Nik Mijic, co-founder of Matik comes to us this week with not only a fascinating back-story, but some great CS-related content as we discuss a wide variety of very timely and important topics.
In this episode, we talk about:
- How Matik automates the creation of content with personalized data, primarily for CS and Sales
- The current state of the ‘digital business review’
- A good understanding of your data is needed for a quality DBR
- Sending out one-pagers based on usage milestones or monthly project status updates - automagically
- A lot of people are scared of negative data, but using it to highlight customer improvement opportunities is key
- The importance of benchmarking cohorts of customers to help them grow and act on the adoption of the product
- Keeping a library of common customer objectives and content/measurements to help them along that path
- Moving beyond rules-based automations in favor of GenAI improvements of the inputs that would normally feed your automations to make them even better.
- Savvy sales teams are taking post-sale data and aggregating business value cases out of it to help set expectations
- Nobody’s data is perfect - don’t let that keep you from getting something in place
- Feedback loops are very important in Digital CS to make sure you are constantly monitoring what is working and what is not working
- The Kirkpatrick model, typically used in L&D can also be used in other ways to measure the short and long term efficacy of your programs and content
Enjoy! I know I sure did...
Nik's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikola-mijic-9012201b/
Matik: https://www.matik.io/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
This is where we don't want them to spend three
hours putting the deck togetherfor a half hour meeting.
Right, correct?
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Correct Right.
Well, even better.
Yet you don't need to have ameeting, right Like be,
proactive.
Right, talk about beingproactive.
What if you were able to go andI think this is where the
digital piece comes in what ifyou were able to go and send
that out on a set kid, and evenif you don't have a meeting?
A lot of people are scared toshow bad data, but it actually
can be a very effective tool inincreasing adoption and getting
(00:30):
your customers to realize thevalue that they've purchased
your product or service.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
And, once again, welcome to the digital customer
success podcast with me, alexChokovic, so glad you could join
us here today and every week asI seek out and interview
leaders and practitioners whoare innovating and building
great scaled CS programs.
My goal is to share what I'velearned and to bring you along
with me for the ride so that youget the insights that you need
to build and evolve your owndigital CS program.
(00:58):
If you'd like more info, wantto get in touch or sign up for
the latest updates, go todigitalcustomersuccesscom.
For now, let's get started.
Greetings and welcome toepisode 43 of the digital CS
podcast, so happy to have youback.
As always.
For those of you in the States,we are at the beginning of
(01:20):
spring break week, so that meansprobably one of several
scenarios Either you took sometime off and you're going on a
trip, going camping who knowswhat you're doing or you're
working from home with kiddos inthe background, either way.
So no matter where you are, I'mso glad you joined us today and
(01:43):
I say us because I'm joinedtoday by Nick Meach, who's the
co-founder of Matic.
If you're not familiar withMatic, it's a super cool
platform form.
You'll learn a little bit aboutit in this episode, but they
specialize in populating contentdynamically with data Just
(02:04):
really super cool stuff.
That is very, very CS relatedand so obviously we talk about
that and some of thosetechnologies.
We talk about the importance ofdata and benchmarking and how
to use that with customers,feedback loops and automations,
(02:25):
gen, ai.
We just kind of touch on a widevariety of things and I think
you'll find some really usefultidbits in this particular
episode with Nick Meach.
Nick, it is Nick, right, it'snot Nicola.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah, I go by Nick.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
You go by Nick, Do you ever?
Who calls you Nicola?
Speaker 2 (02:48):
You know my mom.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Your parents.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, my parents too, my siblings.
But when I moved to the US,Nick was easier for people to
pronounce and so we ended upjust going down that path and
it's kind of stuck.
So Nick has been kind of whatI've gone by over the past few
years.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Yeah, for sure.
And when we talked likeinitially, I think we both kind
of shared our kind of storiesabout, you know, moving to the
US, Like I moved to the US whenI was 10, Austrian born, and you
had kind of a similar journey,right.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah, so I was born originally in Bosnia, so Sierra
Igua, Bosnia.
Most of my family's from thatarea.
And when the war happened, theYugoslavian war, we fled to
Hungary.
From Hungary we went to Germany, tried to stay in Germany, but
we couldn't get our papers andcitizenship.
So because there were just somany refugees that were coming
(03:46):
up from the Yugoslavian war andended up kind of applying all
over the world Canada, US,Australia got accepted to the US
and my parents decided to come,come out here.
So we moved here when I waseight years old and I was in
Utah for a really long time, butI've been in the Bay Area now
for about 11 years.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
That's amazing.
It's such a cool story.
I mean I love it when there'samazing weird circuitous stories
into you know just adulthood,because I mean there's few
people that have a straight shotor I guess, and I think,
similarly to CS, like there'sfew people who have cuts into CS
(04:27):
as well, because it hasn't beenaround for that long, totally,
totally.
Yeah Well, I jumped right intoit.
But welcome to the podcast.
It's super awesome to have youand obviously we're talking
because of this wonderful thingyou've built and are building
(04:51):
with Madagascar.
I'd love to kind of get alittle bit of, I guess, an
origin story of what led youinto building this company and
how your experiences kind of ledyou to want to do that and just
Give us a sense for for what itis you're trying to solve.
(05:13):
I don't want I hate puttingwords it's not as, when it comes
to, like you know, this is whatyou do, right.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah, I guess the elevator fish kind of at a high
level.
Just to starting there, youknow Maddox.
What we do at Maddox is we weautomate the creation of content
within PowerPoint, googleslider, email with hyper
personalized Data in the formsof charts, tables, text images
that we insert into that contenton your behalf.
So we work a lot with customersuccess and sales teams across
(05:45):
companies like greenhouse issauna glass door To automate
things like business reviews,renewal decks, roi decks,
automated one pagers that getssent out via emails, anything
that incorporates data whereyou're trying to highlight value
and when how the kind of ideaoriginated is.
Way back when I worked for astartup that was in the customer
(06:10):
success space, I was a CSplatform very similar to
Gainside or catalyst or any ofthose tools that that CS teams
use.
And you know one of the thingswhen I was at the startup, our
customers were always asking ushey, we do these things, we do
these decks and these ROIcalculators and these business
reviews.
They're really, reallytime-consuming but they're
(06:31):
Extremely valuable to share withour customers.
And so when I joined LinkedInAfter the startup, I joined a
team called insights thatbasically we built internal
tools and narratives for ourcustomer success and sales teams
, and so typically the workflowthat we saw was you'd have a
template right in PowerPoint,google slide stored somewhere
for all the different touchpoints, whether it's a business
(06:53):
review or a renewal deck,whatever it may be, and you as a
rep let's say you had abusiness review with a client
tomorrow You'd go there, youmake a copy of that template
that had your design, everything, and then there would be
instructions that would say Alex, go to Salesforce to get this
metric.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Go to Tablo, take this screen use this go to this
report and go to the yeah, yeahit's into Excel.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Do this math and we had an internal tool that
already existed at LinkedIn thatkind of automated that process
and I had the chance to rebuildthat and it really kind of got
me thinking hey, I think there'sa huge opportunity for this one
, such such Huge impact atLinkedIn, not just from a
productivity standpoint, butthis whole notion of when you're
sharing this hyper personalized, data-driven content with your
(07:38):
customers.
That usually led to betterbusiness outcomes, right like
adoption.
Upsells and so forth.
So I thought, hey, if this worksfor a LinkedIn, there's got to
be other companies that havevery similar problem, and so
I've always been on the supportside, meaning ops.
I was always the data personthat you would go to to request
data, and I met my co-founderthrough a mutual friend.
