Reducing Churn and Scaling Operations in SaaS B2B Companies | Victor Antiu from Custify

Ernesto Quezada: Pathmonk is the intelligent tool for website lead generation. With increasing online competition, over 98% of website visitors don’t convert. The ability to successfully show your value proposition and support visitors in their buying journey separates you from the competition online. Pathmonk qualifies and converts leads on your website by figuring out where they are in the buying journey and influencing them in key decision moments. With relevant micro experiences like case studies, intro videos and much more, stay relevant to your visitors and increase conversions by 50%. Add Pathmonk to your website in seconds. Let the AI do all the work and get access to 50% more qualified leads while you keep doing marketing and sales as usual. Check us on pathmonk.com. Welcome to today’s episode. Let’s talk about today’s guest. We have Victor from Custify marketing manager with us. How are you doing today, Victor?

Victor Antiu: I’m doing great, Ernesto. How are you?

Ernesto: I’m doing great. Thank you so much for asking. Appreciate that. I hope you’re doing well as well.

Victor: Yeah. It’s a nice evening here in Bucharest, and I’m excited to talk to you.

Ernesto: I’m sure our listeners are excited to learn a little bit more about Custify, so let’s kick it off with that. Victor, in your own words, tell us a little bit more.

Victor: Right. Custify is like a GPS for customer success teams. Basically, we help businesses navigate the complex world of customer relationships with software that automates and simplifies customer success processes. Our platform’s main goal is to help our clients reduce churn, improve onboarding, and massively improve productivity. We do this by scaling and automating the actual customer success tasks that the teams have to deal with. So how does the software do this? It’s just like a CRM. It connects to the entire software stack and lets CS teams have all of the customer information in one place. Everything from a 360 view to emailing to customer support, messages, notes, anything you can think of, you can do with a customer, including lifecycle management. All of this. So, that’s kind of the platform itself. And as a company, we’re stretched around multiple countries in Europe. From Romania and Germany to some people in Serbia, and we also have somebody in Australia as well. We’re also bootstrapped, very proud of this, and we’re profitable.

Ernesto: Awesome. And Victor, so that our listeners who are tuned in can get a good understanding of Custify, what would you say is that key problem that you guys like to solve for customer success managers out there?

Victor: The key problem is customer churn. That’s every kind of business struggle. Getting clients is one thing, but customer success people like to say getting a client is easy and keeping a client is harder. If you talk to a sales guy, it’s different. If you talk to a marketing guy, it’s different. But in customer success, because from a SaaS perspective, 90% of a customer’s revenue comes after purchase. And that’s something that most people don’t really get. So we at Custify improve and focus on the customer success teams to help companies get this revenue, ensure they get this revenue, and minimize their churn. We’ve had companies that had 50% to 60% churn drop it by 80% through Custify. Obviously, there’s a lot of work involved, so it could take months to do this, but that’s basically the problem we try to solve.

Ernesto: Awesome to hear that. And I don’t want to assume here, but what would be the vertical that you guys like to go for? Is it only SaaS B2B companies that have a customer success manager, or are there other segments that you guys like to go for?

Victor: In a nutshell, it’s SaaS B2B companies. Yeah, you nailed it. It’s basically the only kind of business model that we can attach to and automate and connect everything and get all the information in one place very easily. It works for others. We’ve had companies from the entertainment industry, but ideally, our ICP is SaaS B2B companies. Yes, definitely.

Ernesto: Perfect. Thank you so much for sharing that. Say I’m a customer success manager. How would I usually find out about Custify? Is there a top acquisition channel for you guys?

Victor: Good question. We’re predominantly an organic inbound company. We rely a lot on organic search. We depend on the website and through our content. So, yeah, it’s SEO. We invest a lot in the content that we create. We don’t like to do basic stuff. We try to invest as much as two weeks in an article, and we do our best to rank everything very well. Everything we do, we do in-house, from link building to the content research to outlining and so on. Aside from this, we do some webinars, we attend some conferences, and we engage in social media through LinkedIn. But our main channel has been organic SEO, definitely.

Ernesto: Great to hear that. Organic is always one of the best channels, right?

Victor: Yeah. As long as you don’t upset Google.

Ernesto: Yeah. So, for our listeners who are tuned in, they can always check you out at custify.com. What role does the website play for client acquisition for you guys?

Victor: It’s the cornerstone of our client acquisition strategy. It’s where we showcase the value of Custify and engage our potential clients through our content. Our content isn’t just the product pages and the blog pages. We also have interactive tools like calculators and different graphs. For instance, there’s a very nice churn calculator that lets you see how you’re standing right now with your business, with how many customer success people you have, what’s your current churn rate, your current acquisition rate, and you can get a prognosis of where you’re going to be given this approach. And you can adapt it based on different strategies. It’s something people should definitely check out.

