Preferred Return Podcast
Beyond the Product: Delivering Client Value with Customer Success
ABOUT THE EPISODE
Welcome back to Altvia’s Preferred Return Podcast! In this episode, our host and Chief Strategy Officer, Jeff Williams, sits down with Altvia’s VP of Client Solutions, Ray Grant, to discuss their passion for helping clients optimize their strategies and data to drive firm longevity and success.
Working together since 2018, Jeff and Ray both take pride in building meaningful client relationships and discuss how that sentiment is emulated by the larger customer success team and even in the Altvia culture more broadly. Hear how Ray has built not only a technically sound and industry savvy team, but also a team that genuinely and intuitively cares about their clients’ success.
Tune-in to hear how Altvia values being true partners, offering a level of advice, technical expertise, and support that cannot be replicated by any other private capital markets vendor.
ABOUT THE EPISODE
Welcome back to Altvia’s Preferred Return Podcast! In this episode, our host and Chief Strategy Officer, Jeff Williams, sits down with Altvia’s VP of Client Solutions, Ray Grant, to discuss their passion for helping clients optimize their strategies and data to drive firm longevity and success.
Working together since 2018, Jeff and Ray both take pride in building meaningful client relationships and discuss how that sentiment is emulated by the larger customer success team and even in the Altvia culture more broadly. Hear how Ray has built not only a technically sound and industry savvy team, but also a team that genuinely and intuitively cares about their clients’ success.
Tune-in to hear how Altvia values being true partners, offering a level of advice, technical expertise, and support that cannot be replicated by any other private capital markets vendor.
MENTIONED CONTENT
COMPANIES
TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Jeff Williams: All right, Ray Grant here we are. Welcome to Preferred Return. Thanks for joining me, man.
[00:00:10] Ray Grant: Thanks for having me. It’s an honor.
[00:00:14] Jeff Williams: I don’t know if I believe that when people say it, but I appreciate that. There’s an element of that that, feels like needs to come out.
[00:00:22] Anyhow, we first started working together in 2018, so we’ve been around for a minute. Tell me a little bit about your background.
[00:00:31] Ray Grant: Yeah, my background is not very interesting. I’ll, give you the long and short of it. I started my career at FactSet Research Systems, out of their San Francisco office.
[00:00:45] So as you’re probably familiar, public data provider, largely used by institutional asset managers for equity research and portfolio management. And started out in their sort of consulting program, supporting managers as their sort of go-to guy, account manager, support rep.
[00:01:01] And it sort of grew into an implementation role working on their data feed products and their content technology solutions team. And so working with a lot of our reseller partners who were integrating FactSet data into their applications.
[00:01:25] Things like Robinhood, other apps that needed access to public market data, pricing data, things like that. So that was a fun experience, getting to sort of work with small businesses, help them strategize how to use our data in their products and with their clients and pricing strategies, partnership strategies, things like that.
[00:01:45] And so that’s, where I found I was most interested is on that sales side, working with those types of partners. And so joined that strategic partnership team at FactSet specifically working on those reseller royalty type of partnerships. And then from there, wanted to make a move in my career to work for one of those smaller companies.
[00:02:13] You know, I loved FactSet and it was a great sort of five years for me there. But as I worked with these little founders and, startup firms, realized that, you know, that’s more the environment I wanted to work in and I wanted to build something and, be a part of some growth.
[00:02:29] So, at that point, moved back to my hometown of Denver, Colorado and was looking for other work in sort of the FinTech space and was fortunate to stumble upon Altvia here in Broomfield. And, at that time, got to meet with Kevin Kelly, founder, and Ben Hendershot, the CFO and it just looked like a great group of people, great leaders, great products, interesting industry. I think FactSet served private markets a little bit.
[00:03:03] Private equity, venture capital. And I thought I knew a little bit about private equity. Turns out I didn’t know anything. You know, and still trying to figure things out a little bit. But, yeah, started out as a customer success manager here. At the time Altvia was sort of just launching its customer success strategy, trying to figure out in this new sort of nomenclature of customer success, you know, what does that mean for our products and for our clients?
[00:03:31] And so, got to help shape that a little bit with one of the founders, Jill Montera, who was building that team at the time. So that was five years ago in July of 2018. And since then, I’ve grown into a manager on that team and more recently joined our leadership team, sort of leading our customer success strategy, and also helping out on the sales side, helping to grow our client base and work with our sales engineering team on solutioning and presenting our products.