(08:00):
He was an early engineer at boxand I was like, hey, I've got
this idea.
I'm not entirely sure if I'mready to quite leave LinkedIn,
but I'd love to kind of noodleup on this with you and see if
it makes sense.
And sure enough, him and Ireally hit it off and the
feedback we got from our networkwas really positive.
So we took the leap of faith andstarted the company back in
2019 and fast forward to today.
(08:23):
We're back by some of the toptier BCs and men, love ventures
and treason Horowitz.
We've raised 23 million todayand again work with a lot of
companies like a sauna, a glassdoor, auto desk and so forth, to
help their teams automate thecreation of this content with
hyper personalized.
You know, tables, charts,images, text you name it.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
That's so cool, it's, it's awesome because I mean,
obviously it fits perfectly intothe podcast which is, you know,
digital customer success andand I think In a lot of ways,
you know, I feel like this isone of those Kind of ideal
(09:07):
maturity steps in a digitalprogram is to to be able to
create kind of personalizedcontent.
That's that's, you know, at hisdoorstep, at the right persona
at the right time, and thosekinds of things.
And I think the digitalbusiness review is is one thing
that has been kind of elusivefor for a lot of folks and and I
(09:29):
think, still is in the mind ofa lot of people, and so I love
the idea that that mattock iskind of at the at the front edge
of Really trying to solve forthat, you know.
But going back to the digitalCS theme, one one thing that I
do like to ask all of my guestsis is the standard question of
you know what's your elevatorpitch of digital CS?
(09:50):
Because everybody comes with,you know, to the show with a
slightly different flavor,slightly different background.
There is no kind of one sizefits all definition.
So I'd love to kind of get yourstuff of what you would tell
somebody that digital CS is.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Yeah, I mean, I think at a high level.
Digital CS is just kind of theability to automate certain
functions right there.
Typical CSM doesn't mean thatwe're going to totally eradicate
the need for traditional CSMand it will automate some of
these processes.
That will help alleviate thetime for the CSM to do more
strategic work right, and Ithink that's a really important
thing to do is to really get theidea that we're going to do
(10:25):
more strategic work right.
And I think what biggestmisconception misconceptions
that I've heard and speakingleaders and our customers around
this concept of digitalcustomer success is that they
think it's only for their longtail of their business right.
It's like hey, we're only goingto do accounts that are not
touched by CSM, when in realitya digital CS program can
(10:48):
probably benefit not just yourlong tail but can also benefit
your enterprise CSM's, orenterprise accounts that do have
a CSM, to hopefully give themmore time again to do more
strategic things that willhopefully lead to better
business outcomes.
So at a high level, that'sthat's kind of my thought on on
the, on the concept.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Yeah, I love that.
I Really love that and and Iyou know the the again the
concept of a digital businessreview.
What do you think the currentstate of the dbr is when you
talk to customers and all thatkind of stuff?
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Yeah, that's the current situation, I think, a
step back.
I think a business review isjust one touch point, right?
I think people who do thisreally really well don't focus
on a singular use case and Takea more of a holistic approach.
We're looking at all thedifferent touch points in the
customer lifecycle, right,whether it's onboarding, whether
(11:49):
it's a business review, whetherit's a renewal deck, whether
it's, you know, adoption, andthey're trying to tie some sort
of content to those touch pointsto be able to help the customer
do some sort of action orrealize some sort of value that
your product or service isrendered.
And so, in terms of speakinglike specifically around the
business review, you know, Ithink today it's obviously
(12:12):
really widely adopted, right.
It's its best practice to beable to go and do those.
I think what we see typicallyWith companies that we work with
is that there is a resourceconstraint, right, with a
typical, you know, customersuccess where hey Book of
businesses are doubling right,given the macroeconomic climate,
and, as a result, we want ourreps to do a lot of these
(12:34):
business reviews or renewaldecks or adoption reviews, but
they don't have the time becauseit's so time consuming to put
them together, and so this iswhere we don't want them to
spend three hours putting thedeck together for a half-hour
meeting, right?
Even better.
Yet you don't need to have ameeting right like be pro right.
Talk about being proactive.
What if you were able to go andI think this is where the
(12:55):
digital piece comes in what ifyou were able to go and send
that out on a set kid, and evenif you don't have a meeting?
Speaker 1 (13:01):
to hopefully then.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Get a meeting where you can talk about more
strategic things that they'retrying to move the needle on.
So I think we're still kind ofin the early stages of, you know
, mainstream adoption and Ithink some of the things that
I've seen is one you really haveto have a good understanding of
your data.
To a certain extent, I thinkthat's always a big thing is
(13:23):
because it's digital, it's it'syou want to ensure that
somebody's getting this, gettingthe right message, just getting
the right data at the righttime right and you want to trust
what you have in the data.
Exactly, and so I think thiswhole notion of smart automation
, where you know you can addthat rule-based logic to
indicate hey, I know that ifthis is zero, we shouldn't be
(13:47):
sending this out at all, right,hey, so right, right, hey, you
don't have this product, weshouldn't be sending out this
one page or at all, becausethey're not going to be using it
.
So I think there is some ofthat stuff that people are
trying to figure out and map outthat entire process and you
know, this is where we hopefullycome in and can help with that
Making sure that you feelcomfortable and confident
sending out this content to yourcustomers without having too
(14:10):
much worry.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
What my brain is going all over the place as
you're talking, because this issuper exciting.
But you know, one of the thingsthat I've talked about a lot
recently is the the crazy amountof variability that exists in
digital CS, meaning that you'vegot, you know, multiple products
to support you've got, you know, internal folks.
(14:34):
You've got external motionsYou've got, you know,
collaboration with differentsituations You've got, you know,
collaboration with differentsituations.
You've got different tools.
I mean, the variables areinsane to where if you were to,
like you know, pick up astrategy that worked in one
organization and plunk it downon another one, it just it
(14:54):
probably wouldn't work, justbecause the variables aren't the
same.
I think goes without saying.
But you know what.
What comes to mind as you'retalking about this is, you know,
persona specific use caseswhere you're sending different
things to different personas.
Also, the use cases around,like you know, sending positive
(15:17):
things is great, but also likeletting an executive know that,
hey, you're off track here andthis is what you need to do to
course correct.
I'm just throwing shit out here.
Sorry, pardon my French, butI'm throwing stuff out here
because I would love to get asense from you of what those use
cases are beyond, just like thebusiness review of how people
(15:41):
are using cool ways andinnovative ways that I may be
missing.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
I mean that example of like you know, usage is a
directional based off ofimplementation, or how you get
started with the product, right.
And so I think in theonboarding phase typically, you
know, there's probably certainmilestones of like, hey, you've
got this setup, boolean fieldsand you've got this setup
yesterday, no, right.
And you know, I think this is agreat where where you can send
(16:11):
out a one pager to not just thepeople that are tactically
implementing your solution, butalso including the decision
makers and the leadership teamon where the implementation is.
So being able to send out amonthly review of where, if your
product is very complex andthere's a huge onboarding
process, to be able to say, hey,here's where we're on track,
(16:33):
here's where we're not, andeverybody's fully aware.
So like kind of automating,like a project tracker of the
onboarding process, and yourmost companies have that
codified at this point.
Right, you're scaling andgrowing you can't be doing ad
hoc.
You have to have some sort of aplaybook.
So being able to send a onepager or an email around, that
is simple use case that I thinkI'll allow you to do that.
(16:56):
I think the other is this whatwe call like an adoption monthly
newsletter, where it doesn'tjust give you usage data of,
like how your team is using yourproduct or service, but being
also being also able to thentranslate into ROI.
