a lot of confusion.

B

So that idea that you can apply a license to a personal namespace often gives people the misconception that if they apply the license do their namespace. They suddenly like have amazing golden powers and you can just gold everything everywhere. So I listed a few misconceptions on this page that I wanted to go over and then talk a little bit about trials, some common issues that we see how we can set up customers for success and then some of the big differences so yeah.

B

The first misconception that I wanted to talk about is customers often write in they say you know: I bought gold I'm in a gold group. Why doesn't my profile say gold, and the reason is that namespace and I'm going to keep on saying namespace again and again, because this is really important.

B

If you're in a gold group you're still a free user, you can participate in any number of groups. You can be in free bronze silver and you still be a free user. Subscriptions' apply to a namespace.

B

Sorry I'm, gonna, open it. My chat just so I can see ya. So if you have a AP of a gold subscription, if you're participating in a gold subscription, your profile I was not gonna, say gold, it's gonna, it's a free! Unless you apply something to your profile, doesn't mean you don't have access to features. The second misconception, I already alluded to in my little introduction- subscriptions grant the Midas touch. So they don't. If you have gold on your user, you don't just automatically create gold groups subscriptions or scope to the name space.

B

They can anybody in the name of space, anything in the name space is gonna, get all the gold features. So if you apply a gold thing to your user, your projects will have gold features and they'll pull from that gold pool of minutes, but nobody can really participate those in the meaningful way. So, typically, we want to apply subscriptions to groups so that you can get those group level features so that all of the projects and subgroups in that group are gonna get those shared minutes.

B

Another thing we see a lot is that people think a license. Key is gonna get emailed out, and so they may they're, like on in our Docs and they're, like I, can't get to the admin section. How do I apply a license? Key where's, my license key I, don't understand so subscriptions are managed and applied through customers kept calm and a link to get lab. Comm account if they don't have a git lab comm account, then they can't apply a subscription. If they don't have a.

B

If they don't ever get into customers, then they can't apply the subscription to subscription. They need both.

B

Another misconception we see is that somebody in accounting wants to make the purchase, so they sign all the papers. They get the account on customers, they log in they're like okay. How do I apply this, so it subscriptions have to be managed by a lab comm account from someone who has owner in the group so yeah that that is kind of annoying sometime for larger customers.

B

Another one is that people sometimes think they need to purchase it our subscription first and let, with the exception of sam'l, where you actually have to have the silver features going or silver plus going at eutz a lot easier. I think I've been most cases to get people invited and get things set up before they actually purchase. It just makes it so that they can do web direct purchases and then another question we get a lot is sort of.

B

Can you apply different levels to some groups and now it's sort of like how self-managed is right. Now you get one for the entirety of your group and then one last misconception is just that personal runners. If you set up your own runners, those don't pull from your Ghaleb com shared minutes- so that's nice, I trials in general is something that we see a lot as well so trials.

B

We really prefer if users initiate their own trials, we'll get requests occasionally for people to have trials initiated like on the behalf of the support team, but we will almost always kick that back and say: please have them go to the setting page of the group where they want the trial on and initiate it themselves. That just makes things a lot easier. It gets them into the custom into customers like a lab comm.

B

It makes sure that the group is set up in the way that they want it and they can already see the count of users in the group. It smooths things all over a lot as of today, silver and bronze trials aren't generally available. We can manually downgrade them and also as a breading trials have to be manually downgraded before a purchase can be made. I know this is a pain. We would like this not to be the case.

B

Yeah well, fulfillment team is working on that. I also wanted to know that support is not included with trials. There's an issue that I've linked here. So if you have a big potential I, we can help them out in some circumstances. But if we just have you know who makes a gold trial like we can't, we can't just support everyone who makes a gold trial. It's too easy right, I've been talking a lot. Is there any questions up to this point or do you do we want to save all questions at the end.

A

You can go either way might be good to just kind of cover the content that way anybody to watching on YouTube can kind of consume it and then do the Q&A once lot great.

B

I, just don't be too boring, I'm, afraid people are gonna fall asleep.

B

Does anybody else from the support team want to jump in and have anything they want to say or no? Okay, I'm, just gonna keep him going through common issues that we have with sales assistant purchases on the calm side is with new customers. Sometimes we get tickets in Zendesk from sales, assisted clients, with questions like how do I set up a group?

B

How do I add additional users why our subscriptions applied to groups instead of users like how our permission is handled a lot of times, we're gonna direct them right to the documentation to answer their questions, but I think there's some things on the sales side that we could do to help clear those things up before they even get to us a lot of times. Customers aren't even aware that creating an account in the customer portal doesn't create an account on get lab comm or how to link their portal and Comm account.

