Anika Zubair (00:00.12)
This episode is sponsored by PlanHat. PlanHat is a customer platform built to acquire, service, and grow lifelong customers. Every year, PlanHat hosts an event called PlanHat Open. PlanHat Open is not your typical conference. It's much less about sitting and listening to presentations all day and way more about ticking things off your bucket list, like surfing or sailing while making lasting connections in a beautiful part of the world.

Last year it was in Malibu, California, and this year they'll be choosing somewhere new. A little birdie told me that it might be in Stockholm. They are giving away a free trip to their next PlanHat Open for one of my lucky listeners. You can enter to win this all-expense paid experience by signing up for a qualified demo at planhat.com forward slash giveaway. Hello, everyone.

I'm your host, Anika Zuber, and welcome back to the next episode of the Customer Success Pro Podcast. I'm a Customer Success Executive Leader, award-winning CS strategist, CS coach, and Customer Success fanatic. I help CS leaders and CSMs build and scale world-class CS processes and teams. I'm a strong believer that customer success is not a destination, but a journey. And it can be a tough journey, but don't worry, I'm here to help.

This podcast was created to help make your CS journey a little bit easier to navigate. Join me every month on this podcast where we will dive into the hottest topics in CS, the newest strategies and the best practices in customer success so you can make your CS journey a little bit easier. Make sure you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts so that you can continue to learn on this CS journey that we are on together.

Anika Zubair (01:52.558)
Welcome back. Today I'm speaking with Guy Rahameen. With over a decade of global experience spanning across EMEA, APAC, and Latam, Guy combines strategic planning, leadership, and technical expertise to drive positive net revenue retention and high customer satisfaction. Currently, Guy is a Senior Manager of Customer Success at Linear B and has recently been awarded the 2025 Creative Customer Success Leader Award for his work in retention and success planning.

He and his team have created some amazing forecasting models and retention playbooks by using data modeling. And by collaborating with the data team, he has created dashboards in Tableau and integrated proactive alerts via Slack to identify risk and highlight power users early. Let's chat to Guy all about how he uses data and the power of dashboards to help make data-driven decisions in customer success that leads to churn reduction and confirmed renewals.

So welcome, Guy, to the podcast. I'm so, so very excited to have you as my next guest here today. But before we get into this extremely interesting topic, can you please tell my listeners a little bit more about yourself, how you started at Linear Beer, and what your role is? Yeah, thank you very much, Annika. I'm very happy to be here as well. I'm going to tell you also hello in Hebrew, shalom. Shalom. I can say it back to you too. Since I'm based in Tel Aviv, Israel.

I'm a senior manager of customer success at Linear B for the MIA region. My road to customer success was kind of like bumpy. I didn't know how to put it in a different way. I actually studied dentistry. It was interesting. Yes. I love talking to everyone on this podcast because I think the best thing about customer success is none of us have come from similar backgrounds. And you're my first guest that's been trained as a dentist. That's so interesting. So why?

and customer success from dentistry. Yeah, so I didn't complete all my studies. Like the first three years were like super interesting, like chemistry, physiology, anatomy, and stuff like that. But then I started the clinical practice and I didn't really like it. And I said, I'm not going to do this until retirement. So I was like, I think around 32 with a bachelor degree in science. I wasn't really sure what I'm going to do with my life. And then I saw a role.

Anika Zubair (04:16.172)
as a satellite operator in a satellite company. I don't know how to operate a satellite, but they told me they were going to teach me how to do it. So it was a B2G and I started working with the customers and I found it really interesting. I done my research. I felt like, hey, this is something really interesting movement going on here. I believe it could really fit my qualities and my values. So I invested a lot in networking, learning.

been really curious, engaging with other people. And then I got my first chance at a startup in an API security company. After a year, we were sold to Intuit. So it was a good time to move along because usually when you are acquired, it's for the technology and not for the CS team. And then actually I have like a really interesting story because I'm...

founding lead in CS Insider. And in my workspace, also contributing was Sumitra Narayan. And she was hiring in Israel. So I slacked her and said, like, hey, I see that you're hiring in Israel for customer success manager. I think I can be a good fit. And the rest is history. love it. I love all of these unique stories. Honestly, it gets me so excited about customer success and where it started and where it's going because

the doors are so open to anyone and everyone that just wants to get in there and really make a difference. But some of the skills or tactics that you just said that you do like curiosity, like discovery, you just wanted to get in there. And I think that those are great skills that make an extremely driven and good CS person in general. So I love that you were just saying those in general, that that's your personality. And I think that's why you probably have succeeded so much.

in your role and even gotten awarded recently as well, which we'll jump into the award in a second, which is really exciting. Congratulations on that. But I'd love to know more about Linear B, the company, what is your team like? What is that dynamic like? Yeah. So first, maybe we can talk about what is Linear B. So we are operating in the software engineering intelligence domain. This is how the Magic Quartern was named by Gartner.