So in our case, you know timesavings, productivity gain is a
huge ROI component of oursolution.
(17:16):
So us being able to send a hereis the number of presentations
your team has generated oremails that they've sent out
with data driven content.
Here's what it would have takenprematic, here's what it is now
with magic, and this is thetime savings and the ROI that
we've been able to deliver.
So being able to send that outon a monthly basis with
recommendations is a great wayto not only just throw data at
(17:39):
your project You're probablyyour customer for the sake of
showcasing data but translatingthat data to recommendations
that they can act upon, and thehope is you are getting in front
of it, even if it's bad, evenif it doesn't show great results
.
If you do it early on, you know.
Hopefully at that point it'llcause your customer to be like
hey Nick, what's going on, usageis not what I expected, or ROI
(18:02):
is not there, let's jump on acall.
It's easier to do that in monththree versus month 11, month
prior to the renewal, and so Ido agree with you.
I think a lot of people arescared to show bad data, but it
actually can be a very effectivetool and increasing adoption
and getting your customers torealize the value that they've
purchased your product orservice in.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
Yeah.
And also showing where youstack up against other customers
.
And simulcs, yeah.
Benchmarking data Like, hey,this is where you're doing great
compared to your peers and thisis how you're where you're not
doing great compared to yoursuper powerful, because it turns
you into a consultant.
You know like you're turning tojust not just a software vendor
(18:46):
, but then you become aconsulting arm of the company.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Totally.
I think some of our bestcustomers, I think the people
who are doing this extremelywell in terms of leveraging data
are people who are benchmarkingRight and I think, there's so
many ways.
We've written a lot of contentabout this on our blog in which
you can visualize benchmarkbenchmarks right.
It can be a cohort of customersthat look like you.
(19:10):
It could be time based even tosay hey, this is what you were,
this is your results last yearcompared to this year, quarter
of a quarter.
That's technically a benchmarkas well, but I think the more
context you can provide in thedata, I think the better it has
to leading your customer to acton it right, Versus just being
like, cool, I generated X amountor I logged in this many times.
(19:33):
I think that's that's not goodenough anymore.
You have to be able to relyback to benchmarks.
And then the other thing, too,is being able to tie it back to
the goals and objectives of whythey purchased your product or
service.
Right, Like everything that youshare, post purchase should tie
it back to why they purchasedyour product to begin with and
hopefully over time.
You know you have a library ofobjectives that are most common
(19:57):
across your customer base.
I know that some companies maynot be able to do that, but you
know in order to really scaleyou're going to have to try to
come up with some sort of alibrary and then you can then,
just similar to the personas,you can then start creating
content that's tied to thosebusiness objectives that say hey
, alex, for this reason.
So here are the metrics that weassociate with that objective
(20:21):
to help them realize that value,and that's what we're going to
be including in our ongoingcontent that we generate for
Alex right.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Are there?
Where's this all going, likeyou know?
I mean, obviously there's thiswhole generative AI piece that's
lingering in the corner andcoming into play, but you know,
it's not completely like wecan't just plug it in and use it
.
It still requires kind of humaneffort.
(20:49):
But, like what, you know what?
What are you and the teamtalking about in terms of, okay,
you know, we can populate thesethings and we can provide
contextual, you know relevance,which in itself is is a big leap
forward.
But but what are you guystalking about?
Speaker 2 (21:06):
I think one of the things that really excites us as
an organization and thefeedback that we've gotten right
is you know, we've typicallyhad what I've called smart
automation.
Like the intelligence layerwithin Matic allows you to do
rule based logic that says, hey,if this happens in the data or
you know, delete this slide oradd this chart instead, right,
(21:26):
to help you, you know, get toclose to 100% automation as
possible, right?
I think where I think thegenerative AI can kind of come
in, especially when it comes toour space, is taking a step
further and really covering theedge cases.
And so what I mean by that is wejust had an AI summit back in
September where we had folksfrom open AI and others join and
(21:48):
talk about AI within the CSmotion.
We talked about what we launchedcalled automated insights,
where we can not only populate,let's say, a chart on a slide or
a table on a slide, but scanthe data that we're sending to
that chart and give you thethree key takeaways that
summarize the trend.
So, for example, if you have,like, a number of presentations
(22:11):
generated over time that weshare with our customers, it can
actually look at that data,analyze and say here's a top
template that was being used,here's the percent growth or
decline.
So that way you're not doingthe heavy lifting, not just
putting the data into thepresentation, but Matic is now
also analyzing that data andgiving the key takeaways in the
exact summary that you can thenshare and alter that you go and
(22:34):
share with your customers.
So I'm really excited aboutthat last mile piece of not just
being able to create thecontent but also taking a step
further and covering some ofthose edge cases that you can't
do with rule-based logic.
That really has to happen onthe fly.
I think AI has a really goodpossibility of helping us solve
that problem.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Yeah, for sure, because, like you pointed out
earlier, like a piece of data isgreat, but it doesn't mean
anything unless you tie someinsights to it and some meaning
to it.
So that's super cool and anawesome use of AI.
I know you work with a lot ofsales teams as well.
Obviously, I think the use caseis very different from a
(23:18):
pre-sale to a post-saleperspective.
I was curious just to get yoursense on what that looks like
and how you've worked with yourcustomers to make sure it gets
adopted in both worlds equally.
(23:40):
Is there internal thing, usecases and things like that as
well?
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Yeah, typically our primary persona has been
customer success, followed bysales.
We have gone a huge internalpoll to be like hey, our FPNA
team puts this content togetherfor internally every single
month and it's a huge pain toput together.
We haven't focused on energythere, just given the demand on
the externally facing contentthat sales and customer success
(24:06):
put together.
For sales in particular, someof the common use cases that we
see is like pricing proposals,roi calculators.
It's more sumptive base whereyou put together a business case
that's based on assumptionsthat you would put in a
calculator that says, hey,here's the ROI that you're going
to get from our service, alexor product over the next 12
(24:27):
months if you decide to purchaseour product.
We see a lot of those use cases.
As well as going back tobenchmarking, one of the things
that I think really savvy salesorganizations have done is
taking the aggregated customerusage of their customer base and
then being able to translatethat over on the pre-sale side
(24:49):
to say, hey, look, a customerthat looks like you, meaning
your industry, your size,whatever it may be here on
average the results that theyget with our product or service.
So it's being able to illustrateand, like I said, I think you
have to have data in order to dothat.
We work a lot with mid-marketenterprise customers, so they've
(25:11):
been around for a while andthey're able to go and aggregate
that information and theninclude that within their pitch
deck, for example, to hopefullyget someone to cross the line.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Yeah, we talked a little bit about data, the fact
that a lot of customers strugglewith data.
A lot of everyone struggleswith data and you got to have
some clean data to be able tofeed some of the stuff.
But what are some of the otherthings where you would look at a
prospect and go you're ready,you're not ready?
(25:42):
What are the stumbling blocksthat you try to advise customers
on?
Speaker 2 (25:50):
To be clear, I think no one's data is perfect.
You've probably worked at a lotof companies I've worked at a
few as well and there's not onecompany that I have worked for
where the data is perfect or itdoesn't have issues.
I think that's just the name ofthe game.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Or there's too much of it.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
Yeah, too much of it.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Also, think about it CRM a lot of it is naturally
inputted data so there's goingto be a lot of discrepancies
when it comes to that.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
So I don't think the state of your data needs to be
perfectly clean to get started,especially if you do have
rule-based logic that canprevent, to make sure that
they're not going to getsomething that they should in a
customer or prospect.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
He's not going to get something that they shouldn't.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
I think another thing that we see quite a bit in
terms of readiness is peoplethink that they need to have a
perfect template or use case tobegin with, and I think one of
the things that we tell ourprospects and our customers is
content is similar to buildingsoftware.