B

There is a big button that says link, but you do have to have both right and then another common thing we see is sort of the upgrades and downgrades right now, there's not a self-service way for customers to upgrade or downgrade their subscriptions, so it has to go through the sales team. Q&Amp;N desk witching cause some delays like we're working on that process, but still it takes time so setting up the custom for success.

B

I'm, just gonna read this verbatim, because I think it's really well put best way to assist a user or system have been on any new platformers to arm them with the resources they'll need when questions arise during the onboarding process, after the sale, the user and or and then will receive an email from gitlab with the information about their subscription I like this and encourage them to save it somewhere.

B

Many of the links below are included in the amount, but it I think it would be good to review each of the following personally with them, so just getting to the right documentation, especially the subscription setup and management and the licensing and subscription FAQ.

B

B

Sorry on this page yeah, if there you have any questions, hit us up in slack support, collab support, I'm score, get Lavanya short, calm or self managed.

B

This one, I think, is really key, be sure to stress to your folks to submit their support issues directly instead of using you as a go-between. This is gonna, make things easier for us, because it will be communicating directly make that easy easier for you, because you will not have to be the go-between, yeah I, think that really will help and that and if you do need to submit something on behalf of someone, do it on comm internal and not to be the support portal I, you won't get associated with the correct org.

B

The ticket won't go towards their org. It makes things difficult. We really want to keep it Zendesk stuff in Zendesk and internal get web stuff in our trackers, and then we've covered this already. But it is really important for sales assisted stuff that the user understands that github does. They need to have a github comm account and they need to have a customer's account and in order to get the subscription they have to use them together.

B

I last section is just sort of some important differences that we wanted to highlight.

B

There is a section in the FAQ about which don't apply, but the highlights are yeah, so sam'l and LDAP is core, but sam'l SSO is silvered, so that is important. Ldap isn't on comm. Yet that is important.

B

The concept of sort of the user being the admin is something that comes up a lot with our enterprise customers. So typically in the SAS product, like your G suite, you are the total owner of all of the users in your group right. So if you need to reset somebody's password reset their to FA, you can do that.

B

You don't have that much power, I'm, Caleb, comm and so you're, not an admin on get lab. Comm you're, not an admin. You really, even in your group and every individual in your group, is in essence signing a contract with git lab and not with you. So that means that we have to treat them as individuals, and so just because you know big Corp wants us to reset the to FA on one of the people in their group.

B

We can't do that because that person has a contract directly with get lab and we have to protect their personally identifiable information, so we have to run them through our two FA procedures. This is annoying, so it's best if people keep their keep their codes, read your it register. Ssh, keys and stuff, like that.

B

There's also kind of a question of logging, so logs also are not really generally available. We can get some logs, but they're not going to have just full access to the logs that request. All of these requests have to go through security, also slightly annoying.

B

Yeah and things like backups and sort of like that, all of the data, warehousing backups and all of the other kind of infrastructure stuff. Like all of that again, since we managed it, we can't make any guarantees that the data is going to be like a capital main Europe. It's probably actually gonna be in the US.

B

We don't have sort of a backup strategy for their individual group. So there's not like a simple like make a backup for my group kind of thing. So there's all of you sort of like small things, get lab. Comm does work really well, but there are these sort of these important differences. I think that's my main spiel, so I'm gonna stop sharing my screen and let's take a look at the questions in the chat. Probably I'm gonna invite you to verbalize them. If you don't mind, I think the first one looks like it's from Joe.

B

Do you like to replace your question.

B

If not that's okay Joe asks what is a namespace. A namespace is a user name or group. So if you go to get lab comm slash something that something could be. You know like Jamie close.I, which would be your user or it could be slash big Corp, which could be a group, and so anything that is like after the slash, that's the namespace. So it could be a user or a group.

B

And then, as you know, after sort of like that top-level namespace, you could have either subgroups or projects, and so we say that the things after that first name, those are inside of the namespace and there's.

A

A lot yeah I'll just show that there's a link to the docs in the chat and I've also created an mr2 link that, from the page that Liao's been presenting so on the YouTube video will link the all this page that has been sharing that will be linked on the YouTube video and then from that page. I've also provided a link to the docs Amanda yeah.

C

I just wanted to add to Lyles last point on namespaces. We get a lot of questions from sales about whether a namespace is available for their prospect. It's something that they ask ahead of time before the sale, because they want to use it, especially the big enterprises in in support. We can let you know if it's available per Dermott user policy, but we can't give you information about who may own it. So a lot of times. We'll get a question like. Can you tell us who currently owns this particular namespace?