Anika Zubair (06:38.42)
And I think that like, try to imagine this scenario. You're asking like, I don't know, a sales rep or a sales leader, Hey, like how's the quarter is going to look like what's in the pipeline. And they open up like, I don't know, a spreadsheet or like a pen and paper, you know, it's not going to fly. don't think we know or anyone that listened to us, like, sales managers that are working without CRM system. So basically we are like that, but for engineering teams.

I think that engineering usually the department with like a lot of like money invested into it, but a lot of the companies are blind into what is happening, how the resources are allocated, how they're working efficiently and so on and so forth. So basically what linear B does, it helps engineering leaders to answer two types of questions. One, are they operational efficient where they can improve, they resolving their bottlenecks and so on and so forth. The second one.

is are they aligned with the business? Are they investing in the right stuff? I don't know, sales are already selling, you know, a feature that should come on, I don't know, Q2 next year. Am I investing, am I allocating my resources? Am I doing my part as an engineer and leader to support, to drive the business? So yeah, I'm putting like 30 % of my allocation on that. And more questions to it, so.

That's linear being a nutshell. That's the elevator pitch. Yeah. Love it. Yeah. And our team is like quite distributed. Like we have obviously in a man team, I manage a CSM in Israel. We have in the States, we have East coast, we have West coast, we have a renewal manager, a support team, our implementation team. And yeah. Yeah. And I know we're going to get into how your team's been working with data, which is such a critical topic as we move into 2025, but

For our listeners, do you have more enterprise clients mid-market? What's kind of like the type of customer or even the type of customer success you're doing? Because CS has evolved so much now that you could be doing digital, you could be doing high touch. What is your team most focused on? Yeah, this is like a great question. I think that as we matured as a business, we went like up market. we moved completely from a monthly subscription. So we do only like yearly now.

Anika Zubair (09:02.965)
We have like a limit, like we don't sell for companies that have less than 50 developers. So our model is more based on high touch and segmented to mid-level and enterprise. And we go after, have like really big names that are our customers. And yeah, it's like exciting, exciting. Exciting, amazing. And I know we'll get into the nitty-gritty of exactly how you're handling your customers and how you're using the data, but.

We kind of started to talk about your personal side and we've talked a lot now about Linear B and the team, but I'm so curious from dentistry into customer success, what is your, I guess, next CS career dream? Because you've been at some great startups, you've gone through acquisitions, it seems like you're on the up and up with your career, but I'm always curious, like what would be next for you? What's kind of like the big next CS career dream? Well, maybe not CS, maybe you're gonna go back to dentistry, I don't know, but what's your next...

I'm going be in the next life and go back to dentistry. But I always like to dream big. And I believe in setting goals. it's funny because customer success are always invested in other people's success. But I think customer success, like CS professionals, should be more invested in their own success. this is my baseline. This is where I want to get. This is my end game. What do I need to do to get there? And this is how I make my decision.

I am saying to myself that in five years, I'm going to be either a VP of customer success or a founder. for me, every decision they make leads me to it. And I'm also a member in CS Angel. it's a great syndicate that takes a group of NLR experts and invests, like angel investments.

in startups that should help improving the NLR metric. So I'm learning a lot there. I love it. Those are some big goals. And I love what you just said, that we focus so much on other people's goals that we sometimes forget our own. But I love that you are chasing a big goal. And I'm so excited for you. And I'm excited to watch it happen for you. You are such a go-getter. And I think a lot of that personality trait is the reason why you won.