It's not like you'll come upwith.
Let's say, you're a leader, youput together a business review
(26:56):
template for your team.
Right Six to 12 months from nowmay look different, because
they use it.
They get feedback.
Hey, alex, slides three andfour are great, but you know
what?
This isn't really resonating asmuch.
I've combined it into one slideand it's been amazing.
Or hey, instead of talking aboutROI this way, I've talked about
it this way and this isresonated, and so part of it too
(27:18):
, is you got to get somethingout the door to get feedback and
there needs to be feedbackloops to continue to iterate on
that content.
Because your product isevolving, your process may be
evolving, your content alsoneeds to be evolving.
And going back to the softwarebuilding software analogy, when
your team ships product, it'snot like they ship and say, hey,
we're done, we're not going totouch it anymore.
(27:40):
People start using it, they getfeedback and then they start
making enhancements anditerating on it.
So I think, it's also anothermisconception that you have to
have everything or boiling theocean.
You got to get startedsomewhere, start with a few use
cases and then build on top ofthat.
And typically it's a businessreview that people start with,
then they go to a one pager,then they go to like an adoption
(28:02):
review, then they do abenchmarking report, a renewal
deck, so you don't have to haveall of it in place.
And this is where the AI isalso can be extremely impactful,
right, like we have out of thebox templates where you give us
your website and we willactually generate a best
practice business with yourbranding and your.
(28:23):
If you don't have thoseresources, your branding and
some of the metrics that we'vegotten from your website that we
think are gonna be applicableto you as a starting point,
right?
So I think AI can definitelyhelp close that gap as well.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Yeah, I mean, the number one question that I get
you know from folks is where doI start?
And I give them your answer,which is you start, have you
start somewhere, you.
And then you build upon it andyou iterate it and you know, if
you have one dataset that'ssuper clean and it solves an
(28:58):
issue you know like, don'thesitate to send that email or
to get that thing out, just shipit.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
I had a mentor of mine who gave me some early on
in my career, gave me somereally, really great advice and
said, you know, don't letperfection be the enemy of
progress.
And I think that's so true in asituation where I think we are
so enamored with being perfect.
I think something that isreally perfect, when in reality
that's really limiting theprogress that we have as an
(29:26):
organization.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Yeah, and when it comes to digital CS, a lot of
folks think that it's this blackbox like you either have it or
you don't have it, which isinteresting, you know to think
about.
But it's totally not the case.
It's like you have it bybuilding upon, you know the
things that you implement andgrowing it over time and getting
more sophisticated over time,and you know working your way
(29:51):
into a maturity model.
You don't start at level fouror five of a maturity level.
You start at level one or two,depending on what you have.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Yeah, yeah, I think.
One other thing to add to that,as you were saying, that is, I
think, the notion of feedbackloops.
I think is really important indigital CS, because you usually
have a small group ofindividuals that are setting up
these programs holistically foryour organization and they might
(30:19):
be on the front lines.
They might not be on the frontlines and making sure that
you're constantly having ahealth check on top of your
programs to be like, hey, arethere changes that we need to
make?
How do we know what changes weneed to make?
Where are we getting thatfeedback?
What's qualitative, what'squantitative?
I think is hugely important tomake sure that you have
long-term success and not justshort-term success with your
(30:41):
program.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah, and I think it goes beyond just the survey.
It's like actually exchangingmouth words sometimes.
You know, one of the thingsthat I've taken from, I guess, a
former and current professionallife in learning and
development is the Kirkpatrickmodel, which is basically how
you evaluate the effectivenessof a piece of training content.
(31:05):
But I also I think it's wildlyapplicable for automations in
general or just really anythingagile related, where you have
these various ways of measuringefficacy of something that
you've implemented, whether it'slike immediate impact of thumbs
up, thumbs down or thelong-term impact of how has this
(31:25):
affected your business in apositive or negative way.
It's interesting to think about.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
And I would argue too that I think early on you're
probably going to be morereliant upon qualitative,
subjective feedback, like theconversations that you have with
your customers one off right,or maybe some CSMs that get
their input.
And then over time as theprogram becomes more and more
established, hopefully thosefeedback loops are more
data-driven and you can see itin the data and I think a lot of
(31:56):
people want to start with thatladder when in reality, you've
got to start with the formerfirst in order to get to the
ladder right, yeah, yeah, youreally do.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
You really do.
That's awesome.
What's in your content diet?
What are you paying attentionto?
What do you feed your brainwhen you're not deeply
entrenched in medic?
Speaker 2 (32:22):
With content in terms of business or outside of work
anything, anything yeah.
You know I do.
Well, I'm a big soccer fan, soI do, I do.
I do wash a lot of soccer tokind of de-stress from, from the
work life.
When it comes to work, I dothink there's some, especially
(32:44):
when it comes to CS.
I think there's some greatthought leadership out there
that I'm always you know.
I think Nick met it as afantastic job at King's site.
I think the folks at Catalystas well do an amazing job.
I think Vitaly produces somereally great content, plan Hat
as well, and I think that's oneof the things that I've been,
you know, being in CS like Iremember when I was at the CS
(33:05):
startup, what now over eight,nine years ago, such an tech in
CS was so early on and they werekind of building these
foundational blocks for thoughtleadership, and just to see how
many thought leaders there arenow and the exchange of ideas
across these different groups, Ithink it's been fantastic.
So I definitely try to stay upto date with all of the major CS
(33:30):
players out there and, you know, pay attention to what they
have to say.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Yeah, well, you gave a couple of shout outs already
Nick Metta and the bunch but arethere any specific folks that
you feel are doing really greatwork in digital?
In terms of companies,particular, yeah, or companies
or individuals that are buildingcool programs, whatever that
looks like.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
Yeah, we definitely have some great customers.
I think the folks at Greenhousehave done a fantastic job.
We work with them, we publish acase study where they've done a
really good job atincorporating data into their
content, but without just thesake of data, but really trying
to tie it to objectives of theircustomers and tying it back to
(34:19):
value and ROI.
And just to see how muchthey've done has been amazing.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
I think they have some of the best templates in
the market right now, and whatthey've been able to audit yeah,
and somebody else mentionedthem as well as an outstanding
contributor, and I forget whowas which episode it was, but
yeah, that's good stuff.
Look, I've really reallyappreciated your time and your
(34:47):
insight and I love what you guysare doing because I think it's
so needed, especially right nowwhere the need to prove you know
, efficacy and to drive outcomeswithin your customers is more
needed than ever before.
So it's awesome to have thatinsight and I appreciate the
(35:09):
time.
Where can people find youengage with you, any parting
words, any webinars coming upthat you want to promote, any
kind of like?
I know you're going to havesome paternity leave coming up,
so congratulations on that, butyeah, it is like end of hot ones
if you watch that show TotallyTo promote or just say hi, or
(35:31):
where you can engage.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Totally, I mean, being a former LinkedIner,
always feel free to reach out tome on LinkedIn.
Try to be very active on theplatform.
If you want to learn moreobviously about our product or
solution or what we do.
Feel free to go to our website,mattockio.
Feel free to fill out a demorequest form and our team can
kind of give you an overview ofour solution and the problems
(35:54):
that we're trying to solve forso those are probably the two
best mediums to go through.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Amazing, cool.
Well, again, I appreciated thetime.
