TCT's 'A Day in the Life of...' series has been primarily launched for college and university alumni to better understand what career opportunities in additive manufacturing (AM) are available to them. Throughout the series, TCT will spend time with a host of AM professionals to communicate what their day-to-day tasks are, what kinds of teams they work within, what they have learnt on the job, and how they got to where they are today. In this instalment, Adrian Wischnewski of computational design software provider nTop explains the role of a Senior Customer Success Manager (CSM).
nTop
You’ve picked up a lead, made the pitch and secured the sale. Now what?
Pat yourself on the back for the creation of a new account? Do little for the new client because you’ve already pocketed their cash?
Nope. Increasingly, technology providers are deploying the likes of Adrian Wischnewski to service these relationships, support customers in their deployment of the product, and grow the accounts.
They call this line of work Customer Success and the likes of Wischnewski carry the title of (Senior) Customer Success Managers. It’s not just an affirmation, Wischnewski and his colleagues are key cogs in the nTop machine. With its software platform, nTop is working to usher in a new era of computational design for product development. The nTop platform has been a popular introduction to the additive manufacturing sector, but deploying it effectively is easier said than done.
Those adopting the platform are likely changing the way they design and manufacture products. They’re seeking new efficiencies and better performance. But that transition won’t be without its bumps in the roads. Which is where Wischnewski comes in.
“We are the link between the customer and our internal teams,” he tells TCT. “A lot of things route through us; we are responsible for the relationship.”
Q. Why should somebody want to work in your space?
AW: It’s all about the customer’s applications. It’s so cool to see what they do and how they push engineering challenges forward with your tools. You see a direct impact of your work.
A TYPICAL DAY
It’s a big responsibility, particularly when working for a small company attempting to pioneer a new approach to design.
The best way to carry that responsibility is through organisation. Wischnewski begins every day with 30 minutes of focus time, addressing the emails in his inbox, prioritising his tasks and preparing for any meetings he has scheduled.
Today, his first meeting is with an account executive at nTop. They’re convening to prepare an introductory call with an aerospace customer. Inside the aerospace company is a champion of nTop’s software, who has recently introduced the technology into another department. Impressed with what they’ve seen so far, that department is interested in discussing potential applications to target with nTop’s computational design capabilities, so Wischnewski and his colleague are gathering information about the team and their inventory of parts to get the ball rolling.
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Once out of this meeting, Wischnewski messages a solutions engineer at nTop on Slack with all the relevant information. The solutions engineer will now do some design work ahead of the next meeting with the customer, where Wischnewski and his colleagues will demonstrate how nTop might be used for a select number of applications targeted by the end user.
Wischnewski’s next appointment is with an existing customer: a business review meeting. This client, operating in the energy sector, is coming to the end of their license period with nTop. So, the meeting covers what has been achieved, where the gaps in their portfolio remain, and what can be done from now until their license period is up.
“[This is all about] what matters to the decision makers for them to, later on, approve the renewal,” Wischnewski explains. “We left the meeting with an understanding of what the requirements are so that we have a chance to extend the focus time afterwards.”
Prior to his lunch break, Wischnewski takes time to congest the information exchanged in these morning meetings, logging what needs to be logged, informing who needs to be informed. Post-lunch, more meetings.
The first is a get-together with internal colleagues, including fellow Customer Success Managers and a Senior VP. This meeting, set up to ensure everybody is across each other’s schedules and workloads, is followed by a meeting that focuses on customer feedback.
“A colleague from the product [department] gave me a product view on that so that I can go back to the customer,” Wischnewski says. “He showed me what they have done on another application in terms of features that are on the roadmap and wanted me to fill a list with potential candidates from customers for early testing.”
Wischnewski is spinning several plates at the same time. From one meeting to the next, his headspace will be occupied with addressing engineering complexities in the aerospace sector, and later helping users identify opportunities in the energy space. One moment he will be dealing with external clients, and the next internal colleagues.
It calls for only one thing as the day draws to a close. Another 30 minutes of focus time. Log the actions have been completed, share any relevant information with his team, and schedule the next set of meetings with customers.
Q. Who is perfect for a job like yours?
AW: You need persistence and endurance. Customer success is a long-term game. You don’t win anything with one or two meetings.
THE ROLE BEYOND THE TITLE
As a Senior Customer Success Manager at nTop, Wischnewski works in parallel with a number of account executives – who support clients in a less technical capacity – and reports to the sales organisation. The customer success department is also supplemented with solutions engineers – the resident experts in nTop’s software that Wischnewski will turn to when customers communicate the challenges they want solving.