Anika Zubair (11:24.589)
your most recent award, which is the most creative leader of 2025. Congratulations. That's super exciting. I'm so happy for you. And it's a really cool award that's done by EverAfter every year. And I think it really rewards stepping out of the comfort zone and doing something different in customer success because as someone who's been running customer success since 2011, it's changed so much. It's changed so much in the last five years, even heck in the last year. It's changed so, so much.

the economy and the way SaaS is working today, you have to be creative to be able to reduce churn and grow revenue and really drive value for your customers. So I think this is a great award. think that you winning it is so, on brand to you, but tell us a little bit more about why you won this award and kind of what the story is or the play is behind the award. So it's like a great question. So I think it's, it came from a real pain.

at the end of the day, we used to have a CS platform. But I've noticed that we never talk about like churn score. Yeah. Even in risk meetings, even in like, I don't know, we were going through our portfolios. And it kind of like make me wonder, like, we know that like churn on its own is a a lagging indicator. Yeah. But I think that churn score, or health score,

also in sense, our lagging indicator. And the challenges that I had with the Jitran score, it's like I had the lack of visibility into the real customer adoption. Not just like usage or connecting the plugs to different integrations. I also was concerned that we are not taking into account like actual habits that our customer is forming because there is a difference between Sepharadic usage.

then going back and creating a ceremony or a habit and reporting based on that in your, in your, I don't know, weekly meeting, monthly meetings or quarterly summaries. And I think that the most, the most difficult or problem that I had, it wasn't actionable. Like I could look at like a yellow customer or red or green for the sake of discussion and okay, what am I doing with it? What should I do to move the needle? So that was like the statement.

Anika Zubair (13:51.137)
like the problem that I was facing. Yeah, you had a real churn issue by the sounds of it and you weren't really sure how to fix that issue. It sounds like customers returning and no matter what data you were looking at and no matter what health score it was telling, it was really hard to, I guess, weed through all that data, which I know a lot of people listening probably feel similar.

We all know data is so, important, and it's so critical and so important for us to really make data-driven decisions, and that's what we're here to talk about today. But sometimes which data is really important? That's overwhelming as well. And I know that you've come up with customer behavior metrics. This is something that you guys have, I don't know, I want to say coined or invented, but it is something. There is the ideal customer profile, which I think we're all familiar with in SaaS, but you've come up with the ideal

customer behavior, which I think is a real game changer because we're past logins, we're looking past like actual product usage, but the behavior of a customer and what is the ideal state of your customers using your product. And I think that's a game changer and will really help a lot of businesses. before we start to take a talk about the data and like what dashboards and everything you are using, tell me what is ideal customer behavior and how did you guys come to this?

terminology, how did you even make this a thing at Linear B? Yeah, I'll dive that in a second. I just want to go back on like the last thing that we've mentioned. think churn in general, like I don't think there is a customer success leader today that doesn't want to improve on churn, especially you also mentioned the market and you know, I think we have the time to market and we're all worried about churn. Yeah, the customers like I think companies in tech were like

You know, it growth at all costs, but now it's like, you know, grow responsive in a responsible manner, profit profitability. Every line item is now being discussed. So I think this is like, this challenge is like, I think other people can relate to it as well. And for the ICB, I think this is a conversation that we started with our data team and our founders. We wanted to know, okay, we offer like different use cases.

Anika Zubair (16:10.529)
Like we talked about, you know, operational excellence and business alignment. And these can also be broken down into more bits and bytes. But a customer comes to you for a reason. They come to solve a problem or like a, or, or a pain that they have, or to install habit or a process they're currently not having. So if they come to you for a reason, you want to know that they're actually doing the stuff.

to help them succeed in this specific challenge. So then we coined the ideal customer behavior. Obviously, like we are focusing on the solution they came for us. But in general, as you see like more adoption across other use cases, there is a huge correlation between the ideal customer behavior, like zero is the best. I know it's like, it's quite hard to comprehend, but zero is the best and three is the worst.

So we are looking at the delta for the customer to be able to achieve customer, to achieve ICB or ideal customer behavior of zero. And we find, and we found really, really high correlation between customers that are ICB zero or one into the renewal rates. I love that. What is zero then? What makes ideal customer behavior zero and what makes three? Like what tendencies or what things would I be doing if I was your customer and I was on zero?

Yeah, if to make it simple, we pretty much like created three pillars of linear B and we define thresholds. Thresholds we considered like, this, this usage that we see will allow us internally, like the customer success leaders to show ROI back to the customers because they're actually doing what we asked them to do. So if they, you know, meet the threshold and they get, they score a point.

in each and every one. So they get to a state of ICB zero. Now, it also helped me a lot in reflecting back to the business like, Hey, there are customers that have like missing integrations because their tax that we don't support it. So inherently, they will never be an ICB zero, some of them will never be an ICB one. So it also helped us to close the feedback loop to, to product to, to sales to marketing.