Thanks for giving us yourknowledge.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Awesome.
Thank you for having me.
I actually enjoyed the talk.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Thank you for joining me for this episode of the
Digital Customer Success Podcast.
If you like what we're doing,consider leaving us a review on
your podcast platform of choice.
It really helps us to grow andto provide value to a broader
audience.
You can view the DigitalCustomer Success Definition Word
Map and get more details aboutthe show at
digitalcustomersuccesscom.
My name is Alex Turkovich.
(36:31):
Thanks again for joining andwe'll see you next time.
This is where we don't want them to spend three
hours putting the deck togetherfor a half hour meeting.
Right, correct?
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Correct Right.
Well, even better.
Yet you don't need to have ameeting, right Like be,
proactive.
Right, talk about beingproactive.
What if you were able to go andI think this is where the
digital piece comes in what ifyou were able to go and send
that out on a set kid, and evenif you don't have a meeting?
A lot of people are scared toshow bad data, but it actually
can be a very effective tool inincreasing adoption and getting
(00:30):
your customers to realize thevalue that they've purchased
your product or service.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
And, once again, welcome to the digital customer
success podcast with me, alexChokovic, so glad you could join
us here today and every week asI seek out and interview
leaders and practitioners whoare innovating and building
great scaled CS programs.
My goal is to share what I'velearned and to bring you along
with me for the ride so that youget the insights that you need
to build and evolve your owndigital CS program.
(00:58):
If you'd like more info, wantto get in touch or sign up for
the latest updates, go todigitalcustomersuccesscom.
For now, let's get started.
Greetings and welcome toepisode 43 of the digital CS
podcast, so happy to have youback.
As always.
For those of you in the States,we are at the beginning of
(01:20):
spring break week, so that meansprobably one of several
scenarios Either you took sometime off and you're going on a
trip, going camping who knowswhat you're doing or you're
working from home with kiddos inthe background, either way.
So no matter where you are, I'mso glad you joined us today and
(01:43):
I say us because I'm joinedtoday by Nick Meach, who's the
co-founder of Matic.
If you're not familiar withMatic, it's a super cool
platform form.
You'll learn a little bit aboutit in this episode, but they
specialize in populating contentdynamically with data Just
(02:04):
really super cool stuff.
That is very, very CS relatedand so obviously we talk about
that and some of thosetechnologies.
We talk about the importance ofdata and benchmarking and how
to use that with customers,feedback loops and automations,
(02:25):
gen, ai.
We just kind of touch on a widevariety of things and I think
you'll find some really usefultidbits in this particular
episode with Nick Meach.
Nick, it is Nick, right, it'snot Nicola.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah, I go by Nick.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
You go by Nick, Do you ever?
Who calls you Nicola?
Speaker 2 (02:48):
You know my mom.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Your parents.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Yeah, my parents too, my siblings.
But when I moved to the US,Nick was easier for people to
pronounce and so we ended upjust going down that path and
it's kind of stuck.
So Nick has been kind of whatI've gone by over the past few
years.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
Yeah, for sure.
And when we talked likeinitially, I think we both kind
of shared our kind of storiesabout, you know, moving to the
US, Like I moved to the US whenI was 10, Austrian born, and you
had kind of a similar journey,right.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah, so I was born originally in Bosnia, so Sierra
Igua, Bosnia.
Most of my family's from thatarea.
And when the war happened, theYugoslavian war, we fled to
Hungary.
From Hungary we went to Germany, tried to stay in Germany, but
we couldn't get our papers andcitizenship.
So because there were just somany refugees that were coming
(03:46):
up from the Yugoslavian war andended up kind of applying all
over the world Canada, US,Australia got accepted to the US
and my parents decided to come,come out here.
So we moved here when I waseight years old and I was in
Utah for a really long time, butI've been in the Bay Area now
for about 11 years.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
That's amazing.
It's such a cool story.
I mean I love it when there'samazing weird circuitous stories
into you know just adulthood,because I mean there's few
people that have a straight shotor I guess, and I think,
similarly to CS, like there'sfew people who have cuts into CS
(04:27):
as well, because it hasn't beenaround for that long, totally,
totally.
Yeah Well, I jumped right intoit.
But welcome to the podcast.
It's super awesome to have youand obviously we're talking
because of this wonderful thingyou've built and are building
(04:51):
with Madagascar.
I'd love to kind of get alittle bit of, I guess, an
origin story of what led youinto building this company and
how your experiences kind of ledyou to want to do that and just
Give us a sense for for what itis you're trying to solve.
(05:13):
I don't want I hate puttingwords it's not as, when it comes
to, like you know, this is whatyou do, right.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Yeah, I guess the elevator fish kind of at a high
level.
Just to starting there, youknow Maddox.
What we do at Maddox is we weautomate the creation of content
within PowerPoint, googleslider, email with hyper
personalized Data in the formsof charts, tables, text images
that we insert into that contenton your behalf.
So we work a lot with customersuccess and sales teams across
(05:45):
companies like greenhouse issauna glass door To automate
things like business reviews,renewal decks, roi decks,
automated one pagers that getssent out via emails, anything
that incorporates data whereyou're trying to highlight value
and when how the kind of ideaoriginated is.
Way back when I worked for astartup that was in the customer
(06:10):
success space, I was a CSplatform very similar to
Gainside or catalyst or any ofthose tools that that CS teams
use.
And you know one of the thingswhen I was at the startup, our
customers were always asking ushey, we do these things, we do
these decks and these ROIcalculators and these business
reviews.
They're really, reallytime-consuming but they're
(06:31):
Extremely valuable to share withour customers.
And so when I joined LinkedInAfter the startup, I joined a
team called insights thatbasically we built internal
tools and narratives for ourcustomer success and sales teams
, and so typically the workflowthat we saw was you'd have a
template right in PowerPoint,google slide stored somewhere
for all the different touchpoints, whether it's a business
(06:53):
review or a renewal deck,whatever it may be, and you as a
rep let's say you had abusiness review with a client
tomorrow You'd go there, youmake a copy of that template
that had your design, everything, and then there would be
instructions that would say Alex, go to Salesforce to get this
metric.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
Go to Tablo, take this screen use this go to this
report and go to the yeah, yeahit's into Excel.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Do this math and we had an internal tool that
already existed at LinkedIn thatkind of automated that process
and I had the chance to rebuildthat and it really kind of got
me thinking hey, I think there'sa huge opportunity for this one
, such such Huge impact atLinkedIn, not just from a
productivity standpoint, butthis whole notion of when you're
sharing this hyper personalized, data-driven content with your
(07:38):
customers.
That usually led to betterbusiness outcomes, right like
adoption.
Upsells and so forth.
So I thought, hey, if this worksfor a LinkedIn, there's got to
be other companies that havevery similar problem, and so
I've always been on the supportside, meaning ops.
I was always the data personthat you would go to to request
data, and I met my co-founderthrough a mutual friend.
(08:00):
He was an early engineer at boxand I was like, hey, I've got
this idea.
I'm not entirely sure if I'mready to quite leave LinkedIn,
but I'd love to kind of noodleup on this with you and see if
it makes sense.
And sure enough, him and Ireally hit it off and the
feedback we got from our networkwas really positive.
So we took the leap of faith andstarted the company back in
2019 and fast forward to today.
(08:23):
We're back by some of the toptier BCs and men, love ventures
and treason Horowitz.
We've raised 23 million todayand again work with a lot of
companies like a sauna, a glassdoor, auto desk and so forth, to
help their teams automate thecreation of this content with
hyper personalized.
