Last week we had a conversation with Nir Kalish, who leads Customer Success at Nimble, a company specializing in AI-powered web scraping. Nir's journey to his current role is as unique as his approach to CS. Here's what we learned:
Can you walk us through your background and how you ended up at Nimble?
Nir: It's been a wild ride. I started as an intelligence officer for five years, so data and technology were always around me. Then I moved into computer science and spent eleven years in R&D organizations. I found myself on this journey to build QA tools, UI automation for complex systems like real-time and network security.
After eleven years, I landed at a startup where I did a lot of things beyond building the QA organization. I fell in love with the business side and realized I wasn't waking up excited about QA anymore. I told the founders I wanted to do something else, and they said, "Choose, you did an amazing job, what do you want?" I told them I wanted to do customer success and sales engineering.
My CEO suggested I relocate to the US to meet the Facebooks and Googles of the world. Since 2011, I've been on this journey of building and evolving sales engineering and customer success organizations. For the past five years, I've been focusing mainly on customer success, but I still advise CEOs and startups on best practices for sales engineering.
You mentioned similarities between CS and sales engineering. What are those common overlaps?
Nir: Look, in the end, it comes down to this: a good sales engineer and CSM needs to understand the business pains, not just the technical pains, of the customer. The main difference is the timeline. While the SE needs to show how we solve that business pain during the POV, the CSM typically has 12 months to demonstrate it. Of course, a good CSM wants to demonstrate it during onboarding, meaning in the first two or three months.
This approach can lead to discussions about upsells, renewals, and cross-selling more business problems. As a CSM, you're bringing executive-level solutions to solve their issues. The SE has a shorter time to demonstrate and is more focused on "This is what I heard, this is what I need to demonstrate."
How do you stay on top of customer needs in a scale-up environment?
Nir: There are three main things you need to track. First, usage - and I'm talking about two types of usage here. There's business usage, like how many seats are being consumed, and then there's product usage, tracking the regular flows users engage with in the system.
A good CSM organization will sit with the product team and mark all the product flows that indicate healthy usage. We want to track those flows and identify the ones that are missing. These are what I call product gaps, and it's the CSM's job to train customers on these flows and explain their business value.
The second thing is engagement. This is where we're lacking as a tech world in tracking because it's not just about how many meetings they kept or support tickets they opened. It's about the language and tone used during conversations. We need to track certain words during these interactions.
The third is coming back to the business value. What are the business pains? How much are we addressing them? This isn't just based on what the customer says, but on ROI conversations with the champion two or three times a year where they fill out an ROI assessment telling us how much we're saving them.
That's fascinating. How do you define business value?
Nir: I'll give you a hint that applies to any company. Business value falls into one of three categories:
- Increased productivity: Can you help a team do more with less?
- Enable the business: Are you allowing them to increase revenue, reduce costs, or enter new markets?
- Secure the business: Are you protecting the business from attacks, breaches, or other threats that could impact their brand?
Any company in the world can bring business value in one or more of these categories. If you can't explain your business value in simple terms within these categories, it's just a matter of time until you fail as a company.
This framework is crucial. It helps you evaluate every feature you develop - is it going to impact any of these areas? If not, don't do it. It's meaningless. When you start thinking about business values and pains first, you understand what questions your sales, BDRs, and CSMs need to ask. You know how to pitch every time.
How do you ensure your team stays focused on these business values?
Nir: It's all about asking questions. A good CSM asks questions all the time. You need to dive into the business aspects, not just the technical ones. Ask second-level and third-level questions. Always dive into the business aspects.
For example, if a customer comes with a feature idea, I always train my team to ask: What problem are you trying to solve? Did you have this problem before using our service, or is it new? What's the impact of not having this feature?
And when you're dealing with executive buyers, focus on the numbers. If I can show that we saved a company $7 million a year, show me one executive buyer who won't want to meet with me twice a year for an EBR. None, from my experience.
So what did we learn?
Talking to Nir was a masterclass in how to approach customer success with a laser focus on business value. Here are the key takeaways:
- Understand the three pillars of business value Every product or service should either increase productivity, enable the business, or secure the business. If you can't articulate your value in at least one of these areas, you're in trouble.
- Focus on business pains, not just technical issues While technical problems are important, always dig deeper to understand the business impact. This helps you prioritize and communicate more effectively with executive buyers.
- Track the right metrics Usage, engagement, and ROI are crucial. But don't just count meetings or tickets - pay attention to the language and tone in customer interactions.
- Train your team to ask the right questions CSMs should constantly probe to understand the business context behind customer requests and issues.
- Align your entire organization around business value From product development to sales to customer success, everyone should understand and be able to articulate the business value you provide.
By applying these principles, companies can create a more value-driven, customer-centric approach to their products and services. As Nir put it, "Who cares about the technical value? Today it's you, tomorrow Google brings it for free. But business value is something that I can accumulate into two things: money and hours. And that's what makes the difference."