Anika Zubair (18:35.501)
Because at the end of the day, you know, because we are in the customer journey, quite like the latest. So I think there is not enough like feedback loop that has been closed that we go like as CS leaders and we go with tell marketing hate. This is the type of leads that will end up being successful customers. And we go and tell to sales, hey, like, you know, if you touch on this and this and this

You will improve the chances coming in into the door already like ICB two or one or zero even. Yeah. Yeah. No, I love that you are using ICB, not just from a customer success perspective, meaning like it's not just helping you look at churn or adoption or anything like that. You're also using it to build out your product. You're using it to give feedback to other teams that are outside of customer success. ICB is not just a CS metric. It's a company metric by the sounds of it, which is so important. And it sounds like

You've used a lot of resource across multiple teams. It sounds like you're also best friends with your data team. That sounds really cool. I think a lot of companies or lot of people listening to this are at companies where they just don't know where to start when it comes to either they don't have a data team or maybe they're not as cross-functional yet. Where did you guys start? Like, ICB 0, ICB 3, having these pillars, having this strategy. This all sounds like really great and really good teamwork. But when did it start and who...

initiated which teams had to get involved to make this such a company wide metric? Yeah. So I think like if I can give like, I don't know, a tip for people out there, it's you know, better done than perfect. Yeah. simple. Start simple. Yeah, I love that. Do something. Take one step forward. Yeah. And, and you know, I believe every CS team has this knowledge, but they just don't like, you know, put pen to paper and say like, hey, this is how like if

I know that if a customer is doing this, I will see success at the like an a later stage and start very simple, like start one, two, three. And I was very fortunate to have a offer as the head of the analytics at the linear B and BI that was very a power user in tableau used to blow. And we came up with like some very early, like quick and dirty framework for the ICB.

Anika Zubair (20:59.117)
We started collaborating. saw like, okay, we need the data signals from the product, from Salesforce and so on and so forth. And we start building an action in on that. I'm pretty sure like, you know, even startups like out there in an earlier stage, we're a startup as well, by the way, like we have like 120 like employees. But you have like at least like one ops person, at least one in your company.

And they have access to Salesforce or any other CRM that people are using and start understanding, okay, like I need to do an internal discovery. What are the points I have? How they can talk to one another. But also reach out, talk to other professionals in your network and see what you could do, what you could learn yourself. I think that like acquiring this type of skills like would also be like an interesting career path.

for CSMs out there, like for CS ops, for instance. And yeah. Hey, CS pros. I want to quickly jump in and let you know if you are enjoying this episode, but wondering how you two can become a revenue focused CS pro, then I have the answer for you. Some of you might not know this, but I run a cohort based coaching program that walks you through step by step on how to align customer success strategies with revenue.

CSM RevUp Academy is my complete step-by-step coaching program that helps you elevate your skills and mindset to focus on driving revenue for both your customers and your customer. As this is a live coaching program, we only open doors for enrollment a few times a year. So if you are interested, go to thecustomersuccesspro.com forward slash revup to sign up for the waitlist. I've been talking a lot about churn, by the way, and how this ICB metric has helped

customer success with like predicting churn and being able to mitigate it as well. But what you just said is that the whole company, including your data team, including your product team, every marketing as well is also bought into ICB. And you also just indicated that it's so important is that you have this data. CS teams have this information. They know if our customers do X, Y will be the result, which is great, but we need to share this information.

Anika Zubair (23:18.689)
Data teams not only need to share information with us, but we need to share like usage or behavioral data back with our data teams as well, because they don't know, our marketing team doesn't know. And I think you've done a great job of working quite cross-functionally. Like it's a two-way street. And I think that everyone listening, if there's one thing you can take away is like building these data models and metrics and ICBs and ICB03, all these things we're saying, all sounds amazing. Sounds great. Like amazing. You've won an award for it. It's amazing. But...

Like it just starts with getting going and working with other teams as well. We can't all just work in our silos. And I think sometimes we get really caught up in customer success. No, I know what's best for the customer. I'm going to do this or I'm going to do this. But there's no I in team. I know that's so cliche, but you need to work together. And it's interesting. ICB helps with churn and retention for customer success. But do you use it for other metrics or other?

forecasting at linear B other than churn and retention? Yeah, so obviously it helps us a lot in early risk flagging. Okay. A lot earlier. We don't have to get to like three months or six months before we know to understand we have a risk there. Like I can give you like even a very simple example. Like we added settings. Want to see what is going on in the settings. Okay. It's not the most like, I don't know.

you know, when you talk about like features can be give you ROI and stuff like about settings. But obviously we know that if implementation is not taking place, we will not be able to show value to the customer. So we want to reduce time to value. we started also to track like during the implementation, how often like the customers are actually going into settings and doing what we're asking them to do, because if they don't trust the data, so you cannot have a discussion, you cannot set the baseline, you cannot set goals for improvement.

