Abbas Haider Ali
Abbas Haider Ali is currently VP Customer Success & Value Engineering at Twilio Segment. He has held leadership roles in field engineering, sales engineering, customer success, professional services, product management & strategy, product marketing, and business development. His experience includes working at startups from Series-B stage through late stage and public companies. He enjoys the opportunity to bring his expertise to other enterprise startups both as a strategy consultant as well as an advisor and investor. He is passionate about mentorship for women and underrepresented groups as they take on leadership roles in tech.
“Value Engineering can be a powerful force multiplier for a SaaS company because it creates alignment to measurable customer outcomes across every part of the organization. It becomes part of the product and GTM teams’ DNA.”
How did you find yourself in Customer Success? What was your journey, and what drew you to this industry?
My career consists of roles that have been pendulum swings between product and go-to-market. The one consistency has been in B2B and generally leaning towards the enterprise. My first time leading a customer success organization was a few years ago, where I was initially focused on customer acquisition, leading a Developer Relations and Sales Engineering team. My initial experience expanded into post-sales and encompassed Customer Success Manager and Professional Services orgs. It was the first time I was directly responsible for the retention and growth of existing customers.
It was a fantastic experience that brought me from seeing the pre and post-sales handoff challenges from one side, to being responsible for breaking down barriers and silos between the two. Over a few months, we had built out a great Field Engineering organization (including Developer Relations, Solution Engineering, CSMs, and PS) that had highly efficient alignment throughout the customer lifecycle and operated in unison across all the functions it encompassed.
That’s when it clicked for me that a CS team could generate a revenue flywheel. CS is responsible for ensuring that customer intent is realized and for laying the foundation for the next phase of customer growth. It’s not just about acting as the ticket escalation point, tracking feature requests, and supporting customer education. Those are small pieces that the CSM is responsible for crafting into a plan that drives adoption, delivers measurable value, and underpinned by a joint plan with the customer.
What does Customer Success at Segment looks like?
Customer Success at Segment follows a standard B2B SaaS model where different CS plans are driven by customer ACV. We have a low-touch, automation-powered, and highly scalable CS program for the long tail of customers.
We offer a light-touch CS program that includes a pod of CSMs who work with an extensive portfolio of companies for our mid-sized customers. It blends automation to drive scale and direct customer engagement for high-value interactions.
Our larger customers are part of a high-touch CS program where they have assigned CSMs that work with a smaller portfolio of companies and have deep ongoing interactions.
Customer Success at Segment also includes the Value Engineering team, which works across all functions - Product, Marketing, Sales Development, Sales, Sales Engineering, Customer Success, and Professional Services - and stitches together the narrative and quantification of customer business benefits.
Value Engineering is a relatively new concept/function within SaaS companies. Can you tell us what it means and why it’s important?
Value Engineering is an evolution of a more common Value Consulting discipline in the software industry for a long time. Value Consulting engages during the later stages of a sales engagement with a customer. They’re responsible for articulating the technical solution's business value and a company’s products to a particular customer situation. As the name implies, value consultants are typically experts brought in to address a specific need and business case, and then they’re done.
Value Engineering is an evolving discipline to take this approach and better align it with a SaaS company's needs. It starts with building a company-wide understanding of what the value of its products is in terms of customer outcomes. This description underpins how every function in the company describes their work, internally and externally. If you’re building a new product/feature - you define a PRD in this language. If you’re in sales and having an early discovery conversation with a customer, you capture your notes using the same structure. If you’re in professional services, you build offerings that activate the capabilities that set up a customer to see those outcomes. And if you’re in customer success, you utilize the same framework to track customer adoption and value realization.
This can be a powerful force multiplier for a SaaS company because it creates alignment to measurable customer outcomes across every organization. It becomes part of the product and GTM teams’ DNA. What used to be a Value Consulting business case that was strictly about selling instead becomes a core skill set that everyone in the company has access to and supports their part of the customer journey.
What is your team responsible for, and how does this contribute meaningfully to the customer’s success with Segment?
A typical description of a team’s responsibility is to refer to a North Star. I prefer a constellation approach and describe the Pleiades of the CSM and VE teams at Segment Twilio as customer health, retention, and growth. All three have leading indicators and cover a hierarchy of measurement starting with basics such as product issues that are blocking customers, all the way up to an active and ongoing understanding of customer business value.
Can you share an example of Value Engineering in practice?