You know, tables, charts,images, text you name it.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
That's so cool, it's, it's awesome because I mean,
obviously it fits perfectly intothe podcast which is, you know,
digital customer success andand I think In a lot of ways,
you know, I feel like this isone of those Kind of ideal
(09:07):
maturity steps in a digitalprogram is to to be able to
create kind of personalizedcontent.
That's that's, you know, at hisdoorstep, at the right persona
at the right time, and thosekinds of things.
And I think the digitalbusiness review is is one thing
that has been kind of elusivefor for a lot of folks and and I
(09:29):
think, still is in the mind ofa lot of people, and so I love
the idea that that mattock iskind of at the at the front edge
of Really trying to solve forthat, you know.
But going back to the digitalCS theme, one one thing that I
do like to ask all of my guestsis is the standard question of
you know what's your elevatorpitch of digital CS?
(09:50):
Because everybody comes with,you know, to the show with a
slightly different flavor,slightly different background.
There is no kind of one sizefits all definition.
So I'd love to kind of get yourstuff of what you would tell
somebody that digital CS is.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
Yeah, I mean, I think at a high level.
Digital CS is just kind of theability to automate certain
functions right there.
Typical CSM doesn't mean thatwe're going to totally eradicate
the need for traditional CSMand it will automate some of
these processes.
That will help alleviate thetime for the CSM to do more
strategic work right, and Ithink that's a really important
thing to do is to really get theidea that we're going to do
(10:25):
more strategic work right.
And I think what biggestmisconception misconceptions
that I've heard and speakingleaders and our customers around
this concept of digitalcustomer success is that they
think it's only for their longtail of their business right.
It's like hey, we're only goingto do accounts that are not
touched by CSM, when in realitya digital CS program can
(10:48):
probably benefit not just yourlong tail but can also benefit
your enterprise CSM's, orenterprise accounts that do have
a CSM, to hopefully give themmore time again to do more
strategic things that willhopefully lead to better
business outcomes.
So at a high level, that'sthat's kind of my thought on on
the, on the concept.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
Yeah, I love that.
I Really love that and and Iyou know the the again the
concept of a digital businessreview.
What do you think the currentstate of the dbr is when you
talk to customers and all thatkind of stuff?
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Yeah, that's the current situation, I think, a
step back.
I think a business review isjust one touch point, right?
I think people who do thisreally really well don't focus
on a singular use case and Takea more of a holistic approach.
We're looking at all thedifferent touch points in the
customer lifecycle, right,whether it's onboarding, whether
(11:49):
it's a business review, whetherit's a renewal deck, whether
it's, you know, adoption, andthey're trying to tie some sort
of content to those touch pointsto be able to help the customer
do some sort of action orrealize some sort of value that
your product or service isrendered.
And so, in terms of speakinglike specifically around the
business review, you know, Ithink today it's obviously
(12:12):
really widely adopted, right.
It's its best practice to beable to go and do those.
I think what we see typicallyWith companies that we work with
is that there is a resourceconstraint, right, with a
typical, you know, customersuccess where hey Book of
businesses are doubling right,given the macroeconomic climate,
and, as a result, we want ourreps to do a lot of these
(12:34):
business reviews or renewaldecks or adoption reviews, but
they don't have the time becauseit's so time consuming to put
them together, and so this iswhere we don't want them to
spend three hours putting thedeck together for a half-hour
meeting, right?
Even better.
Yet you don't need to have ameeting right like be pro right.
Talk about being proactive.
What if you were able to go andI think this is where the
(12:55):
digital piece comes in what ifyou were able to go and send
that out on a set kid, and evenif you don't have a meeting?
Speaker 1 (13:01):
to hopefully then.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Get a meeting where you can talk about more
strategic things that they'retrying to move the needle on.
So I think we're still kind ofin the early stages of, you know
, mainstream adoption and Ithink some of the things that
I've seen is one you really haveto have a good understanding of
your data.
To a certain extent, I thinkthat's always a big thing is
(13:23):
because it's digital, it's it'syou want to ensure that
somebody's getting this, gettingthe right message, just getting
the right data at the righttime right and you want to trust
what you have in the data.
Exactly, and so I think thiswhole notion of smart automation
, where you know you can addthat rule-based logic to
indicate hey, I know that ifthis is zero, we shouldn't be
(13:47):
sending this out at all, right,hey, so right, right, hey, you
don't have this product, weshouldn't be sending out this
one page or at all, becausethey're not going to be using it
.
So I think there is some ofthat stuff that people are
trying to figure out and map outthat entire process and you
know, this is where we hopefullycome in and can help with that
Making sure that you feelcomfortable and confident
sending out this content to yourcustomers without having too
(14:10):
much worry.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
What my brain is going all over the place as
you're talking, because this issuper exciting.
But you know, one of the thingsthat I've talked about a lot
recently is the the crazy amountof variability that exists in
digital CS, meaning that you'vegot, you know, multiple products
to support you've got, you know, internal folks.
(14:34):
You've got external motionsYou've got, you know,
collaboration with differentsituations You've got, you know,
collaboration with differentsituations.
You've got different tools.
I mean, the variables areinsane to where if you were to,
like you know, pick up astrategy that worked in one
organization and plunk it downon another one, it just it
(14:54):
probably wouldn't work, justbecause the variables aren't the
same.
I think goes without saying.
But you know what.
What comes to mind as you'retalking about this is, you know,
persona specific use caseswhere you're sending different
things to different personas.
Also, the use cases around,like you know, sending positive
(15:17):
things is great, but also likeletting an executive know that,
hey, you're off track here andthis is what you need to do to
course correct.
I'm just throwing shit out here.
Sorry, pardon my French, butI'm throwing stuff out here
because I would love to get asense from you of what those use
cases are beyond, just like thebusiness review of how people
(15:41):
are using cool ways andinnovative ways that I may be
missing.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
I mean that example of like you know, usage is a
directional based off ofimplementation, or how you get
started with the product, right.
And so I think in theonboarding phase typically, you
know, there's probably certainmilestones of like, hey, you've
got this setup, boolean fieldsand you've got this setup
yesterday, no, right.
And you know, I think this is agreat where where you can send
(16:11):
out a one pager to not just thepeople that are tactically
implementing your solution, butalso including the decision
makers and the leadership teamon where the implementation is.
So being able to send out amonthly review of where, if your
product is very complex andthere's a huge onboarding
process, to be able to say, hey,here's where we're on track,
(16:33):
here's where we're not, andeverybody's fully aware.
So like kind of automating,like a project tracker of the
onboarding process, and yourmost companies have that
codified at this point.
Right, you're scaling andgrowing you can't be doing ad
hoc.
You have to have some sort of aplaybook.
So being able to send a onepager or an email around, that
is simple use case that I thinkI'll allow you to do that.
(16:56):
I think the other is this whatwe call like an adoption monthly
newsletter, where it doesn'tjust give you usage data of,
like how your team is using yourproduct or service, but being
also being also able to thentranslate into ROI.
So in our case, you know timesavings, productivity gain is a
huge ROI component of oursolution.
(17:16):
So us being able to send a hereis the number of presentations
your team has generated oremails that they've sent out
with data driven content.
Here's what it would have takenprematic, here's what it is now
with magic, and this is thetime savings and the ROI that
we've been able to deliver.
So being able to send that outon a monthly basis with
recommendations is a great wayto not only just throw data at
(17:39):
your project You're probablyyour customer for the sake of
showcasing data but translatingthat data to recommendations
that they can act upon, and thehope is you are getting in front
of it, even if it's bad, evenif it doesn't show great results
.
If you do it early on, you know.