So even like, you know, when they get out of the door and start their post sales journey, I already know what they are doing. And I also see what they did during the sales process. So because we use the same instance for the POC and for after they become a customer. So I have all the data there. I'm coming into the door, not blind. Yeah, I love it. I love it. And you are using the data so proactively as well, which I think is another really important play.

Anika Zubair (25:40.383)
in customer success. mean, being proactive is always our goal, but I think you guys have really started to nail down. Okay, we have this beautiful data and this beautiful information about ICBs, but what do do with it? What the heck are we doing with it? Which I think you guys have built out lots of notifications, lots of ways of addressing risk early, like you said, and this drives not only churn reduction, but it drives renewal. like, how are these notifications brought in? Tell me day to day, if I'm a CSM at Linear B.

How are CSMs using this data daily? Yeah, so we know that we have a lot on our plate as CSMs. Like we own accounts, we take face-to-face meetings, we need to prepare for meetings, we need to share summaries after, we need to have our internal meetings. like you have like not as much time if you want in a day, you know, work. Yeah, there's definitely not enough time and CSMs are having to do more.

than ever before. And it's so important to like leverage technology, which I think you guys do really well. So we wanted to action on that. So it's one thing to look at the data, but if you don't know what to action or when to action, so it's going to be very difficult. So we've put like an algorithm in place that showed us significant movement in ICBs like, Hey, like this customer was ICB like zero or one, they reduced to ICB two or three. This is the reason.

why have they have reduced like maybe you should reach out to the customer. And we also have, we have collaborated with the, with a startup called the Rupert that can send this notification. And I get a summary once a week on my customers that are in risk. And then I can action right from Slack. So it's very easy for me. I can explore the engagement of the specific customer and say like, Hey, you know what, this is Christmas and the holidays makes total sense that

You know, they're not logging in, but Hey, if they're like, I don't know, three months to renewal and I see like a really significant drop in ICB, I'm in a problem. And then I can also open a risk report from that. do our risk meetings on, on Salesforce. So I can open a risk report right from Slack, but then there is the other flip of it. If you see us suddenly in increase in ICB close to when you are in this customer was not using.

Anika Zubair (28:05.069)
You see a spike in usage. They might be looking at your competition. Now comparing to other stuff. And usually you also get a question. Hey, do you have this feature or integrate this or do do that? then how do you stop that? Like, let's say like we're right in the middle of seeing that ICB change. How does the CSM step in? Like what's their best action if they're seeing from going from three to one or one to three or whatever. How, how do you guys step in then to, guess, alleviate that risk?

Yeah, so we have like, can explore the data and you can see exactly what the customer is doing, like the end users, what habits they have, how often they go back, like on a daily basis, bi-weekly basis, monthly, quarterly, and what features in turn. So, and then it's up to the CSM to decide, Hey, this is an actual risk. Like, I want to flag that. I want to have like an internal discussion with the CS team. And then we decide what is being escalated.

We have a C level also risk meeting bi-weekly and basically everyone is behind us and helps us in that regard. Like founders, VP engineering, VP product. So whatever, like the BDR team, like if we need to go and create another champion. love it. I love that the whole company is behind the customer. You guys are really living and breathing this because a lot of companies say we're

customers are at the heart of everything we do, but you're just saying like your founder or your VP of engineering is willing to get on the call to really demonstrate, you know, the data behind their settings or their logins or whatever they're doing. because I think for some CSMs, it can be very overwhelming. Like it's a lot, like we just said, there's so much work to be done as a CS professional today that doing it all alone can seem daunting. And especially with data, because I think

Some people are very data-driven or naturally data-curious people, but how did you help your team get more, I guess, comfortable with the data? Because not everybody uses Tableau. Not everyone has so much data. And I'm sure the first few days or even the first few weeks or months of having so much data about flagging risk early or showing ability to renew sooner, it's probably overwhelming. How did your team adopt all of this? Yeah, so I think this is where we like

Anika Zubair (30:27.489)
kind of thought about like, let's not only flag bad stuff, let's flag good stuff. Good. Good. I'm happy to hear that. Because sometimes we get so worried about the churn that we forget to celebrate the wins and customer success. So suddenly, like we also added another notification that comes, hey, here is a power user that is not recorded in Salesforce. Who is this person? I can go and explore their engagement in a click of a button from Slack. I can go and send in intro email.

