In this episode of Mastering CS: Candid Leader Insights, Irina Cismas sits down with Konstantin Kleemann, Senior Customer Success Manager at SAP Taulia, a working capital platform that helps companies pay suppliers faster while freeing up cash. Konstantin came from years at UniCredit structuring working capital deals for corporate treasury teams, and that background gives him a perspective on the buyer side that most CSMs simply don’t have.
He shares what customer success looks like in a two-sided platform that serves both buyers and suppliers, how he navigates relationships across procurement, treasury, finance, and IT simultaneously, how the team uses AI agents and Salesforce to manage a global portfolio, and why building trust early is the one habit that determines everything that follows.
What You’ll Learn
- What SAP Taulia does and what the CSM role looks like across a two-sided working capital platform
- How CS at SAP Taulia spans implementation, post-live program management, and supplier engagement
- What good onboarding looks like for both the buyer and the supplier side
- How the team tracks health and success once a program is live
- Why building trust early is the one habit that shapes everything in the customer lifecycle
Key Insights & Takeaways
CS in a two-sided platform means managing two sets of relationships simultaneously. The buyer needs strategy, alignment, and integration. The supplier needs trust, transparency, and a reason to adopt. Both need to be moving at the same time.
Technical integration and business objectives don’t always align, and that’s where CS earns its place. Bridging the gap between what IT needs and what treasury and procurement are trying to achieve is one of the hardest and most valuable parts of the role.
Supplier adoption is a health signal, not just an onboarding milestone. Whether a supplier is taking early payments on invoices tells you a lot more about program health than a standard login metric.
Trust is not optional, it is the foundation. If the client is not fully sold on the strategy you built together and doesn’t trust you understand their business, you will never reach the goals they signed up for.
Podcast Transcript
Intro
Irina (0:06 – 0:26)
Welcome to Mastering CS Candid Leader Insights, the podcast where we dive into the world of customer success within the three leaders. I’m your host, Irina Cismas, and today I’m joined by Konstantin Kleemann, Senior Customer Success Manager at SAP Taulia, a working capital platform that helps companies pay suppliers faster when freeing up cash.
Konstantin (0:27 – 0:30)
Thank you for having me!
Irina (0:31 – 0:53)
Thank you for joining. Before we dive in, you came in from the banking world after years at Unicredit. Now you are a senior CSM.
Paint us a picture of your day-to-day. Who are your customers and what does the work actually look like?
Konstantin (0:53 – 4:56)
As a customer success manager here at SAP, it’s a very crucial role for both internal and external processes. We are right there from the start. Once a client signs with us, we are essentially one of the first teams the program is handed over to.
It can be different solutions. As you mentioned, most of our solutions are focused on working capital optimization. We have supply chain finance, dynamic discounting, which is where the customer uses their own cash to support their suppliers, and we also have receivable finance, also called factoring. So we are right there from the start, getting to know the customer from the implementation phase, through post-implementation, and the rollout of the program. I also have some customers that I had in my banking days and took over when I moved to SAP Taulia, but for the whole lifecycle, I’m essentially in charge and working with my customer.
The relationship gets very strong on a day-to-day basis. We are the bridge between our internal teams and the customer. From my end, I work internally with our financial operations team, the technical support team, and at the start of the implementation, the technical consultants and the project manager. We work very closely with those teams to make sure that the strategy the client has in mind and the KPIs they envisioned when signing with us are met. We roll out the strategy in the beginning and define processes. We make sure that the technical integration aligns with the business objectives, which is one of the most crucial and hardest parts sometimes, because technical integration and business objectives don’t always align. This is where we really dive in with our customers early on.
Once a program is live, our day-to-day is very much about making sure the program runs smoothly, the client is engaged, and we are there for escalations. That’s also where we look at what is driving the value of the program and how we can access expansion opportunities for the client. How do we reach a certain working capital goal? Is it through term extensions with suppliers?
Supply chain finance and dynamic discounting are crucial here because they strengthen the relationship between supplier and buyer, help the treasury team unlock working capital, and give procurement on the buyer side a vital tool for better negotiations with their suppliers. It’s a strategic environment for the customer.
The difference between a CSM at Taulia and other customer success managers is that on a daily basis, I work on the customer side with procurement, treasury, the finance team, and the IT team. My IT knowledge is far from perfect, but I do need a good understanding of who to reach out to internally and which people to involve in the process flows to get the job done and deliver value to the customer.
How a Typical Day Breaks Down
Irina (4:58 – 5:15)
And help me understand in that setup, most of your time is in discussions, in understanding, in negotiations, in calibrations, in report building. How does a day in your life look like?
Konstantin (5:16 – 6:52)
Once the program is live, we need to track and monitor where it’s going. When it comes to working capital, which suppliers can we engage for the program? We work with the client and the procurement team on what their supplier relationships look like, how strongly they’re engaged with their suppliers, and how we can engage with those suppliers in the best way possible. It varies from customer to customer, and it sometimes takes a lot of time to have a smooth process where procurement is comfortable with us talking to suppliers and joining supplier negotiations.
