Where does it hurt? | Nir Kalish

[Nir] (0:00 - 0:25)

There are multiple pain types, right? There is the technical pain, there is personal pain, by the way. Think about a CTO that his company is having a lot of problems and he needs a solution, not because he cares about the company, because he cares about his seat, because if it will continue, he is out.

Now just think about someone that's just working now in NVIDIA, stocks moves up, if he's out and he just joined six months ago, he will lose all his money, right?

[Dillon] (0:34 - 1:01)

What's up lifers and welcome to The Daily Standup with lifetime value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I've got my man Rob here. Rob, do you want to say hi?

What's up? And we've got JP here. JP, do you want to say hi?

How's it going folks? And we've got Nir here. Nir, can you say hi please?

And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young. Nir, thank you so much for being here.

Can you introduce yourself please?

[Nir] (1:02 - 1:21)

Yeah, so a quick intro. I started my career as an engineer leader. After 11 years, I shifted to the business side and became someone that built from the ground up customer success and sales engineering organizations.

And this is my path, which I still enjoy 12 years later.

[Dillon] (1:21 - 1:39)

Still enjoy, that's the key. And there's an asterisk there, right? Because sometimes you wonder if people still do after that long.

Well, Nir, you know what we're doing here? We ask one simple question of every single guest that we have, and that is, what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? So can you tell us what that is for you?

[Nir] (1:40 - 1:46)

Yeah. How you generate business value in every interaction, every time, all the time.

[Dillon] (1:48 - 2:08)

Simple, right? That's heavy. That's heavy, man.

I get anxious just thinking about that. How am I going to provide value this time? How am I going to do it?

So tell me a little bit about how you think, and I know you manage teams, Nir. So how do you instill this in the folks that you work with?

[Nir] (2:09 - 3:39)

Yeah. So many times we focus only on technical value, right? This is the feature.

This is how it works. We can do A, we can do B, that doesn't matter. Because if you really want to be successful, both in the selling aspect and in the customer success, apps as renewals, you need to provide business value.

And the business value is always the question, why did I bought this service? What problems do I try to solve? And how do I prove that I solved those problems, right?

So if you really think about it, in every startup, in every technical company, in every company in the world, there are three types of business values that you should provide, either one of them or some of them. Either you help to increase productivity of the team, okay? Or you enable your customers, you enable them to run their business, meaning either to find new opportunities, business opportunities, or reduce costs, or increase profitability slash revenue, or you protect the business from cybersecurity aspect.

If you think about it, if a company is building something that doesn't address any of those, it's just a matter of time until they will shut down. But the question of customer success, how you can understand why they bought your service from the business side, how you demonstrate it during the onboarding, and how you continue to demonstrate it, that's the key to create apps as renewals, to get room or, you know, chair in the table with the executive buyer. Because if it's just technical, you won't meet the CTO or the CEO of a company, because it's too tactical.

[Dillon] (3:40 - 3:57)

JP, what does this look like for you in your daily work, the difference between maybe like leading indicators and lagging indicators? And we always have conversations about both, but is this a thing that you're thinking about or that you guys talk about internally where you work?

[JP] (3:58 - 5:50)

Absolutely. Since I work on with more scale customers, the scope at which we do discovery, for lack of a better word, is going to be a little bit smaller, as opposed to maybe at like your enterprise level or something where people may have like 30 or 40 clients, so they can really spend a lot of that time. But I think Nir, this actually is something that's always on my mind, because one of the challenges I know that my company faces is that it is an on-prem software, which means we're not getting a lot of usage data out of the customer.

So we're really relying on them telling us, and part of my function is getting that information on how they're using us. But the other part of this is we face these silos in companies where we could have, I could have a huge client. I know I can't say their name, but I have some like huge clients, but I am their CSM, right?

Which means that they must not be spending a large amount of money on the scale team, right? Well, what's going on there, right? Because it's like one plus one doesn't seem to equal two.

You're a multi-billion dollar revenue company and you're spending peanuts here. Who am I having the conversation with? And I think Nir what you say is like, I absolutely agree.

I think my challenge is, and I think this falls under stakeholder mapping. How would I effectively figure out who I need to be having the strategic conversation with versus the tactical conversation? Because that's the blocker that I run into is how do I get to that person when sometimes there's somebody who bought and then they're just coming to me.

And sometimes that person is like gatekeeping almost, you know?

[Dillon] (5:50 - 5:50)

Yeah.

[Nir] (5:51 - 7:52)

So I will tell you one trick that I learned over the years that might help you. Okay. So when I talk about part of the business value proposition is also to do ROI calculator, right?

And many times the way that the ROI calculator looks like is, hey, customer, I did the ROI calculator, FYI, you save millions of dollars with us. Give me more money, right? And the other side, what they hear is, what amount of bologna?

You don't even understand. So we do that the opposite. When I do it before EBRs, before we knew us, before the end of the onboarding, I take the champion and I do conversation.