Maybe offering them, come to a beta, come be in a beta program, come be, come, I don't know, meet the VP of product to come talk about the roadmap or like, want to send you a gift card or maybe you can come and share what, what is it that you do with the linear B that helps you so much in your day to day. And sometimes it's also opportunity for upsells. Maybe it's from there from a different business unit and the director and they're exploring.

And so on and so forth. So this is also where we go back and check hands with our sales counterparts. And also like we are thinking about taking it to the next steps because obviously we see all the linear users across the world and we have the top 10 or the top 20 users. So just thinking about like an idea that we want to like an email from, from a co-founder, Hey, you're among the top 20 users, the best in the world in my product.

I value your engagement. I would love to hear more about that. We value your partnership and so on and so forth. So you can do so many good about that. you know, I think that like focus, I think focus is the name of the game. Also when we come to our customers, we cannot ask them, we are a change management agents at the end of the day. You are, but you're so focused and I love that how focused, how much focus you have, but also curiosity. I think as I hear you speak about all of these

flags and all of these notifications. A CSM is getting all the notifications, which is great, but you have to be curious. You have to be focused and curious by the sounds of it. You're getting the notification, but as a CSM, you have to go and be like, why is my customer doing this? Or actually that's such good behavior. I need to go and talk to my marketing team. Like you have to be curious. You have to dive in deeper and you have to ask the questions or you have to really question what your customer is doing, which I think is so important in today's

Anika Zubair (32:52.533)
world of customer success, but you mentioned good triggers and bad triggers or good risk and like bad risk, I guess, flagging and notifications. What are some early risk flags that you guys see? What are some things that your customers are doing that flags risk early in the data? So I think like the example we mentioned, like if you're in implementation, you see people not going to settings. Okay. When you have a problem. simple as that, like just

as simple as a settings can be flagged. Interesting. If your champion is not logging in at all champion and program manager. Yep. So it means nothing happened. If we have a training for end users and none of them logs in. simple, but I love it. I love it. think we sometimes over engineer data, by the way, we get so overwhelmed by it that we forget that some of the simplest behaviors, like you just said, logging in settings, all these simple things can result.

in a very effective use of product and likelihood of renewal, but we're so caught up in all the mess that we forget that simple behavior equals churn prevention. And I think also, you you got to add to it, like the value question, the value confirmation. I seek always when I engage with customers is asking what is the value that you see in Linear B? If they tell me we don't see value, I know I have a problem early on. Yeah.

Early on, if they cannot answer this question, if they tell me, yes, I see value. Okay. What is the value? Got it. Yeah. You've to go. You've got to ask those tough questions. You have to be curious. I love it. I love it. I love it. Okay. So we talked about churn indicators. Let's talk about the good ones too. So you mentioned that you have early like flags of champions or product, like customers that are going to be advocates of your product. What are those kinds of flags and what does a CSM do with that type of notification? Yeah. Great.

So these are, call them power users, power users we don't know, we don't have a record on them in our CRM and Salesforce. So I get a notification and I get the, and I can also do a data dump to it and like filter by a specific customer. It's really good for like being proactive and showing to the customer and to say like, not really sure about the usage and so on and so forth. They're not exposed to it and say like, Hey, go talk to these people. These people are using.

Anika Zubair (35:18.519)
They're coming back on a weekly basis. They're doing this and this and that. So it's also good like being proactive and showing to the customer, Hey, like there is an actual usage or Hey, you have a problem. did everything together, but you know, at the end of the day, you got to enforce, you got to be committed to your success as well. So, and then I have the, power users. So I multi-threat. One of the biggest turn risk you have is a champion living. Yeah.

or the decision maker is leaving. But if I invest time in, you know, obviously like prioritize my customers by our world bar in the customer journey, what is the potential for upset, but I go and multi-thread. So I don't have like a single point of failure that I put on my chips. go all in playing the roulette and I'm saying, okay, five.

