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Aanal Patel :
It was half of the CS team that was cut. Yes. Change in this form isn’t the greatest. It sucks, to be frank, but we still had customers that we needed to to make sure had that that measure of success, that ability to to lean on us for what they needed. And so I can’t have CSMs proactively reaching out to them every month to to have a conversation. The biggest piece of feedback we were given was twofold. 1, customers loved

Jon Johnson:
Hi, Josh.

Josh Schachter:
Hi, John. Hi. How are you? Yeah. I’m good. I’m good. Hi, Aanal.

Aanal Patel :
Hi. How are you?

Josh Schachter:
I’m good. I’m good. Hi, everybody. We are filming this on we are recording this on Veterans Day, so happy Veterans Day to all of those who have the day off and who are remembering and celebrating. And the episode will be coming out in just a few days from now. I’m Josh, one of your cohosts here with John Johnson. Christie is off for the day looking at colleges, which is really fun. So not for her.

Josh Schachter:
Not for her. She’s graduated. Just to be clear, she’s graduated. It is for her daughter. So, and so we’re really excited to be here with Aanal Patel. Aanal is the senior customer success director at Crunchbase, and she’s gonna tell us a little bit about Crunch. I mean, we know Crunchbase. Of course, we all know Crunchbase, but a little bit of the ins and outs and maybe some fun facts we didn’t know and what some of their focus areas are right now.

Josh Schachter:
So, Aanal, thank you so much for being here.

Aanal Patel :
Thank you for having me. I’m really excited. You know, I wish I was back touring colleges because I do miss those days. But now on to better and bigger things, with Crunchbase. You know, Crunchbase, like you said, a lot of people know our brand. Crunchbase is an AI powered platform that’s helped about 75,000,000 dealmakers discover, prioritize the right opportunities using our private market data. So Crunchbase has historically been able to tell, you know, someone who’s looking for deals to close or doing due diligence, understanding what’s happening within a company. Crunchbase is able to surface that information and that historical data pretty easily to our consumers, and and that’s what Crunchbase has been known to be.

Josh Schachter:
Now we’re in So you you actually said that you were an AI powered company, AI powered platform. I would not have a year ago been like, oh, my the list of my AI companies, you know, Crunchbase is right on the top there. But so so you’re you guys are just going with it. Right? You know, like, tell us a little bit more about that.

Aanal Patel :
We are. So here’s here’s the beauty of it. I mentioned how, you know, we’ve been able to give you historical data, like, what has happened within a company, What Crunchbase is now you know, has now been doing and has launched has been the ability to tell you what could happen within a company, you know, which companies are growing, which companies are, you know, due for a funding round, which companies are likely to exit, things of that nature. So we’ve got growth insights, news insights, funding predictions, growth predictions that are powered by our proprietary data and surfaced via, you know, our API and our platform.

Josh Schachter:
That’s amazing. What what are you who are you trying to disrupt with that? Are you trying to disrupt the the VC junior analyst that, like, you can help to, you know, preempt some of these these insights directly by purchasing your API information or whatnot? Or, like, where’s what what’s that disrupt because it sounds disruptive.

Aanal Patel :
It’s it’s very disruptive. I mean, I think the customers I’ve spoken to, like, we’re targeting the VCs, the PE firms. We’re targeting market researchers. We’re targeting dealmakers, so, like, salespeople, because all three of those sectors rely on beating individuals or beating competitors to individual companies or to individual trends. They all want to identify, you know, the next big thing before someone else does. And so with those, like, investor insights, the product services insights, those funding predictions, like, we’re able to not just target VCs PEs. Our sales teams are using, you know, our predictions and insights to really fuel their own pipeline. We have consultants really doing quicker research.

Aanal Patel :
Data scientists are are huge advocates in terms of, you know, the ability to save them time. What would take them 2 weeks is, you know, hopefully, going to be able to take them one day with Crunchbase’s predictions and insights. So that’s kind of where we’re playing at the moment.

Josh Schachter:
John, you had got a question there. I cut you off, so I wanna give you some time.