That’s one part. On the treasury side, it’s about how do we monitor and track success? They signed up for our solution. They want to see progress and results. Every client has a different way of measuring that. A lot of times it’s about how we track working capital improvement in terms of payment term extensions, while at the same time making sure suppliers are happy and still have a good relationship with the client.
So we track a lot of the supplier outreaches: how those conversations go, supplier onboarding on our platform, and the supplier outreach overall.
What Good Onboarding Looks Like on Both Sides
Irina (6:52 – 7:00)
Because you touched upon this subject. What does good onboarding look like in your case? What are you aiming for in the coming months?
Konstantin (7:01 – 8:35)
There are two sides to that: the buyer side and the supplier side.
On the buyer side, once they sign the contract with us, the goal is to get to implementation as quickly as possible. We aim to start the implementation process within the first 30 days of signature. That means we need the IT team from the buyer, treasury and procurement to be aligned and present, and the resources in place for a smooth implementation. We aim to deliver that within six to 16 weeks depending on the client, with six weeks being the best case. But the client needs to be ready.
On the supplier side, it’s about having a smooth process from initial engagement to quick onboarding. We are a third party coming into a relationship between the buyer and the supplier, and nowadays a lot of suppliers are cautious about that. Trust needs to be built. Communication needs to be set up in a way that feels trusted, and we need to be aligned with the procurement team. Timing is also a big part of it: when does the customer communicate to the supplier that something is coming from SAP Taulia, and when do we reach out to the supplier? The communication to the supplier needs to be consistent on both ends.
How the Team Tracks Health and Success Post-Onboarding
Irina (8:35 – 8:42)
And once they are past the onboarding, how do you ensure things are going well? What does help look like in your case?
Konstantin (8:43 – 10:59)
On the supplier side, it’s not click-by-click tracking. It’s really about how the supplier uses their opportunity to take early payments. The supplier doesn’t have to pay to be onboarded to the SAP Taulia platform, there’s no usage fee. The big opportunity is that the supplier can actually see their invoices and where they are in the process on the buyer side: whether an invoice has reached the buyer, whether it’s being processed, or whether it’s been approved. And then it’s really about taking that early payment. A supplier might have an invoice with a 90-day payment term, but they can take that invoice and get paid out after five to ten days because the buyer has already approved it.
So for us, tracking is: does the supplier take an early payment on an invoice, or on all invoices? That’s one part.
The other part is whether a supplier enrolls on the Taulia platform. Some suppliers are more strategic. They onboard to the platform because they want to see their invoices and have a transparent view of where their invoice is with the buyer. They don’t necessarily take early payments on all invoices, but they do so more strategically at the end of quarters or the end of the year for balance sheet and accounting purposes. So those are the two ways we can track health on the supplier side.
On the buyer side, it’s about how the program develops over six months, one year, two years, or five years. How many suppliers have we been able to onboard to the platform? How many suppliers agreed to new terms or new contracts with the buyer? That requires very close engagement with the buyer as well, because we need to understand where the buyer stands on the procurement side and where the suppliers stand.
The Operational Infrastructure Behind CS at Taulia
Irina (11:01 – 11:10)
I’m curious, what is the operational infrastructure behind all of this? What platforms are central to how CS actually runs day to day at Taulia?
Konstantin (11:11 – 12:03)
There are a number of tools we use. Two that are quite well known are Jira and Confluence. Jira is essentially our day-to-day tool when it comes to technical support. We work a lot with our technical support team, and our clients also use ticketing systems where we get involved through Jira tickets. Confluence is our main knowledge base when it comes to how a customer is set up on the technical side. This is important because we need to know the specifics for our customers, and so does our technical support team.
Those are the two major tools. Of course, there are other tools we use for automating processes, and AI comes to mind as well.
Irina (12:03 – 12:14)
How do you combine the tool set with the AI layer and what’s the role of the AI?
Konstantin (12:15 – 13:01)
Salesforce is also a major tool we use, especially for supplier outreach. We track supplier outreach and success through Salesforce. We have a dedicated team that reaches out to suppliers, so I don’t do that myself.
But for specific suppliers, we as customer success managers do get involved, because we are the most trusted part of the relationship. We talk to our customers every day, they know us best, and we are involved in expansions and the different stages of the lifecycle. So Salesforce is one of the tools we use to track supplier success as well.
Irina (13:02 – 13:15)
Does health scoring also sit in Salesforce? And is Salesforce the central platform where you have a full client and customer overview?
Konstantin (13:15 – 13:29)
We have our account plans in Salesforce.
We have the history of kind of supplier outreach, which suppliers do we talk to? What are the, kind of to track that and then to also share that with the customer at the end.
Irina (13:30 – 13:40)
And how does Salesforce integrate with the AI layer? What are the automations that you guys are, are building? How do you leverage AI on top of the tech stack that you have?
Konstantin (13:41 – 15:08)
We leverage AI for automating processes. When it comes to managing account plans and updating those, I personally use a lot of agents to make sure my daily tasks are in order. I get notifications on what is due today, and once something is done, it’s updated.