I don't record it and I tell him, hey champion, I want us to do an ROI calculator. I want you to give me the numbers because this will be the tool for you to put us accountable on the promise that we gave. And I ask him the question and I open the Excel and we fill it up.

And in the end, sometimes it's so, whoa, wow, you actually saved me $50 million or $10 million or $1 million. And then I tell him, hey, you know, it's not me. You did all the job.

I have an idea. How about in the EBR, you will talk about this slide. I will prepare everything.

And you will talk about it to the executive buyer. Now, guess what? When I'm talking about it, the executive buyer see, oh, he wants more money and he's BSing.

But when I presented it, I said, hey, me and John, we worked on it. John did an amazing job. John gave me the numbers.

John, do you want to present the numbers? The buyer actually hear someone from his team telling them how much my company saved them or enabled them or allowed them to increase productivity. So the confidence and the trust moves up.

And now I get the door to get more money. In your case, you will do that. So the champion will actually will say, wait, there is an opportunity for me.

I, of course, I'm going to introduce you to the CTO because you will tell him how great job I did and save money.

[JP] (7:56 - 7:58)

Rob, I don't know what you going to say.

[Rob] (7:58 - 7:58)

Rob, go ahead.

[JP] (7:58 - 8:00)

I don't know what you going to say, Rob.

[Rob] (8:00 - 8:52)

Well, Dillon, you pointed at me when the words ROI calculator came up because you know I talk about this all the time. I'm actually working on the same thing for my consulting business right now. I'm trying to introduce a new program where I'm like, OK, if you invest $1 in this program, you get $2 back.

I think that's like a cool case to be made. But the actual application that came to mind for me, one of the best lessons I learned when it came to upsells was don't sell the F-words. You guys know what the F-words are?

You ever heard this? Drop it. Drop it.

Features and functionality. Features and functionality. You know it, Dillon.

That was actually our first interaction, I think, was right after I gave that presentation. But regardless, Anir, the thing you bring up is that it's such a better method to start with pain discovery before you go into every meeting. Like, what is the pain my user is having?

And then envision, OK, magic wand.

[Nir] (8:52 - 8:59)

What is the business pain? Because by the many times they will talk about the technical pain, you want to pull them to what is the pain?

[Rob] (8:59 - 9:52)

What bothers the business? Yeah, assuming it's a business. Yes, totally.

So start with what is the business pain? But I would also, I do think there's other types of pain, but we can talk about that later. But then also ask yourself, OK, magic wand, what does this look like as a solved problem?

This is kind of the method that I've learned to follow. So what is the business pain? What does this look like as a solved problem?

And then you figure out the steps in between about how to get there. The way this came up with a client that I'm advising right now, they're upselling this certain product. And the way they're upselling, their upsell playbook as they drafted it was like, well, let's just give them a full product tour.

Let's show them how this button works, how that button works. I was like, guys, no, I could sell this thing without even screen sharing just by talking about the value. And I don't know if I can actually do that.

But I think there's a path to do that with so many of our products that are much less reliant on the features and functionality. So it's a great point.

[Nir] (9:52 - 10:58)

And I will tell you one thing, Robert. You are right. There are multiple pain types.

There is the technical pain. There is personal pain, by the way. Think about a CTO that his company is having a lot of problems and he needs a solution, not because he cares about the company, because he cares about his seat, because if it will continue, he is out.

Now, just think about someone that's just working now in Nvidia. Stocks moves up. If he's out and he just joined six months ago, he will lose all his money, right?

The potential is huge. There is a personal pain. But the magic is to understand where is the business pain, because the business pain gives you more money.

Business pain gives you access to the leadership who take decisions. And by the way, we have unlimited budget, if you think about it. Every CRO can get more money to buy the right tool for them.

Same goes for CTO. VPs have more limit. Directors have much, much more limit on their budget, right?

But you want to take that and to understand what is the business pain and the personal pain, connect them together and show them how your business, your service, your product, that's all of that, because they will do all the job for you.

[Dillon] (10:59 - 11:37)

That's what I was going to say is I feel like there's a ton of different pains. The goal is to create the through line back to business, because business has the money. An individual user can have a pain about doing their job.

And the expectation is that their job feeds some further KPI that helps the business perform. And so you want to try to create that connection. Same thing with the CEO, right?

I mean, they're worried about their seat, but then they're going to be more worried about like, well, how do I get the business to perform better? So on and so forth. This has been incredible.

Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention. We are out of time, but would love to have you come back in the future. And maybe if we could get you and Rob in the same room, you guys could just fight it out.

[JP] (11:38 - 11:41)

Yeah. I want to see. I want to see.

That would be, no, I'm kidding.

[Dillon] (11:41 - 11:52)

I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I think we're all on the same page and sort of like talking in the same direction.

We're all just coming from different perspectives. I love it. So Nir, again, I would love to have you back in the future, but for now we've got to say goodbye.

[JP] (11:53 - 11:54)

Thank you. Bye-bye.

[Voiceover] (11:58 - 12:29)

You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at lifetimevaluemedia.com.

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