This is what is going to be know. So I'll go and put some chips here, some chips here, some chips there. It's so important. And I love that we talk so much about identifying risk and identifying churn. And as we even said at the start of this podcast, that is probably the number one topic that's on people's minds right now because of the economy, because of SaaS spend and because of software. But I think the other flip side of it is that having so much data insights can directly contribute to renewals. So how are you guys using

all of these account risk reviews, all of these notifications, all the data and data behavior that you have, how are you setting yourself up for those renewal conversations to be almost like a no-brainer that your customer is just like, of course we're renewing because we've seen so much value and because you've been so engaged all throughout the journey. What are you doing when it comes to the renewal and the data usage? Yeah, so we try to go as far as we can in our forecasting.

And we try at least six months before renewal to go and ask the question, Hey, like it's a very simple direct question. Hey, Anika, you know, if you had to renew tomorrow, would you renew? Yeah. I love that question, by the way. It is such a critical question. If you are a CS pro listening today and there's one thing you can do from this podcast, ask guys question to every one of your customers, lean into it, ask your customers. It helps you and it helps them. Yeah. So if they say like, yeah, heck yeah.

Anika Zubair (37:37.569)
I say, perfect. Like, okay, what else do we need to do? Like who holds the budget? it should it go the same like signing procedure that we had like last year? Okay. Let me connect you to our renewal manager and already start the conversation. If they say like, maybe or yes, but, or no. So, okay. What do I need to do for, to get you to a position where you can, you tell me, yeah, guy, we're renewing. So you have enough time to mitigate.

When you are coming like three months to renew in your, your back against the wall, you go into like a defensive mode. It's like you lose the right and ability to be proactive because now you are like in crisis mode. are now thinking, okay, like I have a landmine, how I diffuse it. so I think it just gives us also breathing space and looking more holistically on our, on our book and not being like, okay, like this quarter all the time, this quarters, because then

or missing out on being really proactive in that area. is. It's a huge miss, like you just said. I think that using all this data to your advantage and asking the tough questions, like you just said, can help greatly. And I think a lot of people just get so nervous and forget to ask some of these questions. And it's not a scary question. I think it's helpful for you and your customers to know what's the pulse check.

at this moment in time. And like you said, you don't want to have three months or two months or one month left and suddenly know that they're going to churn. It's good to have early indicators. So I love that you're asking that question. Surprises are not good for the business. need to be all around, though. I think some people think, oh, it's such a harsh question to ask customers. But your customers don't want a surprise either. They don't want surprise. The renewals are going up or a surprise. This is happening like.

You know, everybody wants to have clarity and that question brings clarity to both sides. So I love that. Some practice I like to do, if I can just add, I like in the kickoff call, like after you go through all the agenda, say, okay, I stopped sharing. then I say, let's go to a time machine. Okay. In the, the time machine, we fast forward, like, I don't know, 12 months, 24 months, ahead in time. And we're having a renewal discussion.

Anika Zubair (39:54.573)
And in the renewal discussion, tell me, Guy, you are amazing. Linear B is amazing. Not only that I renew, I'm going to renew for five years. What needs to happen for you to say that, how success looks like in your eye? I document that. And when I go back to like the renewal conversation, I said like, hey, Anika, this is what you told me just like, you know, six months ago, like your words, not mine. Nah, I love it. Ooh, I love it. We did it.

So very new, right? Yeah, I love it. I love that you're holding your customers accountable, but I also love that you're asking right at the start. Like you're really setting the tone for the entire relationship and really setting yourself up for a successful renewal by making sure it's super crystal clear from the start. Because I think a lot of time in CS we rely on what sales have told us or maybe what happened in the sales cycle. But when they start a new relationship with their CSM,

you need to know what is gonna make them successful with Linear B and what is gonna make their business successful. And like you just said, asking the question, documenting it, and then bringing it back to them is a great way to keep everyone super crystal clear of what we're here to do today and the value and ROI you're getting from our product and services. I love it, I love it. Guy, we could keep talking so much more about data, but I have one more question and then we'll get into quick fire round. I'm thinking now, we've talked a lot about

data and innovation and trends and what you guys are doing with ICB is quite innovative and it is something that's helping you make extremely smart data decisions in your business. How do you guys think like looking forward maybe a year to like how do think this will further revolutionize either your retention or your churn forecasting as you guys use this more and more? Yeah, so we already have like proof that like we see a clear correlation.