We also use AI to make sure we are on track with tickets and aligned with the customer on time. One of the crucial parts is being responsive to the customer, but with the right data. There’s a lot of data out there nowadays, and it needs to be the right data that we present to the client. AI helps us sift through the large data pool we have. We gather a lot of data on our platform, and the buyer also has a platform they can look into. We analyze spend data from the client because we have a direct integration into their SAP system. So we can analyze the data and then work with the customer on expansion plans and so on. AI gives us a basis to work from, and then it’s very individualized per customer depending on their strategy.
Irina (15:09 – 15:18)
So for all the mandate or manual tasks, you guys have built the CS agents that basically help you on the day to day.
Konstantin (15:19 – 15:20)
Correct. Yep.
How AI Agents Are Built and Shared Across the Global Team
Irina (15:20 – 15:30)
Did you build those CS agents on your own or was it something that you requested it and the technical team basically implemented it?
Konstantin (15:31 – 16:02)
Some agents were created by our technical team based on their technical knowledge, but I have one or two agents that I built myself that are more specific to my own work. And within our global CSM team, certain CSMs build agents and share them with the group. It’s collaboration within the team as well.
How to Keep Data and Reporting Consistent Across a Global CS Team
Irina (16:02 – 16:47)
That was actually going to be my next question. How do you make sure that the information you share is consistent? Because as we all know, even with the same source of data, the way you look at it can vary. The data tells you the story you want to tell, and if you ask different questions, you get a different story. So how do you make sure that across the global CS team, everyone has the same common understanding of what healthy means and what reports they are looking at? How do you keep that consistency when you are a global team?
Konstantin (16:47 – 18:25)
For us it’s communication. That’s the main word. We have global team calls and regional team calls where we share. And then the most important thing, going back to Confluence, is that we have a CSM section with all the knowledge a CSM needs: the terminologies, how we create business cases, how we track the development of a business case with the customer. There’s a common process at the foundation that is essentially the same for everyone. Once it gets to more specific customer cases, there might be some differences, but the terminology we use is the same. That’s the most important thing, because when you use the same terminology, the AI is quicker at picking up the general processes and you get consistent answers. Especially nowadays, if you ask the same question two or three times in different ways, you get a different answer each time.
And I think another big part is how you store your data and knowledge. That’s been a significant process for us, especially now that we are part of SAP, where there are more processes in place. You have to make sure the data and knowledge are stored in the right places. We have three to four systems or storage places where we get information from, and the AI has access to all of that internally.
What Being on the Banking Side Taught Konstantin About How Buyers Decide
Irina (18:26 – 18:46)
I want to take you back to your uni credit days for a second. You spent years structuring working capital deals for corporate treasury teams, which are the same buyers. You now work with Taulia.
What did being on that side of the table teach you about how they make decisions?
Konstantin (18:48 – 20:31)
Coming from a banking perspective, you get to know a company differently. Very large organizations, a lot of resources available. I was lucky in my banking days because I started in the working capital team when it was being built and developed, so I was able to grow with the team.
When I decided to join SAP Taulia, there were around 15 people when I joined, maybe three when the company started. From a banking perspective, you have a much larger portfolio of solutions to offer the client. I didn’t just work in the working capital team, I also worked in M&A and structuring teams, so I got to see the whole spectrum. The conversations are much larger.
When you come to Taulia, it’s a niche product. You have to make sure that what you’re bringing to the table is solid. We talk to the same people, treasury and finance, but we are now much more on the operational level as well. We talk to procurement, we talk to IT, because we are a SaaS company. So we talk at very different levels. I do sometimes talk to the head of treasury or the CFO, which gives you this variance that you didn’t have in banking, where you mostly talked to the treasury and finance team. The perspective gets larger when you go to a smaller company in terms of the people you talk to.
The Habit That Still Shows Up in How Konstantin Runs Accounts Today
Irina (20:32 – 20:50)
You started as a business consultant running implementations, then moved into CSM, senior CSM, basically seeing every layer of the same customer journey. Is there a habit, a way of thinking or something you learned the hard way early on that still shows up in how you run accounts today?
Konstantin (20:50 – 22:20)
The most crucial part is building trust with the client. If you don’t do that in the beginning, it shows later on. If you don’t earn the client’s trust, if they’re not fully sold on the strategy you built with them, and if you don’t understand their specific business and how they operate internally, you won’t reach the goals the customer envisioned.
Understanding the actual internal business processes of the buyer takes time. It’s not something you learn in a day, which is why you have to talk to different departments and different people within a team. It’s not just the head of treasury, it’s the procurement people, it’s the accounts payable team.
That’s one part. The other part is that while the general implementation process is largely the same, how you develop and bring that across to the customer varies from customer to customer. It comes down to communication. Communication is key, and how you develop the relationship throughout the lifecycle of the program matters. You have to show the customer where their business can go in the future. Having that trust is what makes all of that possible.
Irina (22:21 – 22:35)
This was a really interesting conversation. Thank you for joining! And to everyone listening, thanks for tuning in!
Until next time, stay curious, keep learning, and mastering customer success.
