57: בקצרה - לשים את הלקוח במרכז (English)

Hey listeners, I'm Matan Ben-Moshe, and I'm the editor of the Startup for Startup podcast. Welcome to a new recap episode, in which we at Monday.com openly share knowledge, experience, and actionable insights from previous episodes. This recap revolves around being customer-centric, which sounds like a nice catchphrase, right? But it's actually a large part of our mission as a company. So to make being customer-centric actionable, we want to give you a deeper look into how we achieve this in our day-to-day practice. In August 2018, our sales team became the consulting group. It's not just a name change, it's a shift in the values that we present to our customers. In order to understand what this transition actually means in the real world, we sat down with Mitchell Blickman, a consulting team manager at Monday.com. So as the company scaled and the product matured, I think it was a natural progression. We wanted to get more logos, we wanted to close deals of larger sizes, close more deals. And to do this, it takes a certain amount of hand-holding. All accounts aren't equal, and there's a lot of intricacies that are involved in the process of bringing larger companies and selling to entire organizations as opposed to just selling to teams. So in order to do that, we had to do a serious shift in the way that we do things and the way that we think about things. So in consulting, we shifted to a very customer-focused, value-based selling approach where we really need to understand the unique aspects of every customer's business so that we can help tailor the solution to them. So this was like the mind shift that we had to make. And I think the name is a good example of the mind shift. But at the end of the day, we are sales. Let's not fool ourselves or fool anybody else. We're selling something. But by calling ourselves consulting, it puts us in that right mindset that we need to be in. This mindset that Mitch talks about has a lot to do with the way that sales commissions are given at Monday.com. We don't make commission, but there's a lot of reasoning behind that. It's the culture internally. We don't want our reps fighting each other over leads. We want it to be a collaborative team environment where we help each other and we're not fighting who gets this one, who gets this one, that kind of cutthroat environment. And secondly, I think a core, core principle of the company is being customer-focused. So we never want to sell someone something that they don't need or they're not going to use or sell it in a way that's wrong or pushy. So I think by removing the commission element out of the picture, it sort of does away with that potential harm that you can do in sales. So we don't have any selfish interest in selling someone something because we're not actually making something at the end of the day out of it. We're aligned with the company goals and we want to scale, of course, and we want people to use Monday and be happy using it. But yeah, there needs to be a valid use case for it. In addition to the shift in mindset, it's a shift in methodology and how we approach customers. So we used to have a transactional approach where things move very fast. And when we would give someone a demo of the product, it was more like a feature run-through, right? We weren't really going deep into how they might specifically use Monday, what are their pains that they're facing on a day-to-day basis. Everyone was kind of getting like a standard walkthrough of all the features and capabilities of Monday. Now, two different things happen. One, the platform has a lot of new features, so it would really be impossible in 30 minutes to give someone a full rundown of all the different things they could do with the platform. The way we do demos now, they're based on an in-depth discovery call that we do beforehand. And this is where we're really getting to know the customer, getting to know what they want to achieve with the platform when they sign up for a trial, what they were looking for, what softwares are they using, what pains are they having in their current softwares. And then in the demo, from the very first touchpoint, it's a completely tailored experience. We're showing them boards in the platform that they can relate to. They say, yeah, this is exactly what I want to use the platform for. This is exactly what I was looking for. They can imagine themselves using it. This is exactly what I need to manage my team or manage my clients. The customer success team has more than 40,000 written interactions a month with our users. Apart from answering each request with empathy while solving the user's needs, we pass users' feedback to the relevant teams in the company, from product all the way to marketing. But it gets difficult when you have thousands of interactions to go through. How can we organize the data to give our customers a clear voice? To answer this question,

Question, we talked with Effie Arman, head of customer success Israel here at Monday.com. She shares the importance of creating a voice of customer program in order to effectively transform all those tickets into actionable insights. All right, voice of customer. So it's a title that's thrown around a lot in this field, in SaaS and startups. What is voice of customer is the big question. For us, it's giving the voice to our customer. We have a product that we believe is for the people. And how do you build a product for the people? You listen to the people and let the people build the product. So kind of to bring back why this all started is how do you do that? How do you take what a person needs and build something? I can say, I know what I need to make my day work successfully and that's X. And Iran can say he needs something else and that's Y. And how do you measure that and how do you take it and actually, I'm not saying write an update that we're actually what I'm saying, let's actually go in the roots and the core of the product and conquer the pain points and basically bridge the gap between the company and the customer. We have a lot of channels that our customers can speak to us and we had that since day one that the product was built, but we didn't do anything with it. We just kind of, like most companies, we said, thank you for your feedback. We'll send this to the appropriate person and it went to the air. We're not a company that wants to be like that. We don't, we're not, we care about our users. You're here because you use it and we actually also use it. But most importantly, like how do you make a product that works for everybody? You listen and you do something with it. So we had to take a step back and say, how do we take this information and do something? So the voice of customer started. It's as long as you have one customer, you have a voice, but you have to give to the product and work on it. And don't wait until you have 30,000 tickets a month. Do it when you have one and there's a process built in and make the customer success team or whatever team it is that speaks to your customers, make their voice powerful from day one. That's it for our third recap. If you want to hear more from Effie or Mitchell's episodes, you can find them in the show notes or on our website. Thanks for tuning in.