Hopefully at that point it'llcause your customer to be like
hey Nick, what's going on, usageis not what I expected, or ROI
(18:02):
is not there, let's jump on acall.
It's easier to do that in monththree versus month 11, month
prior to the renewal, and so Ido agree with you.
I think a lot of people arescared to show bad data, but it
actually can be a very effectivetool and increasing adoption
and getting your customers torealize the value that they've
purchased your product orservice in.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
Yeah.
And also showing where youstack up against other customers
.
And simulcs, yeah.
Benchmarking data Like, hey,this is where you're doing great
compared to your peers and thisis how you're where you're not
doing great compared to yoursuper powerful, because it turns
you into a consultant.
You know like you're turning tojust not just a software vendor
(18:46):
, but then you become aconsulting arm of the company.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Totally.
I think some of our bestcustomers, I think the people
who are doing this extremelywell in terms of leveraging data
are people who are benchmarkingRight and I think, there's so
many ways.
We've written a lot of contentabout this on our blog in which
you can visualize benchmarkbenchmarks right.
It can be a cohort of customersthat look like you.
(19:10):
It could be time based even tosay hey, this is what you were,
this is your results last yearcompared to this year, quarter
of a quarter.
That's technically a benchmarkas well, but I think the more
context you can provide in thedata, I think the better it has
to leading your customer to acton it right, Versus just being
like, cool, I generated X amountor I logged in this many times.
(19:33):
I think that's that's not goodenough anymore.
You have to be able to relyback to benchmarks.
And then the other thing, too,is being able to tie it back to
the goals and objectives of whythey purchased your product or
service.
Right, Like everything that youshare, post purchase should tie
it back to why they purchasedyour product to begin with and
hopefully over time.
You know you have a library ofobjectives that are most common
(19:57):
across your customer base.
I know that some companies maynot be able to do that, but you
know in order to really scaleyou're going to have to try to
come up with some sort of alibrary and then you can then,
just similar to the personas,you can then start creating
content that's tied to thosebusiness objectives that say hey
, alex, for this reason.
So here are the metrics that weassociate with that objective
(20:21):
to help them realize that value,and that's what we're going to
be including in our ongoingcontent that we generate for
Alex right.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Are there?
Where's this all going, likeyou know?
I mean, obviously there's thiswhole generative AI piece that's
lingering in the corner andcoming into play, but you know,
it's not completely like wecan't just plug it in and use it
.
It still requires kind of humaneffort.
(20:49):
But, like what, you know what?
What are you and the teamtalking about in terms of, okay,
you know, we can populate thesethings and we can provide
contextual, you know relevance,which in itself is is a big leap
forward.
But but what are you guystalking about?
Speaker 2 (21:06):
I think one of the things that really excites us as
an organization and thefeedback that we've gotten right
is you know, we've typicallyhad what I've called smart
automation.
Like the intelligence layerwithin Matic allows you to do
rule based logic that says, hey,if this happens in the data or
you know, delete this slide oradd this chart instead, right,
(21:26):
to help you, you know, get toclose to 100% automation as
possible, right?
I think where I think thegenerative AI can kind of come
in, especially when it comes toour space, is taking a step
further and really covering theedge cases.
And so what I mean by that is wejust had an AI summit back in
September where we had folksfrom open AI and others join and
(21:48):
talk about AI within the CSmotion.
We talked about what we launchedcalled automated insights,
where we can not only populate,let's say, a chart on a slide or
a table on a slide, but scanthe data that we're sending to
that chart and give you thethree key takeaways that
summarize the trend.
So, for example, if you have,like, a number of presentations
(22:11):
generated over time that weshare with our customers, it can
actually look at that data,analyze and say here's a top
template that was being used,here's the percent growth or
decline.
So that way you're not doingthe heavy lifting, not just
putting the data into thepresentation, but Matic is now
also analyzing that data andgiving the key takeaways in the
exact summary that you can thenshare and alter that you go and
(22:34):
share with your customers.
So I'm really excited aboutthat last mile piece of not just
being able to create thecontent but also taking a step
further and covering some ofthose edge cases that you can't
do with rule-based logic.
That really has to happen onthe fly.
I think AI has a really goodpossibility of helping us solve
that problem.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Yeah, for sure, because, like you pointed out
earlier, like a piece of data isgreat, but it doesn't mean
anything unless you tie someinsights to it and some meaning
to it.
So that's super cool and anawesome use of AI.
I know you work with a lot ofsales teams as well.
Obviously, I think the use caseis very different from a
(23:18):
pre-sale to a post-saleperspective.
I was curious just to get yoursense on what that looks like
and how you've worked with yourcustomers to make sure it gets
adopted in both worlds equally.
(23:40):
Is there internal thing, usecases and things like that as
well?
Speaker 2 (23:46):
Yeah, typically our primary persona has been
customer success, followed bysales.
We have gone a huge internalpoll to be like hey, our FPNA
team puts this content togetherfor internally every single
month and it's a huge pain toput together.
We haven't focused on energythere, just given the demand on
the externally facing contentthat sales and customer success
(24:06):
put together.
For sales in particular, someof the common use cases that we
see is like pricing proposals,roi calculators.
It's more sumptive base whereyou put together a business case
that's based on assumptionsthat you would put in a
calculator that says, hey,here's the ROI that you're going
to get from our service, alexor product over the next 12
(24:27):
months if you decide to purchaseour product.
We see a lot of those use cases.
As well as going back tobenchmarking, one of the things
that I think really savvy salesorganizations have done is
taking the aggregated customerusage of their customer base and
then being able to translatethat over on the pre-sale side
(24:49):
to say, hey, look, a customerthat looks like you, meaning
your industry, your size,whatever it may be here on
average the results that theyget with our product or service.
So it's being able to illustrateand, like I said, I think you
have to have data in order to dothat.
We work a lot with mid-marketenterprise customers, so they've
(25:11):
been around for a while andthey're able to go and aggregate
that information and theninclude that within their pitch
deck, for example, to hopefullyget someone to cross the line.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
Yeah, we talked a little bit about data, the fact
that a lot of customers strugglewith data.
A lot of everyone struggleswith data and you got to have
some clean data to be able tofeed some of the stuff.
But what are some of the otherthings where you would look at a
prospect and go you're ready,you're not ready?
(25:42):
What are the stumbling blocksthat you try to advise customers
on?
Speaker 2 (25:50):
To be clear, I think no one's data is perfect.
You've probably worked at a lotof companies I've worked at a
few as well and there's not onecompany that I have worked for
where the data is perfect or itdoesn't have issues.
I think that's just the name ofthe game.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
Or there's too much of it.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
Yeah, too much of it.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
Also, think about it CRM a lot of it is naturally
inputted data so there's goingto be a lot of discrepancies
when it comes to that.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
So I don't think the state of your data needs to be
perfectly clean to get started,especially if you do have
rule-based logic that canprevent, to make sure that
they're not going to getsomething that they should in a
customer or prospect.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
He's not going to get something that they shouldn't.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
I think another thing that we see quite a bit in
terms of readiness is peoplethink that they need to have a
perfect template or use case tobegin with, and I think one of
the things that we tell ourprospects and our customers is
content is similar to buildingsoftware.
It's not like you'll come upwith.
Let's say, you're a leader, youput together a business review
(26:56):
template for your team.
Right Six to 12 months from nowmay look different, because
they use it.
They get feedback.
Hey, alex, slides three andfour are great, but you know
what?
This isn't really resonating asmuch.
I've combined it into one slideand it's been amazing.