C

So we can reach out to them and ask if my prospect can use it? The answer is always going to be no, but we will tell you if it is eligible and if it is eligible we're going to instruct you to ask the prospect to send in a support request. So we can go ahead and process that that request.

B

Okay, thank you minute. David. You had a kind of a question in note.

D

Yeah, thank you. Some of this may be just be my not understanding right, but in the start of it it was you describe me some common misperceptions or misconceptions. Some of it just seemed like hey. The customer wants to be able to do this, but that's because they don't know how to navigate our system, because it's this way so I don't mean to come across a write as critical.

D

Just trying to understand I mean thinking about like understanding how the customer wants to interact with us and are there changes that we can make on our side to make it easier for them to engage with their subscription yeah.

B

Absolutely and you're not gonna, get any harsher critic of a product than support. So don't worry about that. Yes, I think that they're, the fulfillment group is still kind of spinning up. Focus of theirs is making sure that subscriptions are easier to manage the things go more smoothly.

B

There are some larger things, though, sort of in the way the gay lab comm is set up, so gay lab wasn't originally designed to be a large-scale SAS product was designed to be a self-managed kind of thing, and so there are some some things that sort of break down in that mindset, and so yes, I think that there is will to make these changes to make it easier for customers and for things to move in the direction that makes sort of more sense as a SAS product, but I think that those changes are on the further horizon.

B

So both yes and no I think there's some low-hanging fruit that we can do that. That is in the short term. That's gonna make a lot of these thing. A lot of a lot of things go away, but sort of the larger paradigm. I think it's gonna take a lot longer: okay, I.

D

Appreciate that, thank you long.

E

I'll just add that I added a couple things to the chat that fulfillment has a number of epochs to generally improve the user kind of flow or journey in purchasing UX. The UX team member, that's working with fulfillment has kind of mapped out at least what is the current state of things. And then you know the team is looking at. How do we get to a more ideal kind of state of where we want to be in terms of like?

E

They know that we have a lot of pain points and our users have a lot of pain points. The last one I linked to especially might be interesting, and one of the epics that they have is about making the portal like quote-unquote invisible, so that the you know user could do the purchasing from directly from gitlab comm. It would automatically kind of provision an account on the customers portal, so to speak, so it would it would still.

E

Our system would still interact with the customers portal, but the customer themselves would not have to go through the portal. They would just do everything from get lab. Comm we're not there yet, but the team, the fulfillment team is working on it.

B

Bill had a question about internal get lab support, whether it's a slack channel or something it's actually an issue tracker that we have set up. It's been linked in the chat and the there should be links on the page directly to internal support page that has a lot of links to issue templates that will help kind of smooth these requests. But if you ever have any question about where to go, if you poke into the support galib comm channel, we will happily link you and we liberally link to it to these things.

B

David you had another question: would you like to verbalize that one about customers having two accounts, yeah.

D

I didn't quite follow what. Why is that? Do they have to have two different accounts, yeah.

B

So the reason is is again sort of a it goes back to sort of the origins of get lab, get lab was designed as a self managed kind of product, and so we didn't build things in like critic, read, processing or account management. So we have the separate thing: customers docket lab comm, which is a wholly separate app that manages subscriptions and lets you.

B

You know, put your credit card details in and generate invoices and do all of those things, and so we rely on that to actually manage the subscriptions and purchases, and then we link back to get lab comm to actually apply this of those subscriptions. But like Cynthia was saying with there is that epic to make it invisible and at some point it it won't disappear, but it won't be quite so obvious, and so much of the pain point Google. You had question yeah. So.

F

I had a recent experience. I was shortly after joined a customer. You know when to customers, auto purchase a license right and it's coming back to me and saying what I mean I got a license, but but it says that I'm, the free tier still all right, look below the customer is going to the user profile, go into settings and providing springshot, let's as the customers in three-tier. Well, then we could I'd them. Okay, yes, okay, you need to go. You need to link the group after you link the group.

F

We go to the group billing section information and check that you have actually the tier there. You have purchased right, I, think it's very confusing for customers right like they just don't get it and I think would perhaps a low hanging through maybe for fulfillment and I know, and it's just true to put them the user profile say: hey yeah you'll have a free tier, but you belong to these groups that had those tiers or something and I like to to make that experience more more seamless I mean.

F

Maybe that's some of the ethics that Cynthia was mentioning. I. Haven't gone through those, yet do you have an experience? Is it support share that that experience? Oh, yes, okay,.