Jon Johnson:
No. You’re good. I you know, I think anytime we’re talking about big data, there’s always kind of the big question around, you know, how is this how is this being utilized at least from the interior. Right? So you manage CSMs. You know, you’re working with customers to meet their outcomes. How are you kind of working through, like, the mindset of thinking through big data, thinking through very strategic offerings, not just from a platform standpoint, but from a human centric standpoint?

Aanal Patel :
Yeah. I think I’m a firm believer in practice what you preach. So one of the big things that we’re doing internally is we’re working with our operations team to create our own lead score fueled by predictions and insights by prediction by Crunchbase’s predictions and insights. So what that means is we’re taking a look at, you know, historically, where where have where’s our sweet spot been with companies that we have been able to close quickly or, have, like, the largest deal or even have the best retention towards. And we’re putting that into a a scoring model and coupling it with the predictions and insights Crunchbase provides. And what that’s allowing us to do is target those high growth companies. It’s helping us target those companies that maybe we didn’t identify before via our own outbounding or via our own inbounding. For CS, it’s helping us identify churn risk early on, like, you know, which company should I get ahead of because they’ve seen, you know, layoffs or because I know that there is now funding available.

Aanal Patel :
Like, who should I be targeting and really talking to to capitalize the benefits of Crunchbase? So that’s that’s a little bit of, like, how we’re using it. And then I think with our customers, it was a matter of listening to them. Like, I’m a firm believer in voice of customer and product alignment. Like, one of the things that came to be when Meg, our CPO, joined Crunchbase about a year and a half ago, was he and I were quick to align with each other and really go on this roadshow just talking to our customers, understanding what our customers need in this whole, like, gen AI world where there were a lot of disruptors. There there was a lot of uncertainty of, like, would there be a recession? Would, you know, would we lose our SaaS budget? Things like that. We wanted to understand, like, what really needed to happen and what needed to click. What did we need to provide our customers to make sure we were sticky? And the thing we heard most often was, tell me what I should do with the data. Tell me what I should be who I should be targeting as opposed to having me do the manual work, me as in the customer.

Aanal Patel :
And that’s that’s where crunch based predictions and insights were really born from was, like, the ability to tell you who to target, who you should be reaching out to, who you should be working with, what trends you should be following, things of that nature.

Josh Schachter:
Tell us about your CS organization. So we can start with maybe your reporting structure, who who you ladder up to, who reports into you, what the composition of the overall post sales program is at Crunchbase.

Aanal Patel :
Yeah. So we’ve got our CRO at top, got our VP of revenue, myself, got a manager, who manages our CSA, and then I’m hiring for another manager to manage some of my CSMs. Under me, I also

Josh Schachter:
or or SMB CSMs?

Aanal Patel :
SMB. SMB and some senior. And then

Josh Schachter:
Just throwing that out there because we’ve got lots of listeners, and I’m sure you’ve got lots of people that are already, like, you know, as soon as this gets out there job. Yeah. Yeah. Arnold, your your your your your LinkedIn message inbox is gonna be be stuffed now.

Aanal Patel :
I love it. I I love when it is. So, yes, we do we are hiring a manager. We are also hiring a renewal specialist. I also have 2 enterprise CSMs who manage our largest logos, and then I also have a customer ops manager. So within my team, you know, we’ve got everyone from the very small business all the way up to enterprise logos that they’re managing, and they’re managing everything post sale, inclusive of renewals. So my CSAs are are more of that scaled model where there’s that one to many touch point, as well as a portion of it being proactive. And then my SMB CSMs are managing SMB mid market.

Aanal Patel :
My seniors are managing that mid market enterprise, and then my enterprise who’s managing everything that’s strategic.

Josh Schachter:
So and and remind me, how long have you been with Crunchbase?

Aanal Patel :
I’ve been at Crunchbase for two and a half years, about 2 to 3.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. 2 Congratulations.

Aanal Patel :
Thank you.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. And that’s dog years, right, in the tech world? So Yeah. So July 2023, so let’s call it a year and a half ago, so halfway in your tenure, you you had something pretty profound happen. Do you wanna discuss because I wanna talk about the before and after and how you guys were able to kinda pick back up. So tell us a little bit about July 2023.

