SalesTechStar Interview with Nikola Mijic, Founder at Matik

Nikola Mijic, Founder at Matik dives into the deeper benefits of automation and how it can enable B2B sales teams to build better customer journeys and experiences at scale:

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Welcome to this SalesTechStar chat Nikola, tell us about yourself and the story behind Matik, how has the platform evolved over the years since starting? 

My name is Nik Mijic and I’m one of the co-founders of Matik. I am originally from Bosnia and I’ve been in the United States for about 25 years now, and have been living in the Bay Area for about 11 years. Prior to Matik, I have worked in various roles and companies that focused on helping customer success teams retain and grow customers. At LinkedIn, I built internal tools that helped sales and customer success teams efficiently leverage LinkedIn data to showcase product value, and this is what inspired Matik.

We were doing a lot of data-driven presentations, like business reviews and renewal decks. It was clear using the data helped build trust between customers and customer success reps, and made renewal conversations easier since we were able to clearly show the value of the product. But it was challenging for teams to create these presentations – pulling the data from multiple sources, making sure you were telling a good story. It would normally take hours to put together, since we would pull in all the data and spit something out that was extremely personalized for your meeting. That was the origin of the idea – how do we automate the creation of these decks.

I met my co-founder, Zak Stein, through a mutual friend who was an early engineer at Box. We were very excited to partner up together and we really felt the initial research we had conducted showed a huge problem, across the board. There was a need to automate the process of querying data sources, creating insights, and then putting those data visualizations and insights into a presentable deck. This way, nothing would have to be done manually.

How does better automation when it comes to building data driven presentations enable sales/ customer output? Can you talk about some of the ways brands are using these types of tools to do this today?

The key word here is scale. At the end of the day, in order for your business to scale, you can’t be doing things manually.

You have to rely on automation and customer success and sales is no different. I would say in today’s macroeconomic conditions where the focus is really on the customer and making sure they retain with your product or service, the need to be able to show ROI without having to hire more people is now more important than ever. You have to be smart about it, and you have to invest in automation.

If you are scaling an organization and have a large customer base, you want the ability to make sure that your CSMs and your account managers are consistently telling the right message and using the correct insights and data to help influence those business outcomes – higher renewals, higher upsells, etc. The way you do this is through automation.

For example, Handshake, one of our early customers, uses Matik to automate quarterly business review (QBR) presentations with their customers and prospects, and generate decks within a manner of minutes. Before, it would take hours to put together. With Matik, the CSM has on-brand insights to share and can focus more on the conversation with customers.

For leaner teams who need to optimize how they build presentations and especially how quickly they do it, how can they integrate these kinds of solutions into their overall technologies to make the process more seamless?

With the way the economic climate is going, most teams nowadays are becoming leaner and leaner so the need to have automation is crucial. A common use case where you have a large number of accounts, for example, doing a one pager is a great way to stay connected with customers using data. Being able to send ROI and show the value the customer has received from the product, as well as recommendations on the customer can get even more value, is a great way to be proactive with customers without a lot of human lift or intervention. Having these types of strategic conversations with your customers builds trust, which is so important.

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Why should sales and other customer facing teams pay more attention to automation that drives custom presentation formats today: how can these tools enable better customer experiences?

Sales and customer success teams have so much on their plates. Combing through data and putting it all together to find insights right for their customer is extremely time consuming.

Again though, it’s very impactful if it’s done correctly, but that can sometimes be a big if. You also want to be able to tie it to business outcomes and time savings, and if we can get the process of creating this content down from a few hours to a few minutes, that’s fantastic! An automated process gives these teams more time to be strategic and thoughtful with their customers and prospects. This is the main reason why there should be a strong focus on automation. At the end of the day, it is through these presentations that clients interact with you and they want you to be able to put this narrative together for them. The whole goal is not to have a data dump, but rather be able to turn that data into insights. This is what drives business outcomes and productivity gain. It should also drive better renewals, better conversions, and better upsells. Companies are asking how they should scale these data-driven content to all of their accounts and all of their customers, not just the ones who have a customer success manager or a dedicated account manager.

In some cases there are some CSMs who have a massive book of business with 200, 300, or even 400 accounts. When you are working with these many accounts it is simply impossible to be able to create personalized data driven content for each one. Our hope is to not only allow you the ability to bulk generate this content for every single one of your accounts, but to also be able to distribute it in the future so that it’s end-to-end fully automated.

A few thoughts on the future of the B2B sales market?

There has definitely been significant change with the pandemic and what’s happened over the past three years. A lot of companies have been going remote and according to a published LinkedIn post I came across, the number of interactions in a B2B opportunity have doubled. You are now having to engage with more stakeholders and the buying committee is much larger. That’s intensified now with the macroeconomic conditions. A lot of companies are evaluating their tech stack to see what is above the line, what is below the line, and where they can potentially save, given what’s happening in the macroeconomic condition. There is a strong need to be able to prove ROI, potential ROI, and be able to put together a cohesive business case on why someone should be purchasing your product. Or on the flip side, why someone should be renewing with you, with your service, or product. This is going to be the number one opportunity for sales and customer success to focus on to drive meaningful results within their organizations.

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What are your views on salestech as a segment and how you feel this space will shape up over the next few years?

This space has evolved so much over the past ten years, I would say even over the past five years. Sales tech as a category was pretty new at the time and a lot of VCs and outside investors probably thought there wasn’t a big enough addressable market to go after.

Gong, Outreach, and SalesLoft are all organizations that have significantly grown and expanded the market as solidified sales tech companies. Sales tech has now become a very attractive space and I don’t see that slowing down. At the end of the day, people are going to continue to spend money on sales tech as long as it provides some sort of value by being able to bring in new business and helping retain an existing customer base. Now, there is a newer category around productivity that is emerging. The big question surrounding this is “how do you make your teams more efficient to be able to influence those business outcomes?” I think this category is going to thrive. Companies are going to continue to spend more per sales rep or per CSMs as more and more technology enters the market. I do believe this will be under scrutiny, however. People are going to be more willing to look at perceived value to see whether or not they should make a purchase and move forward with your product or service.