B

We've seriously did we see that I think I let off today with that example? Yes, we have that all the time, both both internal to get lab and with customers. The way that you lab comm subscriptions work is confusing. Okay, thank you.

B

Cynthia! Do you know if we have an issue about exposing group information on the users billing page I know I brought this up before, but I don't know if it got turned into an issue. I.

E

Remember, seeing there have been a number of proposed redesigns and I'm I, don't know that there is one specifically around exposing this on the user page like if you're on your user page to expose. What's you know what licenses might be apply to your groups? I do know that they are looking at like as the kind of first step to redesign the customer portal itself.

E

So it's a little more clear which namespace you applied a license to because, of course, one of the most common errors we have and see is that a user or customer has purchased a subscription, but they've applied it to their own namespace, like their usernames rather than the group namespace. So that's kind of the low-hanging fruit that they're, starting with, is redesigning just the look of the customers portal. So that's much more obvious which namespace it's being applied to and so I'm not sure we have one specifically on the billing. There.

C

Is just jump in I? Don't have the issue in front of me, but I'll link it somewhere once I get it, but one of the things they're looking to change on the the personal users profile page is to show what the perk the personal account subscribes to. But then beneath that also any related groups as an owner and what those packages are so I think that that's going to help a lot as well.

B

Great, thank you both are there any other questions.

G

Can only just verbalize it I'm in the car, the is there a desire to move the code base to more of a multi-tenant with subscriptions kind of built in I know we use it and it's probably not a huge use case, but I could see where customers may want to. You know manage internal subscriptions, charge, backs, etc, track kind of internal usage.

G

Where they're you know, their shared services team might be acting kind of like, like a service provider like like, we do forget, lab comm so to make that self-managed and you know, and then Shore the holes in in the.com. You know what we have in.com as well with third-party packages. Does that make sense, yeah.

B

Well, let me let me rephrase- and you can correct me you're asking: is there any will and product to add sort of the ability to run your own get lab comm, maybe just personally like within your own organization, but adding some of those features to to make it more like a SAS product I both on for self-managed, which would in turn help calm?

B

Yes, okay, I'm unaware of any sort of large-scale initiative of that type. But if anybody knows I would love to hear about it, I certainly have will. This is something that I would very much like to see. I think it would benefit our self-managed customers a lot and it would make life on the.com side a lot easier.

B

H

Would a big life on the.com side a lot easier on.

B

The.Com side, we would, if we I, think if we approach gitlab self-managed as SAS product, then we would get things like user authentication or like right now in order asset to authenticate that a user is allowed to make any change like that. We're allowed to make any changes for a user like on behalf of a user. We have to go through a fairly complicated process, so, like resetting two-factor authentication, we need to you know verify like all these different facts about them, where, as we approached it more as a self-managed.

B

Alright, sorry, as a SAS product, I think that we could build things that would make a lot of those processes easier, like I, even something simple like having a support. Pin if you like on your G suite, if you as an admin, want Google to make changes, you generate a little support, pin and then we Google knows that it's actually you and they can make changes without running you through a bunch of stuff. So I I think that it would probably actually benefit dot-com more and self-manager would kind of get it for free.

H

Interesting yet because I mean going with what Brad was saying, I think multi-tenancy self-hosted, where you can have multiple licenses on the same server is, is a huge request from everybody in and sales. So it.

G

Is but it also goes beyond that, you know just you know, different business units I know trying you work with very large enterprises that act like you know, probably 10 or 20, or 50 different organizations under the same umbrella, right and and shared services. Teams typically, are like you know: they're, basically like what we do for com and they have chargeback methodologies and they have onboarding and they want to distribute permissions.

G

You know down and say: okay, this group, your self, managing only your group right, but at the you know the top level management it's managed centrally or hosted centrally, just like just like get lab. Comm is.

H

Yeah you're, exactly it's probably out of scope with this discussion, but you're, absolutely right in that the chargeback model and having different or at one or might want ultimate. But another org only wants starter yeah you're exactly right, but I think that might be in a scope of this discussion. It.

G

H

Well, yeah I do and I are completely on board together on that.

B

Getting near the bottom of the hour, is there any last questions.

B

Okay, if not, then I'm gonna pass back to William yeah.

A

No just uh thanks Lyon team for joining us I personally think these discussions are always great and I know that everyone on the call is is also really good about logging issues, commenting issues, definitely for that product feedback cycle, and- and this was great thank you for all the wonderful info and we'll catch up with you all next time. Cheers.