ICB1 and ICB1. So we see, we know that this is working and this is like, you know, it's not like 100%, but it's gives like a really, really good indication. The way I see it, it's like fully automated. Like if I see like power users, like I don't need to take action, like, send emails, offer them like beta, beta to be part of betas, based on the specific feature that they are going and interest them.

Anika Zubair (42:17.441)
Yep. Or go and create an or connect them specifically to the product owner. What they're working on. Or someone is like completely like over the top. Go to a marketing, go to a member for the marketing like like do a case, a case study with us. Or write a G2, send them a like here, write a G2 get like $50. I don't know gift card from Amazon. So it's like

Taking it to the next level so CSMs can really focus on understanding the business questions the customer have and help them to drive success in that regard. I love it. I love that you've had a problem. If you go back to the start of this podcast, the problem was churn. You were like, gosh, how can I predict this? How can we actually make sure our customers are seeing value and we identify churn early? You started to build ICB with the help of again, your data team, your engineering, everyone was involved.

But now the evolution of this data and the evolution of this strategy of churn forecasting and renewal forecasting has turned into case studies, has turned into advocacy, has turned into all of these amazing things, which just goes to show that data-driven decision-making can really change the whole business. It's not just changing how customer success is doing their jobs every day.

I love it. And on that note, we're ending on such a high, but I want to have play of time for a quick fire question. So Guy, are you ready? I always challenge every single one of my guests to answer the next few questions in one sentence or less. Are you ready? Yes. Amazing. My first question for you is if you could predict the future, what do you think customer success will focus on next year? So in 2026. Revenue generation. Yeah, I love it. I think that that's...

I love hearing that just everything I do around this revenue in CS. I love that everyone is endorsing this. My next question is which app or software do you use every day on your phone or your laptop? It can be CS or it can be not CS. Can I say two? You can say two. Okay. Okay. Thank you. I always negotiate. careful. Yeah. Use the workout app or like activity.

Anika Zubair (44:35.585)
can set goals with your Apple watch. So I like to keep in track like how much I'm moving and stuff like that. It gives me a sense of like, you know, doing something for myself. And the second one is Twitter. okay, X today, but Twitter. gosh. I feel like there's so few people left on X and Twitter, but it's such an interesting following of people who do. So I will share your

Twitter handle in the show notes of everybody wants to see what what guy is up to on Twitter because he uses it so often. Awesome. Cool. Next question is if you could change one thing about customer success, what would it be? Yeah, I believe each CSM should have a quarter of absolutely. I love it. That's a spicy answer. We can have a whole podcast on that. No, I'm free. I like whenever I'll come back to you. That's such a good answer, though. I totally agree. But

Let's save it for another podcast. Next question is who should be my next podcast guest? okay. I'm going to nominate Yair Brutinger. He's a dear friend. he's the head of customer success operations in Control Up and he's there for nearly six years. Okay. and I met him, actually it's funny because we are both Israelis, but I met him in London in the customer success excellence awards. won an award there.

But he also won an award for best use of technology in customer success. I believe he has a really interesting story to share. I will add him to my list of next guests I have to reach out to. Thank you so much, Guy, for your energy, your passion, sharing all your tips and tricks with my listeners today. I have so many notes that I've taken. I really love everything you guys are building with data-driven decision making. If my listeners...

have any more questions or want to connect with you or want to reach out, what's the best way to get in contact with you? LinkedIn. I like spend a lot of time in LinkedIn. I think we all do. I think we all do. It's not a good thing, but it is what it is. I will make sure. helped me with my career. This is like great stuff. I owe a lot to LinkedIn. Like I put in the calories, but LinkedIn was a great platform to do. Yeah. I love it too. Amazing. I'll make sure to link.

Anika Zubair (46:51.657)
all of Guy's information down the show notes. Thank you again, guys, for your energy again and your time. I really appreciate it. My pleasure, Anika. Very happy to be here. Amazing. Thank you for listening to the Customer Success Pro podcast today. I hope you learned something new to take back to your team and your company. If you enjoyed today's episode, please can you take one minute to give me a positive review on Apple Podcasts? It takes a lot of time and energy to create an episode and I want to continue to create more for you.

but it would be great to know that you are enjoying these episodes. Also, do not forget to subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcast or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast as I release a new podcast every month. And if you have any topics that you would like me to discuss in the future or you would like to be a guest on this podcast, please feel free to reach out. All my contact details are in this show notes. And if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to share it because sharing is caring.

Thanks again for listening and tune in next time for more on customer success. Cheers to your CS journey and catch you next time.