One of the duties of a Customer Success Manager (CSM) is to keep customers up to date on how your company’s products and services are helping them. Quarterly business reviews, monthly updates, and other reports are critical to demonstrating business value. But they can also be time consuming to create and keep the CSM away from the actual work required. Matic wants to change that.
Nik Mijic is the co-founder and CEO of Matik. Earlier in his career, he worked for several start-ups, including Customer his success his tech start-up. After that, he joined LinkedIn Insights where he worked with the team to help build internal tools and narratives for successful and sales teams.
One of the things Mijic did at LinkedIn was rebuilding an internal tool that automates the QBR (Quarterly Business Review) process. Product marketing and sales enablement create templates for reports, such as business reviews, and insert placeholders where specific account content or data needs to be added.
CSM takes templates, makes copies, and collects data from various business systems. It took us a while to create these reports, but we knew it was important to create and share them with our customers to improve business outcomes. Mijic says that if you can demonstrate to your customers a clear picture of product adoption, high renewal rates, low churn rates, or net new business, you’re demonstrating the value of your product or service. And it worked very well on LinkedIn, he said.
He also saw an opportunity to automate the data collection process that CSM was consuming a lot of time. So, with Zak Stein as his CTO, he launched his Matik in January 2019. After doing some research, we found that many companies face this challenge. So they built a prototype out of his apartment, and at the end of 2019 he did a seed round with Menlo Venture.
What does Matic do?
If you want to save time on reporting, the obvious answer is automating the data collection process. That’s Matic’s job. Supporting customer success and sales teams, Matik automates data-driven narratives and content in the form of PowerPoint or Google Slides presentations, including ROI decks and calculators, quarterly business reviews, hiring reviews, account reviews, and more .
Admins connect data sources such as CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot), big data databases (Google BigQuery, Snowflake), Google Sheets, and other data to the product via APIs. Then query the data for the report. No data is captured. Administrators can create presentation her templates that contain specific data or content placeholders. It can also be a simple lookup field. In other cases it is a SQL query. Content can be text-based, images, or any other content supported by your presentation software. You can also set up charts and tables and have data feed into them.
The CSM enters the product, selects the desired template, and enters filters such as account and date range for reports. Matik then goes out to all the necessary systems, pulls the data, and adds it to the reports. Administrators can also configure rule-based logic that applies rules to templates. For example, an administrator can create a rule that indicates whether a metric falls below a certain amount, and remove the slide showing that metric from the presentation.
Once the report is created, the CSM can download it, open it in your preferred presentation software (or in the case of Google Slides, open it directly in the software) and make any necessary changes. Mijic said he knew he couldn’t automate everything, so by providing the report in a presentation format, the CSM could easily open it and make any necessary updates.
Mijic pointed out that Matik is not a new presentation software product. Create PowerPoint or Google Slides for end users to download and edit. Once the presentation is downloaded, Matik’s role in the process ends. Presentations are not linked to data sources. A point-in-time view of account data.
Who wants this kind of software?
Midsize businesses find that their customer success teams spend more time creating reports than they do strategic engagements with customers, because it dramatically reduces the time needed to create reports. , which requires a tool like Matik. It’s also a great tool for pre-sales and sales reps to create her ROI calculator or suggest prices to prospective customers.
Another benefit of Matik is that it helps keep your CSM and sales on-brand and using modern templates. It also ensures that your data is accurate by eliminating the need for error-prone manual calculations.
Matik’s own account team uses the software to send customers a one-pager showing how their CSMs and sales reps are using the software.
And that’s the kind of big thing that we encourage our clients to do as their clients do. How do we take this data and turn it into data-driven content that shows value and adoption? Consider the current economic situation.Climate? I think the front line for all leaders right now is how can we provide better value to our customers. Especially as budgets get tighter, it’s key to being able to show value through data and tie it to business outcomes where customers are the first to buy products and services.
Where does Matic go from here?
In 2021, Matik plans to raise additional Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz and evolve the product in several ways. One of our roadmaps for the first half of this year is to integrate with Office 365 so that presentations can be opened in PowerPoint online.
But Mijic sees another trend at digital CES. For example, a company is looking for a way to ensure that every customer gets a monthly ROI one-pager or her recurring QBR. To that end, Mijic wants to allow Matik to programmatically send reports and assist with distribution by email. Matik has expanded its set of integrations to include Gainsight, Catalyst, and other data sources to provide even richer reporting.
my view
The number of use cases was clear when we saw how the product worked. It’s a great tool for customer success and sales. But it’s also a tool with many internal use cases, from marketing reports to executive briefings to departmental updates. All you need is to develop a template and make it available.
Mijic agreed that it has a wide range of use cases, but his team is now focused on supporting customer success and sales needs. This makes perfect sense. While it may be easy to say your product works for everyone, nuances can be lost when trying to support every team and use case.
Also, when everyone is talking about artificial intelligence, it’s nice to see that not every product that delivers value to a company needs to talk about AI.