Ernesto: Definitely. On that note, Victor, is there any tools or tips or methods that you would recommend to our listeners for website lead generation?

Victor: Given the latest Google changes, I would say to keep everything simple and focused. Get it as authoritative as possible. Don’t write AI stuff. Do it as detailed and as insightful as possible. Reference as many studies, as many stats, and make it the best it can be, and it should rank well.

Ernesto: Great advice for our listeners. Let’s switch gears a little bit, Victor, and talk about you as a leader. You being the marketing manager at Custify, what are some key tasks you like to focus on in your day-to-day work?

Victor: The marketing team does a lot, but we’re actually quite small and distributed. From my side, it’s all about keeping the content fresh and the SEO sharp. We have a lot of activities like webinars, conferences, and partnerships that we work on. But this is handled by my colleague Irina, and she does a really, really amazing job with those. If you haven’t seen a Custify webinar, I recommend people give it a shot. For my side, I like to deep dive into the keyword research, coordinate with the content team, work on the website, and work with the design team to improve and redesign pages as time goes on. For instance, right now we’re redesigning some product pages and improving, adding some animations, making them a bit more interactive. That’s kind of my day-to-day stuff.

Ernesto: Sounds like you have a full plate there, Victor. In the meantime, how do you stay up to date with all the marketing news and trends out there? Is there a preferred channel that you like to go with?

Victor: There’s some stuff on Twitter, currently known as X, with some SEO experts like Glenn Allsop, who is really, really amazing. But I usually just check the SEO Superstar group on Facebook. It has really nice insights and really nice people. It’s also a bit more niche, so you can get more insightful stuff, not just the normal blogs.

Ernesto: Thank you for sharing those tips. Let’s jump into our next section, Victor, which is our rapid-fire question round. Are you ready for them?

Victor: Let’s see.

Ernesto: First off, Victor, what is the last book that you read?

Victor: I love to read, but I never really finish a lot. I have a nice library, but not all of them have been finished. Currently, I’m starting “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ,” which sounds religious, but it’s actually written by Philip Pullman, who wrote His Dark Materials series. It’s an interesting take on a number of familiar stories and how one man’s vision becomes one man’s business. Definitely controversial, but very interesting. I’m also finishing “Bad Science” by Ben Goldacre. It’s a critique and analysis on how statistics and science haven’t been used correctly in studies, medicine, and in general. If you’re into statistics and analytics, that’s an interesting one.

Ernesto: Interesting reads for our listeners. Next, if there were no boundaries in technology, what would be that one thing that you want to have fixed for your role as a marketer today?

Victor: The role has been changing a lot in recent years. If I look back at what I was doing ten years ago, it’s quite different. Not fundamentally, like, yeah, you still have a message, a USP, and so on. But as a day-to-day task, so many things are automating. So many things have reasoning quality. With these new AI tools, you can automate almost anything from keyword analysis to writing a really good article from a couple of prompts. My problem right now is actually the other thing I would like to automate: detecting automated content. That’s coming up as one of the problems we have in Custify as well. So many people reach out with guest posts and ideas and articles, and they’re AI-written. That’s not something we approve, also because of Google. If I could find a way to easily detect automated content, that would be my dream.

Ernesto: Interesting. Next, if there’s one repetitive task that you could automate, what would that be?

Victor: The most repetitive task I do is detecting AI content. I use a bunch of tools to check the same content. I suppose I could automate it with some APIs and stuff, but then things change, algorithms change, and then I would be at square one in six months. So, my most repetitive task right now is detecting AI content, and that’s quite annoying.

Ernesto: Lastly, Victor, you have a lot of experience already in the marketing world, but what is that one piece of advice that you would give yourself if you were to restart your journey as a marketer today?

Victor: I would stay calm and tell myself to stay flexible and keep learning. I would tell myself to understand that most marketing initiatives fail, and that’s okay because that’s the goal of marketing: to try and try again until you find something that works, which is the spaghetti method if you want. But it’s never a silver bullet where you can get it just right from the first time. The industry changes at lightning speed, and the best marketers are always students at heart. So keep learning, try new things, and learn.

Ernesto: Definitely would agree with you. You have to try, you have to fail, because it’s all part of knowing what’s going to be the right formula. Awesome to hear that from you, Victor. We are coming to the end of the show today, but before we do end, I want to give you the last word. If someone forgets everything about the interview today, what is that one thing they should remember about Custify?

Victor: Custify helps businesses scale their customer success operations and improve their customer churn.

Ernesto: There you guys heard it. Check them out at custify.com. If you’re a customer success manager out there and you want to reduce churn, retain customers, and grow revenue, they’re the guys for you. Victor, thank you so much for tuning in with me today. To our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in, and I’m looking forward to our next episode at Pathmonk Presents. Thanks a lot, Victor.

Victor: Thank you, Ernesto. Have a great day, everyone.