Or hey, instead of talking aboutROI this way, I've talked about
it this way and this isresonated, and so part of it too
(27:18):
, is you got to get somethingout the door to get feedback and
there needs to be feedbackloops to continue to iterate on
that content.
Because your product isevolving, your process may be
evolving, your content alsoneeds to be evolving.
And going back to the softwarebuilding software analogy, when
your team ships product, it'snot like they ship and say, hey,
we're done, we're not going totouch it anymore.
(27:40):
People start using it, they getfeedback and then they start
making enhancements anditerating on it.
So I think, it's also anothermisconception that you have to
have everything or boiling theocean.
You got to get startedsomewhere, start with a few use
cases and then build on top ofthat.
And typically it's a businessreview that people start with,
then they go to a one pager,then they go to like an adoption
(28:02):
review, then they do abenchmarking report, a renewal
deck, so you don't have to haveall of it in place.
And this is where the AI isalso can be extremely impactful,
right, like we have out of thebox templates where you give us
your website and we willactually generate a best
practice business with yourbranding and your.
(28:23):
If you don't have thoseresources, your branding and
some of the metrics that we'vegotten from your website that we
think are gonna be applicableto you as a starting point,
right?
So I think AI can definitelyhelp close that gap as well.
Speaker 1 (28:36):
Yeah, I mean, the number one question that I get
you know from folks is where doI start?
And I give them your answer,which is you start, have you
start somewhere, you.
And then you build upon it andyou iterate it and you know, if
you have one dataset that'ssuper clean and it solves an
(28:58):
issue you know like, don'thesitate to send that email or
to get that thing out, just shipit.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
I had a mentor of mine who gave me some early on
in my career, gave me somereally, really great advice and
said, you know, don't letperfection be the enemy of
progress.
And I think that's so true in asituation where I think we are
so enamored with being perfect.
I think something that isreally perfect, when in reality
that's really limiting theprogress that we have as an
(29:26):
organization.
Speaker 1 (29:28):
Yeah, and when it comes to digital CS, a lot of
folks think that it's this blackbox like you either have it or
you don't have it, which isinteresting, you know to think
about.
But it's totally not the case.
It's like you have it bybuilding upon, you know the
things that you implement andgrowing it over time and getting
more sophisticated over time,and you know working your way
(29:51):
into a maturity model.
You don't start at level fouror five of a maturity level.
You start at level one or two,depending on what you have.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Yeah, yeah, I think.
One other thing to add to that,as you were saying, that is, I
think, the notion of feedbackloops.
I think is really important indigital CS, because you usually
have a small group ofindividuals that are setting up
these programs holistically foryour organization and they might
(30:19):
be on the front lines.
They might not be on the frontlines and making sure that
you're constantly having ahealth check on top of your
programs to be like, hey, arethere changes that we need to
make?
How do we know what changes weneed to make?
Where are we getting thatfeedback?
What's qualitative, what'squantitative?
I think is hugely important tomake sure that you have
long-term success and not justshort-term success with your
(30:41):
program.
Speaker 1 (30:42):
Yeah, and I think it goes beyond just the survey.
It's like actually exchangingmouth words sometimes.
You know, one of the thingsthat I've taken from, I guess, a
former and current professionallife in learning and
development is the Kirkpatrickmodel, which is basically how
you evaluate the effectivenessof a piece of training content.
(31:05):
But I also I think it's wildlyapplicable for automations in
general or just really anythingagile related, where you have
these various ways of measuringefficacy of something that
you've implemented, whether it'slike immediate impact of thumbs
up, thumbs down or thelong-term impact of how has this
(31:25):
affected your business in apositive or negative way.
It's interesting to think about.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
And I would argue too that I think early on you're
probably going to be morereliant upon qualitative,
subjective feedback, like theconversations that you have with
your customers one off right,or maybe some CSMs that get
their input.
And then over time as theprogram becomes more and more
established, hopefully thosefeedback loops are more
data-driven and you can see itin the data and I think a lot of
(31:56):
people want to start with thatladder when in reality, you've
got to start with the formerfirst in order to get to the
ladder right, yeah, yeah, youreally do.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
You really do.
That's awesome.
What's in your content diet?
What are you paying attentionto?
What do you feed your brainwhen you're not deeply
entrenched in medic?
Speaker 2 (32:22):
With content in terms of business or outside of work
anything, anything yeah.
You know I do.
Well, I'm a big soccer fan, soI do, I do.
I do wash a lot of soccer tokind of de-stress from, from the
work life.
When it comes to work, I dothink there's some, especially
(32:44):
when it comes to CS.
I think there's some greatthought leadership out there
that I'm always you know.
I think Nick met it as afantastic job at King's site.
I think the folks at Catalystas well do an amazing job.
I think Vitaly produces somereally great content, plan Hat
as well, and I think that's oneof the things that I've been,
you know, being in CS like Iremember when I was at the CS
(33:05):
startup, what now over eight,nine years ago, such an tech in
CS was so early on and they werekind of building these
foundational blocks for thoughtleadership, and just to see how
many thought leaders there arenow and the exchange of ideas
across these different groups, Ithink it's been fantastic.
So I definitely try to stay upto date with all of the major CS
(33:30):
players out there and, you know, pay attention to what they
have to say.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Yeah, well, you gave a couple of shout outs already
Nick Metta and the bunch but arethere any specific folks that
you feel are doing really greatwork in digital?
In terms of companies,particular, yeah, or companies
or individuals that are buildingcool programs, whatever that
looks like.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
Yeah, we definitely have some great customers.
I think the folks at Greenhousehave done a fantastic job.
We work with them, we publish acase study where they've done a
really good job atincorporating data into their
content, but without just thesake of data, but really trying
to tie it to objectives of theircustomers and tying it back to
(34:19):
value and ROI.
And just to see how muchthey've done has been amazing.
Speaker 1 (34:24):
I think they have some of the best templates in
the market right now, and whatthey've been able to audit yeah,
and somebody else mentionedthem as well as an outstanding
contributor, and I forget whowas which episode it was, but
yeah, that's good stuff.
Look, I've really reallyappreciated your time and your
(34:47):
insight and I love what you guysare doing because I think it's
so needed, especially right nowwhere the need to prove you know
, efficacy and to drive outcomeswithin your customers is more
needed than ever before.
So it's awesome to have thatinsight and I appreciate the
(35:09):
time.
Where can people find youengage with you, any parting
words, any webinars coming upthat you want to promote, any
kind of like?
I know you're going to havesome paternity leave coming up,
so congratulations on that, butyeah, it is like end of hot ones
if you watch that show TotallyTo promote or just say hi, or
(35:31):
where you can engage.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
Totally, I mean, being a former LinkedIner,
always feel free to reach out tome on LinkedIn.
Try to be very active on theplatform.
If you want to learn moreobviously about our product or
solution or what we do.
Feel free to go to our website,mattockio.
Feel free to fill out a demorequest form and our team can
kind of give you an overview ofour solution and the problems
(35:54):
that we're trying to solve forso those are probably the two
best mediums to go through.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
Amazing, cool.
Well, again, I appreciated thetime.
Thanks for giving us yourknowledge.
Speaker 2 (36:07):
Awesome.
Thank you for having me.
I actually enjoyed the talk.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Thank you for joining me for this episode of the
Digital Customer Success Podcast.
If you like what we're doing,consider leaving us a review on
your podcast platform of choice.
It really helps us to grow andto provide value to a broader
audience.
You can view the DigitalCustomer Success Definition Word
Map and get more details aboutthe show at
digitalcustomersuccesscom.
My name is Alex Turkovich.
(36:31):
Thanks again for joining andwe'll see you next time.
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