Aanal Patel :
Yeah. It was it was a rough month. That’s for sure. We unfortunately had a rift, and, you know, it wasn’t the easiest of of conversations or news, and and it was a huge change, like, for the entire customer.

Josh Schachter:
Clear, it was half the team where that was cut.

Aanal Patel :
It was half of the CS team that was cut. That’s huge. We did not lose half of the customer base. We lost half of the individuals managing the base. So it was a matter of, you know, yes, change in this form isn’t the greatest. It sucks, to be frank, but we still had customers that we needed to to make sure had that that measure of success, that ability to to lean on us for what they needed. And so it was it was a matter of mobilizing my existing team that remained and and really creating a methodology that worked for us and for our customers to to meet them where they were at without straining our resources. And so came about, you know, we we birthed a a new scaled model.

Aanal Patel :
We created many, many, you know, knowledge knowledge training tutorials. We created videos, a little bit of, like, the self serve guidance, but then also collaborated closely with marketing, and our internal teams to to make sure our customers were helped every touch point or every step of their journey without having a human approach to every single account on any given day.

Jon Johnson:
Well and how is that how is that, like, shifted? I mean, you had to. Right? You don’t have as many people. You have just as many customers. Right? So this is very much one of those

Josh Schachter:
Did you have to do more with less? Yeah. We all bought that.

Jon Johnson:
Worst. I hate that so much. Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
What are some of like, you’re

Jon Johnson:
a year and a half, like, into this new kind of model. What are some of those lessons that you learned not only from your customers, right, hearing what they’re saying and the change in the expectation, but also from your team? So kind of 2 prompt approach. What are some of those lessons that you’ve learned? And I don’t know why these balloons are for those watching, balloons just went on to my video. I don’t know what happened.

Aanal Patel :
Yeah. Some of the some of the lessons that we’ve learned, 1, data data is a a great driver, but it also can hinder what you’re looking to accomplish. Too much data can hinder. And so we quickly learned that there is a thing called analysis paralysis that everyone’s heard of and that we can’t over overthink the structure of, you know, the scaled model. Like, we have to analyze, you know, where our sweet spot is, where our product is heading, understanding, like, who we’re building for, and ensure that that is the center of our strategy. That’s where we’re that’s, like, our north star of who do we wanna focus on, and then how do we help those customers that maybe don’t fit into that model still be just as successful. And the biggest lesson that that we learned out of that was tools make a huge, huge impact. A feedback loop is an even bigger impact.

Aanal Patel :
And what I mean by that is it’s a different approach. It’s a change for a customer, especially when they don’t know, what they should expect post a riff or post a change. And and not many of the customers knew that we went through this, and so it was a matter of making it seamless. And when we did that, the biggest piece of feedback we were given was twofold. 1, customers loved our our automated onboarding and our no touch onboarding. And what I mean by that is that tells me that we did a really great job outlining how to implement the tool and how to become successful. And the way we did that was, like, via milestones. So we created milestones every customer should achieve within, you know, an x amount of time or what’s

Josh Schachter:
the What what are they?

Aanal Patel :
Yeah. So first, it’s as simple as assigning a seat. Like, get your seats assigned. When you do that, I’m gonna give you information on why it matters and then give you the next three steps I want you to take. So it’s a guided approach to onboarding. Saving a search is huge or setting up your territory of your salesperson is such a big win because you’re going to get all of that juicy information on what’s happening within the companies in your territory or that fit within your territory, for you to then go prospect and target immediately. And it’s gonna give you a snippet of, you know, what you should say, how you should say it. And so that right there was an immediate win for anyone on that sales prospecting profile, that fits that profile, and they’re loving it.

Aanal Patel :
And so it’s it’s nice to have built, like, 6 or 7 milestones within the 1st 3 months of their onboarding period because you’re now controlling the narrative without having to control it. You’re showing them how they can be successful and get ton to value almost immediately because it’s what

Josh Schachter:
it’s What tools were you using to connect all these

Jon Johnson:
dots? That was my question. Was this manual? Is this automated? Are you you know, how are you building these journeys?