We worked with an up-and-coming retailer with solid growth through their physical locations and hit significant business growth challenges as the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact was felt in early 2020. They had a digital business they had been building out, but it was relatively new to them, and all of a sudden, it was going to have to become their lifeline as the full scope of the pandemic became apparent.
They quickly built out a growth team and were architecting their growth stack to transform their business as soon as possible. Our team spoke to them and used our value framework to map out the use cases and outcomes they needed in phases during 2020 and going into 2021. That qualitative discovery work performed by the sales team was quickly turned into a quantitative analysis with the customer because of using the VE language/structure from the beginning. A business case was a natural artifact from the work and helped the customer make prioritized decisions for their budget. Professional services and Customer Success teams used qualitative and quantitative assessments to build a joint implementation and ongoing success plan.
As these milestones were hit, at every phase, the customer knew exactly where they were from a spend-value analysis standpoint and could justify unlocking the value in the following stages, including expanding their usage of our products. The value engineering approach with the customer supports a mutual understanding of value realized for what they’re doing with our products at any point they want to inspect it, and they have forward-looking predicted value for the subsequent phases. They feed into each other and power a robust customer-business relationship.
Why do companies need a Value Engineering team? At what point should a company consider adding a Value Engineering team, and how would you convince a VP of Customer Success to consider adding this department?
If companies have ever had discussions with their customers that include phrases like “are we seeing enough value for what we pay?”, “should we just build this ourselves?” or “it’s getting too expensive!” or any of the other comments that indicate the customer doesn’t have a clear understanding of the value being delivered, then you’ve already felt the need for a Value Engineering team.
That’s the acute problem, though, and not really unlocking the potential of what a Value Engineering function can do for a company, including a Customer Success team. Every CSM should have the skills to do value anchored discovery work, map out qualitative business value, build joint success plans connected to customer business outcomes.
Doing this in isolation, however, is an uncomfortable experience for both CSM and customers. Value Engineering is the company-wide muscle that a dedicated team can help train. Done right, it means that every customer interaction from the first time they talked to your company utilizes a consistent value framework. By the time a CSM is engaged in a value conversation as part of an upcoming renewal conversation, everyone (including your customer) is immersed in the language and structure to articulate the value of your product in the language of customer business outcomes.
The most convincing thing, however, is the business case for Value Engineering itself which plays out in the form of increased speed and quality in every stage of the customer lifecycle - demand generation, sales qualification, time to close to deals, average sales price, customer gross retention, and customer net retention. All of these numbers are materially impacted by a Value Engineering team that is rolled out well and has the support of a company’s leadership.
What is one tool the Value Engineering team uses to drive success for Segment customers?
A shared understanding of use cases and associated customer value across all parts of the business is the fundamental asset that a Value Engineering team maintains.
Typically that comes in the form of a stack of tools:
Visual using drawing tools such as Miro, Lucidchart, or Mural
Written descriptions of all the components of the visuals in GSuite
Value calculators in GSuite spreadsheets
What is one thing you feel companies are doing wrong when it comes to how they think about delivering value to customers?
They think of it in terms of their product vs. customer outcomes. The former approach describes delivered value in your product's language - # of users, API volume, amount of stored data, etc.
The latter requires translating the product measures into the language of how your customer measures your product's value - both qualitative and quantitative. That means it has to ladder up into either making money, saving money, increasing efficiency, or reducing risk.
If you can’t translate your product measures into those categories, then you have an incomplete value framework and should revisit it.
It’s also common to think about it as a point in time conversation - presale when building a business case and post-sale when it’s time for renewal. It should be part of all stages and engagements in the customer journey
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What is one actionable tip you’d give to a Customer Success department who’s looking to get started with Value Engineering?
Value Selling precedes Value Realization, so make sure that muscle is well developed (or has a parallel plan) so that the go-to-market org as a whole is in sync.
What advice would you give to someone interested in pursuing a career in Customer Success?
There are many paths and associated strengths coming into a customer success role, and you shouldn’t get discouraged if one particular CSM role/team doesn’t feel like a great match. I’ve worked with amazing CSMs with backgrounds as BDRs, Sales, SEs, consultants, and product managers.
The core skills in my experience are discovery, portfolio management, ecosystem knowledge, and practitioner empathy for the market you’re in — everything else you can pick up.
What is one book that has had a significant impact on your career?
Culture Map by Erin Myer. Having stumbled through managing across cultures in a global team early in my career, I found this book to be an efficient guide for doing it right.