Customer Success is a key cog in nTop's operations. It ensures the company is cognisant of customer pain points and helps in-house engineers to focus their efforts on providing solutions. On rare occasions, it even provides valuable insight to the company hierarchy. nTop’s recent acquisition of cloudfluid, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) firm, can be traced back to customers struggling to get their nTop-enabled designs into CFD tools.
“[My responsibility] is to drive long-term success and growth with the customer base, since we as a company will only grow when our customers are successful with our product,” Wischnewski says. “This is the focus.”
In essence, the likes of Wischnewski are at nTop to ensure customers adopt, integrate and deploy its software effectively. And continue to do so over a long period of time. Wischnewski has a book of business – inclusive of all of the clients he is responsible for – and his aim is to have more clients included in that book of business, with each account growing over time.
“This happens by providing strategic consultation and achieving success against customer goals related to nTop applications,” Wischnewski says. “Every customer buys software with a target in mind, so we understand those targets and lay out the strategy for how to achieve those together with the customer.”
Each and every meeting with a customer is an opportunity to give with one hand and take with the other. Wischnewski and his colleagues can impact their wisdom, educating the customers on best practices and supporting the identification of application opportunities, while also procuring feedback as to how to improve the nTop product offering. It won’t always be along the lines of ‘align with a CFD supplier so we can simulate our designs,’ but could be smaller innovations that unlock capability.
“[We are] a kind of sensor on the pulse of a customer,” Wischnewski says. “You react to the information and inputs to keep the customer happy.”
Q. What have been your biggest learnings in this role?
AW: Prioritisation and goal setting are key. There’s always more work than you can handle, so if you don’t prioritise, you will lose time. Know what you do, why you do it, and what you want to achieve when you approach your customers.
THE PATHWAY
While much of Wischnewski’s role relies on interpersonal and organisational skills, his mechanical engineering background serves as a strong foundation.
With his mechanical engineering degree, Wischnewski quickly landed a role as a Project Engineer for a CAE company. Here, he was running lightweight projects based on structural optimisation methods, such as topology optimisation, to alter the size and shape of products in order to lightweight products.
In time, he took on more responsibility as a Project Manager, taking the lead on the direction of assignments and supporting the staff that had filled his prior role of Project Engineer.
By the time he left, he had served just under a decade at the CAE firm and become an expert in multidisciplinary optimisation, though he mainly worked in body-in-white structures for automotive. His next move was to a 3D printer OEM, combining all of the skills he had developed to work as an AM consultant. Here, he would frequently run deign for additive manufacturing (DfAM) studies for customer, again leveraging his structural optimisation expertise to unlock application opportunities.
These experiences made him a suitable candidate to join the Customer Success department of a company like nTop, which he did around four years ago. He was attracted to the company because he saw an opportunity to have a greater impact within a younger business. Wischnewski has since take on the responsibility of managing his fellow CSMs in the EMEA region.
He has also found himself operating in a crucial department for the company. Not only is nTop working to pioneer the uptake of computational design, but much of its customer base is leveraging its tools to design parts for additive manufacturing – a technology renowned for its complexities and idiosyncrasies. Most customers, then, need a little handholding as they get to grips with AM, and they’ll likely need some guidance on how to use nTop too.
Customer success requires a lot from the people employed to oversee it. Wischnewski notes that, fundamentally, people working in Customer Success need to be curious. They have to be interested in the customer challenge and compelled to solve it. They also need strong organisational and time management skills, while it will always be helpful to understand the technical experts that are feeding their challenges back to you.
And then there’s the interpersonal skills.
“You need to be really passionate about working with people. This is what you do all the time,” Wischnewski says. “Whether it’s internal or external, you always face other stakeholders who also have their own targets, own goals. This has to motivate you to network and build new contacts, deepen existing contacts or relationships, and therefore being also motivated by helping customers achieve their goals, because we do a lot of work, a lot of consultancy, but then at the end, it's left to the customers, and they have to bring it across the target line.”
Part of Wischnewski’s role is to keep in mind that achieving the customer goals are always the north star. There will be many actions and activities, discussions and delegations, along the way. But it is all for a purpose. And putting that purpose into perspective will always help.
“When you meet a customer at the beginning, they have huge goals,” Wischnewski finishes. “You cannot do this with one step. So, you have to break them down into smaller goals, so that step by step, you get closer towards achieving the big goal.”