Aanal Patel :
So like I said, we had to get scrappy. We had Outreach. We had my now manager of CS, Chantal, and our ops manager, Mackenzie, really work together and create these onboarding sequences with the help of our solutions engineer and our product team. So we’re building out different milestones. We’re building out these, like, how to videos, guided paths, things like that, alongside our knowledge center, to make sure that these customers are successful. What we’ve moved to now, now a year and a half in or, yeah, a year and a half in, we’re having our marketing team help us with these, like, touches. So providing air cover and a more one to many, approach because outreach is super limited. We can reach out to our point of contacts, but we can’t reach out to all of our end users.

Aanal Patel :
And so that was, like, a huge gap that we recognized. We recognized early on, but we didn’t have the time, to dedicate to that just because we needed something quick.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. And you did it within 3 to 4 months?

Aanal Patel :
We did it within 3 to 4 months. Like, we were off the ground running by November. November 1st, if I’m not mistaken.

Jon Johnson:
Was that more was that, like, predicated on the I I haven’t actually used the software, like, internally other than in the past when I’m doing research on on companies that I’m, like, you know, informing myself. So I’ve had that experience with Crunchbase. But, when it comes to, like, the lift for trans transformation within the organizations, I would expect that there’s a lot of education that needs to go in, to start. Right? Getting people onboard and getting people, up to speed. How has that changed with a complete reduction in staff? I mean, half of your staff is gone. Right? So your enablement has to transition to something different. You know, how have your customers responded? Maybe not necessarily, like, on renewal rates, but just, like, on satisfaction and and kind of the experience of, like, do they still love Crunchbase in the same way? This is one of those things that we we hear so often when CSM teams get decimated, and they’re like, well, I don’t know who to talk to anymore, and I’m pissed. Right? So so talk to me a little bit about, you know, how your customers have kind of responded to what you’ve offered them now as standard.

Aanal Patel :
Yeah. So it was very strategic in the sense that I pushed a lot of the low touch, low need customers into that scaled model first because that’s where I really wanted to test it. And the reason being is these were individuals that I had known come from previous Crunchbase experience, and we can tell in terms of their usage or adoption, etcetera. And so there wasn’t much of a shift for them. They still had access to an individual CSM if they needed help. So they had a main POC that they could reach out to. The ones that were coming in net new, we were putting via these onboarding paths, these skill onboarding paths. And for them, it was it was much easier for them to consume the knowledge as opposed to having to be forced on this, like, one to one training where, honestly, they didn’t have the time at that time.

Aanal Patel :
And so it it was great. Like, that’s great feedback. I think the the thing that I learned pretty quickly was we can’t please everyone. I understand that, but there’s a way in which we can. And it’s via a support model and a CS model that comes together and and works together. So, you know, our customers in that scaled approach not only have access to our support team, but also a CSM or a pseudo CSM. And it’s kind of done on a round robin scale where they write in and my team will still jump on a call. It’s not like you’ve lost complete touch with a human.

Aanal Patel :
We’ll still do that that sort of engagement. We’ll even have our product team jump in and help us out with, like, hearing out what our customers want, what they need in that segment. It’s not that they’re completely shunned from those communications. It’s a matter of I can’t have CSMs proactively reaching out to them every month to to have a conversation. It’s you know, we’re heavily reliant on surveys, CSATs, things like that to really help us understand where they’re at. And if I foresee any sort of risk or churn, we do jump on that well ahead, and we we mark those well before that 90 to 1 20 day period before renewal hits.

Josh Schachter:
Hey, everybody. It’s Josh. I’m taking a quick break from the podcast to tell you a bit about UpdateAI. I started UpdateAI to solve 2 major challenges for CS teams. The first is that we save CSMs 4 to 5 hours per week with our productivity through AI. Secondly, we give leaders a window into all the conversations across each account and the entire portfolio. So we help knowledge transfer, we help increase the coverage model of your CS teams, and we help you detect emerging patterns in what your customers are telling your CSMs across all the risks, product feedback, advocacy moments, and expansion opportunities. So come check us out at www.updateai.

