Scott Barker helped scale Outreach from $20 million to $250 million ARR, raised $100 million for his own venture fund, and then had a panic attack. He sold everything he owned, put what was left in a backpack, and spent four months in Indian ashrams before writing an article that went viral. On a recent
The Data Said We Were Wrong: How Ironclad’s CCO Uses AI to Drive Outcomes
AI is changing Customer Success (CS), and now the main question is not if teams will use it, but where it can make the biggest difference. Rob Edmondson, Ironclad’s Chief Customer Officer, believes you should begin with your existing data and let it reveal any mistaken assumptions. On a recent episode of the [Un]Churned podcast,
The Contract Isn’t the Win: How Microsoft Thinks About Customer Success at Scale
If you ask Pradeep Raman how his team measures Customer Success (CS), he won’t talk about health scores or NPS. Instead, he focuses on the percentage of customers who committed to a deployment and actually finished it on time and at full scope. This metric shows if customers are getting value and if Microsoft is
The CS Org Structure That Turns Retention Into a Growth Engine
What happens to growth when customer value and revenue are managed by different people with separate goals? Brad Casemore, Chief Customer and Growth Officer at PartsSource, has a clear answer. Nine months ago, he combined the CCO and CGO roles at a 750-person healthcare tech company where equipment downtime can halt care. On a recent
Staircase MCP Connector Is Now Live on the Anthropic Claude Store
Your AI tools act smarter when they know your customers. And AI tools like Claude are becoming the daily working environment for more revenue and post-sales teams. Teams using Claude’s native integrations can now find and leverage Gainsight’s Staircase AI, live on the Anthropic Claude store, to bring the full depth of their customer relationship
23 Customer Experience Conferences Worth Attending in 2026
The 2026 customer experience conference calendar is packed. Not every event is worth your time or travel budget. The right choice depends on your role, your priorities, and what you plan to do with what you learn. This guide covers which 2026 customer experience conferences deserve your budget. It also covers how to choose the
How AI Is Changing the CSM Role: From Knowledge to Context
Ask most CSMs what makes them good at their job, and they’ll tell you some version of the same thing: they know their stuff. They’re well-versed in the product, its use cases, industry benchmarks, and workarounds. That knowledge took time to build, but AI has made it table stakes. This doesn’t mean CSMs are less
Pulse 2026: Agenda, Speakers, and Why It’s Worth the Trip
As I write this, four astronauts are doing something no human has done since 1972: looping around the Moon on Artemis II, 252,756 miles from Earth, navigating genuinely uncharted territory. One of them—Victor Glover, the mission pilot—is a Cal Poly San Luis Obispo alum. Same as me. Glover didn’t get to pilot a lunar mission
Why Your Customers Are Already Shopping Around (And How to Catch It Early)
Churn doesn’t usually come with a warning. When a customer skips a QBR, stops responding on Slack, or sends the dreaded “we’re evaluating our options” email, their decision is often already set. The signs showed up months before, but you missed them. Eric Gilpin, President of Go-To-Market at G2, has spent 25 years building two-sided
Net Revenue Retention: How to Calculate NRR with Benchmarks
Your NRR hits 115% and the board approves. Then two enterprise accounts pause expansion. Suddenly that number feels less solid. Strong net revenue retention looks like validation—until a few large accounts stop growing and the total hides what’s really happening. This article explains what NRR means, how to calculate it, what good looks like by