Josh Schachter:
It’s completely free to sign up and trial. One of the things that you had mentioned to me before is that you help your customers celebrate the milestones as they go through the journey. So can you share a little bit more about how you guys do that?

Aanal Patel :
Yeah. So we’re actually revamping that all together. So one of the things that we’re really excited about is, you know, we’re leaning in on our product team, and our engineering team to provide us those, like, Pendo signals of what our customers are doing on a regular basis. What do their journeys kind of lead to? Like, are they on our financial hub for, you know, a majority of their time, or are they looking at profile descriptions? And with that kind of knowledge and insight, what we’re doing is building out milestones that are meaningful. Like, what does it mean to be successful in Crunchbase? A few things. 1, like, you should have your seats assigned. You should be using the tool to, you know, do a little bit of your own research. You should be using our growth outlook cards that are powered by AI to identify, you know, whether a company is growing or not.

Aanal Patel :
You should be saving said company to a list. And once you make those milestones or those you hit those milestones, like, we’re celebrating with, like, you did great. Like, this is why it matters that you did this, and here’s the return you should see. And then here’s the 3rd here’s, like, that next step that you should be taking in order to go achieve that next milestone.

Josh Schachter:
So it’s content. You deliver content to them to show them what’s next. It’s not just a badge.

Aanal Patel :
Nope. It’s not just the badge. I want them. I I want to drive adoption into the base, and I think this is a great way to do it. And it also helps us kind of curate a journey for a specific persona that’s joining Crunchbase. Or on the API side, it’s a little bit it’s a little bit difficult to follow along, but there’s milestones there too. Like, you know, making your first API call, calling an endpoint that I know is meaningful to somebody in the financial sector versus somebody in software.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. No. I love it. So, I wanna talk a little bit about we’re heading into 2025.

Jon Johnson:
God. I can’t believe it.

Josh Schachter:
I know. As I said, I’m like, wait. It’s so weird. I’m so old, but not as old as John. Oh, gosh.

Jon Johnson:
So I still have my hair, though. So

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s been long gone. Long gone.

Aanal Patel :
2025, I’m hoping to be a great year. It’s gonna be my wedding.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, look at look at look at Well, there we go. Anojis just, just just just pulling us out of this this dishing each other. Yeah. What what are your wins? Like, what are what’s your biggest focuses for 2020 5 as you think about I assume you’re you’re planning now for it.

Aanal Patel :
I am planning now for it. I think the biggest what I’m hoping is our biggest win is, you know, we’re we’re we’ve launched this new product. I am hoping one of the things that my team can help with at with this launch has is going to be around, the ability to further drive our stickiness when it comes to our data value. So Crunchbase’s value has been rooted in the data we provide our customers. I am so incredibly excited to see how this historical data that we’ve provided customers for years on end is now shifting into that future thinking data. Like, what could happen? Tell me if a company is growing. I wanna see how sticky that is. And I I know we’ve gotten some great traction, and I know my team is, you know, equipped, ready to support it.

Aanal Patel :
And so we’re really thinking through, like, best practices, strategy sessions to host with our customers as we deliver this new product to them. And, one of the the key metrics that I’m looking to track is retention, but also that that satisfaction score. So, you know, we haven’t historically rolled out a customer satisfaction score for our companies that have had our API, like our customers that have solely API. And that’s something that I’m really eager to to look into.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. I’m really excited for you because, like, a part of I go out there and I talk about AI and I talk about the RAG pipeline. You know RAG, retrieval augmented generation. Right? And so this this idea of giving more context to these agent workflows. And and so you guys are like, this is this is perfectly fitting into your wheelhouse right now. It has just given, you know, just the Red Bull wings to your dataset of of, like, being able for Outreach and whatnot to be able to go in there and pull in Crunchbase data to know, like you said, if a company’s growing or or whatnot. So I’m excited for you. I think that’s and and I love to see that you guys are, like, leaning all in on this.

Josh Schachter:
How are you guys last question. How are you guys thinking about AI for yourselves as far as, enablement? You mentioned, like, importance on aligning with your chief product officer and maybe some other things. What what are you guys thinking about internally?

Aanal Patel :
Yeah. Internally, I think 2 things. 1, if I’m looking at it from, like, a customer perspective, one of the biggest things that we had heard was our our in our customer’s inability to understand our query builder was huge, and we took that as a fundamental issue or a fundamental problem. Because if a customer doesn’t know how to query a search within crunchbase.com, we’re going to fundamentally lose that customer. And so the thing that we did was we brainstormed internally with our engineering product, our customer teams to to really identify the problem, the root cause, and then how do we solve it. And that’s where our AI search comes in. So, like, you know, it’s it’s helping our users make smarter, efficient business decisions and easily ask in natural language. You know? Hey, Crunchbase.

Aanal Patel :
Like, can you find me 500 startups in the San Francisco area that focus on health tech? And that’s all they have to do. They just have to type it in as opposed to having filters to go through it. So that’s been a huge win. It’s it’s helping us become 10 times more confident in the decisions we’re making on the product because we’re hearing it, we’re making it happen, and it’s working. Internally, the way we’re looking at, you know, AI, of course, you heard about predictions and insights. My team is starting to to put together those use those insights and build out a a churn forecast and a retention forecast. And those are the types of companies that we want to make sure we have our arms around and we have additional support from, like, our product team, our cross functional teams to to really focus in on. And I I just think, like, AI accessibility is essential for, like, organizations.

Aanal Patel :
You know, you’ve got to be able to to track AI trends, like, across industries emphasizing, you know, how you’re democratizing those AI tools, like, allowing businesses of all sizes to leverage those technologies. And I think the overarching goal when I think of AI is the ability to make AI driven insights accessible for nonexperts. Like, that’s the key thing to me. And you should you should look at it as, like, a code free I I don’t know. Like, to me, like, when I think of AI, like, building code free AI platforms is going to, like, further push the narrative. And the biggest thing that I think we’re doing apart from predictions and insights is, like, our partnership with Perplexity, which I’m really excited about.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. She plugged it right at the end. Plug it. You should’ve done it in the beginning. You’d have more viewers. But plug it, and then we’re gonna leave on that. Tell us all about Crunchbase’s partnership with Perplexity.

Aanal Patel :
Yeah. So it’s you know, Perplexity is this free AI search engine. It’s designed to really help you discover information. So ask it any question, and it’ll search the Internet to give you accessible, verifiable answers. Well, when you plug in Crunchbase data and use that as, like, the data source, you’re going to be able to get our uniquely sourced proprietary data, within Perplexity’s search engines. So you will be able to, again, like, come together and understand the information of a company when it comes to its financial data, its profiles, its company data, etcetera, to help, like, those investors, those researchers, salespeople make those decisions faster without having to, like, read through a bunch of different articles.

Josh Schachter:
I love that partnership too. I mean, obviously, because the functionality behind it, but also because I think it’s the it’s an early adoption of the future of the monetization of these of these different systems like Chat, GPT and Perplexity, where you have these partnerships, and it’s not just Perplexity going out there, scraping the Internet, and giving it all away for free. But, you know, you guys are are the ones that are the data source here. So I think this is a big thing that we’re gonna start to see, and that’s so exciting. Again, another reason it’s gonna be an exciting year for you guys is, yeah, that unveils itself.

Aanal Patel :
It’s a huge, huge, like, win, especially because, like, we’ve heard time and again, like, people want Gen AI to help them do their jobs. And this is this is a means in which it will help them. Like, data scientists, if I were a data scientist, then that would be where I’d live because it will do that analysis portion for me, and it will help me surface, like, the trends I need.

Josh Schachter:
Aanal, thank you so much for being here. You’ve got a lot of exciting things personally and professionally going on, so congratulations. I think 2025 is going to be a grand year for you. So, congratulations, and thanks again for being on the show.

Aanal Patel :
Really appreciate it. Thank you. And I look forward to 2025, and hopefully, you both still have hair.

Jon Johnson:
Yes. That’s the goal.